Business as Usual

Spring weather has been great here in SLC.  Everything is green and temps have been perfect, days in the mid 70's.  The boat is steadily coming along.  It has been great that we can both work on the boat together, Beth has been taking on more and more challenging projects.  Its great for me, I find that when you work on a project like this there are portions of it that you just really don't want to do.  I don't really even have an explanation as to why I don't want to do them, I just hate the idea of having to do it, so I put them off...forever.

The project I have been working on is the deadwood.  Basically this is a spacer in between the bottom of the boat and the lead keel.

I cut out the wing shapes for the deadwood, which are all a little different. Then stacked them up and glued them together.

You can see here that I have started to shape the left side of the it, I plan to shape it soon, then I'll wrap it with fiberglass and glue the whole thing to the bottom of the boat.  At that point it will be time to try and move that 4000lb. keel underneath and start drilling out for keel bolts.

All the fir is laid for the decks, now we are just putting in things like this Teak king plank and a few other teak accents here and there. We are hoping to caulk in between the planks sometime next week which will be the final step in the decking process.

We have been sailing Beth's dinghy a little bit and all we have is a paddle, which is pretty awkward to use in such a wide boat.  So Beth found some basic plans for a set of oars.  Here is how we are working them from square to round.  They start square then I rip the corners off on the tablesaw making an octagon.

Then Beth uses the jack plane to cut down the corners and slowly it becomes more or less round.  We haven't cut out the paddle part yet, but we will show some pics next time.

The best looking dinghy on the Great Salt lake.