Setup Milestone

Yesterday was a huge day. I didn't finish till late and so didn't have time to post, hence this brief description today.

I embarked on a mission to get all of the molds set up on the strongback. A number of the cleats needed modifying, to make the all important WL3s line up. This took up the first hour or so, but no major problems emerged.

Once done, I carried everything to the strongback & got sorted out. As a precaution, I checked the strongback levels and was less than impressed to find the feet loose again. Annoyed, I releveled the strongback and drove about 10, 000 screws into both feet. Seems pretty steady (again). Hopefully it'll stay that way now.

That little frustration behind me, I set about mounting each cleat into it's proper position. For this job, my weapon of choice was some big-arsed, hex drive, bugle headed, self tapping screws. I drilled a pilot hole as best I could first, trying to keep it as straight as possible. They drove well through into the vertical side panels of the strongbox, meaning that at least these bits shouldn't move unexpectedly.

Happy that all the cleats were as accurate as possible, I turned my attention to setting up a stringline, so as to align the top & bottom centerlines for each mold. Gary's book says to nail a bit of timer to the molds backing onto each stem mold, but I didn't want to start hammering stuff into these, so instead I fiddled around with clamps until I came up with the set up shown in the photo below.

This worked a treat, because I could change the angle of the line by simply sliding it up or down at one of the ends, meaning that I could get the line to meet up with the centerline precisely for each station. This also meant not messing around with a plumb bob, which I discovered I quite suck at using.

At last, all fitted. It's exciting to start to see her shape for real. What's even more exciting (and scary), is the fact that from now on, everything I do will become a very permanent part of the boat.

I then duly dragged my long suffering family out to the boat, and prompted them to "oooh & ahhh" at it whilst I enjoyed a nice cold glass of chardonay, with my nose in the air & my chest puffed out.

So there we are, all ready for inner stems & planking. There probably won't be much happening at this blog site for a little while now. I kind of didn't expect to get to this point so quickly and I've not got the planking sorted yet (not happy with the quotes so far & am trying to get it a bit cheaper). I also need to suss out what timber is going to be best to use for the inner stems.