When people stop by the museum to watch us as we work on Cherokee, we often have to describe how the parts that we're working on relate to the plans and photos that they see on the wall.  These parts bear no immediate relation to the shape of a boat, unless you happen to be familiar with wooden boats and how they go together.

But now it's a different story.  The process started when we locked the keel into the position it will occupy for the next 3 months, and began attaching the floors.  The boat began to take shape.  Here's how it looked.

We began by flipping the keel upside down.  We drive the bolts that hold the floors onto the keel from the underside, and this area of the keel will soon be fasted down to its supporting wedge, so now's the time to install these bolts.  We countersunk the holes that Abe drilled the day before and began to install the floors.  

A brief aside about countersinking and ingenuity.  

A countersink is the little indentation that we drill into the wood so that the bolt head sits either flush with or just below the surface.  Normally you just use a standard countersink bit or something similar to do this.  But... there's the problem with countersinking a fin neck bolt:  The bottom of the head is tapered, but not as much as a screw.

If you use a countersink designed for a screw, the hole that the head sits in is too steeply tapered and the bolt doesn't seat solidly against wood.  Second, you've already drilled the bolt hole, and you have to find a way to make your countersink exactly centered on this hole to match the head of the bolt.

The solution is to make a custom countersink with a shaft that centers it in the hole.  In our case, we used a standard spade bit, some bronze rod, and some silver solder. 

Robin reground the spade bit to match the underside slope of our bolts.  Then, he slotted a segment of bronze rod, set it exactly in the center of the bit, and soldered it in place.  This bit of rod acts as a guide for the spade bit.  To use this, we chuck it up into the drill and plunge the guide into the hole that was previously drilled for the bolt.  The guide keeps the bit perfectly centered as it cuts a countersink around the existing hole.

Voila!  Centered and just the right shape.  

I really like knowing that if we need a tool that we don't have (or may not even exist), we just make it ourselves.  It's one of the nice bits about this job.

So, enough boat builder geek out.   Back to installing the floors.  

We drive the bolts into the keel from the bottom, up through the floors and then bolt them in place.

Just before the heads go into the countersink, we coat the undersides with 3M's 5200.

This stuff forms a permanent flexible bond between the bolt and the keel and acts as a gasket to keep water out.  It's about as sticky a substance as you can imagine.  If you work with boats, at some time in your life you'll get to enjoy owning clothing with permanent, waterproof, flexible stains on them.  

We also coat the bottom surfaces of the floors with a bedding compound that helps to keep water out of the joint area between the floor and the keel.  Water trapped in tight, dark, enclosed spaces likes to breed mold and rot.  We're pretty much an anti-rot crew, so on goes the bedding compound.

That half-circle hole you see in the floor is called a limber hole.  It's there to allow water that gets into the boat to all flow freely to the lowest part of the boat so it can be easily pumped out. 

So, one by one, the floors go on.

Once we get all the floors installed that sit on top of the support wedge, we can flip the keel back to the upright position.  Looking aft...

Next came the stern post and the stern knee.

The top of the stern post had been left with extra material on it, "just in case" and now it's time to saw that off and make a good, level surface for the horn timber to sit on.  Getting this cut right on is critical.  If we make the cut even a tiny bit off, the horn timber will sit too low or too high at the end.  

Needless to say, we checked the cut line that had been marked on the top of the stern post very very carefully.  

Before cutting the top off, we decided to put a tenon on the top of the stern post.  The stern post and horn timber have a relatively small mating surface, and two bolts are all that hold these 2 segments of the backbone together.  Adding a tenon helps to lock this joint together more securely than the 2 bolts would do on their own.

Here's David cutting the cheeks of the tenon.  Yes, he's using a circular saw for this critical cut.  He's a pretty confident fellow.

And, finishing off the cut with a hand saw.

Voila!  One tenon.

A little squaring up and flattening with a hand plane, and it's ready to go.

Next, the mortise on the mating horn timber.  First it's drilled out, and then the sides are squared down and chopped out with a chisel.

But it was the end of the day, and we were beat.  The next morning we came in, coated the faying (i.e., the joining) surfaces with bedding compound and fit it together.

Perfect.

And when we measured the heights of the horn timber above our baseline, we were within a 32nd of an inch over 6' away.  In other words, the angle of the joint was perfect.  

Whew.  

We supported the end of the horn timber with a post set at the proper height, and then braced the whole affair against the ceiling.

This locks the timber in place and keeps it from moving either up, down, or side to side.  

So, now the boat looks like a very long, skeletal sea creature.

Another aside.  

We'd talked about the possibility of putting up a web cam, or having multiple photos of the boat all taken from the same vantage point to make a kind of time lapse picture of the boat under construction.  The problem is, the boat is so long, and the space is so confined, that it's difficult to have any photo really show the whole boat. 

This is often the case.  Many builders never really see the boat they're building as a whole until they take it outside when it's completed.  This can be hair raising, particularly if you're concerned that the sheer may not be as fair as you'd like.   

But, as a result of this limited space, I'll be trying to take a regular series of photos from at least 2 vantage points, and you'll keep seeing these throughout construction. 

Ok, back to the work.

We've installed a number of floor timbers, now we're installing the laminated frames that have floor timbers already attached to them.  These are the first frames that go into the boat.

Next, it's time to start setting up the molds.  The molds define the shape of the boat, but they're only temporary structures that we'll remove once the rest of the frames (or ribs) are all installed.

We screw a cleat onto the base of the mold

And then screw the cleat into the keel.  This locks the bottom of the mold in place on the keel in exactly the place it needs to be.

We choose a frame near the center of the boat, and set that one up plumb and square to the boat's centerline with bracing against the walls of the shop.  This keeps the frame from moving no matter how much we abuse it.

Here's Max setting up bracing for the mold.

Once they get into the rhythm, the molds go up relatively quickly.

And in a very short time, the boat takes shape.

There are tons of other, less glamorous jobs to be done along the way.  Cutting the excess length off of the floor bolts for one...

Karl continues to shape the ballast keel plug.  It's getting smoother and more shapely by the day.

Next up, setting up the floor timbers that go up the face of the stern knee and stern post.  These little fellows sit on notches cut into the sloped wood go give them a solid attachment point.

With a little imagination you can see how the boat curves sharply down to the ballast.  We'll have a little more on that in the next entry, along with some massive nails.