40.) It's Not Art, It's an Ark (A Small One, Anyway)

The photo in my last post was a closeup of the hull ready for more planking.  The way I can tell that I'm finally finished with fairing is when the scratches left by 80 grit paper look even and uniform across the surface, with no shiny spots remaining (which would signify a low spot where the sandpaper hasn't touched the surface.) It took four layers of epoxy mixed with fairing filter and a lot of hand sanding to get to this point. The area up near the port bow still needs more work.

Here's a view from farther away.

This only works if you use a sanding block so that you don't accidentally press the sandpaper into the low spots.  Next is a photo of my new favorite way of hand sanding--using a roll of 3M sticky back sandpaper on each side of a strip of wood.  I peeled back the paper for the photo so it's easier to see what I am talking about.

The picture below shows dry-fitting planks to the port side. (No glue/epoxy yet.) Each plank has to be tapered to fit its neighbor.  I'll show how I do that in the next blog post.  Now, that I've had some practice, I am getting pretty good at it. The seems between the planks are going to be much tighter on the port side than I was able to get them when I started on the starboard side.

39.) Is this Art?

If so, I may need to do this instead of restore boats.  I'll tell you what it is tomorrow.

38.) Fall Back, Regroup and Reorg, Prepare for Battle

Before any of my legions of readers (slight exaggeration intended) send any more sympathy cards to my wife mourning/celebrating my passing, I should probably explain the lack of any recent updates on this blog.

One of the things about boat restoration, at least the way I am doing it, is that it requires a lot of equipment. You need an array of tools for woodworking, for mixing and applying composite materials, and for painting and finishing. You also need supplies of the raw materials for all these activities. And then there's the boat itself, hogging up the prime real estate in the center of the shop.

It's very important to keep all this stuff organized, put away, clean, and fully functional. I am a big believer of the idea of a place for everything and everything in its place.

But around the time of my last post, you would have never guessed that if you happened to stumble upon my shop, which I had unwittingly turned into a stirring monument to either A) Entropy or B) Sheer Sloven Laziness.  I prefer option A but I am sure my mom would have picked B had she seen the place.

So I got to work becoming Mr. Clean (without the earring).  Among other things, I made a nice white oak cabinet for my hand planes and some mahogany dividers for my tool chest.  See photos below.

I also cleaned and sharpened all of my tools so they would be ready to go. I even went so far as to reorganize my sandpaper! It's surprising how much of the stuff you can accumulate working on boats. I have the usual sandpaper box with individual full-size sheets in both regular and wet/dry, in all the standard grits ranging from 40-2,000. I also possess an arsenal of different papers for each of nine different electric or air powered sanders plus a bunch of hand sanders, including one three feet long.  In addition to different grits, these come with different backings like Velcro or adhesive and different hole patterns for different methods of dust extraction.  The grit can also be made of different materials for specific jobs; you don't use the same one to sand wood that you use to sand epoxy and the epoxy type is different still from the one you use on paint. I have a wall chart that helps keep me from losing my mind over this.

One of the reasons I have so many sanders is that I really don't enjoy sanding very much and am always looking for ways to make it easier. To speed things up, I change paper often and try to move fairly quickly from one grit to the next highest one.  If I get really impatient, I can quickly find myself surrounded in a pile of sandpaper boxes, discarded used sandpaper discs, plus two or three or four different sanders, their power cords, and the vacuums I hook them up to.

It was in the middle of one of these Pig-Pen (yes, there's a hyphen in Pig-Pen) episodes that I finally decided that enough was enough and that I needed to stop working on the boat and clean things up before I either injured myself, broke a favorite tool by sitting on it, or accidentally burned the whole shop down.  And just as I made this resolution I stood up and stepped on something and snapped it in half. It was a part for the boat that I had spent days making. Ay Carumba.

So that's what I have been doing. That, and well, um, uh, I also got kind of distracted by the idea of making a "Krenov style" hand plane. It's not finished yet, but here's a picture of mine sitting in front of one made by a guy named Scott Meek, who is probably the best wooden hand plane maker in the U.S.  Yes, I am copying his work for the most part and, yes, mine isn't nearly as good. But, hey, it's my first one! Ya' gotta start somewhere, and if I am going to imitate someone it might as well be Scott who, as he'll be the first to admit, got his start by copying Krenov's planes.  I am guessing my first crack at imitating Shakespeare would fare similarly.

These side journeys are now just about over. I like, totally, promise that my next blog will be about something I did on the IC. It will not be another blog post about why I am not writing more blog posts.

Oh, one last thing, Cosette is now doing very well.  It's been too hot to bring her into the shop as my assistant, but she'll be returning soon in the fall when I expect to back working full throttle on the boat.