I decided to shorten the lengths of timber from their 4.5m-ish lengths to 1-2m lengths depending on best-fit for the frame members, which are the first things to make. I fiddled around with arrangements for the parts and luckily had all the pieces fit exactly into the amount of timber I had. I did accidently cut the transom frame bottom in half when it is meant to be a solid timber, but I can repair that by epoxying the halves back together and reinforce it with a ply gusset. It'll probably be stronger than before doing it that way, if a little heavier. Given that it's going to have an outboard attatched to it anyway, it's hardly going to break the balance of the boat or anything. Worst case scenario, I replace the timber and cut it again. I hacked the boards into shorter lengths and carted the whole lot off to school.
The great thing about being an art/design teacher at a secondary school is the access to a machine shop that is reasonably well equipped to deal with the kind of project I'm undertaking. In my spare periods today, after getting all my lesson prep done nice and quickly, I pottered around for an hour or so, a lunchtime, and an hour after school and got all the boards thicknessed to 19mm from the raw boards, all the templates transferred to the wood pairs, and roughly cut 3 or so pairs of frame members. The rest will have to wait until monday when I can get back to the bandsaw.
And finally, my meagre successes:
I've started now. It is odd, but those first three frame members up there are telling me I will succeed at this. I don't know why, and whether it is madness already setting in, but they're whispering success at me.
And advice about who to kil......
Success.. Just success..
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