The Tardis Project

October 29, 2014  Hours spent building to date:  283 I took a break from fairing to add the small fore-and aft stringers in anticipation of putting in the big, beefy engine stringers which take the stress of the engine and run half-way through the boat.  As I scarfed short pieces into boat-long pieces and glued

October 26, 2014 Since frame fairing — turning frames with square edges into frames with angled edges — does not make for a really compelling blog, I thought I would post some pictures of the project I completed just before starting the Tardis.  Just before taking my Jericho Bay Lobster Skiff out of the water

October 22,2014  Hours spent building to date:  250 Fairing is very boring, since you work and work, but not much on the boat seems to change.  But it has to be done, like doing the dishes or cleaning the litter box. The first job was to turn the keel from flat into a ‘V”, since

October 19, 2014  Hours spent building to date:  232 The next step was to connect the straight part of the keel, the curved part and the stem all together to create Tardis’ “backbone.”  The first joint went great — planed down the angle on the curved part for the scarf joint, put it on the

October 16, 2014   Hours spent building to date:  225 Cut the straight part of the keel to correct dimensions.  After a 20-foot cut in 1 1/2-inch old growth Douglas fir, even the Festool saw was running a little hot.  The keel  looked good and sat flat, so I glued it to the frames after getting everything as

Polyurethane adhesives are the bane of the boatowner’s existence.  They are unpleasant and difficult to work with, but absolutely essential and highly effective.  Kind of like colonoscopy prep or Miss Palermo in fourth grade. They dispense from a tube, which is often poorly made.  They will not come out of that tube reliably in less-than-tropical

October 13, 2014  Hours spent building to date:  206 Using a plane to fair plywood makes a sound a lot like scraping your fingernails over an old-fashioned blackboard.  No sweet-smelling shavings, just a sandy, gluey dust.  A sander takes off the excess wood, but tends to round over the edges, which need to be as sharp as possible where

October 9, 2014  Hours spent building to date:  196 One of the magic moments of boatbuilding is setting up the frames, bulkheads or molds.  After a lot of work, the piles of wooden pieces come together and resemble something that is a lot like a boat. And on the Tardis, it happened fast.  My friend

October 7, 2014  Hours spent building to date:  184 Someday, waiting for good weather to cross the Straits of Mackinac and avoid 5 foot waves and 1100-foot freighters, Tardis will seem very tiny, about the size of her phone-booth namesake. But today, with her building frame (called a “strongback” in boatbuilding parlance) almost totally filling the

October 3, 2014  Hours spent building to date:  169 After two months of relatively diligent work, all the frames and bulkheads are ready for the strongback.  I have a pretty good metal ruler that will have to be retired at this point — some of the numbers are literally wearing off from measuring and checking the