Progress continues on the little boat building project, not without its anxious moments, but completely enjoyable. Just as an aside, I count myself one very lucky fellow to be able to work on a project like this.
I have stitched the transoms on the boat. You will recall, possibly, that this boat is a pram, which has two transoms -- flat ends -- one at each end. I can't imagine why this is so, but if you're building a pram, it means you have double the opportunity to curse like a sailor -- because transoms don't really want to be there, at the ends of the boat. They want to be somewhere else.
Yet here they are:
On second thought, it's not so much that the transoms didn't want to settle onto the boat. Rather, the boat was a bit resistant to the transoms' arrival. At the bow and the stern, the stitched-together strakes weren't so perfectly stitched together; there were small gaps between strakes. See:
See, that gap, and a number of other gaps like it, meant that the transoms, with their precisely placed notches, didn't fit the strakes so much. There would be gaps. And a sense of non-alignment. Nobody wants that.
So I did what I always do. I whined, using the online Passagemaker Dinghy Builders forum, hoping for advice (which is consistently forthcoming, thank goodness). And the advice was just what you would expect: "Don't have a cow, man. But tighten things up if you want."
So I used a highly unsophisticated but effective combination of clamps and body english to draw the strakes together, one pair at a time, and re-do or add stitches to get them tighter. And it worked.
Next step: using epoxy to convince the transoms to stay put, even after the stitches are gone. But first, I gotta find out when to address the twist issue -- a topic for another day.
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