12 November, '05

Charlie is making good progress, well supervised of course but not by me. Aristocat Lord McLeod of Matangi CBW (Cat of the Beautiful Whiskers) is the shop foreman and frequently wanders the workshop floor making sure that all is in order. For naps he has a pile of planer shavings in a sunny corner that Charlie dare not sweep up, and is very very good at training people to open doors, ( including the refridgerator ) feed him, sit still while he sleeps on a knee or scratch a spot that he cant quite reach.

Sundowner number one is really taking shape now, heres a shot of the frames set up, and the powerful little boats lines are beginning to be visible. To give you an idea of scale the stem is very nearly head high on me !

The job that is going on right now is lining up, and trueing the framework ready for stringers. We have later on this week the entertaining job of pushing a pile of “twobyeight” back and forth through the sawbench to reduce it to 25mm x 20mm ( 0ne inch by 3/4inch ). Three of these are to be laminated together to make each chine and gunwale stringer so we need 18 of them about 7m (about 23 ft) long to make up the six major stringers, and then 40 more for the rest of the stringers which use two each.

I’ve opted for laminated stringers rather than solids because the Sundowner is a fat and jolly little maiden, and has a lot of curve in the sides and the sheerline. Its hard to wrap these largish stringers around in one piece especially if the wood is kiln dried and typically hard to bend so we laminate them in place. Slower but much easier!