It's looking like spring!

Well, unlocking, anyway. Out to Wavey Creek yesterday for some tech support and boatbuilding - Courtney was put to work on his folks' new Vista machine (yoinks!) while Tara sanded down the sealed frames. We cleaned up the stringers with router and sandpaper (tried some little rounding planes from Lee Valley, too, but they didn't work all that well for this application). The picture on the left is of the sanded frames stacked up against the freezer, with a cedar plank in front of them.

Then it was time for the excitement - can you feel the excitement? - of cutting hull planking. We brought three big 1" cedar boards in from the garage and cut them into ½" strips. The smell of freshly cut Western Red Cedar is wonderful! Here's Tara standing next to one of the boards.

Now, we need a fair bit of planking to cover the hull - something like 13 square metres - and it looks like these planks won't be enough. More challenging, though, is the fact that these planks are only about half the length of the longest cedar strips we'll need.

Which means a whole bunch of scarf joints. Which means coming up with some kind of jig to make it easier. We played around with various possibilities and we think we can slide a narrow triangle against the tablesaw fence for cutting the scarfs. For gluing, we haven't played with this yet, but we can probably build some sort of box (two parallel sides) into which we slide the pieces to be scarfed. We'll figure it out and post pictures later.

Pretty cool to be cutting planking, though! That construction frame might be together by the end of the week. Or not; Courtney's band has been really busy. But the boat is moving forward.