Slow progress

Hola!

I've made a little bit of progress since the last post. The day after gluing the panels and sheer clamps (along the scarf and puzzle joints), I inspected them and sanded the little epoxy that squeezed out of the joints.  Plastic between all the layers made them work a breeze.


Earlier today, I prepared the side panels for the sheer clamps.

It was quite warm, however, so I chose not to mess with epoxy as it would have cured too fast.  Instead...I took TipSea out for a quick spin :)

By the time I got back in it was cool enough start messing around with glue... The 2 side panels are stacked with packing tape applied in between so that they don't get glued together.  I marked a line where the sheer clamp should go (it needs to be glued on 1/4'' proud) and applied a generous amount of epoxy thickened with Cab-O-Sil (Cell-O-Fill).  At first I only put the glue on about 1/3 of the length of the panel on top and bottom and clamped the 2 sheer clamps (again, top and bottom) in the middle.  After that, I just added glue to the rest of the panels and started clamping it down with the PVC pipe clamps I made the other day.

It went relatively well.  When I was done, there was a little thickened epoxy left so I applied a small bead between the panel and what will be the bottom of the sheer clamp with my finger where I didn't see any squeeze out (I wore gloves...of course). 

Hopefully there's enough glue in there to make it stick!



Getting started

So the barn/shop has been officially renamed "Cumberland Head Boatworks".  The conversion from junk storage to woodshop/ boatshop was spearheded largely by my friend Craig (http://poozletrap.blogspot.com/) who started building an i550 in there and further improved by another friend Nick (http://www.summerwoodbuilding.com/) who pimped the shop out like only a fine craftsman would.  I couldn't just sit around doing spreadsheets all day so I decided to build a Chesapeake 17LT from a kit made by Chesapeake Light Craft (http://www.clcboats.com/).  I'm using the shed attached to the actual shop so don't be fooled by the mess...

The kit arrived within a week or so of ordering it from CLC:

It was remarkably small.  One of the sheer clamps (actually pictured) was broken but a quick call to CLC and a new one was on the way.  Their customer service is EXCELLENT (so far anyway).

Since it's a 17 foot boat, I decided to build two 8 foot tables to do some of the initial gluing on.  I didn't have enough nice floor space to just do it on the floor and figured the tables could be useful later

Big thanks to Nick who did the majority of thinking on these.  Compressed air framing gun made the process very quick.  It's all leftover lumber too so it cost $0 and took about an hour to complete.

 I wish the picture could better express the scale of this boat. As soon as I laid the pieces out, I aligned them and got the epoxy ready. The sheer clamps were probably the biggest pain.  I used a piece of string to make sure they were (relatively) straight when glued at the scarf joints.

All glued up about an hour later>>>