Jersey Girl

Houseboat update, Thursday, August 9, 2018 -- I'm back to work on Jersey Girl. Here you can see I have started construction on the aft deck seats and stowage areas. The hatches that I have plunge-cut with a circular saw allow access to below-decks, where I will keep water and fuel tanks. I will cut similar openings in the deck on the port side. The openings will be surrounded by wooden dams to divert water away from the openings, and the decks will be covered by hinged seats that will also serve as hatch covers. When these panels are fiberglassed and glued and screwed into place, they will help to provide considerable stiffness to the hull.

Houseboat update, Saturday, August 11, 2018 -- It's getting to the time when Jersey Girl starts growing up, and I need to start by defining her superstructure with eight clear red cedar vertical posts that will support the roof over her aft deck and serve as the jambs for the door from there into the cabin -- or, as I like to think of it, the salon. I have not been able to find a local source for clear eight-foot 3 x 3 cedar posts that I need. ("Clear," in woodish, means almost completely free of knots, straight-grained and having no twist or warp.) I could order them, but they'd take weeks to arrive and they'd be horribly expensive. But 2 x 4's are available and relatively reasonably priced, so I'm gluing them up in pairs, two at a time. I've done this before, with Sitka spruce, for a mast on a sailing dinghy I built 27 years ago, and it worked very well. If this works as well, I will be happy. I just hope the relatively "thirsty" grain of the cedar does not absorb the epoxy so quickly that it siphons the adhesive away from the joint. I won't know until tomorrow, when the epoxy is cured and I release the clamps. Then, I will have to trim the assembly from its present dimension to the 3 x 3's that I need. (Did you know that the actual dimension of a single finished 2 x 4 is 1 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches -- meaning that my glued posts will be 3 x 3 1/2 before I trim them?)

Houseboat update, Thursday, August 30, 2018 -- I am dry-fitting the support posts for Jersey Girl's aft deck roof. It was quite complicated to cut the below-deck portions of these posts to accommodate for framing, and it will require some bit of nipping and tucking before everything is shipshape. Ultimately, these posts will be chamfered along the corners, to make them lighter in both appearance and weight.

Houseboat update, Saturday, September 1, 2018 -- When I said I had to do a little nipping and tucking to make the aft deck roof posts fit properly, I wasn't kidding -- except for the "little" part. As you can see, there are quite a few irregularly sized and shaped notches that have to be cut to make sure this post fits perfectly around the below-deck framing and still stand plumb in relation to the hull. A circular saw is good to start with, but to really make it fit, I had to fall back to more traditional tools -- a hammer and chisel, a hand plane and a Japanese pull saw. The fit is now perfect, but before I can install it, I have to fill any imperfections in the wood with epoxy putty, sand everything smooth, cut top and bottom dadoes to receive the upper and lower horizontal rails, and cut the corner chamfers with a router. Then I will be able to install the first of six such posts. Now I understand why it takes so long...

Houseboat update, Saturday, September 1, 2018 (Part 2) -- Here's how I cut the dadoes in the roof support posts for the railing tops and bottoms: First, I scribe where I want them with a pencil. Then, I use a circular saw with the blade set to a half-inch and make cuts within the scribed lines. In this case, for a one inch wide dado, three cuts are enough. Next, I use a hammer and chisel to knock the waste blocks down almost to the depth of the initial cuts. Finally, I use the sharp chisel blade, by hand and without the hammer, in the manner of an ultra-low angle block plane, to smooth the bottom of the dado.