January 2012

Over the New Year’s weekend I started cutting out the boat’s permanent molds to the lines drawn on each mold from the ¼ luan plywood. This was quite a process balancing the 4x8 sheets of plywood in my workshop and then cutting them out with my jigsaw. I soon found out that a standard ‘up cut’ jigsaw blade doesn’t lend itself to a clean cut line.  The plywood splintered terribly so I changed to a ‘down cut’ jigsaw blade. Using this type of blade is harder to start but the end result is much better to work with, all the splintered edges are on the inside of the mold. I was able to make a jigsaw cut to 1/8 of an inch from the ‘traced line’.  By the end of January all the molds were cut and sanded to their individual mold lines. The sanding was challenging and I found the best solution was to build a mobile stationary disc sander from some parts I had hanging around my shop. It is important that the surface be square to the sides of the mold. While taking a break from all the sanding, I thought a change of pace was in order, so I built the 16 foot mold ladder back. On completing for ladder-back I found that it was quite unwieldy and decided that I would make legs for the mold with 6 inch wheels. This worked great.