Winter coaching on the Wanganui River

They're bridesmaids...

One of the trickier challenges in this boat building exercise has been the construction of the oars. The basics were simple and we ran up four roughly shaped examples in a few days, even allowing for my building one back to front and the subsequent correction.

Rough shaping the spoons

However, shaping them so they would 1) match and 2) look 'proper' was something we baulked at. Despite suggesting to Joe that he could whittle away of an evening, while watching Game of Thrones or some similarly undemanding nonsense, the oars remained untouched for over a year. I spent hours trying to work out a method for guaranteeing a uniform and seaworthy shape.

The basic shape

Well, today, I decided just to get on with it. I started with this. You can see the thickness of the spoon:

I got out our small plane and set to. To my amazement and delight, within a short time, I had brought one to a state of 'almost perfection' (see earlier blogs for definition of this term):

One done, see the difference!

Only the need to feed my boys prevented me from continuing into the night: I shan't sleep with the sheer excitement of knowing that, tomorrow, I shall get all four up to scratch. Unless, of course, I make a cock-up.

No, that's very unlikely. Isn't it?

Change of direction

Building the boat with company is fun: an unbroken stream of rowing chat, bad puns, philosophical discourse that would put Pete and Dud to shame and repetition of formulaic jokes turns the tedious tasks like sanding and gluing into a social event. There are also genuinely challenging problems to solve and techniques to learn that make it really interesting and rewarding.

The last few weeks, working on my own, have been rather dull, to be honest, though I have made progress and Harry and Kim have been there ready to hold things when needed. Unfortunately for you, gentle reader, this dullness is coming out in the rather mundane style of the recent blogs. Either that, or Joe simply has a better way with words. As long as he comes back with the leathers for the oars, I am prepared to say I am looking forward to his return.

Here's what accounted for a fair chunk of my time in the last week:

This is the rudder that we made from ply a few years back. The idea was deliberately to show the ply as a key building material and, by exposing the layers as the rudder tapers to the tip, the striations gave it a special look.

As confessed earlier, I wasted hours of work by hastily attaching the fittings in what turned out to be the wrong position, spoiling the beautiful finish in the process. I am not at all happy about messing this up: I made a mistake that might have been recoverable, but my attempts to remedy it only compounded the problem. Having swallowed the spider, bird, cat, dog, goat, cow and most of the horse, I gave up and decided to make an entirely new rudder from scratch.

I started another ply version, as I mentioned earlier, but felt that it just wasn't going to work out too well.

Ply sandwich

Marked up

So now, when Joe gets back from his in depth research into the yachting scene in Croatia, or cruising in Brighton, he can choose between two versions:

Mahogany and Fijian Kauri

Ply version, before sanding

The Kauri will be relatively light coloured, but, with varnish, darker than the above. The new ply is much lighter - almost a cream colour -, but will also darken with varnish applied. I may experiment with some staining, too. It remains to be seen whether the grain and knots that are showing will enhance or spoil the look. So far, even poor quality ply has yielded a very pleasing finish.

On the other hand, the Kauri does look good and I have invested quite a bit of effort in it, having added all that mahogany....

"When our backs are to the wall, we'll turn and fight"

One of my previous errors, several years ago, was starting the project in the first place.

Another one was cutting the timber for the cox's seat back a bit too short. One of the pleasures of working with wood, however, is that such mistakes can be rectified with ease, or glue.

We have a bit of a theme going with mahogany: the ends of the foot stretchers, the breasthook, the rudder yoke and the oars all have what we can pretentiously claim to be 'detailing' (thanks, Kevin McLeod) using the left overs from the thick length we bought to make the transom.

It therefore made sense to stick a couple of bits onto the otherwise-too-short piece of Fijian kauri. While I was at it, I also added a mahogany edge, top and bottom.

The added extras

I even remembered the early lesson we got that you cannot have too many clamps.

Tada!

It's all Joe's fault....

The oars remain the big hurdle between us and the Waikato: more about them later.

In the last week, I have sorted out the seat fixing, built a seat back for the cox's seat (worth a little blog on its own) and shaped the knees that will further strengthen the seats.

As well as the oars, what remains to be done is:

• Fitting the slots for the foot stretcher
• Varnishing for the final time
• Gluing the seats and knees in place
• Fitting the rudder.

The last on the list, annoyingly, caused a hiccup. OK, a cockup. The rudder was complete and I had finished the yoke, even adding eyelets for the rudder lines:

The yoke aren't white

Eyelets in Gaza

Unfortunately, I then had one of those moments of idiocy which, looking back, some may think have been a feature of my building methods. In most cases, Joe was there to avert disaster with his sage advice:

"You don't want to do it like that"

However, he's away, so therefore entirely to blame for my fitting the brackets on the rudder in the wrong place. I hadn't checked where the pintles needed to go to fit on the transom.The brackets were too far down on the rudder.

A badly drawn pintle

Rudder pintle

Two pintos

Guess what?

The necessary drilling and gouging to fit the brackets meant that the rudder was spoilt. Any repair would have been a botched effort and, although that may be what I specialise in, I decided to make a whole new one.Well, two so far, because my first effort was made up of scraps of ply and was heading to be a mess. I decided to buy some nice, clean ply and start from scratch.

Can you guess what it is yet?

Problem Solving

I have been puzzling over how best to fix the seats in place. Aside from their obvious purpose, they are important as braces for the overall rigidity of the boat. One option would have been to bolt them in place, but I was reluctant to do so because the seats look so nice without any fittings to spoil the lines (see the pictures below). We will, of course, fit the knees in place on top of the seats, but they too should not have any visible fastenings.

The rowing seats in place

In the end, I opted for dowel pegs drilled into the underside of the seats and into the supporting cleats. I came across a handy little gadget to ensure that the holes were exactly aligned: a little metal stud with a very sharp point that fits into the first hole drilled, so that, when the seat is laid on top, it gives a neat and precise reference mark for the second drilling. Neat and simple.

Marker studs

Dowel peg in place

 The seats then dropped into place, once I had hit them with Harry's rubber mallet:

The bow seat, fixed with the pegs, but not yet glued (the knees, as you might expect, are below the seat).

With knees...

All 3 seats fitted

Back by popular demand

This may just have been our longest gap yet, but the flame burnt, albeit dimly...

I have just completed a contract that lasted 14 months: being currently between opportunities, I have a bit of time to revive the project. Joe is away in the UK sourcing leathers and pintles, or maybe dressing in leather and sinking pints, at least one of which is popular in Brighton. He'd better come back with the goods. However, I made a promise to myself that I would get this damn thing done this year (yes, the same promise I made for the last three years) and so I took the plunge.

The frustration of the last couple of years has been the knowledge that we are really, really close to completion. On Monday morning, I decided to roll up my sleeves and crack on, with a clear plan of attack, no distractions, no interruptions: I was going to get the seats in place.

I opened the workshop (garage), to find that Harry had claimed part of his inheritance - half the garage - and has spread all the bits of a Kawasaki around. Never mind, the company is good and sawdust is the best finish for engine parts.

A couple of hours passed after which I had found most of the tools I needed. A while later, I had made some elegant and entirely redundant braces to support the rudder yoke. These, when in place, didn't match, so I made some more, but much quicker since I had been through the steep learning curve on the first attempt.

The rudder, with pointless braces.

Cynics might suggest that this inability to stay on task is at the root of our problem. I would respond, but something bright and sparkly just flitted across my field of vision.