The great sheer clamp debacle

Today is the sixth day we've been working on the sheer clamp. It has been haunting our dreams.

We've made a lot of small adjustments, including some changes to the structural layout of the frames. We now believe (though we may be delusional) that things are more symmetrical, plumb, level, true, fair, and all other words that mean good.

This picture below shows us in triumph (for the moment) next to the boat with sheer clamp temporarily attached. If you can pull your eyes away from the riveting sight of my ass, the 2 sheer clamps can be seen held to the stem with the two c-clamps and pink string.

Background information

To the left is a picture of the completed boat design that we are building. I hope this sheds some light on the subject for those who've asked. The design is called John Dory, and was made by a Scottish man named Iain Oughtred.

Mounting the stem

We also mounted the transom, but you can't see that in this video..

Marking and cutting out the transom

Here are a couple of shots of us working on the transom. Its a piece of dark red meranti, which is also called "Philippine mahogany," though I guess its not technically mahogany.







In the this shot you can see us working on the bevel that the planks will line up against. Hopefully...







This is a look at how the transom will eventually be mounted to the rest of the boat. Are you visualizing?? Can you see it??

Gluing Stem Laminations

ugh, these are such boring blog titles.

at least the pictures are sexy and fun. like below:

Ripping laminations for the stem

This video shows us goofing around a lot, trying to get ready to rip our big white oak board into 2" x 1/8" strips. It took us awhile to set up, because the board wasn't two inches high. We solved that problem by making the cuts at an angle thus increasing their measurement to 2"+.

However, when we started ripping with the table saw, we realized that a lateral bow in oak meant that we couldn't line the board up accurately on the table saw. Starting at 0:08 or so, we begin planing the board offscreen.

After we rip the board into something like 20 strips (lams), we have to set up the jig that we will be bending them on. This requires cleaning off the table, marking out the structure of the curve from the plans, and then using a batten to draw a fair curve. As you can see, this takes me a long, long time. Drew has to help.

Then we aligned blocks along the curve, using a unnecessarily labor intensive drilling and screwing procedure that looks like some sort of complicated dance. This is my favorite part in all the movies. Its also a little embarrassing.

After setting up the blocks, we quickly and with almost no fanfare clamp the lams to the jig. Thats what all this work was leading up to.

Attaching some battens

Time Lapse: Attaching the frames

Here we are setting up the frames on the jig. You can see that the boat will be build upside down. The video is shot from the stern, so what will be the bow is at the far end of the garage.

Mounting the Frames

We've now assembled all five of the permanent frames and the two temporary stations molds. The next step is to mount them on the building jig.

In order to mount them we have to attach them to frame posts, and then to spalls which are attached to the jig.

Today we added posts and a spall to one frame, and marked out where the rest of the spalls will go on the frame jig.

Assembling the Frames

The frames are first screwed together with gussets. We used silicon bronze screws. After assembling the frames, we took them apart, coated the joints with epoxy and reassembled them.