A Thanksgiving photo, and Joining the Coaming

#3 son and his family visited on Thanksgiving Day, and my granddaughter showed a great interest in the boat- she knows the way to her granddad's heart. She climbed all over and then settled happily in the sternsheets. Later she insisted in taking her parents and her other grandfather to see and admire the boat. I hope she likes it as well afloat.

Although I didn't reach my goal for today, the final fit of the coaming, what I did get done went very well.

The coaming pieces were epoxy bonded together yesterday. I started today by sanding off the hardened excess goop on the edges and both surfaces.

The main project was to fit the two sides of the coaming together. Instead of just tapering their forward ends to match and screwing them together, I made a rabbeted "stem" piece for the two sides to screw into.


I dressed a chunk of tropical hardwood on the planer, to get four smooth sides square with each other.

I measured the angle at which the two coaming sides converge, 53 degrees, and set the table saw for half that, 26 1/2 degrees.

I marked how far apart the two sides were at the maximum width of my hardwood stock

and ran the wood block through the saw in each direction, giving me a pair of converging cuts at the right angle.

I left the saw set at the same angle and lowered the blade so it would just reach the first cut.

finally, still leaving the saw at 23 1/2 degrees,  I turned the stock over and sawed the remaining sides away, far enough offset to match the 12mm thickness of the coaming.

After trimming its length to the width of the coaming,

I screwed it in place

and trimmed the forward deck piece to fit around it.

Finally, I screwed the coaming in place at the transom and at alternate frames. The last steps, which I didn't get to today, will be to trim the bottom edge and round off all the edges with the router.

The today's job took six hours. There's a tradeoff between skill and patience.