New Year's Project

I've been fortunate enough to have had the past week off. I apologize for not posting more, but I've been taking this vacation seriously. We've been spending most of the week at home just relaxing and doing as little as possible - it's the first extended vacation that I've had in more than a year, so I was enjoying it reading A Splintered History of Wood.

For DD's birthday, I went to Thomas Yost's website and slightly modified his Sea Pup design a bit for DD. She likes to paddle and I thought that something similar to the Sea Pup with some "training wheels" (i.e. outriggers with an ama on the flat rear deck) I drafted a set of plans and printed them out in full scale. I gave her the plans as a birthday present along with the offer to help her build her first boat.

So, earlier this week, DD and I glued the paper patterns to some cardboard that I had and cut the templates out. Today, we brought them downstairs to the basement and she traced them onto the marine plywood that I had left over from my previous SOF build.



DD has never used power tools before, so I let her rough cut the pieces from the edge of the sheet of plywood with a jig saw after some safety instruction. I'm pretty sure that DW was very nervous. To be honest, it was a bit scary, but she did well. She helped me to get the correct size Forstener bits to cut the holes in the stems and the inside corners on the frames, but the drill would have been a bit big for her to use, so I did the drilling. I'll use the jig saw to cut to the lines that she carefully marked - the cost for marine plywood is a bit steep, so I will do the cutting to avoid scrapping any of this very expensive Okume plywood! She'll do the sanding and we'll do the assembly of the frame together, but I'll need to get some smaller gloves for her for when we epoxy the stringers to the frame.