3-13.

Horror.

Those arms I wrote about, ingeniously crafted with tracing paper and tediously cut out, they could be our downfall. We worked so hard last weekend laying out the arms on the 12.5mm plywood sheet, making sure to conserve wood, spacing the arms to waste as little wood as possible.

We have only one sheet of 12.5mm. Today we were ready to draw and cut the centerboard, which consists of two 12.5mm pieces glued together for strength. But there in front of us on our diced-up sheet of 12.5mm we could see that there was only enough wood for one full-sized centerboard piece.

As I mentioned before, plywood, marine plywood, can't be purchased in Tallahassee. We should have looked ahead through all the plans and made an inventory of what parts would be cut out of what wood and had a better idea of how to conserve the right size pieces of plywood. Because while we thought we were doing really well at not wasting any wood, we were going about it in the wrong fashion. Our arms should have been cut out after we saved room enough for the relatively large centerboard pieces.

So we are either going to try making a laminate for half of the centerboard (gluing together smaller pieces of wood to make the whole), or a trip to Panama City might be in the works. That is the nearest source of marine plywood. We were fortunate enough at the beginning of the project to have the man from PC deliver our wood on his trip up from south Florida where he buys the wood.

On a happier note, today I cut out the other half of the centerboard case, and it came out the same size and approximately the same shape as the half on the spine. A little sanding on the corners matched it right up with its other half.