Tempus Fugit

Another summer seems to have vanished like a sugar cube in a cup of hot coffee.   I suppose I got to paddle quite a bit and visit with friends and do interesting things, but it still seems altogether too short.  When I was a kid, it always seemed that summer went on forever.  I wish it still did.

However, this brings the start of wonderful things.   Like sign-up for a new year's class of boat-building.  After exhibition last June, I had a list nearly three pages long of people who were interested in the boat-building class.  I put together an email regarding class registration. (which was yesterday...) and about the class itself and sent it to the people on the list.

I figure that we usually get maybe 5% of the people who were interested at exhibition to actually show up for registration - if I'm lucky.  When I was driving to registration, I could see that all the side streets around the school were almost completely full of parked cars.  As I turned down the street the school is on, there were students waiting in a line that stretched down the sidewalk from the building to the street and down the sidewalk along the street.  It was only 9:00 AM - registration doesn't start until 10:00 AM, but is first-come, first-served in order to be fair to everyone, so people come early.  Sometimes really early - with a chair, a book, a cup of coffee, snacks, determination and apparently - a strong constitution.  It felt a bit like an Apple iPhone launch.

The lines for woodworking and boat-building as well as a few other classes run from the side of the building and ran all the way to the parking lot and back to the dumpster.  As I took my paperwork into the building and prepared to bring the skin-on-frame canoe downstairs as my "calling card", I was approached by a woman who was clearly distressed.

"Are you the boat building instructor?"

"Yes."

"Is it true?"

"Is what true?"

"That this class is for returning students only."

"WHAT?"

"That's what the sign says."

"No - that's not true.  It's open registration.  I don't have returning students."

I went and checked the sign with the class listings that showed students where to wait to register.  The sign clearly had an asterisk and a notation beneath the class name that said, "Returning Students Only".  I grabbed a marker and crossed that line out in a big hurry, let me tell you.  It was a clerical error from using an old class list.  I have no idea how many students saw that sign and went home without finding out if this was true.  I was beginning to sweat that the class wouldn't run because people left after seeing the sign.

Because of the way that the school runs, there are minimum enrollments - 8 people is the minimum for my class to run.  It's also sort of the maximum class size, too - I only have room to build and store 8 boats.  If each person decides to build their own boat (like last year's class...) I have the minimum number of people and the maximum number of boats - a precarious balancing act.  Fortunately for me, ten students registered and are planning to build 8 boats.  Two couples have decided to build a boat together and the other 6 students will build their own boats.

So, if anyone DID see the sign and go home, I apologize.  While I'm not responsible for the error, I still worry that people missed an opportunity.  If you did, please comment on this post or otherwise get back to me - I'd like to know.

It's Monday again. Blech.

Monday Again?

Dang.  Somebody either put me out of my misery today or bring me a triple espresso.

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Not quite Tech Tip Tuesday

Today's post is a bit about what we've got going on in the shop where I teach. As we're winding down for the end of the Fall session, I've got boats in almost all phases of construction. I've got solo boats, a tandem boat and a sea kayak. My students ask me how I can keep track of things at the various stages, but it's getting to be second nature.

As you may remember from an earlier post, the couple building the tandem had cut and glued up the feature strip for their canoe. It came out rather nicely. At this point, the strip is about 2" wide and almost 7/8" thick. The pattern that you see on the face runs all the way through the stock. As I may have mentioned before, the blonde wood is carefully selected Poplar (Carefully selected to avoid the greenish streaks that Poplar can have.) and Peruvian Black Walnut - a very soft variety.


Because I have so many novice woodworkers in my class, we choose to use cove-and-bead joinery to ensure ease of assembly by my students. Unfortunately, I think that if we did hand-beveled strips, many of the students would be good at it by the time they were about half-way through their canoes. As we are interested in improving the speed of assembly and limiting the amount of final fairing and sanding, cove-and-bead seems to be the way to go. It isn't perfect as there are some points where the bend and twist of the hull make it difficult to keep the strips well seated, but this isn't a "show stopper". The strip you see above is thick enough to allow us to plane the surface that will show flat using a thickness planer, to remove any steps in thickness that have occurred during the gluing process.

This flat surface is important. We want this flat surface to run against the fence on the table saw. Using our piece of 1/4" aluminum bar stock as a gage to set the spacing between the table saw blade and the fence, set featherboards on the fence and table and we cut off two 1/4" thick feature strips. We are left with a scrap that is usually about 3/16" thick that would be ideal for inlay in a deck or for a detail on paddle blades that would match the feature strip on the hull of the boat.

The next step is to set up the router table. I've discussed the router table here before. (Side note : The router table gets such hard use that I've been designing one to have made from aluminum tooling plate with micro-adjustments to make set-up easier. I've been thinking I should write an article on the subject...) Because we only have two strips, we can't afford to make mistakes. What we do is to make two or three "dummy strips" from scrap that are about 18-24" long and are exactly as wide and thick as the feature strips. Using this, we set up the router table and mold cove and bead on the feature strips, winding up with this profile:


While this is a great way to get out feature strips, it's a bit time consuming. One caveat about making feature strips this way (i.e. off the forms) - a strip about 1-1/2" to about 2" is the maximum width depending on the amount of curvature that the hull has to avoid getting poor transitions to the remainder of the hull.

One student is finishing up the final details on her boat. The decks, thwart and coamings are in and the seat frame is to be mounted before final sand and varnish. In the picture below, this Wee Lassie II is getting seat blocks installed. I prefer to use either 4 seat blocks or two frame rails set in "Dookie Shmutz" (Thanks, Nick Shade, great name for the stuff! ) which is epoxy thickened with wood flour and fumed silica to a peanut butter consistancy. The process we use is to install a dummy seat and clamp the blocks to the top of the seat. Using a compass, we scribe the hull curve on the blocks and cut them out on the bandsaw.


The big trick here is to get the seat level side-to-side, at the balance point of the boat, far enough forward that the thwart isn't in your back and the seat tipped just a little bit forward to take the pressure of the back of your thighs when paddling. I also like enough clearance under the seat frame to get my hand under it to clip the straps on my Crazy Creek Canoe chair together. Makes a nice back-rest when paddling. We then screw the seat frame to the blocks. I do this to allow the builder to get the frame out for re-caning in the future.

The other boat that's coming along is the Osprey kayak. Although this photo doesn't do it justice, the deck is a shapely an sensuous curvature. There is a center strip of Butternut and the whitish island is Port Orford Cedar with it's lovely citrus-ey smell. The vertical element of the coming will also be Port Orford and the cap and coaming rim will be more of the Butternut. She's going to be a very pretty 'yak.


If you're wondering what the object is in the foreground covered with foil, it is a pan of brownies. My Saturday morning classes include what we refer to as the "10 o'clock Union Break". This is actually a very important part of my class. At 10 AM, we turn off the power tools and take a break to have coffee and snacks. We use this "quiet time" to bond as a group and to answer questions and solve problems that the students may have. It also gives the students a rest so that they returned refreshed and re-energized to do more great work.

Never underestimate the restorative power of coffee and a donut!

Coffee

• I am productive! I am productive! I am productive!


• Better latte than never.


• A day without coffee is like night...you sleep through it.


• We all have to do the daily grind.


• Espresso yourself.


• Automatic drip defines most people's personalities.


• Stand your grounds.


• If the spoon doesn't dissolve, it ain't coffee.


• I love the caffeine; it's the rich taste I could do without.


• Don't stop till you're shaking.


• Impatience is a virtue.


• Take two cups and call me in the middle of the night.


• Who needs sleep when you've got coffee?


• There's no rest for the caffeinated.


• Decaf is for sissies.


• Man cannot live by coffee alone - donuts are pretty essential too.


• There is no such thing as a free refill.


• It's okay to be full of beans sometimes.

Coffee, Coffee, Buzz, Buzz...

I think that most offices tend to run on a significant amount of coffee - preferrably good coffee. At my workplace, we used to have a coffee vending maching that used powdered stuff and it was terrible. So they upgraded to one that actually ground the beans and then added the powdered stuff. Better, but not great. Then we upgraded to a single cup Keurig coffee maker.

Much Better.

My DW's workplace also got the same machine, but they have different types of coffee from what is offered here. One type from Coffee People is this:

That's right. It says jet fuel. Is it ever! My DW brought me a few pods of the stuff to try. I tried one out yesterday. I had the sensation of being a nervous rabbit about an hour after my cup of the stuff.

And so, let us pray the prayer that our Folger's taught us to pray, saying:

Coffee Drinkers Prayer

Caffeine is my shepherd; I shall not doze.
It maketh me productive in wee hours:
It leadeth me beyond the yawning masses.
It restoreth my buzz:
It leadeth me in the paths of conciousness for its name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of addiction,
I will fear no Equal:
For thou art with me; thy cream and thy sugar they comfort me.
Thou preparest a carafe before me in the presence of The Starbucks:
Thou anointest my day with pep; my mug runneth over.
Surely richness and taste shall follow me all the days of my life:
And I will dwell in the House of Juan Valdez forever.

Amen.