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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