Wednesday, January 18, 2012

My tools are older than I am..

With the four main panels cut, I plowed into cutting the rest of the pieces - the forward and aft hatch covers, risers, doublers, and so forth. It seems like a lot of parts when you first see the plans, but there's really a surprisingly small number of parts and pieces. I think it speaks well of the CLC folks and their design - to paraphrase A. Einstein, this boat seems to be as simple as possible, but not more so.

Along with cutting panels, I also scarfed the sheer clamps together to make 16 feet lengths of 3/4" by 1 1/2" straight grain fir. The plans call for a conservative 8:1 scarf angle rather than the customary 12:1 because these pieces will be joined to the side panels, which in turn will be glassed, so an 8:1 joint will be plenty strong.  For 3/4" stock, 8:1 means a six inch hypotenuse. The Japanese pull saw is the ticket for cutting scarfs in this kind of stock. It's really easy to get accurate results if you go carefully. I marked the angle, dropped a perpendicular as a guide to make sure I was cutting square, and cut these four ramps by hand in about 15 minutes. A couple of minutes touch-up with the plane and they were ready to glue.

I followed the same gluing procedure as I did with the ply: put down some wax paper, align the sticks along the front edge of my benchtop to make sure they're straight, slather some  epoxy thickened with wood flour onto the scarf (I used dust from my sander again), position them longitudinally, send a finish nail through the joint to keep the sticks from sliding under clamping pressure (I drilled a pilot hole to make it easy), and repeat with the other two pieces to make a stack two high, then clamp the stack. It's another cold night, so I'll put a cardboard box around the glue joint and put a light inside.

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