Saturday, July 19, 2008

Progress is swift now... I figured I'd be done in a month...




Nuthin' doin'... if you've ever built a house or watched a building go up... the framing stage is always the most exciting and the quickest.  Little did I know that I was not even half way done yet...

Here you can see pics of the skin together and the bulkheads placed inside the boat.  Bulkheads are the pieces on the ends and in the middle... The bulkheads are thicker than the outside skin.  Bulkheads are 3/4" (the skin is 3/8ths).  The design is cool, it's really an exoskeleton.  In other words, the boat's strength is in its skin - not unlike an airplane or lobster.  

The boards put on the top sides are called "clamps", not to be confused with the actual metal clamps holding the "clamps" on as seen in the pics... I don't know why they call the boards clamps but they serve an important purpose in terms of boat shape and strength.  I've also discovered that they come in handy when crashing into a dock... that's the beauty of wooden boats, they can be fixed and painted ; )

The floor (or "sole" in nautical parlance) is in at this stage.  The sole ply is 1/2" thick.  

The last pic of this series is the stern area.  Note, one of the things that I like about Sam's work is that he designs in plenty of floatation.  The boat is designed to float after capsizing, which comes in handy when one is boating in 15 degree weather which I frequently do during the winter.   

Note the left and right compartments (I guess I should be saying port and starboard at this point).  Those compartments are filled with foam.  I'm from New England therefore I am cheap so I found old dock floatation, cut them up to small blocks and filled the compartments with lots of closed cell foam blocks.  

I'm glad I did the blocks in retrospect because just this year I added another hull-through hose through one of the floatation compartments and all I did was to remove some blocks to make way.  Worked out well.  

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