Ahhhhh. Vacation. The family has made a trip to sunny New Smyrna Beach, Florida to escape the harsh upstate NY winter. My father rents a place in the area for a couple a months each year and this is our third year in a row of coming down for a visit. I'm not particularly fond of "vacationing" but having a place to stay that isn't a hotel and having a car to drive makes for an affordable get away that feels "homey". In reality, my ideal "vacation" is a week at home or at our family cottage working on projects. I enjoy puttering around, fixing things, building things and working with my hands at my leisure.
However as time goes by I realize that vacation needs to mean more than just working. Spending time with my wife and children truly is a blessing and brings me great joy. Most importantly, my wife has earned the right to get away. I believe my wife and I respect each other a great deal and there has never been a time where I said, "you can't do this or go there" and she has reciprocated with the same thing. She doesn't nag me to do this or that and she never complains about the amount of time I spend working on my hobbies. She bears the additional burden of being married to a cop and the stress and worry that can sometimes entail. She has grown accustomed to attending family events alone or having me called away due to my job. With all that, it's important to make time for a true vacation away from call-in's, tools and even boat building. She deserves it, it's good for our family and it's good for me to take some time to smell the roses so to speak.
However, while she is taking a walk with my daughter, I have some time to update the progress we have made on our Diesel Duck. I glued up the second half of the shaft log, clamped both sides together and did some layout for the dado that needs to be cut into each half.
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| The final dado with be a rectangle but I laid it out in a circle. |
In George's book he doesn't worry to much about a perfect circle for the propeller shaft. In fact, this may be the simplest part of the build. Each half of the shaft log is made up of two 2x8's face glued together. Then each half has a channel cut out down the center called a dado. Then the two halves are face glued together with the dado's meeting in the middle. This is a very simple way to insure a long, straight, enclosed channel for the propeller shaft to pass through. Obviously it would be very difficult to drill a 2" hole in a straight line through nearly 9 feet of wood.
You'll recall from my last post that we are using rescorinol glue for this part of the build. Having done two glue ups with this adhesive now, I can assure you that it is not as difficult to work with as some may lead you to believe. Provided you measure carefully and have and maintain the appropriate temperature, everything will work out fine.
Before I cut out the dado, I just need to verify the appropriate dimensions, as I am using a larger propeller shaft than the plans call for. I don't think it really matters so long as there is a reasonable amount of space around the shaft when it is finally assembled.
I also spent a few hours building an assembly table for the boat frames. This is the process of essentially lofting each frame for the boat, full size. The lofting is then used to lay out the pieces of lumber that will make up the frames. The framing table must be large enough to accommodate the largest frame in the boat. In the case of our 41' Diesel Duck that means at least 12' 9" wide by 9' 3 tall.
This is a very rudimentary table that is designed to be temporary. I wanted to make that clear because this thing is cobbled together with mostly scraps of dimensional lumber. It is sheathed with the OSB that we used for the keel lofting and most of the dimensional lumber came from the scraps after building the boat shed. I did have to buy a few 2x4's and my total cost was around $25.
I put the framing table in the back corner of the boat shed. Just to keep things simple and maintain some structural integrity the final size of the table was 14 feet by 10 feet. Part of the table does overlap the boat cradle, but there is still plenty of room to work on the keel as well. When the frames are complete, I'll disassemble the table and any parts of the keel that have been assembled can be slid back to the center of the cradle.
I attached a couple of 2x4's to the boat shed's knee wall to act as a ledger board. I then ran a 2x4 perpendicular to the ledger board along the end wall of the boat shed to act as the rim joist. I then used whatever 2x4's I had to lay out the joists for the table deck. The joists were laid on top of the ledger board and toe screwed in. I then attached short legs, again using scraps, to the ends and dry fit them into the stone base of the boat shed floor. I moved the stones around to level each one and to maintain all of them in the same plain.
I then added on various lengths to each joist, screwing them to the end legs to achieve the final table dimension of 10 feet. For the end rim joist, I attached a joist hanger to the end wall rim joist and ran a 14' 2x4 perpendicular to the end wall and attached a leg at the opposite end. I then added a few more leg sections to the 14 footer to stiffen things up.
I was careful to keep the joists on 16" centers which made sheathing with the OSB a breeze. I had to rip 2 sheets in half, lengthwise to achieve our final size. Quick and dirty, but pretty effective, It's certainly to much span for a 2x4 to remain rigid, but at 16 inch centers the finished product was relatively firm with minimal bounce.
The final step will be to add a coat of white paint to allow the frames layout lines show up clearly. Just before we left for vacation we had a nice sunny day. While it was around 30 degrees outside, our visqueen roof allows the boat shed to warm up nicely and it was around 57 degrees inside. Perfect for painting, so I got a quick first coat of the cheapest white paint I could find.
When we get back I hope to be able find some money in the budget to buy a new video camera for our YouTube series. I'm currently using my wife's DSLR camera which has it's limitations. The biggest issue being that you can't make a video longer than 29 minutes. I have found that for a 15 minute video I am shooting at least a couple hours of footage. It gets annoying to be constantly worrying about running past the time limit that the camera is limited to. Another major issue is the inability to use auto-focus. When set to auto-focus the camera makes so much noise in the video's audio track that it's distracting. We've done 6 video's so far and have gotten some really nice feedback. To be perfectly honest, I enjoy creating and editing each episode so I think a new camera is a worthy investment.
Speaking of worthy investments, You'll notice that some small ad's are now appearing on our site here. I hope they are not to distracting, and as I learn how to use the feature I will try my best to provide ads that readers here may find legitimately useful. If you've read the entire series so far you may remember when I added the sponsorship button along the right hand side. You may also remember that I hoped to get to a point where we could begin to run ads in order to generate some income to help fund the build instead of having to ask people to be a sponsor. Well that time has finally arrived and I hope in the future that this ad campaign may become a legitimate tool to help fund our boat build.
With all that said, we would greatly appreciate if you would click on the various ads that appear on our site and check them out. The only way to generate income from the ads is to have our readers click on them.
If you would still like to be a sponsor by clicking on the PayPal link we would be extremely grateful for your support. However, and I completely understand, if you prefer not to sponsor us now, please click on the various ads that appear on our page and check them out. That small gesture would be truly helpful to us and we humbly request your support.
I hope to do the same thing with our YouTube channel in the future but I'm still working out the details. If you haven't checked out our videos yet, please do and let us know what you think.
Next time I hope to get into some keel component assembly. I would like to finish the shaft log and then start work on the bow and transom knees.
As always, thanks for checking out our site and we are grateful for the encouragement and all of the kind words that we have heard from many of you. It truly is motivating and inspiring to hear from people from all over the world. We are humbled that you have taken the time to check out our project.
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