BTW

Turns out I wasn't so lucky after all. While the building jig was level, it wasn't square. Luck did not intervene; Cary did. He said every time he looked at it, he knew it wasn't right, and he proved it to me with a construction framing square. This, of course, broke my heart and moved me to tears, but Cary said he would help me make it square, and that the tweaking should take only half a day. I made him promise that while we do that, he must behave like a civilized human being: no name-calling, no sarcasm, no condescension or derision. He agreed, but that means he'll have to acquire a new personality, at least for half a day.

Meanwhile, I attached the forekeel to the bow transom and determined that it will fit in place accurately on the jig, square or not. The directions for building this boat are not exactly thorough and often require interpretation and initiative on my part. That is a good trick because usually I have no idea what I'm doing. For the transom-forekeel assembly, I figured out that I had to countersink some screws, although the word "countersink" had never been in my vocabulary. I did a rather blonde job of it, but nothing that a little wood putty can't fix. As always, I learned later that a special tool exists for countersinking; it's called a countersink drill bit.

BTW (which I thought meant "bites the weenie" but found out it means "by the way"), I e-mailed WoodenBoat with my question about laminating. I asked if it is really necessary to laminate the center frame and forekeel, or if you could just use already-laminated 3/4" marine plywood instead. They have not responded. Now that BTW, if you catch my drift.

Drill team

Video Hosting - Upload Video - Video Sharing

Fleeta shoots mom

13 July 2006
Part of my New Year’s resolution was to make a documentary film about my boatbuilding project, and until last week I had made no progress on that aspect of the endeavour. All day Sunday, I worked on my boat while Kelsey hung around the house without much to do, so I prevailed upon her to shoot me. (That reminds me of a powerful scene in Tommy Lee Jones’s movie, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, in which a blind man asks TLJ to shoot him, but I digress...) Anyway, I have posted two short videos, “Drill Sergeant” and “Drill Sergeant, Part Deux,” that show me working on the building jig. Kelsey shot those with my little digital camera; I gave up on getting a real video camera, mainly because I can’t afford one, but also because I don’t really want one. The film portion of this project will just have to consist of poor quality, short video clips from my digital camera. We have an expression around our house for this lazy approach to a situation: “It’s the least I can do.”

Last Sunday was a most productive day:
I assembled the building jig, which includes the ladder frame, the two station molds, the laminated center frame, and the expertly-beveled stern transom. I may not have won the lottery, but by sheer luck and without even trying, the building jig turned out perfectly level. The only part left to do is to attach the forekeel and bow transom, which might be tricky but maybe luck will intervene again.

Fleeta Foote is back

Two weeks ago, my 17-year-old daughter, Kelsey, aka Fleeta Foote, returned from her one-year stint as an exchange student in Costa Rica. This called for celebration and visits from numerous relatives and friends eager to see her. My brother-in-law, Roger, asked me if I could foresee anytime in the future that I would be able to work on my boat, and I assured him that progress would proceed much more rapidly now that I had an extra set of hands to help me. He laughed and said, “I thought you’d have less time because you’d be busy doing things with Kelsey.” He was right, of course. In the two weeks that Kelsey has been home, I’ve accomplished very little on the boat, but I have gone wine tasting in Healdsburg (with Kelsey as the designated, resentful driver), shopping with both daughters, to Monterey for the Fourth of July, read books, and with Kelsey watched numerous episodes of her favorite TV show, “Friends.” We also went to see The Devil Wears Prada and enjoyed every minute of it.

Blonde bevels bow of boat

Sunday, 18 June 2006
In addition to the two laminated pieces, I also wanted to cut out the plywood pieces for the bow and stern transoms. First, I had to transfer the patterns. For this I used white sailcloth because (a) you can see through it like tracing paper, and (b) it does not stretch, tear, crack, or splinter; it is dimensionally stable. So I finished all that, unloaded the securely strapped plywood from the top of the car, drew the patterns onto the wood, and chop-chop-chopped.

So far so good. The next step was to bevel the edges of the transoms, a process I had no idea how to accomplish. I gathered every tool I could think of: power planer, hand plane, rasp, chisel, sandpaper. In my boatbuilding book, the section on beveling says, “Bevel edges of transoms.” The power planer scared me, the hand plane frustrated me, the rasp didn’t do what I wanted, the chisel was the wrong tool, the sandpaper was ineffective. So I pulled out the one tool that always works for me: tears. “I want to do this but I don’t know how,” I sobbed to Cary. He softened and agreed to show me how to do it, and by that I mean he did it for me.

I may not win the Feminist of the Year award, but I will build this boat, with a little help from my friends.

Friday, July 7, 2006
My mind, if not my body, has been on vacation for a couple of weeks and could not concentrate long enough to blog. Meanwhile, I have worked a little on my boat:

1. I finished beveling the transoms. After Cary beveled the stern transom, he left me to my own devices for the bow transom. My first pass looked good, but when I laid the pattern on top, it became obvious that a second pass was in order. Anyway, I am now a skilled beveler and ready to assemble the building jig.

2. I cut the laminated pieces for the forekeel and center frame. Those turned out fine except they will need quite a bit of wood putty to fill the spaces left by my lousy laminating job. That reminds me: I must contact WoodenBoat about using plywood instead going to all that trouble of laminating.

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.

Blonde joke #4

Did you think I had forgotten the blonde jokes? The first one is especially good; it took me a while to get it:

1. Did you hear about the blonde who went to the library and checked out a book called "How to Hug"?
Got back to the dorm and found out it was volume seven of the encyclopedia.

2. A blonde drives up to her house and sees that it is on fire. From her cell phone, she calls the fire department in a panic. The dispatcher tells her to settle down; they need to know how to get to her house. The blonde replies, "Duh, in your big red fire truck."

3. What does a blonde owl say?
What, what?

Easy as 1-2-3

The steps to creating the center frame and forekeel of the Nutshell Pram are:

1. Cogitate.
2. Procrastinate.
3. Laminate.

Getting ready for step number 3 was similar to preparing for First Communion. Just like First Communion, I had to cover everything with plastic, mix up a batch of epoxy resin and hardener, don my white veil, and receive the sacrament. Now that I've done it once, I know how to swallow the host in one gulp and can return to the altar anytime I want. The main difference is that for laminating, you need a lot more clamps.

After ripping the strips of wood to be laminated, I made a dry run without the epoxy to make sure the jig would work. It didn’t. The triangular pieces of wood needed more than one screw each to stay put, so I sawed, drilled, and screwed in more blocks until everything was fast. But wait, I needed more clamps. Always need more clamps, so off to OSH I went and returned with half a dozen cool, sexy C-clamps, and a couple of bar clamps for good measure. After another dry run, which succeeded, I set the altar of laminating: the epoxy resin and hardener, measuring cups, mixing bowls, stir sticks, sponge rollers, rubber gloves, a rubber mallet for pounding the strips flat, a score of clamps, two helpers (a husband and a son), and a protective covering of plastic over everything within a 20-foot radius of the communion rail.


I mixed the resin and hardener and stirred for a full five minutes, as instructed, and delivered the mixture in a chalice to Father Cary. He rolled the glue onto the strips, which I held flat and then placed onto the altar, I mean jig. All was going well until we were about halfway through and the glue started to set. Then it was all over because once it starts to set, it goes really fast. Unfortunately, I had mixed way too much epoxy before we could spread all of it onto the strips, so about $30 worth of glue hardened into a solid rock.

Parker and I went ahead and clamped the strips that we had prepared for the center frame. I mixed another, much smaller batch of glue and laminated the strips of wood for the forekeel. We clamped those onto the jig. Three days later, I checked them and they turned out fine! On the fourth day, I created the center frame. (This is a very religious process). This time, I did it myself, with no help from the male sector, or maybe that should be sextor.

So, in a nutshell (little joke), here is an epoxy primer:

1. Read the directions on the cans of resin and hardener before you begin.
2. Measure a small amount of resin and hardener precisely into a mixing bowl.
3. Stir thoroughly for 5 minutes.
4. Pour mixture into a shallow container, such as the small paint tray that comes with the small rollers. The key word here is shallow, because a chemical reaction occurs that generates heat, and the heat speeds the reaction. You want to dissipate the heat to slow the reaction. My problem was that (a) I didn’t read the directions, and (b) I had mixed the glue in a deep container. When it started to set, I plunged my rubber-gloved hand into the mixture and nearly burned my fingers off. This stuff can actually burst into flames!
5. Ignore anything your husband says to you.
6. Drink heavily when you’re done.

Luckily for me, I was already really good at numbers 5 and 6. The good news is that the whole laminating process wasn’t as difficult or even as messy as I had envisioned. Now that the laminating part is done, I am in the state of grace and can proceed with the actual boatbuilding.

Vintage Rambler

Wearing my librarian hat yesterday, I asked a co-worker if she knew what a blog is. She said, “Yeah, isn’t it someone’s ramblings on the Internet?” I laughed and replied, “Yes. Perhaps you’d like to see my ramblings?”

A few months ago, I barely knew what a blog was. Now I write several and it seems that more and more of my time is consumed with the care and feeding of my blogs. To my dismay, Blonde in a Nutshell occasionally suffers neglect while I tend to others. Sometimes, desperate to post something on this blog, I’ll copy ramblings from one of my other blogs. So, with apologies, here goes:

“Progress on the boat has been slow lately because that thing called work keeps getting in the way. However, after the fiasco in Novato, I went to the tool sale at the fairgrounds and bought a workstation (some assembly required) which is a totally cool thingamajig that can double as a sawhorse. I’ve casted about for C-clamps and am discouraged at the utter dearth of them among my friends and relatives. But wait, there’s another fiasco waiting to happen. This weekend in Sebastopol there is a 'Vintage Wood Boat and Antique Swap.' My husband has warned me that this could be an entire swap meet populated by Bills and not to expect any great deals.

So far, I have ripped a 2x4 into long, thin strips for laminating with epoxy. Two pieces have to be laminated: the center frame and the forekeel. The ripping procedure was a particularly unpleasant one that involved a band saw and an artillery of curse words. I haven’t laminated yet, though, because first I have to rip more wood (more cursing), get the epoxy, and set everything up, making sure I have all the materials. A sixth sense tells me that the epoxy chapter of this story will include a lot of cursing, too.


Also, I have assembled the building jig, which is a ladder-type structure that lies horizontally and sits upon my new workstation. Feel free to admire both the jig and the workstation in the photo below. It is upon this ladder frame that I fasten the stations molds, which I finished a while back, and the center frame if I ever finish laminating it, and then begin building the boat.”



Update: Last Saturday, I called the phone number for the Vintage Boat Swap and the person who answered said the event was meager because a lot of vendors cancelled and if I was traveling a ways, not to bother. That was all the excuse I needed not to drive out to Sebastopol, but all day long I wondered if the guy said that as a joke and if, in fact, there were all kinds of great deals there that he didn’t want anyone else to find out about.

I ripped the other 2x4, which went well and with a minimum of cursing, but still have not laminated.

Yesterday, after I switched out of my librarian hat for my quilter hat, I had a long conversation with one of my quilting customers who turns out to be the daughter of an avid boatbuilder. She said she had spent the day sailing with her father in his newly launched 36-foot centerboard yawl. An octogenarian, he has just completed his eighteenth wooden boat. Thirty years ago, he built a stout 27-foot sailboat that he, his son and daughter sailed to Hawaii and back. I told her about my Nutshell Pram project, and she even knew the boat. In fact, her family owns a summer cottage on the coast of Maine, near the WoodenBoat school, from whence came the Nutshell Pram. The summer cottage is the ultimate home of the newly-launched yawl. Her family is living the life we want to live! She told me where her father builds boats, at the marina in San Rafael, and that I could go visit him anytime I want. Perhaps this weekend I will do that!

The weirdo weturns

When I arrived at Bill’s house that day, the first story he told me was about some people who had answered his ad, come to his house, and stolen items from him. I said, “That’s lousy,” and made a mental note that he’ll probably accuse me, too. After an hour of enduring his stories and then realizing that he had no intention of selling anything, I lost patience, set the clamps down on his band saw, and said, “Bill, I have to leave,” and literally ran to my car and sped away.

The next day, my friend and business partner, Kathy, received a phone call at the corporate headquarters of TopStitchers from an old man who said a blonde named Melissa had come to his house and stolen three clamps from him. Kathy had no idea what he was talking about. She coaxed more information out of him and determined that he meant Louisa, not Melissa, but told him that she found it hard to believe that her business partner was the type of person who would steal clamps from an old man. He insisted I had and that he was going to call the sheriff to investigate. She told him she thought it was a mistake, hung up, and went back to work.

A little while later, I went in to work, and moments after I walked through the door, the phone rang. Kathy answered. She talked and laughed and winked at me, then told me about the conversation. My new boatbuilding buddy Bill had found the clamps and I was exonerated. Kathy was relieved to know that I was not a crook.

Later, I told Cary the entire story. He became indignant that this man had called me a thief. He phoned him and said, “What kind of a kook are you?” Bill apologized to Cary, and later he called and apologized to me. I accepted, but wanted to know, “Why didn’t you just call and ask me where the clamps were?” He didn’t have a good answer for that, so I just said good-bye and thanks for calling. Then changed my phone number. Then drove down to Black Point at midnight, broke into Bill's shed and stole his clamps.

Just kidding! I stole the band saw instead.

The world is full of weirdos

This classified ad practically hollered at me from the pages of Latitude 38: “Pre-estate sale by owner. Boatbuilding tools, materials, fastenings, fittings, plans, books, magazines...I’m lazy and wish for geezer home.” I called the Novato phone number and talked to Bill, a cheerful man of about 110 who said he had plenty of clamps, sawhorses, and even a sheet of plywood that I could have.

Bubbling with excitement, I raced down to Black Point anticipating the treasures I would find at garage sale prices. Bill indeed had treasures, but garage sale prices were not part of the bargain. Mostly he wanted to deliver long-winded stories about every clamp, bevel gauge, and chisel in his workshop and then decided he didn’t really want to part with them. He had hundreds of C-clamps, but could let me have only three of them, at $15 apiece. Fifteen dollars each? Are you crazy? I had been thinking more along the lines of $15 for 15 clamps.

Was I interested in any books? In fact, I had been keeping an eye out for Howard Chapelle’s American Small Sailing Craft, a boatbuilding classic that is still in print. There was a copy of it on Bill’s bookshelf. “Would you sell me this one?” I asked. Long pause. “Don’t know if I can give that one up,” Bill said. I scanned the shelf again. “You have two copies of it,” I pointed out to him. Of course, he wanted $15 for that, too, even though he clearly had paid half that at a used book store.

As for the coveted mahogany plywood, he could only let it go for full market value, because after talking to me about the Nutshell Pram, he thought he might want to build a dinghy, too. Sure, Bill. And I’m going to build the Queen Mary.

Disheartened and disillusioned, I came home empty-handed. Cary tried to console me by pointing out that the boatbuilding world is full of antisocial weirdos. It’s not just the boatbuilding world, though. The whole world is full of antisocial weirdos, and they are all either running or responding to classified ads.

The Laminator

This week I did actual work on my boat. With a jigsaw, I cut out the station molds, which are plywood forms around which the boat is shaped and built, and cajoled Cary into planing them for me. Planing is right up there with sanding, which is right up there with watching paint dry. Unfortunately, planing is a big part of boatbuilding, so I’ll have to really hone my cajoling skills.

Today I worked on something called a laminating jig. There are two pieces - the forekeel and the midship frame - that are constructed from laminated strips of fir. The laminated pieces must be shaped a particular way, and to achieve that shape, I spent the entire day as follows:
1. Transferred the patterns for the forekeel and midship frame onto plywood.
2. Ripped a two-foot long piece of 2x4 in half, then cut about 20 triangular pieces of wood from those two lengths.
3. Made a run over to the creepy haunted house, namely Yardbirds, to buy screws with which to fasten the triangles to the plywood, only to find out I bought the wrong screws.
4. Made the screws work anyway. This involved creative use of a drill press.
5. Fastened the triangular wood pieces to the plywood along the patterns mentioned in #1. That's like saying, "Finished my master's degree in nuclear physics." Everything that could go wrong, did, and I had to try every drill bit in the house, never to find the right one and had to make another trip to the hardware store. For trip #2, I went to Rex Ace instead of Yardbirds because I can't deal with the Munsters at Yardbirds.

Now I am ready to laminate. Call me The Laminator. I'll be back, but first I must achieve a certain blood margarita level. It is Cinco de Mayo!