(that's Jay Picotte, the director of the museum on the left)
The focus this past week has been on getting the deck beams faired, finished, and installed.
We fit the deck beams to the sheer clamp first. We want them to fit firmly and tightly to the clamp, and to be plumb as well.
You can see that the beams are higher than the sheer plank here. That's intentional. When the beams have been fit, we take the deck camber mold, hold it up against the side of the beam, and trace the final shape of the deck camber on the beam. That way we know that the camber will be exactly right on the finished beams.
Once the beams are fit, we give them a coat of finish off the boat. Much easier to do it now than later!
A while back, we sorted through the diminishing lumber pile and moved all the stock that we wanted to use for the decking, sole, coamings and covering boards inside.
Each time we sort through the stock, we grade it with an eye towards its final use. Clear, long planks will be used for the covering boards. The deck planks aren't very wide, so we can get decent planks out of the long stock that has some defects by working around the knots and checks.
Not much is left of the original pile outside. Mostly it's extra oak that we had on hand to make sure that we had lots of stock to work with for the frames.
We've started cutting decking stock and sorting it according to length. It's good practice to drop into production mode from time to time and just focus on doing lots and lots of one thing. It's not particularly exciting or glamorous work, but it speeds up the process and makes the next steps much easier.
Joel has finished the framing for the cockpit sole and has installed a temporary plywood platform. This makes it infinitely easier to work inside the boat!
In case you didn't know, on a boat, you stand on the sole, not the floor. And while we're at it, the ceiling goes up the sides of the hull, not overhead. Cherokee has no ceiling planks, so you don't have to think about that term again for the remainder of this project. However, if you find yourself on a nice wooden boat, and you're admiring those nice fore and aft boards that form an inside wall, you can now show off just how salty you are by NOT remarking on "the nice walls there."
David has been tackling the very tricky planking bevel at the transom. The transom meets the planking with a bevel so that the end grain of the planking and transom meet, just like the mitered joint in a picture frame. Only it's a curved, constantly changing bevel, so it's a Bit Trickier.
He uses an angle grinder to work the end grain of the silverbali planking. It's impossible to get a plane in this tight space, and using chisels or other edge tools is slow, impractical, and risky. It's really easy to break out chunks of wood when you're using edge tools on end grain. So, a tool that just chews its way through the wood ends up being the ideal one for making this delicate, fine joint.
Go figure.
As he works, he checks how much more planking wood he needs to remove using a curved pattern that represents the outer face of the finished transom.
It's exceptionally dusty work.
The silverbali dust is particularly oily, so it sticks to Everything.
You can take a wad of the stuff and pack it like a snowball.
So, yes, we wear breathing protection any time we're sanding this stuff. It's actually a pain to sand because it clogs up most sandpaper almost immediately. We'll see more on that later when we're fairing the hull and deck.
The pattern has been cut out for the rudder and we're having Jeff from Boothbay Harbor Shipyard take it up and build us a rudder.
This is something we could do ourselves, but time is getting tight and we want to make sure we're absolutely ready to launch in the spring.