On a Roll

I felt a bit on a roll tonight and couldn't really stop. I'd been staging the laminations and blocking so that they'd all be ready at the same time. Not sure that was the best technique because suddenly I was overwhelmed with blocking from all angles, much like Adrian Peterson would see when running up the middle. I have a small basement shop that's getting smaller by the day. Since I never got around to building the flip top table(s), my power tools sit on the floor until ready. That means lifting the bandsaw up on the workbench and putting it back down when done, all 75 lbs of it.

Neat view of centerboard in centerboard trunk. Not sure I've seen a photo like this. I was dry fitting to see if my fillets would get in the way; they don't.

That experience was uniquely offset by hand planing. Just about every woodworker I know loves hand planing. The rhythmn, the smell, the progress, the smoothness. It really is therapeutic. Exhausting, but therapeutic, especially after sanding-sanding-sanding down all the squeeze out from my mediocre epoxy work over the last couple days. Planing was followed by the random orbital then 120 grit on a sanding block. It's about as good as I can make it. The manual says the block will churn through thousands of miles of water. God, I hope so!

Planing. It's what's for dinner.

Getting the keel nose block down to form.

I had a surprise visitor today. Chris stopped by with 50 lb of tire weights so I can do my lead pour this weekend! Chris is awesome. He had his whole family in the car, heading up to a huge hobby store near my house. I'm sure they were all thinking, "For Pete's sake, he just got done building the damn boat. Now he's gonna basically build another one?" Nice people, that group. Too bad I was covered in sawdust from planing the nose.

The trouble is, I don't like to spend money where I can avoid it. There's 'clean' lead and there's 'dirty' lead. Dirty lead comes in the form of the tire weights that have a lot of waste materials with it, such as the 50lb bucket here.
 

Yay Chris!!

Clean lead can be bought from eBay for about $1.20 a pound, including shipping, which requires much less work, but of course is more expensive than free.

Boo ebay!!

However, given how much trouble I've had calling tire shops, this might actually be the only route I have available. Two Tires Plus and two Good Year shops near the house both would not/could not sell me their weights. Oh well.. in the scheme of things, not a big deal. Just not expected, which I should expect to happen more and more.