I Crack Myself Up

Posted by Kurt Maurer on Sep 1, 2006

I'm starting a new boat project, a custom design worked out by me and some guy up north, who won't be named until I'm confident he's okay with it. (I know someone's gonna ask, so it's a 17' x 20" four-panel, hard-chined shape similar to the Chessies/Arctic Hawk/Shearwater. A play boat, but with enough waterline for cruising, and a spectacular rolling machine all the while. We hope. It will be a hybrid.)

Anyway, I glued up the bottom panel scarfs yesterday. This morning I took 'em out of the clamps, and while admiring my astounding craftsmanship noticed a slight problem... I glued 'em backwards. I mean, the bow points up and the stern points down, that sorta thing. Whoooopsie. You'd think that, since this will be my eigth boat, I'd be well beyond this sort of dumbass boner. Not so! I have SCADS of talent for building WTF's?, reckon I always will.

I had been looking forward to quickly gluing up one last set of scarfs on the side panels, taking maybe fifteen pleasant minnits, then going fishing. But this development changed all that, or so I thought at first while pounding my skull against the brickwork.

After kicking around a few options, I sawed the joints apart with a Japanese pull saw as carefully as I could, stacked the panels and freshened up the scarfs with a block plane, then came to regard my new scarfs as looking rather better than the originals. The loss in finished panel length appears negligable. So I re-glued 'em, glued the erstwhile last joints also, and went fishing after all. Total time spent back-tracking and regaining lost ground: 40 minnits.

Didn't catch squat, but the party next to me stuffed an ice chest full of speckled trout. It turned out to be tons more depressing than the boat building flash of idiocy.

I post all this to remind everyone of how wonderfuly forgiving this business of building wooden boats really is. And also to remind the congregation that NO woodworker will EVER stop F'g U. I'm sure glad those two little facts of life go hand-in-hand so nicely, ain't it grand?

Cheers, Kurt

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