Big Day

It has been a very Boaty weekend. I won't lie to you (Thomas never lies!): I am tired.

After I (very generously, I thought) posted this morning about the boat triumph yesterday, I got the following message from the one person who had nagged me for the update (in case you haven't guessed, it's my mother, Mary).

I think if we did less partying would have had a more factual building report. Too limited in words. But it certainly is big. No pics of cutting bottom or attaching same. You get an f on report card

There's a wonderful book called "Ball Four", written by former Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton. It was the first tell-all sports autobiography, written at a time when even reporters traveling with the team would not print all of the (true) stories about the ballplayers' carousing, boozing, and carrying on. It was a club, and a very secretive one at that. Then Bouton wrote this book--exposing some really seedy underbelly of professional baseball--and was reviled by the baseball community. I don't think he ever worked in the MLB again. (He went on to invent Big League Chew (bubble gum packaged to look like chewing tobacco, in an effort to keep kids off of tobacco) and last I heard he had founded and was running the Vintage Base Ball Federation, an old-timey baseball league, playing by the rules of 1880. But I digress.)

In the book, he tells a story about Mickey Mantle, who asked the Yankee manager (maybe Leo Durocher?) if he could have the next day off. Durocher said sure, and Mickey hit the tiles that night. Stayed out all night drinking and partying, and finally made it back to his room around dawn. He spent most of the game huddled on the bench, trying to sleep, but as luck would have it, in the late innings, the Yankees were down by a run or two with men on base, and the manager needed Mantle to pinch hit. He staggered up into the bright sun, grabbed a bat, stumbled to the batters box, and hit the first pitch for a home run. He trotted the bases, and collapsed back on the bench, right next to Bouton. According to the story, Mantle leaned forward and peered at the screaming fans with bloodshot eyes and said, "They have no idea how hard that was."

That is how I feel about this morning's post.

I will try to make amends now.

Yesterday's job was pretty straightforward, as I had predicted the day before: I traced the boat outline on the plywood "bottom" (leaving a little around the edge just in case) and then cut it out with my circular saw. I flipped the boat frame upside-down, drilled holes through the bottom into the ribs, and then applied woodglue to the bottom of all of the ribs and the sides. I laid the bottom back on, screwed it down, and piled with rocks. (Uncle John calls this the 'glue and stack' method of boat-building.)

Then I mixed the fillet (epoxy + sawdust), and lined all of the seams with it.

Then I went to the block party, talked to Mr Hall (the one person there I knew), who mixed me several Dark and Stormys (rum, lime juice, and ginger beer -- a very nautical drink). After that, I don't remember much.

So, this morning, after the Jeeves pick-me-up, I went out to trim the excess around the bottom.

As is my way, I did this by hand: using the manual hand (that's redundant) saw. This was very exhausting work, cutting at a tough angle, and underneath the sharp-edged rub rail. I barked the back of my hand into this edge frequently and hard enough that it was spewing blood at every cut. You can see some on the side of the boat in this picture of the saw:
After getting as much as I could cut, I sanded down the rest with the sanding attachment on my drill. This was tiring and very saw-dusty work. Photo by Henry
But at the end of that sanding, I truly did feel like I had made a BOAT.

I then began the priddying process. I sanded out much of the mess from the inside filleting job yesterday.

I also sanded the sharp corner/edges off of the ribs and rub rails (should probably have done that before trying to saw the edge of the bottom) so they're more user-friendly.

Sanding doesn't sound like hard work, but the oak of the rub rails especially was exhausting, time consuming work. And it was well over 90 degrees today, and much of the day I was in the sun. It was brutal out there.

I also sanded down the edges of the stringers on the side of the boat. They are made of three-layer plywood, and when you sand down, you go through one layer of wood, and then the (dark) wood glue, and then another layer of wood, and then the glue, and then the third layer of wood. A neat side-effect of this is that the dark glue lines make a neat pattern on the side stringers. I think this looks very cool:
At this point, it was an inch deep in sawdust, especially the corners and edges and joints. So I decided to hose the whole thing off to clean it up in preparation for fiberglassing. (Somewhat ironic, as I had been so paranoid about the wood getting wet for the last month.)
It was while I was letting it dry that I read the afore-mentioned e-mail from Mary, giving me an F. I decided to call her, and in the course of conversation, she (rightly) pointed out that it would be a very bad idea to fiberglass the boat after rinsing it. Now, I hadn't SOAKED it. I just gave it a quick jet with water to get the sawdust out. And, as I said, it was a VERY hot day here today.

But still and all, it wouldn't do to mess up the fiberglassing after having come this far. Plus, it was about 2:30, and I still had to mow the lawn and do some other things around the house (like lay on the couch and watch the Blackhawks game. Go Hawks!) So I called it a day.

I also scrubbed my special, 3am idea from last week. As I've decided not to proceed, I'll tell you what it was: I found some very thin (1/8 inch) oak wall paneling (a 4'x8' sheet). Like bead-board, with 2-inch "planks" (divided by, you know, those little indentations in bead board.) I had planned to cut apart all of these individual 2-inch boards and attach them, overlapping, on the sidewalls, to make a faux "clinker boat".
While I still think it's a clever idea, it would add some unnecessary weight to the boat, and given that I still have to design and add a sail rig, I don't think I should be adding unnecessary weight.

In addition, I really LOVE the look of the wood with the fillet epoxy on it. The baltic birch is a very, very white wood. Even staining it, I didn't think it would take on a very interesting color. But after seeing it dried on the inside of the boat, I'm excited. I'll do a little test on the bottom of the boat, but my plan now is to just add a small amount of the sawdust to the coat of epoxy, giving it that nice rich brown color. I think it will be very nice.