Loads of rain yesterday but at least the strongback seemed to stay dry this time.
Wish I'd set up this way in the first place. Oh well, live & learn. I've still got to suss how far out of level the strongback is now, but I was anxious to make some sawdust today, so I launched straight into cutting out the molds instead.
I'm not going to be able to proceed with the project for the next few days (bloody work), so I wanted to get this bit out of the way today. I'm also still waiting for a sanding station that I ordered last Monday (said it'd only be two or three days). I want to it use to get the edges of the molds & mold extensions straight and accurate. In my next sessions, I intend to focus on getting everything perfect and then start mounting it all onto the strongback. I'm at the point where I need to become pretty anal with precision. It's so easy for inaccuracies to creep in (especially for a numpty like me), so I plan to slow right down and try to get everything as right as I can.
One bit that I think I might've stuffed up already is with the glueing of the templates to the ply. It didn't seem right to use heaps of the spray ashesive, so I was a bit girly with using it initially. Ironically, I was worried about the templates wrinkling up. Dissatisfied with the results, I got progressively more heavy handed as I went along, but I never truly applied lots of glue to the entire surfaces. Now, pretty much all of the templates are wrinkled to some degree and the photo below shows the worst of the templates (first one I applied glue to).
I stuck the remaining stern stem tempate down onto the last bit of ply today & absolutely drowned it before sticking it down. It seems ok and I was even able to cut it out straight away as well. It's too late to do anything about it now, except to measure out all of the waterlines on the really suspect molds to verify the outer edges before sanding down to the lines.
Be warned if you plan to do something like this: Use shitloads of glue with templates!
At least there didn't seem to be much waste once the molds were all cut out.
All done & ready for Mr Sander.
I also measured out & cut a mold extension (as accurately as I could). Wanting to avoid further cockups, I tentatively set up one of the stem molds to check alignment with the mold extension and strongback cleat.
Perhaps its a good thing I did because I'm not sure if there's a bit of an error somewhere. The cleats in the book/plans specify 50 x 50mm. Apparently this isn't a stock dimension & therefore needs to be milled. I was told this at the timber place (Walker Bros, Gosford) that it'll be closer to about 46 x 46mm in the end (which is pretty much what I got). The problem is that even this looks too big (by three or four mm). The result of this could mean that the rest of the molds would sit too low and the waterlines wouldn't line up properly. I'm about to email Gary Dierking to clarify this.
It could be that everything's ok and that the station molds are meant to sit slightly lower than the cleat's top surface. Oh well, see what Gary reckons.
On a totally separate note, over the years whist mentally working out how I'd go about building a boat, I was worried as to how I'd go with obtaining all the clamps that all decent boatsheds obviously require. On investigation the hardware stores' clamps looked rediculously overpriced, however, during my many cash dispersal expeditions to Bunnings, I found that there are often cheaper ones on offer. I grabbed a few each time I went to deposit large sums of cash on other items and now seem to possess enough clamps of various types and sizes,to last me a lifetime.
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