Team

WEll, at the end of the first nearly full day to helping Dave build his Night Heron we were fairly busy.

Today was scarfing the panels and sanding to produce a near perfect angle in each panel to be joined. Being a anal type of guy as is Dave, we took turns working on working on the scarfs. We essentially built up a staggered layer-a staircase- of layers and planed the rough slope shape, stopping to sharped the block plane blade to razor sharpness. After that we then sanded carefully till we created perfect scarfs, but it took hours to do so. The idea is to make a minimal line in the joint. Two panels required an additonal scarf and I did the impossible by banging out the scarfs in just over 20 minutes.
Glue up was accomplished after taping the joints, clamping several layers on the table, then we sat back to watch the game and drink beer. Well, I felt unease thinking it went to well and kept looking at the sidejoints till I noticed that we missed clamping a joint on the bottom layer. For nearly an hour the unclamped joints were just sitting there in a horrible gap and with a degree of desperation I yapped out orders and we managed to slide out the bottom layer of three scarfed panels out, reclamped the top two layers, then with Dave's patience and efforts we managed to sperate the panels with bending a a long, razor sharp X-acto knife. From there we washed the exposed glue off with a damp rag between scraping carefully with a razor. All in all the scarf faces survived without damage and were clamped to prvent warping. The glued panels looked to be doing well, too. From there it was getting back to the game and drinking some deserved beers.
Tomorrow we start to cut out the pieces.