John Storrow

I've had that gouge with the orange handle since I was a kid.

Progress on carving the hull. This is the fun part, I get to pretend I’m MichaelAngelo

Progress on the gluing up of Lifts. I'm glad I have enough bar clamps. The first stage of the gluing I attempted to keep the lifts from slipping just by gluing blocks at the seams. Being impatient to get going with the gluing, (should a used CA) I didn't wait long enough for the glue that was holding the blocks to set long enough. Murphy's law, what can happen will happen: they popped off during the glue up, resulting in a slightly miss-aligned glue job. This is easily corrected during the carving, and I only think of the original lines as a departure point, as long as the end result is lump-free, sturdy, and water-tight. The human eye is capable of detecting the slightest defect in the shape of the boat, which can then be sculpted away.

I made one or two mistakes, but managed to get the lifts cut out. I think it will be rather tricky to line them all up accurately before gluing because if you make a small mistake between the alignment of two of them, the alignment of the next one after that will be potentially even farther off. I did try something new. I marked not only the vertical section lines, but also the horizontal water line to help line things up in all directions. For one of the lifts I cut the cut-away all the way aft past the stern, instead of up to the sheer. I'm going to have to fill that in with an additional little block of wood. I cant wait to get it carved up so I can test float it with a CR-914 keel bulb. She's pretty short ended but definitely wide, so the 3 1/2 pound bulb might work which would be great. The conservative sail plan I drew is about 440 square inches, and the CR-914 is about 580 square inches, so maybe something in the range of 500 square inches would work pretty good. That ...

Okay, so after much head scratching, I decided to nix the idea of making it (her) a planked model. I've drawn up the lifts to carve the hull. Here's the lines plan. I've traced the lifts (not shown) onto the wood.   I really like the character of this boat. I wanted to make something unique. Its fun to visualize that High straight bow, plowing into the waves.