Things I never expected I'd be saying...

Nothing else will ever wake me up in quite the same way as the slug in my coffee this morning!!



For a little bit of backstory: I've been storing the various cooking supplies we brought with us in the basement near the basement door, so they don't add more clutter to my mom's kitchen. The larger moka pot was down there because a full moka pot of coffee is too much for me. However, yesterday I bought some decaf coffee beans so I can now enjoy a half-caffeinated larger volume of coffee in the morning.

Anyway, from now on, the larger moka pot will be staying upstairs. Once with a slug was more than enough!

Holes and shapes [boatbuilding, projects]

I eventually gave up on trying to work yesterday afternoon, reasoning that there will be a finite number of days in the upcoming weeks when the conditions will be ideal for working with epoxy.

Along with that, I don't like keeping other peoples' tools in borrowed-tool purgatory for too long, so I wanted to get some holes drilled and counterbored in order to return things to M.

Someone was asking the other day about the woods used in these boats. The marine plywood is okoume, fabricated in Greece. The wood used for the breasthook, quarter knees, rails, and mounting blocks is sapele, an African hardwood/mahogany.

I mention this because it was a bit challenging to drill the 1/2" holes through the sapele blocks. That's some dense and sturdy wood! Thank you to the trees that have become parts of this boat. My first counterbores were also a little wonky, but I'm not overly concerned by that aesthetic because the holes will still be functional and they aren't in a prominent location. Please also ignore the small tear-outs in the plywood (argh).



I then filled the 1/2" holes with epoxy, as shown above. Once the rowing units finally show up, I'll drill 1/4" holes through the epoxy to attach the rowing units to the boat. The idea is that as the bolts wiggle in the holes, it's better for them to wiggle against epoxy rather than wood. If the holes enlarge too much, they can be drilled out and filled with epoxy again later.

I also got a bit of shaping work done on the stern end of the gunwales. This area is tricky to photograph because it's at the back end of the garage and there isn't much space to maneuver.





Overall I think the curve from the gunwales to the transom came out well, and the edges of the quarter knees round over nicely to the gunwales.

While I am doing this sanding work I keep having flashbacks to watching boatbuilding videos where the person sanding or planing is repeatedly using a straightedge to check and see if their work is flat. Most of this boat's surfaces aren't flat, but by the time I get to the painting and varnishing stages, hopefully I won't observe too many low spots. Hopefully.

After filling in the 1/2" holes in the sapele blocks, I still had some leftover fillet, so I was able to run around and fill in a couple of low spots and gaps on the inside of the boat. I also filled in some small gaps at the bow, and now I think I'm finally satisfied with the shape of the bow.



I think later today I'll aim to flip the boat back over, sand down the handful of patches I added on Sunday, sand everything down just a bit more with 120 grit to be sure I haven't left scratch marks, and then give things a go with the first full epoxy coat.

Wish me luck. Or fortitude. Or something.

Stuff and waste disposal [stuff, hippie update]

One of the challenges of the boatbuilding project is that it is generating a lot of waste. The packaging for the trailer has been the worst of it, so far. The trailer parts came in four packages, including two large boxes secured with some of those giant box staples. Inside the boxes (which you might remember, failed to protect the axle end anyway), things were somewhat cleverly cushioned by adding plastic trash bags and then filling the bags with some form of that expanding foam, so the foam would fit the shape if the items in each box.

My mom carried out a small experiment with some of the expanding foam, to verify that it is not water-soluble, although it is easy enough to cut (although that makes a huge mess). I did figure out that if I stand on it, it squishes down somewhat. Seattle charges for garbage based on the volume and weight that households produce (as they should!), so my mom has the smallest possible volume can, and the expanded foam won't directly fit in it. Instead, it looks like if I squish, roll, and then tape up one bag of the expanded foam at a time, I can then basically get one piece at a time into the can. It is thus going to take several weeks to fully dispose of the foam pieces. Let that point sink in for a minute.

In the meantime, the remaining pieces are on the floor in the downstairs bedroom where I'm staying, and George kind of likes using them as obstacles when playing.

Meanwhile, the boxes and their staples. I have this long-ago memory of my dad gathering up small bits and pieces of metal for recycling, but I'm hazy on the details. My internet searches for information about metal box staples tended to be fairly useless, as they mostly turned up information about a horrible big-box office supply chain, or about staples in paper. I did eventually find something that indicated that box staples are typically stainless-steel coated with copper.

And sometime after that, I found information about scrap metal recycling in this area, which basically says, separate out your ferrous and non-ferrous metals. So, lo! The staples are indeed ferrous, so they went inside a ferrous can, crimped shut and now in the recycling bin.

While learning that, I also learned that yes, you *can* leave labels on your recycled cans, but they'll get burned off, whereas if you do go to the trouble of taking them off, they'll be recycled as paper (to the extent that actually happens).

My mom works really hard to be conscientious about how she disposes of things (and about thing acquisition), so she did try listing the more intact of the two large boxes on the local Freecycle, but didn't get any immediate direct hits. (side note, with her Ridwell subscription, she can usually recycle things like plastic bottle caps and bread tags, and more.)

Most of the people I encounter in New York might find this level of attention to waste disposal to be very foreign, and yet it seems to me that New York has a far larger and more complicated waste disposal problem than Seattle does.

At least one aspect of the solution to all this waste production is to buy less stuff (especially online!) and borrow more. The other day I came across this article about a 'library-centric economy', and while I don't think it would work for everything, it seems like it could work for a number of things. I have yet to make use of the tool library in Albany, but that's one example I'm glad exists. I'm now pondering what it would look like to set up a camping and hiking library at my college.

Also, puzzle libraries need to become more common.

More sanding [boatbuilding, projects]

I was intending to apply epoxy to the outside of the boat today, but then I double-checked my notes and the manual one more time, and they suggested that yes, I should probably go up to 220 grit and hand-sand to remove orbital sander scratches on the wood before starting in with the epoxy.

So maybe I will apply epoxy tomorrow.

I burned through the 220-grit really fast.

Photos won't really capture what was accomplished today.

I'm finally getting my head wrapped around where I left off with the next manuscript I need to be working on.

Also balanced my checkbook. Car and boat expenses (well, car expenses are basically boat expenses) mean I need to keep other hobbies very modest for a while here.

Clothes-mending it is!