Month: June 2020

I cut another board for the thwart, and, thankfully, I did it right this time. I redesigned it, too, to be a little more symmetrical. And you better believe that I measured, re-measured, and re-re-measured to make sure I didn’t ruin another board.

I put the wheel assemblies, now painted, back on the transom.

I dry fit the thwart and mast partner just to see the boat in its so-far completed form.

I’m not sure if I’ve featured the oarlocks on the blog. I’ve been working on them for a week or two. The oarlocks themselves are the cheapest nylon ones from Duckworks. I’m not yet sure where exactly along the wales they’re going to be permanently installed, so I made some temporary mounts out of some 1x oak that I had.

The mounts are kinda ridiculously tall, but that’s because the 3/4″ oarlock shafts go down 2″ below the surface into which the oarlock sockets are installed. So two layers of the 3/4″ thick oak wouldn’t be tall enough, and thus it’s three layers at 2-1/4″ tall.

The fourth layer, those smaller blocks at the bottom, were supposed to act as holders below the inwales, with the hex bolts going through the space between the hull and the inwales, between the inwale spacers. But the hex bolts you see are clearly not long enough. Not sure what I was thinking when I calculated the lengths.

And the smaller blocks won’t work either. I drilled holes exactly in the middle of them, but that spacing doesn’t even come close to matching the spacing of the inwale spacers. Gotta figure out something else. I’ve got some 3″ hex bolts that should work, but they’re 3/8″ instead of the 5/16″ that I used here originally. Not a big deal to drill the holes in the mounts a tad bigger. And I’ve got some aluminum bar parts to use instead of the blocks here as well.

On Saturday I sprayed a second coat onto the aluminum angle, flat bar, and square tube parts that make up the wheel assemblies. On Sunday I touched up a few spots on the hull with red and yellow.

I sprayed outside this time, rather than down in the potting shed area below our back porch. Quite a bit better outside in terms of ventilation, so neither did I make the whole basement smell like spray paint nor did I end up with black gunk in my nose from breathing aerosol paint.

There were a few problem areas on the hull that needed some attention, especially some transition areas between painted areas and stained wood areas. The worst was around the undersides of the quarter knees. It’s painted there, whereas the tops and sides are stained. The masking tape I’d used hadn’t quite prevented some splotches from creeping up and showing on the sides of the quarter knees. I nice sharp chisel took care of removing the paint, though.

Then I also touched up some spots that lacked paint coverage, a little square on the port side of the top of the transom that showed gray primer showing through that needed yellow. Likewise there were spots on the topsides of the leeboard guards that didn’t get quite enough red on them since the boat was upside down for the coats of red.