Oars

Started on some oars to keep my mind off the frames. The oars come in Jim Michalak’s book Boatbuilding for Beginners and Beyond, it’s becoming a well thumbed tome. For a while I thought I’d go for Dynamite Payson’s oars but eventually the Michalak ones proved to have more detail in terms of marking out the wood and more explanation for the building. Also they’re laminated whereas the Payson oars come from one piece and maybe more likely to warp.

It made a welcome break to do something straight forward and with plenty of explanation. The light Trow plans are packed with detail as I found out again later on but you really have to dig and delve to get to it. I’ve got the plans on the computer and I open them using Freehand 9 which is an old version. I can’t read the measurements straight off the screen but have to write down the co-ordinates of each point and then subtract one co-ordinate from another to get a length. This works, but it is time consuming and jotting down the x and y then subtracting adds room for error.

Later I came back to the frame plans to take the dimensions for frame 3, but then I decided to look at the bird’s eye view drawings of the boat. Expanding the plans to 200% on a whim I saw that provision has been made for ply backing on the frames. Albeit 5mm ply which I haven’t got.

Measure once cut twice

I set about trying to solve the dilemma of how to put the frames together in such a way as to allow a notch for the inwales. First I made a time consuming grid for laying out the frames and measuring the angles. I think this may have been an exercise in procrastination as I was quite happy to put off making the first cut.

From the drawings (see Hello post) you can see that the wales fit exactly where the frame members join. I can’t think of a way to make an effective 3-way joint. After much faffing with halving joints, experiments with dowel joints and a metre of wasted wood I came to the conclusion that the frames will have to have a ply backing. The ply will act as a bracket and will only need to be about 10cm wide. The frame members can then be attached to the ply and the ply can be notched without weakening the frame. This will only have to be done on frames 1,3 and 7 so hopefully it won’t add too much weight.

By the end of the afternoon and still with nothing tangible done I made a blank for the bracket for frame 1. However, I failed to check the measurements before cutting and when I laid it on the grid after carefully finishing the edges I found it didn’t fit. I tried to rectify it but could tell it was a lost cause. So one way and another I had a reasonable amount of kindling for tonight’s fire.

Now I have to mark out some panels to free up the waste wood for making the brackets. This means doing the conversions from decimal inches to cm, something else I’ve been happy to put off.

Today dawned like this:

A shimmering sun rises out of a black sea.

It was time to get going. Started on the stem again, amid derision from the family, “How many fingers have you got left?” They asked, with smirks, every time I came indoors for a top-up of tea.

I took it slowly bearing in mind the lessons I learnt when I cut myself. Namely, make sure the wood you’re cutting is attached to the bench and concentrate on what you’re doing.

Painstaking and perfectionist aren’t adjectives that I’d apply to myself. On a moving scale I’m nearer the “hurried and slipshod” end. Hopefully, with this build I’ll move towards a necessary degree of P and P.

“Fixity of purpose.” Were the words that drifted through my head as I whittled away at the stem and “Perseverance” when I had to take the workbench I’d made apart and re-do it. It was just too sloppy.

Here’s the stem, a satisfying shape with is three sets of parallel lines. Though you can't appreciate them here.

And here’s the bench sporting wheels from a child’s tricycle.