Separation Anxiety II

I know it's been a while, and I haven't contributed anything towards the boat, or the blog. Sorry.

I was at the fracture clinic yesterday and a silver tongued orthopedic specialist explained that I wasn't to do anything with my arm (including go to physio) for at least 10 days. I am going back for another xray in three weeks.

In the meantime, the nurse has strapped my arm into a strange sling that Kim (the wife) described as bondage gear. This was a surprise to both me and the nurse. Having said that, why they insist I wear a rubber mask and carry a whip around is beyond me.

So, the strongback remains dormant in the garage. I will attempt to put a coat of epoxy on the plywood strakes with my right hand. (I was going to put a Wiki link to strakes for you, but I have a bad arm, look it up!).

In the meantime, I will practice making cups of tea for Chris upon his return, he has a lot of catching up to do.

Separation Anxiety (in more ways than one)

Bad news, work has stopped on site for a few days. Two things have happened.

1. Chris has gone on holiday, and as most tasks require a fair amount of chatting, I am rather scuppered.
2. I fell off my bike.

On the way home last night, a considerate motorist decided he wanted to change lanes without checking his (or her) mirrors. Luckily, my quick reactions meant I could grab a handful of brakes before I damaged his (or her) paintwork. Unluckily, my four piston radial monobloc caliper brakes were slightly too good and locked up my front wheel and the bike disappeared from under me. The results are as shown below.



A rather scratched Triumph Daytona, missing
the indicator and a chunk of plastic.




A separated shoulder

  

















As it happens, I am away this weekend anyway so wasn't going to do any work on the boat anyway.

Hopefully, I'll be out of the sling next week and can crack on with the moulds.

Some technical stuff.

It might help people understand what we are up to if I try to describe the key stages in the building process.

Firstly, boil your kettle: while this is happening, add a teaspoon of tea per person to the pot, plus ‘one for the pot’…

Once you have this delicate process sorted, build your boat.

Sadly, we fell at the first fence. Despite numerous hints, Joe seemed incapable of addressing the needs of the workers, so don’t blame me if the thing sinks. It is worrying, but maybe things will improve while I am away on a fact-finding mission to the pubs of the River Thames in the next two weeks. I have a secret hope that it will be more or less seaworthy by the time I get back.

I digress… the key stages of the process are: building the strongback (the frame that supports the whole construction), setting up the moulds (a series of formers around which the boat itself is built). These two phases are possibly the most important – we are going several extra miles to get them absolutely right, so the boat will be ‘straight and true’. This is tough for two blokes who have zero scores on Completer-Finisher, but we are faking it well so far.

Once we have the moulds set up, the keel, stem and stern (which need to be accurately cut and shaped) are put in place. The next stage is to fix the strakes or planks: a very tricky operation if you are starting with a tree or even a sheet of ply, but, it is hoped, very much more simple because the complex shapes of each strip have been precut for us: that’s the real advantage of the kit.

As we go along, there will be much application of epoxy, both as a varnish and as glue, probably to the two of us (Joe has mysteriously found a use for most of the latex gloves already), but also to build up a pristine, waterproof surface on the boat.

Once we have the planks in place, we flip the boat over, removing it from the strongback and moulds. Then we start the fitting of the various interior components: thwarts (seats), decking, knees (strengthening braces) and tholes (rowlocks). Finally, we shall remove various structural components of
Joe’s house to get the thing outside and then, at long last, sea trials will commence.

Simple, really.

Our Strongback - almost complete and dead level

Just in case you thought we'd forgotten to build the boat.

Just a quick note to say we haven't forgotten to build the boat. Or fill in the blog for that matter.

Last weekend the majority of the Strongback was constructed in the garage. My car now lives outside, and I can't get to my beer making fridge. Remind me to write something about the beer making fridge, it was a school project for my son Jack, he got an "achieved".

I have looked up Strongback on Wikipedia to see if it was worth linking to some really useful information for you.

It wasn't, I can summarise in a much more entertaining fashion.

From Wikipedea

1. a strongback is a beam or a girder that acts as a secondary.. oh never mind, it's very dull. 
2. The name of a band formed by former members of that well know act "Palladium" (not to be confused with the Australian band of the same name), or
3. The name of at least three Caribbean Herbs. I can think of at least 10 other names for Caribbean herbs, and none of them are strongback.

Anyway, we are making good progress, but the pictures on my iPhone are a bit grainy, so I'll get Chris to take some with his digital camera - here's an unlicensed strongback image from t'internt while we wait. I think this one is bowed in the middle a bit.




A big Strongback in someones back garden, this is probably
what Noah's neighbours saw when they first started to get
suspicious of the incessant hammering.



The first cut.

Right, we are off!



Here's Dave, performing his ceremonial duties.



At 10 am, Saturday 9th of October, we had a Groundbreaking ceremony where the first piece of timber was cut in anger. Unfortunately the mayor of Wellington is currently tied up in thrilling mayoral election campaign, so we had to settle for the next best thing. Dave from Placemakers in Kaiwharawhara stepped up and performed the duty.

The timber in question is actually fence posts for the Strongback. They don't provide this stuff in the kit as most builders have plenty of this lying around in their garage. Not being most builders, I have old bikes and bits of my son's car lying around my garage.

Chris doesn't even have a garage.

Follow the transformation of these fence posts as they become a snooker table flat surface to build the boat on. (Come to think of it, I have a pool table in the room above the garage, I better not mention that to Chris.)



Words, words

Father:	I say...
Daughter:	Yes, Daddy?
Father:	Croquet hoops look damn pretty this afternoon.
Daughter:	Frightfully damn pretty.
Mother:	They're coming along awfully well this year.
Father:	Yes, better than your Aunt Lavinia's croquet hoops.
Daughter:	Ugh! - dreadful tin things.
Mother:	I did tell her to stick to wood.
Father:	Yes, you can't beat wood...Gorn!
Mother:	What's gorn dear?
Father:	Nothing, nothing, I just like the word, it gives me confidence. Gorn...gorn.It's got a sort of woody quality about it. Gorn. Gorn. Much better than 'newspaper' or 'litterbin'.

One of the pleasures of this boatbuilding enterprise is the immersion in a language that calls from the depths of our ancestry. Old Norse (is there a new Norse?) and Old English give us a vocabulary of solid, worthy words, all of them deeply woody. Away from the nastiness of txting and the mangling illiteracy of the spellchecker, we can bask in the warmth of terms such as thole, thwart, sterns, stems and hogs. We can talk about buttock lines and rowlocks with barely a smirk and one day soon, I am sure, Joe and I will manage ‘gusset’ into our conversation and keep a straight face…

Already, we are beginning to have conversations that an outsider would struggle with and we haven't even unpacked the kit. We're currently discussing the location and structure of the strongback (which will be made out of four-be-two) as well as the possible approach to constructing the transom and stem. Lovely.

It's arrived.

Due to a slight hiccup in getting my contract renewed, I found myself unemployed for the day today. Coincidentally, I was emailed yesterday by the ever-helpful Robert from Nisboats to tell me my package had just left Auckland.

So I decided to spend my first morning of unemployment clearing out the garage for the huge pile of wood that would be arriving later in the day. Something like the picture to the right.

I got the call from the truck driver to check that I would be "on-site" to take delivery. This was it, Harry and I were waiting to help the driver off with the load.

It was a big truck....

It wasn't a big pile of wood...

Amazingly, Nisboats seem to have come to an arrangement with IKEA to create a flat-pack boat kit. While the pallet was the biggest I have ever seen, they have managed to pack the boat in a brown envelope.  I took a poor quality photo..

Can you tell what it is yet ?

Oh, and in case you thought I would have it built by next weekend Chris, unfortunately my period of unemployment ends on Monday and I have to go back to work.