Thursday, April 21, 2011

Measure twice, then again, and again

This past weekend was nice and busy, occupied with gardening, going out for beer and wine tastings and dim sum, barbecuing, wine and other shopping and other things; I am not a boatbuilding obsessive.  Still, I spent several hours drawing the frames on 9mm plywood.  Armed with a T-square, metal ruler, tape measure and protractor, I measured, marked, drew, checked, added, subtracted, compared with printouts, erased, and so on.  Each piece has eight sides on the bottom alone, so it takes about 34 measurements (half vertical, half horizontal) to draw, plus a pencil tied to a piece of string for the curved bits.  Not too many early mistakes, and I hope none left uncaught, plus I got quicker at it as time went by.  It took a few more hours on two weekday evenings to finish and double-check the drawing.  The final check involved using the Pythagorean theorem: believe it or not, this stuff is actually useful.  I had coordinates for the beginning- and end-point of each straight side, so I calculated the vertical and horizontal distance between them, squared them, added them and took the square root (the old a^2+b^2=c^2 formula).  Thank heavens for Excel.  The biggest error was 3mm, about one-eighth of an inch (I blame fat pencil tips and fat fingers), and I fixed it anyway.

Cutting the pieces will be tough, with so many straight sides.  Some can be done with a circular saw; others will take a jigsaw, with drill holes at the corners so I can change directions.  When all eight are cut, I will line them up and take a photo to post here.  It's almost Easter weekend, and both my daughters are home from grad school (yes, I am that old), so I won't be doing much cutting--not that I'm complaining, it's a great joy to have them around.  I have a feeling building this boat will take a long time!

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