Life on the Outer Coast

" Screwing & Choke and Chuck"

The last two days have been largely spent in the somewhat dark hangar at UAS taking part in a skin-on-frame kayak building class. Total lack of articulate speech could be related to the long work day or perhaps the half or so of a beer necessary to quench the thirst of a dusty day in the shop.
Friday Keith and Sam and I worked with Brian doing some prep work. Sounds simple enough, but entails some training for those of us less familiar with plunge routers , slick planes, band, jig and chop saws. Let's say, prep work was interesting and a little initimidating for me. Fortunately it was easier to actually do than it was to think about doing. I get a little worried about screwing up or maybe getting sucked into the alluring blade of a bandsaw. Amazingly, neither unfortunate event occured.
First thing in the morning, Keith and I each built a steam box for bending ribs. Relatively painless... next I screwed the gunnels together in pairs so that we could cut mortises for the deck beams and ribs. This is when the day acquired the word of the day and the subject of the mornings running joke "screwing".
The plunge router was a little more intimidating , dusty and noisy than the cordless drill. The jigs that Brian had made the 45 degree mortise cuts (deck beams) possible, despite how improbable it seemed that I could accomplish my share of this task. Scary, but quite fun when it was accomplished. We also cut the mortises for the ribs with a plunge cutter, actually we did this before the deck beams as it was a more suitable task for training being that it was a straight cut. We seperated each pair of gunnels and laid out the the shop for class with each set of gunnels and other pieces of wood on a pair of sawhorses. I was toast.

Today would have been more appropriately called "deck beams", but "choke and chuck" supplied more humor. We set up the form of the boat with forms and cam straps so that we could attach the deck beams at the end of the day. We used a square form at each end to hold the ends of the gunnels together then drilled a hole and slashed the ends together with coated nylon. With some imagination the forms looked like boats. The rest of the day was taken up with shaping the deck beams. The critical pieces of this were cutting the tenons with japanese saws and chisels and shaping the bottom of each beam with the bandsaw of death. The tenons were all located on the bottom of the deck beams. Again the technique of relatively painless, but scary because if you cut to far, you had to re-build the deck beam. Fortunately, no mishaps. The bandsaw bit was a little wild because it involved reaching your arm across the bandsaw and pull the long deck beams through the blade. I used a push tool to help this along, as pulling across wasn't an easy reach. Next Keith and Scott routered each deck beams to remove the sharp edges and Brian sanded the bottom. The beams were ready to go in the kayaks about 5pm. We slacked up on the cam straps and starting at an end we spread the gunnels apart just enough to ease the tenons into the mortises. We drilled through the top of the gunnel into each tenon and inserted a small dowel to hold it. Lastly we drilled holes at 45 degree angles from each end of the deck beam through the gunnel and inserted another dowel. Fortunately for my pride the skin of the boat will cover up alot of carpentery inadequacies. At the end of the day, we had to use alot less imagination to conjure boats out of the wood.

12 marbled murrelets on the way home. 1 obvious juvenile, 3 with fish.