The Tardis Project

February 28, 2016  Hours spent building to date: 2,208 Working around jury duty (very interesting), I finished up the aft bulkhead and went to work on the roof extension that forms a nice rounded canopy over the cockpit.  Fairly complex joinery (and more beams to make), but the pagoda-like structure that results is quite good

February 21, 2016  Hours spent building to date:  2,174 We’re still in a phase involving pretty basic carpentry, so things seem to be moving right along.  Having watched every episode of This Old House and The New Yankee Workshop over the past 20 years may have helped. The small drawers under the dinette went in

February 11. 2016  Hours spent building to date:  2,123 Another snowstorm blew in and halted the Tardis Project temporarily over the weekend, but progress resumed on the fore cabin,  and all the basic carpentry is done.  I was also able to move out into the deckhouse and get a couple projects underway. — After giving

February 4, 2016  Hours spent building to date:  2,087 Look at this giant boat filling my shop.  Until now, I can’t think of one project that I haven’t been able to complete either properly or through guesswork and liberal quantities of epoxy filler. But today I had to declare defeat due to two ordinary, perfectly

January 27, 2016  Hours spent building to date:  2,042 A head cold and a pretty good-sized blizzard slowed progress, but the next phase of construction after the deckhouse commenced with some interior carpentry. Day One was spent completely cleaning up the shop, which was coated with sawdust after days of heavy sawing and router work

January 18, 2016  Hours spent building to date:  2,004 Broke through 2,000 hours this weekend detailing and sanding the deckhouse beams, installing the deckhouse side supports and the aft bulkhead.  Pretty routine stuff. The 2,000-hour mark brings up the question I am asked more than any other:  “When do you think you’ll be done?”  Inquiries

January 14, 2016  Hours spent building to date:  1,985 As I mentioned in the last post, the forward deckhouse windows are a morass  of compound curves and bevels.   So immediately up on perusing the plans, I made a quick trip to Walmart for some poster board and patterned the window first in cardboard, then in thin plywood,

January 12, 2016  Hours spent building to date:  1,972 This is post number 100 since August 8, 2014 when the project began.   I have changed a lot since then.  I have joined the runners, quilters, mountain climbers and little old ladies with 248 cats as a true obsessive.  When I’m not working on the boat,

January 7, 2016  Hours spent building to date:  1,948 The Tardis is looking very shippy today with the installation of the deckhouse beams.  This was a lot of labor, but nothing technically difficult, since all 10 beams are the same length and camber. I started by notching out the carlins, not a bad job since

December 30, 2015  Hours spent building to date:  1,916 I wanted to do something special for the Tardis over the holidays, and decided to tackle the forecabin hatch. I have always admired “butterfly” hatches on classic boats.  They open up from the sides as pictured below, and since they were invented in the days before