Hey gang,

Just wanted to post a little update on my progress...There's no doubt in my mind this was the right project for me for right now...with a 4 year old and 14 month old, it's not like my time is going to be mine for the foreseeable future so it's now or never really.

As it stands, I maybe get about an hour to work on it a day and sneak down whenever I can to scarf strips together, but I'm at the point where the first strips are mounted and I'm actually ready to start planing strips. I spent 2 whole days reacquainting myself with my sharpening systems, and ironically, I'm back to using a simple norton 1000/8000 wettstone for the scary sharp edges for my planes. I ended up using the Grizzly to regrind the primary bevels, and then the norton wettstone to grind the secondary 25 deg bevels, and I have the missing arm hair to prove it. :D

I spent about a week truing up my stations and I'm still running into a few stations that are just not lining up with the others (station 6 of 10 specifically), and we're talking like a half inch out of whack, so I have to ponder exactly how I'm going to fix that, I may just end up raising the station to meet the strips, because at this point, bending the strip to meet the sheerline is bowing the strip which I assume is a bad idea right?

I also had a little bit of a heartbreak...filed under 'you don't know what you don't know, until you make the mistake" I bought 5/4 boards that were 6 inches wide...I ripped 3/4" blocks, then turned them 90 degrees to cut my strips...what that ended up doing was producing a ton of quarter sawn grain patterns, when I think I was after more of a flat sawn effect.

http://s63.photobucket.com/user/WkndHack/media/WoodSets.jpg.html

It's not the end of the world - it's not like the wood is ugly by any stretch, but it turns out the chocolate colored boards I bought produced the nicest strips, whereas the remaining 5 boards (almost 80% of the remaining batch) were kinda meh...I'm totally fine with just working with what I have, and at the end of the day, most of it will be below water anyway, but still - it's one of those things I wished I'd paid more attention to.

So the way it stands, I have enough wood to cover the sides with the nice grain pattern from about the water line to the sheer line which should be enough. The wife has also weighed in with her initial design requests which of course are completely the opposite of what I had intended for the boat, but hey that's marriage for you. The hull will be primarily WRC, and the deck will be primarily the Alaskan Yellow Cedar, with some weird patterning I totally disagree with, but that's just me.

One design element we both agree on will be wood burning a queen anne's lace into the deck...I have no idea how, but I figure I have a few months to work it out.

The process up until this point has been frustrating but incredibly rewarding (the very definition of anything worth doing well). I built up my scarfing miter box, and I've decided that I hate MDF forever. The first 4 strips are scarfed, and hopefully I figure out what went wrong with this damn misbehaving station.

I create an imgur album to start storing some of the work in progress photos so you can follow along as well.

http://imgur.com/a/ghndC

Also talk about timely conversations...I just ran into that inner/outer stem debate (my design calls for no stem for the bow), but putting one on after the boats been glassed...my god - pure genius...that's what I'll be doing for sure.

One last thing...I asked a few months back about planes for beveling the strips, and I was directed to a miniature stanley trim plane. After working with it on some test strips, I decided I'm 'going to try to swing a proper block plane...for something I'm going to be doing repetitively for months, ergonomics matter, and that little plane while functional, is just going to be 4 months of no fun.

Just wanted to pop in and say thanks to everyone for the help...hope to provide more updates soon.