Don’t Work Tired:( - 16 Hours

Today's lesson, Don’t work tired! Today wasn’t a long work day on the Tiki but it was a low energy day. I cut the slot for BH3 (Bulkhead 3) 10mm wide instead of the specified 7mm. The constant shift between inches and mm didn’t help either.

I don’t think this is any kind of tragedy just a little more epoxy filling.  The beauty of this type of construction is that not every cut needs to be perfect since epoxy fillets cover many small mistakes without compromising strength.
The good news is that all the plywood for both backbones, the area between BH2 and BH6, are completed and ready for epoxy.

Keel Backbone - 9 Hours

The first two sheets of 9mm plywood are cutup into boat parts. In particular the backbone, backbone doubler, and keel sides as named on the plans. Transferring a scaled picture(1:10) of a part to plywood at full scale, I believe this is called lofting, is a little tricky the first time through. For every piece I would expect a station, a point along the x axis, and an elevation, a point along the y axis, to describe a part. With the keel curved profile there doesn’t seem to be enough information to draw the curve or more likely I can’t glean it from the plans.  Now the curve on the bottom of the keel may not seem critical but the parts layout on sheet 2 of the plywood leaves very little room for error. Sheet has four keel sides and two forward backbone doubles crammed on it.

Lessons for the Day:
1.  I think that with all the fiddling with these curved "best fit" parts, it probably would have been better to cut out a template on some scrap 1/8” plywood to make sure of fit before advancing to the expensive plywood.

2.  I can cut a much more accurate line using my 5-1/2” Roybi circular saw than my Roybi Jig Saw. I think I’m doing fine on a long cut with the jig only to look back and see the drunken sailors walk. Then out comes my Roybi 3”x18” Belt Sander to throw that sailor in the brig.

Buying and using the Roybi 5-1/2” circular saw was a great tip from Scott Williams Element II Tiki 26 blog. Thanks Scott!

Units of Measure

I pulled out my first sheet of 9mm plywood, stared at the plans and with calculator and imperial(inches,feet,yards,etc) measuring devices proceeded to transfer the metric draw parts to the plywood. Constantly shifting between imperial and metric is a pain. I wish President Reagan had let the US go metric back in the day and by now all my tools would be metric.
As it is I spent three hours cutting out one aft keel backbone.

I ordered a 10m measuring tape from Amazon and then found one of my old triangular drafting scales that has 300mm range. The only downside for me working in metric is that I don’t have an intuitive feel for say 152 mm,  but 6 inches on the other hand and I can tell by eyeball if that line or part is about right.

That first cut was tough as there is no going back now, the clock has started!

Plywood is here!!

Finally after much rigamarole I have all my 6mm and 9mm plywood. The wood showed up in the back of a PAS 18 wheeler and the driver and I transferred it to my F250 pickup truck in the town office parking lot.  Unbelievably four companies were involved getting this plywood from White Plains New York to Knox Maine. Condon Lumber, FreightQuote(shipping broker), NewPen(shipper that picked up the wood), and Portland Air Shipping(PAS) the company that delivered the wood.
The main issue was that a semi truck and trailer cannot get up our driveway and we can’t unload on the main street. This fact was on the shipping order but NewPen dropped the ball.
If the load had been delivered to a business I think things would have been smoother. Or as it was find a public place and meet the semi truck to transfer to my truck. I did get permission from the town office first.
Also I learned that these freight companies have buried in their contracts that they have up to 6 months to make delivery! Which means if they mess up and send the load to Aruba, oh well, yell and scream if you like but 6 months is 6 months.

If I had to do this again, if at all possible, I would just drive and pick up the plywood, it would cost no more overall and there would be certainty.

NO PLYWOOD@#

I wish I could say Condon Lumber has worked out great in supplying my plywood, but that's not the case. Last Wednesday I was told that the 6mm plywood had just arrived at their dock and would be shipped either Thursday or Friday. As of today it still has not shipped. So another week down the tubes.

We're headed to the mid-west for some family functions, so now the week of the 21st is the soonest real start of construction.

Build Start?

This could be my first build day or not. I decided to try and rip some 20x32(mm) and 20x45(mm) stringer material out a piece of 2x4 (inch)Douglas Fir I picked up last week. My cheap table saw worked OK but it slowed going through that fir compared to spruce or pine.

I did buy vertical grain fir but when cutting out the stringer pieces the grain is as shown. Can anyone tell me if this wood is stronger in one grain orientation vs the other? The middle piece, 3rd from left is destine to be the lower hull outside stringer which will be scarfed to the 5th from left once I trim it down a bit.