If you compare this photo to yesterday’s photo, you’ll see the sawhorses have been removed from under the starboard hull backbone, and there are temporary legs on every frame. We used a laser to get our fore/aft and port/starboard alignment and then fixed the temporary legs to blocks screwed into the shop floor. On the…
This photo shows the starboard hull backbone, lined up on a zero mark (the blue tape), and blocked in place along a reference wire stretched along the floor. The lower bulkheads have been “welded” in place using a high-strength filleting compound of epoxy, glass micro-spheres, and colloidal silica (the white substance at the intersection of…
Dave working on one of Mon Tiki's two rudders. That's TWO rudders.
I have been reading about scarfing plywood for as long as I’ve been building boats, but I’ve never done it. The idea of hand-cutting a square 12:1 edge along a sheet of plywood just seemed impossibly impossible. But today I had no choice. The lay-ups for the rudders for the Tiki 38 are too long…
We met Joe down at the boat-shop today to catch some epoxy work while it was still green and easy to take down with a surform. Catching it while it’s still soft is way way better than waiting till it’s hard enough to grind, because when epoxy is hard enough to grind/sand, it’s really hard!…
I had previously described building this boat as having two distinct steps; the second being the assembly of its parts, and the first being the fabrication of the parts. (Or as Dave put it to his son, “You know how you like to build with Legos? Daddy likes to build with Legos too, but he…