2-20. Day 1

The humble beginnings of a boat - some wood, a builder, and his apprentice-builder.



Boat designs scoured over, letters and emails to foreign lands overlooked, ignored, or answered, finally decided on the Truant - a John Welsford (New Zealand) design.
Various tools and supplies accumulated in previous weeks. Okume plywood delivered Friday. Construction began today!



Following the building guide instructions, we started drawing. We drew out frames 1,2,3,4 and the transom. Looking at the designs with all the arrows and lines and numbers and sailing terms was mind-boggling to me at first. Fortunately, once the lines started taking shape on the plywood and I figured out the arrow and number system of measurements, the process became much less formidable - actually fairly simple, and I started to see the boat and how it will fit together (this had been an explained, yet mysterious concept to me).
There was one glitch encountered: Mr. Welsford knew what he was doing when he built the boat and drew up the plans, and he doesn't convey all the little details that would be useful in the building process to the novice builder. While trying to make the seat top curve for the frames, the master seat top curve plan succeeded in baffling us. How could the grid continue out for 800 mm when the frame ended at 610 mm? It turned out that we are good at fudging (well, we'll see when the boat floats or not) and our seat top curves look symmetrical and to-scale. Although Mr. Welsford doesn't elaborate on his designs and the reasons for doing certain things, it's nothing a little ingenuity can't figure out. When we had finished drawing the four frames and were drawing the transom curve, it hit me. The grid went past the frame boundaries as a guideline for the curve - which means to use that guideline, we would've needed to shift our drawing over on the plywood to make room for the entire curve, past the edges of the frame. (Granted we didn't go back and try this, but in theory I think it is what Mr. Welsford expected.)



Thank goodness for the metric system! There will be, and already has been, uncountable frustration and anger, stress and tears abated due to this incredible measuring system. While shopping for lumber is a bit unusual - trying to compare millimeter sized wood with our inch sized wood, which is actually not the size it claims to be - in the end the struggle at the lumber yard is well worth the brain effort saved in doing tedious fraction math during construction.