The stringers are on!

Yes, all four stringers are on. Courtney and Tara once again convinced Ron to help paint the fence, er, build the boat, and finished attaching the stringers this past weekend. Buster took this shot of them working away Monday morning.

It was good to have six hands for the job, too, for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that fitting the stringers works best if you have two people to hold a stringer in place and another to mark where the frame should be cut out.

The other reason... well, it's like this. There's this blade you can put on an angle grinder, and it has teeth rather like those on a chainsaw. Great for quickly roughing out, say, slots in the frames. Also good, as it turns out, for quickly roughing out slots in your thumb, if you get a bit careless with it. This left only five hands to work on the boat, or maybe 5.5 depending on how you're counting. Not the world's worst injury, and Courtney can still play guitar in his band, but it was enough to require a quick trip to the hospital.

Anyway, enough mit der sad stories - don't the stringers look great? You can't really tell from the pictures how neatly they're recessed into the frames and the transom and the apron, but it's a reasonably neat job, with the cracks all filled in with thickened epoxy. You can see Tara and Ron filling cracks in the last couple of photos.

We still have to pull the screws we used to hold the stringers in place, and then we have to bevel the frames and do a bit of trim around the hog, but the next big job is planking... and that is exciting!

Got the other sheer stringer on

...last night. Took all evening. Fiddly stuff. The deck-shelf stringers should be easier. Must stop telegraphese. (Only you can stop telegraphese. You can make a difference. Send money now!)

Good heavens, the avifauna at Wavey Creek! Hummingbirds, finches, doves, a zillion species of sparrow (well, it seems that way, anyway), blackbirds, cowbirds, woodpeckers, wood ducks and mergansers, to name but a few. No orioles this year or last, though, after a few years with dozens of them. Makes you wonder what's going on with their habitat, down south a ways.

Tempus fidgets.

Sometimes it's hard to find the time to update this blog. For the benefit of our regular readers, we haven't forgotten about you, and we are working on the boat; we'll have proper pictures when we hit the next milestone.

In the past week or so we:

• attached the transom;
• beveled the reinforced portion of every starboard frame;
• beveled most of the apron; and
  
• dry-fit and attached the starboard sheer stringer.

It's fiddly business, but now that we know how to approach it, the port sheer stringer should go much more quickly. The deck shelf stringers should be even faster, because they're recessed into the frames and held top-and-bottom... so they can't fall off.

Don't ask. ;-)

Pictures when we have all the stringers on!