On Monday night I finished beveling the shear line with the palm sander.
On Tuesday my knees hurt to much to work on the boat.
On Wednesday, I visited with a member of the Hugger Ski Club who had built the Arctic Tern 14 kit, which is pretty much the same kit except it’s 14 feet long instead of 17 feet long like mine. It was interesting to see what it looks like done close up. First I looked at it from a normal distance, and noticed how good it looks. Then I got in close and looked for small details like how important it is to get the panel seams exactly matched up (evidently not too important, because hers was off by a little bit and it still looked great) and how much she had to build up the epoxy around the cockpit reinforcement (a lot). I was curious about the wire holes – I was hoping they’d vanish when you epoxied, and they don’t. But they actually look like decoration. Now I know why it’s important to make the drilling jig for drilling the holes correctly rather than just drilling wherever you feel like – the symmetry and consistent pattern makes it look better. She also gave me a couple of scraps of wood that I could use to make said jig.
Thursday Vicki and I went paddling. As I already blogged about.
Tonight, in spite of the 90 degree weather, I made the jig. It’s hard to cut the two edges of the jig parallel without a table saw, and hard to get the drill holes in the center, but I got it close enough I guess. For each of the four pairs of panels, I taped them together to prevent them from moving around too much. And then I drilled – you drill through both panels at once so the holes end up in exactly the same place, and of course I couldn’t tell when I was just through the panels, so I ended up drilling through the table as well. It went pretty well.
One thing I’m not sure about is that the diagram in the manual only shows holes in panels 1 and 4. I know you’re not supposed to drill the bevelled shear line where panel 2 meets panel 3, because that’s where the deck and hull are joined and you use strapping tape rather than wires at that point. But I’m not sure what you’re supposed to do about where panel 1 meets panel 2 and panel 3 meets panel 4. Obviously where left panel 1 meets right panel 1 and left panel 4 meets right panel 4, there isn’t any problem with matching hole because you drill them both together. But when you’re matching dissimilar panels, maybe you don’t actually know where to put the hole until you’re ready to put them together? Oh well. Next step is wiring, so I guess I’ll find out soon. After that starts, things will (hopefully) start looking different, and I’ll be posting pictures again.
I love these sentences, where the words are all familiar, but the whole makes no sense to me. It’s like a kind of music.
I always have to restrain myself from saying “Is that what the kids are calling it nowadays?”