The Tardis Project

December 23, 2014  Hours spent building to date: 467 Holiday duties have slowed things down a little, but Ray and John have been helping scarf and lift, so we got a couple more planks on. Had a bit of an oops with the port-side second plank.  I started with the starboard side and had been planning to

December 18, 2014  Hours spent building to date:  452 Ray came over today and we put on the first two planks.  I had spent three days head-scratching, patterning and scarfing, so it was good to see some real progress. Mark provides super-detailed plank patterns, and all his measurements have been extremely accurate so far.  So

December 13, 2014  Hours spent building to date:  428 All 240 feet of sheer plank laminations are on the boat at last.  It seemed like I was working hard, but only getting a strip or two a day finished and glued due to difficulty in placing clamps on both sides at once, glue drying time,

December 3, 2014  Hours spent building to date:  387 I’m the kind of boatbuilder that sees an open joint not as a problem, but as an opportunity to use more epoxy.  The one thing I’m fussy about is sheers.  On the boats I’ve built from scratch, I have always left them high and shaved them

November 23, 2014  Hours spent building to date:  372 Ray came over and we laminated the port stringers and aft sheer clamp in record time. I had hoped to have the   ready for planking (or sheathing I guess is more accurate) by Thanksgiving, but the forward part of the sheer clamp still has to

November 20, 2014  Hours spent building to date: 363 With fairing finished, time to return to some real boatbuilding — which in turn led to more fairing. The topside stringers are the long, thin members that provide a bonding surface for the topside planking.  They are curved for roughly the forward 15 feet of the

November 15, 2014  Hours spent building to date:  338   The engine mount is attached to two more heavy stringers that run about five feet in from the transom and form the sides of the motor well.  They are 3/4-inch plywood, so the well assembly is 1 1/2-inches thick — pretty hefty to handle the

November 7, 2014  Hours spent building to date:  326 Nothing big to report — just a lot of the small jobs that lead to a big boat.  And a few tidbits for the followers that are coming in from the WoodenBoat Forum. Finished up all the bottom stringers.  Now that I know how to do

Now that the stringers are in, they have to be faired to meet the planking.  That led to one of those situations that if I was doing this professionally would lead straight to bankruptcy. As you can see, the under berth stringers basically stop right in the air — they are hooked to nothing at

November 2, 2014  Hours spent building to date:  297   The big stringers that run fore-and-aft through the whole aft end of the boat are in after a lot of fitting and fiddling to get the “egg crate” slots all aligned.  My friend Ray came to help with the installation, since they have to go