The Tardis Project

April 13, 2015  Hours spent building to date:  916 I don’t know if the pictures will really show it, but Tardis has a coat of primer on and to me is looking more and more like a real boat. More on the paint and process later, but so far, so good as to overall finish. 

April 10, 2015  Hours spent building to date:  904 At the end of the day I was really beat after another session sanding up and down all over the boat, but at last it was done.  But I said to myself, “I said the primer was going on this week, and it’s going on.”  So I

April 3, 2015  Hours spent building to date: 886 Returned to the boat (and more snow!) from Sarasota after a great break and have been working diligently ever since — it just doesn’t look like it.  It is simply hard to show a boat growing smoother in pictures — they all look a lot like

March 20, 2015   Hours spent building to date: 859 The first day of Spring — and it has been snowing since noon and will continue to snow all night.  I have seen worse winters (in 1969 in Spokane we had five feet of snow on the ground), but have never known one so unrelenting — three

March 16, 2015  Hours spent building to date:  835 Gee, it’s too bad but I had to stop sanding for a couple days and move on to the keel.  The reason is simple:  once I totally fair the bottom it’s just too slippery to work on.  I can get on all right, but getting off

February 12, 2015  Hours spent building to date:  815 I have been sanding the hull now for 12 straight days, less one off for a blizzard.   I might have been sanding until son John hauls us off to Assisted Living, but for the help of follower Scott Curry. The problem with sanding a fiberglass boat

March 7, 2015  Hours spent building to date:  786 As I was adding the fill coats to the Xynole, layer after layer, there was always a spot on the third panel from the bow on the starboard side that I didn’t trust.  It was sort of greasy, a couple times I thought I saw a

February 28, 2015  Hours spent building to date:  756 Ray and I put on a burst of speed and got the whole boat done this week.  Same old learning curve story — I could do one panel myself in about three hours.  When we started, Ray and I could do one in about two hours. 

February 23, 2015  Hours spent building to date:  731 Half the boat is glassed and filled, and I have begun sanding the back panels in preparation for paint. This part of the build is turning into a real marathon — I have worked 14 days in a row, although some days are only two or

February 18, 2015  Hours spent building to date:  707 The material is usually fiberglass and the process is called “glassing.”  But Tardis is going to have a covering in keeping with her science-fiction name:  Xynole. Xynole is a polyester cloth — basically the same as stuff as a made-in-Malaysia golf shirt, but modified to make