It's been several days since I have had a chance to work on the boat. Part of the time has been spent scouring the city looking for a source for wood meant for things other than slapping some frames up and hammering fiber board to them, but I finally found a place called The Woodworker's Source in Phoenix. The selection is amazing, but you of course have to have a pretty critical eye to make sure you get what you want.

In the mean time, I put together a contraption meant to hold the transom at the 93 degree angle required by the plans, and amazingly enough, these meet those measurements exactly. Once in a very great while I do something right, but generally I have to do just about everything at least twice before I get it the way I want it.

I finally picked up what I considered to be pretty decent mahogany and here I'm testing the fit of the boards to one another. The old adage, "measure twice, cut once" is simply not sufficient for me because I measure the cut of these boards several times and it still looks as if I may have cut them too short, or at least they are so close as to leave no room for error.

I also started putting the stem together, but I'm too ashamed to show the pictures of the effort. You have two ways to go when putting together the stem; you can laminate several thin strips of wood and epoxy to build up the stem with the proper curve, or you can simply cut and glue pieces together to build it up. I chose the latter method, during the execution of which I botched up several pieces of beautiful mahogany so bady that I wanted to cry. I haven't given up on it, but I'm definitely considering other options.

It's been a while since I posted, and a lot's been done, with puzzlingly little progress to show for it. First I thought I'd give you a peek at my first attempt at a stem pieced together from parts. This approach was really hard to make work for an amateur-amateur because of the tricky mating surfaces. Had I cut the entire stem from boards glued at a 90 degree angle I think I could have made it work, but I chose instead to go with what one would think is the more difficult approach, a laminated stem.

This picture shows the laminated stem I made, along with the outer stem that I'm laying up using the inner stem as a form. To make the stem I glued two 36 inch long 1x4 planks face to face. I then used a table saw to cut 3/32" wide strips. I then taped the plans to a sheet of plywood and screwed some pine 2x2 blocks to the sheet along the line of the stem. I slopped epoxy on each face of all of the strips and pulled them around the blocks and applied a shit-pot full of clamps. The book says that this process is messy, and they are absolutely correct. Gloves, while difficult to do any work in, are highly recommend, otherwise your hands will be absolutely coated in epoxy.

I've glued up the planks for the transom and done a cursory shaping and planing, and now I'm testing for fit and fairness. I first cut the transom using the fair curve lines from the plans, neglecting the teeny-tiny little note that says to cut the transom to the inside facing of the planks and not the lines. To fix it I had to cut off the bottom of the transom, glue a new plank and cut it.

I've spent what seems like days and days measuring and eyeballing the lines of the hog, which is a 2" wide piece of mahogany the forms the backbone of the boat. This was one piece but to get it to form to the curve of the bottom I actually cut it into two 2" X 3/8" pieces, which I am gluing back together now. Up to this point I could if need be backtrack a few steps if I screw something up, but now I'm at the point where this becomes much more difficult.

Here I'm gluing the stem that took hours and hours more and buckets of epoxy more than should have been used, so I'm naturally nervous about the whole thing.