Category: Building Mon Tiki (page 3)

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

We are building a James Wharram designed Tiki 38, with additional engineering to meet US Coast Guard inspected passenger vessel specifications by John Marples of Searunner designs. What that means is that right now we have a barn filled with…

Some moments of drama and doubt today. When the liftgate went up on the delivery truck, the first thing I noticed is that the protective creates for our precious plywood were all but destroyed. My first thought was “Oh no.…

We are building Mon Tiki to US Coast Guard Inspected Passenger Vessel specs, and that meant we had to beef up the scantlings, mostly by increasing the per-side stringer count (strakes that run fore and aft on the inside of…