Up to the Gunwales in Sawdust

Welcome back.

Well, the Rugby World Cup imposed a bit of a go-slow on the boat building process. Priority being given to watching the matches over standing over the boat sanding the inside.

A word of warning, if you ever build a boat, and in particular a boat that you build upside down on a strongback, take an extra ten minutes wiping the excess glue off the inside of the hull after you've glued anything on the outside. I would say that we have spent about 20 hours sanding and scraping the inside of the hull. A particularly tedious and soul destroying task.

So, to break the monotony, we did some other jobs in parallel, mostly to stop us going insane with boredom.

Firstly, we've fitted the gunwales. This involved more clamps, a couple of brass retaining screws, a lot of glue, some steam, a router, a spokeshave, some sandpaper, and a firm conviction that "it's not an exact science". To describe the process would be complicated - so I used all my wordart skills and drew this cross section.

Stick the side bit to the boat, then the glue the cap to the side bit and the boat, then remove all the bits that are outside the dotted line with a curved router. It says on the instructions that you aren't to use those blades "freehand" but I couldn't see a problem. Anyway, as with the "David", start with a lump of wood and chip away all the bits that don't look like Michelangelo.

And just to show you that we are doing something, here's me, manhandling a very dangerous power-tool, covered in bits of gunwale. You can see the gunwale side has been added to the starboard side of the boat. You can also see I am losing my hair at an alarming rate!

Don't put your fingers there!