(Entry 3) The workshop - After.

After...What more can I say?  Today was a busy day, but it was very productive.  As you can see from the BEFORE pictures (in one of my previous posts), and these here, the transformation is very noticeable.  The wooden box against the wall on the right-hand side is going to disappear tomorrow afternoon, and magically turn itself (okay, I might be involved a little) into a Strong-Back for the canoe molds.  Most of the unwanted stuff I put on the side of the road out front has disappeared from this morning, hopefully tomorrow there will be very little, if any left over for me to take to the dump.

I'm not sure what I did to the camera (shh, please don't tell my wife) but the quality of photographs seems terrible today, could be the lack of lighting (I hope it is).  You'll notice the black garbage bags up by the door, there is about six of them in total.  They are filled right to the tops with anything and everything I could put in them today.  You name it, kids toys, old lumber with nails, broken glass, cigarette butts (from the good-ole days), and just about everything else you'd normally find in your average pack-rats garage.  Hey look, my extra washing machine/shelving unit is alone in the corner with noting on top of it, poor guy.  =)

 Whoo-hoo!  I received my canoe kit complete with plans the other day.  There are two sets of plans, the one you can see is just general information, dimensions, and views, etc...The plan you can't see (it is boring), has full-size images of the canoe molds that need to be transferred to poster board (so I can keep the original plan), and then transferred to some thin plywood to be used in the building process. Next task, finding carbon paper to make the transfer to the poster board, I'm pretty sure it's extinct. These plans were drawn by hand in 1984, a fact I found quite interesting. I wonder how many people have actually built these boats, there are a few pictures kicking around the internet, but not a whole lot.

In the bottom right corner you'll see the Dacron fabric that will be used to cover the framework of the boat, and then varnished for a (fingers crossed), watertight finish.  It is actually very heavy, and fairly thick compared to what I had imagined.  The yellow roll above the Dacron is Kevlar roving (or so they have named it), it is applied on a 45 degree angle across the framework of the boat to stop the boat from twisting, I suppose it ads torsional strength.  The two rolls to the left of that are Heat n' Bond, basically hot glue in a roll.  It will be used to apply the Dacron skin to the framework of the boat before we shrink the Dacron.  They also included a set of generic instructions, I'm a touch upset about that, for the amount of money I paid I would have been much happier with plan specific instructions.  Most of the information in the booklet doesn't apply to my build, or does it?  I'm not sure, it doesn't specifically point out that this paragraph is for my boat or for another, we'll see how it goes.

That's about as much as I can muster for today, tomorrow we should see some progress and maybe I'll be a touch less exhausted and able to write.  Toodaloo!