Today was a long and hot day. It’s a good thing I’m not counting the hours, because I’m sure I’m taking more hours than what they say it should take. Plus it was hot and humid as hell today, and for much of the work I couldn’t use my stool and had to stand. Looking at the Pygmy Boats site, I’m about done 15 of the theoretical 70 hours (not including some of the optional extras I’ve bought). Today I added the side panel (Panel #2) on each side, and it’s looking a lot more boat-like. Because this is a hard-chined boat, the joint between panel 1 and panel 2 is the chine.
The first side panel is wired up near the bow. I had to tilt the keel panels on their sides to make the side panel line up better. I also clamped the stern end of the side panel to the work bench to keep it moving around and falling off the table.
Now I’m wiring the back end. The one handed clamp is once again proving invaluable.
After wiring in both ends, you then go back and loosely wire one hole in the middle, before you go back and loosely wire all the holes from bow to stern.
It was at this point I discovered something very disconcerting – at the joint, under the epoxy where I can’t touch it, is some text stenciled on by the plywood mill. The manual assures you that they chose which side to put the stickers on (which indicate the inside of the boat based on making sure that was the best side aesthetically, but now that I read it carefully they do warn you early on to “scrape stickers off and then sand out any of the residue left. Stamps can be lightly sanded out.” I guess I should have realized that when they said stamps they didn’t mean the same thing as stickers. It’s a little late in the game to be undoing all the wires and flipping the boards to put that stuff on the inside, so now I’m trying to figure out the least ugly way to cover that up. Vicki suggested getting somebody to paint a loon over it.
Doing the right side here, it was surprising how as you put in the wires, the seam actually starts lining up correctly, even though it seems like it never will when you first start.
First blood! Remember how yesterday I said that the sharp ends on the wires were going to cause problems? Well, I was reaching around the boat to get something, and I got stabbed. I have lots of other little cuts on my hands, but this one was pretty obvious when it happened.
Doing the left side was pretty much the reverse of doing the right side, except the chine line wasn’t lining up as a proper butt-seam, but more like a lap-seam. I had to put the carpet knife blade in the seam and pry with it to get things to line up correctly.
After wiring the chine line loosely, and making sure everything was aligned correctly, I tightened the wires. Then I wired the temporary frames at the chine line. This helped pull things together very nicely, except I broke off two wires right at the base of twist. After that, I had to insert two tiny little temporary frames up near the bow and stern which help pull out the shape of the bow and stern a bit. Those were real buggers to get wired into place, mostly because of the tight quarters. The stern one is only 13 inches from the stern, and the hull is pretty narrow there. I broke two 1/16th inch drill bits doing the temporary frames – the first one I just broke a tiny bit off the tip, and I’m not exactly sure how, I just suddenly noticed it was damn near impossible to start a hole. The second drill bit broke when I dropped the drill. I have two more of these bits, so I hope I don’t continue to break them at this rate.
At this point, I ran some glue from a hot glue gun along the temporary frames to help hold them in place when it comes time to remove the wires. Then I went inside to enjoy the air conditioning and some ice water and sitting down. Next stage is to epoxy the inside of the keel seam.