(Entry 9) I want my baby back RIBS...

I'm not sure if it's a canoe, or a hairy caterpillar...to be honest, I'm not sure I care.  If the beast floats, call it by what ever name fancies your tickly-place.  It has been an eventful six days since my last post, allow me to run you through the festivities.  First I needed to figure out which type of lumber I was going to use for the RIBS (if you haven't guessed, I've managed to get all of the ribs in the boat).  Then I needed to borrow a table saw, and then of course cut them to appropriate dimensions.  Next, they then of course need to be bent, glued, clamped, measured, twisted, and every other damn thing you could think of (I think a burning cigarette to the eyeball may be more enjoyable).  So there you go, you're all caught up!  Good day folks.   

Okay, only joking.  Seriously though, that is probably the most time consuming and possibly irritating job I've had to do on this project yet.  If I were to do it all over again, I would definitelyforsure100% source green lumber for the ribs.  If you remember my last post, you'll recall me mentioning "green" lumber for the ribs, well I decided to be a tit and cheap out...I decided to use some lumber I had recently sourced that was now just laying around.  Table saw now borrowed, I call up my brother (thanks Ryan) to help me run the Cherry lumber through.  Knowing full well that this cherry is kiln dried and will not take a steam bending (according to many-a-internet forum folk) we proceed to cut the ribs to half their thickness to later be laminated and put into position. Okay, perhaps a word on lamination before we continue.  If you have two thin pieces of wood (in this case) and you glue those two pieces of wood together, bend the wood into position, once the glue between the layers of wood dries the wood will be forever bent into shape.  There, a very quick blah-dibbity about laminating wood.     

So we cut all of the lumber to half the thickness of the final rib size, but double the actual width, which was incredibly stupid.  The finished rib dimensions were supposed to be 1/4" thick, by 1/2" wide, so now we have about 40 pieces of lumber cut to 1/8" thick (half of finished thickness), by 1" wide, can you detect an issue here?  I can, and I won't even go into the issues I had trying to laminate the ribs into the canoe at double the width.  So after I figured out that the double-wide (reminds me of Eminem's home from 8 Mile) ribs were forcing the canoe out of shape during lamination, I had to figure out how to cut an 1/8" thick strip of cherry on a table saw without having it rattle and jump straight off the table and into my face.  Turns out that two days later I'd have the answer, and after about an hours work the strips were now reduced to half their width, which is the correct width.................

I can see this is getting confusing for you, your eyes are closing and you are falling asleep, you are getting sleepy, very sleepy, veeerrryyy...  Okay, so enough of that long-winded mindless babble, enough of Mr. Boring talk.  The ribs are in (all but one on each end, these need to be cut in half as they won't bend into place), all frikken' 18 of them.  Funny story, the plan calls for 18 total, but I will actually have 20 in total since I decided to reduce the spacing of the ribs by 1" so that I could avoid them landing on a station mold, haha, super funny leg slapper eh!  I love creating more work for myself, why didn't I increase the spacing to get the same result with less work?  Dumb-ass...  

Anyway...tomorrow I will hopefully have all of the zip-ties (they work great as clamps) off and the boat flipped, yay!

Blabbity-blah, until next time folks, cheers!