A Shipwright in Training

With the major varnishing done, there’s an air of calm that’s descending on our little corner of the shop. Nothing hard left to do really, just ticking off the list of things to attach and paint.

And when we make a mistake, we say “it is what it is.” We’ve been saying that a lot, actually.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. But still, we like to see if we can get perfect to come over and give us a kiss from time to time.

We’ve got another coat of paint on the deck. good thing, because the deck was looking quite pale next to the deeper blue of the quarter round molding.

Now it’s all a deep, satisfying shade of blue. You can’t really tell in that photo, but we’ve also put on the final coat of white topside paint.

Along the way, I remembered that we had to make a little block that ties to the line that you use to pull up the centerboard. The block acts as a stopper to keep the line from falling down the centerboard trunk slot. At first I was going to make an octagon, but it was too difficult to work out all the angles precisely. You don’t want to make a thing like that and have it look all wonky… it’s right or you don’t bother. But still, the square block was again too dull, so I turned something close to a ball, and we’ll use that.

We’ve got most of our spar hardware properly located and attached.

We had some trouble figuring out exactly where to place the outhaul cleat on the boom. The hand drawn picture in our book showed it in an awkward place, and the location on an actual boom in the shop was about 6″ aft of that. We compromised and put it in between the two locations. Turns out that this was exactly the wrong place, as it bumped right up into the boom crutch. So, take it off, plug the screw holes with donkey toothpicks (also called spiles), move it back. Now the boom has 2 small, round, visible repairs.

It is what it is.

We started attaching the hardware to the rudder as well.

You whang in copper nails, snip them off about 1/16″ from the fitting, and peen them into place. Of course, that presumes that you remembered to countersink all your fittings.

Take out the nails, countersink, snip the nails ahead of time, drive them back in. Bend the fittings a bit in the process and mess up the paint a bit.

It is what it is.

I learned how to make an eye splice last Saturday in a 3 strand rope, and what do you know? We need to make eye splices in the bridle line on the gaff. Well, isn’t that handy? So, I made a nice little eye splice, but I didn’t allow myself enough rope for the 2nd one. Try again. I made another one, but the eye was too big. Try again. The third one came out nicely.

Not such a great photo because you can’t see the way the splice tapers down instead of just stopping. Trust me, it’sa very nicea.

Tomorrow we’ll finish up attaching hardware,

maybe put a last coat of paint on the interior, help other folks out, do a major shop cleaning.

God only knows what we’ll do Friday. Probably just help other folks out with their boats.

The forecast is not good for Saturday’s launch and graduation ceremony… it would really be a shame if it rained.

But… it’ll be what it’ll be.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 9:17 pm and is filed under Classes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.