S/V Ripple

I had suppressed how messy an epoxy lamination glue-up is.  I had all the tools and materials laid out, waxed the template, rehearsed it all in my head, and guestimated the amount of epoxy i would need.  I mixed the resin and hardener (150 ml total), stirred thoroughly, and started slathering.  Each facing pair of the 8 is slathered and mated, then the 4 are made into two, then those faces slathered and joined until there is a single slithery 8 ply that is clamped to the jig, evened up, and adjusted.  Very messy. I had clamps to spare, but not epoxy!  I used all of it.  About 2 hours.

I bought wood for actual boat parts this week - 20 board feet of Alaskan yellow cedar.  Light, strong, straight-grained, and decay-resistant, it is an ideal boat building wood, and local , sort of.  Not that it is less expensive for that! I took a guess at the amount, mostly simply wanting to get enough to get through the next phase of the build - transom, keelson, apron, and stem.  I'll have some wood left over from that, but not a lot. Today I ripped the blanks I cut yesterday and ran them through the thickness planer until they were the desired dimensions.   I also made the bending jig for laminating the apron and the stem. The picture shows all the parts I prepped today (except the keelson).  I hope to do a glue-up tomorrow. 

The building frame and station molds are complete.  Nothing in the picture will ever be wet, but what is done now is the foundation for the rest.  Now its a matter of attaching a transom, keelson, apron, inner stem, outer stem, keel, skeg, and wrapping the whole thing in okume plywood, and fitting out the interior.  Oh... and painting, varnishing, making spars, rudder, oars, and dagger board. But from here on out, crafting actual boat parts will be involved.  Time to go buy some wood. My back-of-the-envelope time estimates suggested I would have 22 hour into this part of the effort.  It went much faster than that... 8.5 hours total. 

I acquired the books that will guide my progress through the building of Auklet.  One is Iain Oughtred's own guide to clinker plywood boat construction, the other I bought on impulse at the time I ordered the first: How to Build Glued-Lapstrake Wooden Boats (Brooks and Hill). It is useful to have more than one reference for such a project, though it also provides great excuses for dithering -- more choices on how to do things.  Since each of these books is written as a guide to an array of boats, they have many contingencies (If dory, then this, if skiff then that, etc.)  What one really wants is one well-illustrated, lucidly articulated book intended for your project alone.  I guess that's why people buy kits.  I at least have my near-ancient past history of building an ultralight canoe, though that is a distant, faded memory. But the project is launched.  I spent some time reading each of my references, and bought the materials necessary for the build...