Saturday

This morning started well enough. I went to my storage unit looking for the charger to my cordless drill, and was pretty excited to find it quite quickly. A picked up a few other items, locked up the unit and headed over to TAP Plastics for epoxy supplies. On my way home I remembered something else I needed from storage and made a second stop there. I completed my errands in less than two hours and I felt good about how the day was going.

The charger I brought home is not the one for the drill! I have no idea what this charger is for, but the battery from the drill absolutely does not fit. I'll go back over to the storage unit tomorrow afternoon to look again.

However, I did make some progress on boat bits this afternoon. Using a really inexpensive miter box and my new Japanese saw, I cut more inwale spacers. Inwale spacers fit between the inwale (a rail on the inside of the hull to help stiffen and strengthen the boat) and the hull. The spacers are cut from 3/4" x 1 3/4" stock, and are just under 4" long. There will be about 25 of them on each side of the boat. Between last night and this afternoon, I have cut about half the number of spacers I will need. These will be set aside until they are needed later in the project. This is the set-up I am using to cut these spacers (those small bits sitting on the table are not the spacers, they are just scrap ends).



The Japanese saw works very well, and makes such nice cuts. It seemingly turned the low-cost miter box into a precision instrument!

I began work on the stem today. The two sides of the hull attach to the stem to form the bow of the boat. Because of the shape of the hull at the bow, the stem has a triangle shaped cross section, and is tapered from top to bottom. The plans call for the stem to be formed from a single piece of wood measuring 1 1/2" x 1 3/4" x 28." After reading a thread on the Wooden Boat Forum comparing a laminated stem (glued up from two or more pieces) with a solid 1-piece stem, I decided to laminate two pieces of 3/4" x 1 3/4 x 28" Western Red Cedar for my stem. I took two pieces of wood from last week's milling session and glued them together this afternoon using epoxy.



The blank is the piece with the C-clamps. It is sitting across two stringers to keep it off the table top. The stringers are covered with clear plastic wrap (epoxy won't stick to it) and sit on a piece of black plastic from a trash bag (to protect the table top). The epoxy will be cured enough in the morning for me to begin the next step but I will let it sit for at least 24 hours to make sure it is fully cured. I will mark the blank with center reference lines and "cut-to" lines so when the epoxy has cured I can begin cutting the blank and shaping the stem.