Flashback

It´s Halloween and I´m in the garage working on the profiles. Trying to get them as smooth and even as possible. My mind wanders off to when I was a kid at school attending woodwork class, making birds feeding stations and other fantastic constructions. Rolf is back from America tomorrow;)

Lumberyard excursion

Rolf gave us, (Frode and Omar) a long list of tasks to finish in his absence. He is over the Pond participating in a job related course. So far progress has been slow, we must admit, but yesterday was a productive day. We went to the lumberyard and found some timber suitable for strips.

The saw issue has to be on the agenda again tough. Should we use a circle saw, or should we use our table saw? Anyone with experience out there? Those we spoked to yesterday about this, had the opinion that we should use the table saw for this job, as it would be easier to cut long lengths and get the right thickness. We might have to run some tests since we need a lot of strips.

The missing link, profile number 160, will be cut on wednesday. And not to many burgers now Rolf!

Night #3, done cutting stations and ready to set up

Tonight we cut the remaining stations and made ready to set them up. We could not help ourself but had to set up the stations at their position to have a look at the lines.. Beautiful hull shape!
While the stations was up in a very rudimentary way (they will be set up permanently and aligned later) we ran a fairing batten along the stations. Looked very fair to our untrained eyes. One of the front stations were obviously not good enough and will have to be replaced, but the rest of the stations looked like the real thing.

Hmmm, isn't something missing here? Should there not be a station at 160cm? I bet there should, so I'll have to have a talk with the designer about that. :-)

The rest of the evening we began fitting the deck to a kayak we need to get out of the garage.
For the next two weeks I'll be away, but I hope Frode and Omar will rip the planks. Fair the stations and set them up. Then we will be ready to start stripping once I return.

Second night, cutting stations and other preparations.

There sure is a lot more work in setting up a strip operation than doing a stitch and glue build. In two nights we have a strongback done and have cut most of the mould stations. If we had found good ply we could have the panels done by now and started bending them into something resembling hulls.
Next evening we will be able to finish cutting stations and start setting them up on the strongback. It will be very interesting to see how the lines of the hull come to life.


I guess this is how a Blade F-16 would look like if it hit something substantial at speed ;-) Still a few stations to cut.

We are now 6 hours into the project, but cost is low as we have used scraps and remains from other projects so far.

Here are the supports for the mould stations. 26 supports at 40cm length, or was it 40 supports at 40cm? Well, at least Frode cut enough of them while he was going at it.

In the background there are two pieces of ply which will go on as the deck of a ply kayak I am finishing at the same time. Need to get the kayak out of the garage fast so I hope to install the deck this week. Ply is norwegian fir 3.6mm thick and not of marine quality, but for a kayak which will only see light use it is OK.

First night, building the strongback and transferring stations

This was not really the first night as Omar and I cleaned out my garage the week before. But this was the first evening we did something which felt like making progress.

To the left we can see Frode inspecting the strongback which is half done. The strongback is built from 12mm ply skins and 2x4 lumber, assembled with 80mm giproc screws.
In the background we can see a Tornado rudder and the door leading to my hobby room.



Omar is transferring the stations to a 20mm particle board. The board was "liberated" when they threw out some desks from my workplace. We got a stack of these ready to be turned into stations.



Omar is very dedicated to his task, to the expense of our sense of aesthetics.. We can live with this as long as he do good stuff.