Hey, I actually worked on my boat!

This poor neglected blog. Progress on the boat is moving at a glacial pace, and sometimes for every step forward I take two steps backward, but I am making progress.

Friday, 16 June 2006
I hitched a ride to Berkeley with Cary to buy marine plywood at MacBeath’s lumber yard on Ashby. They had everything I needed: one sheet of 3/4” ply, one sheet of 3/8”, and two sheets of 1/4”, all of it a Phillipine mahogany plywood called Hydrotek. Everyone seems to speak of MacBeath’s reverentially because it has a wide variety of woods and reasonable prices, but the help there stinks. The pale and soft young male (I can’t bring myself to call him a man) who fetched the sheets of plywood for me loaded them onto the racks on top of my car and said, “Thanks, bye.” When I asked him to help me secure them to the racks with the straps I had brought along, he said, “Sorry, we’re not allowed.” He added, looking at me knowingly, “Insurance.” A couple of unkind words flashed through my mind at that point because he had the look of someone who hasn’t lifted a finger to help anyone do anything in the two decades he’s been on earth, but I bit my tongue and just shook my head. In retaliation, I refused to move my car out of their driveway until I had tied the boards down with the straps, and I took my sweet time doing it.

From Berkeley, I drove back to Richmond to fetch Cary from the yacht harbor where he was working. In the parking lot, I inspected my plywood and saw that I had barely made it there without losing the boards on the freeway. That word “insurance” came back to haunt me, but I banished it like Satan from my mind. Cary wasn’t ready to leave yet, so I set to work re-tying the boards. Luckily, there was a man, a real man, in the parking lot who came to my rescue. Apparently an expert on the physics of strapping boards to the top of a car, he explained to me in detail what I had done wrong and how he would do it right. Fine by me. He did a great job of it, and he was refreshingly unconcerned about insurance.

Back in Petaluma, I unclamped the glued pieces that had been curing for two weeks and saw that I had done a really bad job of laminating. Cary reassured me that a little putty, a little paint, will make them seem like what they ain’t. I transferred the patterns for the center frame and the forekeel onto the poorly laminated pieces and wondered: Why do to all this trouble of laminating strips of wood? Why not use 3/4” plywood? It’s already laminated and it’s the correct thickness. I asked Cary and he saw no reason not to. I’m going to contact WoodenBoat and see what they say.