Happy Birthday to you...

...Happy Birthday to you / Happy Birthday, dear Shilling / Happy Birthday to you! (Courtney wanted pictures of cake and candles, but Tara said no.)

Yes, Boxing Day (December 26th for those of you who don't have Boxing Day) was our Shilling's first birthday, in the sense that we started work on December 26th, 2006. Like most one-year-olds, the Shilling still doesn't talk much, doesn't get around all that easily, and isn't allowed to drive yet.

We're almost done planking (man, I'm getting tired of saying that), as you can see from the portside shot. We're still looking almost sane, as you can see from the picture of both of us. That's probably about all we can ask for at this point. (And more coffee - we can ask for more coffee. It's very morning out.)

Interior pix

As we put on the last few planks, we're also beginning to clean up the exterior of the hull. Ron (being rather more compact and flexible than, say, Courtney) volunteered to go inside and hammer out some badly placed nails, so we have some shots of the interior.

Looks fairly well-sealed for this stage, though of course once we clean up the squeeze-out and glass the interior it will be REALLY tight!

And speaking of tight, how about this sight of Ron contorting himself around frame #2 and the CP case? We're very lucky he's decided to put in some "sweat equity"!

Sometimes we're clever. Of course, it's usually too late by then.

We're almost done planking, so it's kind of silly that we came up with a major improvement to the process now. We post this for what it's worth to anyone crazy enough to be contemplating building their own boat. :-D

See, when we glue the planks onto the frames, some of the glue squeezes out and runs down the frame edges. When the glue is dry, we use a chisel to remove it. But wouldn't it be good if the squeeze-out ran down onto something we could remove easily? Some kind of sticky paper we could use to, you know, "mask" the bits where we don't want glue?

Something like this newfangled stuff called "masking tape", perhaps? (DUHHHHHHHHHHHH!)