Normative boatbuilding

Monday, Mar. 1: Not much time to work on the boat today, but a couple of things did get done.

I trimmed off the gripe where it had overlapped the bow. I was sorry to see that I had installed it just a little off center, so when it was trimmed even with the sides of the boat and the stem, it makes a wedge shape which is a little lopsided. Nothing to do about it, it won’t have any functional effect, and no one will see it unless they get under the boat. But I still don’t like it.

I also made a pattern for the top edge of the skeg, where it meets the boat’s bottom. As I mentioned yesterday, that pattern had to be made normatively, rather than positively: (Sorry, I couldn’t resist saying that. I had an economics professor who taught me that expression, and have never before had a chance to use it). I’ll make the skeg match up with the shape of the bottom as it should be, instead of how it is right now, under strain from some but not all of the structural pieces are already installed. The rest of the pattern for the skeg should be easy: the bottom edge is a straight line to where it intersects with the sternpost.

A tour boat came by about the time I was cleaning up the work site, and I could hear the guide on his loudspeaker. "That guy has been working on building a boat for a long while now. He's always out there." Hmm. I'm a tourist attraction, now?