Saturday, November 24, 2012

More Stripping

I decided to use a different-colored strip along the waterline. As I thought , it earned me a lot of work. All the instruction about laying parallel strips, then filling the bow & stern ends with a few "filler strips" kind of goes out the window-I now have to use lots of tapered strips to match both the curve of the ends, and the curve of the waterline.
I think/hope it gets easier after this....

Saturday, November 3, 2012

The First Strip

I think I'll hold off on the next picture until I can take one that shows more progress.
This was a tough day. My DSL  modem blew up, spent half the day getting a new one to behave.
While making an adjustment to the Bow Form, the right-angle bracket that holds  it on the strongback broke. I re-glued it with epoxy, and that, too, broke. I screwed it together, then discovered that all the reference marks that I made were now useless- I had to construct a new jig for a string line , re-level, re-plumb, and re-align the thing.
Then I tried taking the first strip along the shear line. Again, it showed waves & curves when aligned exactly on the marks. I removed and replaced nails until the whole strip looked fair. The strip came within 1mm of the marks everywhere, and I figured that there was no point in building strictly to the forms if some of them are misaligned. 
I used a 1/2" strip, and had no problem making the curves at the bow & stern. 
11-10-12
I couldn't exactly bring myself to post a photo of one strip on the forms.
as usual, I'm figuring it out as I go along. My idea this time, was to "take as long as it takes", which is good, but it also results in "glacial progress". At times, I feel like I'm making a Federal Case out of it.
I decided on a light-colored (pine) strip at the Waterline mark. It looks nice, but it also sort of cancels out some of the instructions I've read, like adding filler strips at the bow & stern until parallel strips can be laid to the shear line. I'm going to be doing a lot of trimming & fitting of strips.