Woodworking is rife with clichés (“measure twice, cut once”). I’ve heard these more than once: Your IQ drops 50 points when the glue bottle is open. The mark of a craftsman is how they recover from a mistake. Here’s a little story that involves both of these. As you may recall, I recently glued the garboard planks to the keelson. Turns out I made a mistake, and one of the planks didn’t fully seat on a bulkhead (specifically, the last bulkhead before the transom).

The garboard planks are the two closest to the keel, or in this case, on top of the keel. Since the boat is planked upside down, these are the first two planks to go on the boat. The planks, in case you forgot, are made of marine-grade plywood. A sheet of plywood is about 8 feet long and the boat is 14 feet long, that means that each plank comes in two pieces that need to get joined.

Before I can think about fitting the garboard planks, I need to bevel the keel so the planks fit at just the right angle. To prepare for this, I watched an Off Center Harbor video ($) from Geoff Kerr’s Caledonia Yawl series. The Caledonia Yawl is a larger boat, but the the construction process (glued lapstrake; plywood) is pretty similar. A few minutes into the video, Kerr says “if you haven’t bought a hand power planer yet, you’re going to run to the store.

In our last episode, I’d expressed some concern about the springback in the keel impacting the alignment of the transom, at least until I was able to add the sheer clamps and planking, which should lock everything into place. I came up with something to hopefully address this concern: a simple ratchet strap. I looped the strap around the building frame and through the opening in the stem post. After tightening it down, there’s no way that assembly is going to bend up.

It’s been about a month and half since my last update on this site. Progress has not been rapid. Mostly, that’s because I’ve been scared overly prudent. I’d argue that it is wise to be careful before breaking out the epoxy and doing something that’d be complicated to walk back. But, I’ll also admit that the complexity of this phase of the build has me doing more thinking than building.

Boatbuilding can be a solitary affair. As a bit of an introvert myself, this doesn’t necessarily bother me. But, from time to time, it is nice to have a few extra hands on hand. With that in mind, it’s been fun to be joined by my brother, nephew, and father on a few recent occasions. About a month ago, they helped to plane down some 1x2 Doug Fir that’ll make up the the sheer clamps.

As a part of dry fitting the keel to the boat prior to breaking out the epoxy and doing anything permanent, I decided I needed to steam bend the aft portion of the keel. As you can see in the plans below, the keel (which is about an inch thick piece of Doug Fir) takes quite the downward bend from the middle of the boat to the transom. I clamped the keel to the centerboard case (and to the stem, but that’s harder to see in the photo below).

I have a t-shirt that has the old saying “measure twice, cut once” on it. That’s decent advice, but I’m finding myself measuring a lot more than twice before I get out the saw. To start with, in the cliffhanger to the last episode, I’d determined where to cut the centerboard case, but hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to actually cut it. Since then, I’ve made the cut: With that done, I then moved on to cutting the notch out of the keel timber.

Let’s talk about the keel. This boat actually has two “keels,” plus a couple of bilge keels. But let’s ignore those bilge keels for now. The two keels are an inner keel and a “false keel”. The inner keel is just called the “keel” in the plans, although an inner keel is often called a keelson. Since Vivier refers to it as the keel, I’ll stick with that terminology. The false keel gets added after planking, and that’s the part that’ll actually stick down into the water.

Over the years(!) that I’ve been working on the project, people often ask me “how’s the boat going?” And for most of those years, I haven’t had anything that looked vaguely like a boat. I’ve had big sticks (the spars). I’ve had a collection of parts in a pile, and some of them were even recognizable as boat parts. It always felt a bit silly to talk about it as “the boat” when it was just…parts.

I promise I’ll get back to talking about the boat build soon. (There has been some progress, albeit modest.) In the meantime, I have yet another side quest to share with you. I was mostly motivated by wanting a little project I could complete quickly, and I’d had my eye on a contraption described in an article from the WoodenBoat Skills site: A Magnetic Lap-Planing Guide . (That’s almost certainly going to be behind a paywall.

It’s been a couple of months since I’ve made progress on the boat, but I have a good excuse. My wife asked me to build a little free library. (It was originally designed as a Christmas gift, but here we are in mid-January!) I’m not going to do a blow-by-blow recap of the build. Mostly because I didn’t take pictures during the build and the build itself isn’t that interesting. I used the “Modern Two Story Library” plans from the Little Free Library site, and followed them fairly closely.

At a recent family gathering, my father’s cousin Stu slipped me an object in a brown paper bag. Contrary to the opinion of some observers, the bag didn’t contain a bottle of hootch. Instead it was an old hand plane. Stu’s father and grandfather had run construction companies, as has Stu, and he found this plane amongst the old tools. Knowing that I’m a woodworker, he passed it to me.

Let me regale you with a story of bulkhead number 2. (This may be more interesting to people who are actually building Beg Meil. In fact, I write this mostly in hopes that it makes it easier for future builders.) A few things that are helpful to know: Each of the bulkheads is numbers, with station 1 being near the transom (stern), and station 8 near the stem (front). So, the bulkhead in question is near the back of the boat.

Last Friday I took the day off and crossed the Puget Sound to head to Port Townsend, WA. Port Townsend hosts one of the largest gatherings of wooden boats and wooden boat people in their annual Wooden Boat Festival. I don’t have any profound insights to share, other than there are a lot of really wonderful wooden boats out there and I had a great time looking at them. So, instead, I’ll share a few snapshots.

Sometimes I wonder who I’m writing these posts for. Every writer needs to have an audience in mind while they write, so who am I writing for? On one level, I’m writing for me, to create a record of the project. I’m also writing for friends and family who are interested in keeping up with the project, or want a little more detail about how the build is progressing. Even so, I often have a future Beg Meil builder in mind when I’m writing.

More thinking about precision In the last post, I talked a bit about precision. I’m going to continue the theme here as I start to stand up the bulkhead supports. One of the keys is to make sure each bulkhead is placed at exactly the right spot. To do this, I decided to buy a couple of stick-on measuring tapes. I used FastCap’s Peel & Stick measuring tapes, which weren’t too expensive, and had both metric and imperial markings.

You may have already figured this out, but one does not simply build a boat on the ground. You need some sort of a platform or frame. And, so, I’ve built a frame to build the boat. The frame is just over 15 feet long, so I picked up some 16 foot 2x6 boards. While one could have joined a couple of 8 foot boards together, it just seemed easier to buy the longer boards from the get-go.

After a little more research, I’ve decided that varnish-over-epoxy is the way to go for the transom. West Systems (which is my epoxy brand of choice) has a nice article on the topic: “Varnish Over Epoxy”. Having some sort of “official” indication that this is valid choice is helpful. I also uncovered a few old threads on the WoodenBoat forum on the topic. The consensus seems to be that that it is a viable approach, but you do have to take some precautions.

At this point, I’ve precoated most of the bulkheads with epoxy, but I was worried about the end grain. Not all the end grain, as a lot of it will eventually get glued to other pieces (planks, deck, etc.), but especially the tie-down holes and the limber holes. Both will have the opportunity to come into contact with water on a regular basis, and I figured that a few coats of epoxy couldn’t hurt.

I’m still spending most of my time encapsulating various bulkhead parts with epoxy. It looks like this: And this: I don’t have quite enough bench space (even temporary benches, like these) to do all the parts at once, so I’m rotating through them, and trying to give all the pieces three coats with some light sanding between coats. I’m also trying to hit exposed end grain – at least the parts that won’t eventually be glued to another part.

Look, it ain’t all going to be exciting. Sometimes you just have to grind. I’m in a phase of the project that is turning out to be a bit of a grind. It’s not bad, but it isn’t particularly interesting. There’s no glamorous-looking curly shavings of clear wood. No carefully chiseling away wood to get the perfect fit. And no novel problems to ponder. And there aren’t even very many good photos of the process.

There’s a notion in technology management spaces (where I spend my working life) of “one-way doors” and “two-way doors.” A one-way door represents a decision that isn’t easily reversible, whereas a two-way door is one where, if you don’t like what you see when you walk through the door, you can turn back around. As I prepared to epoxy the centerboard case together, I was aware that I was in one-way door territory.

“From stem to stern.” The last few posts have been pretty stern-focused, so now it’s time to talk stem (aka, the front of the boat, or bow). On the Beg-Meil, there are actually two stems. There’s an inner stem, where the planks actually land, and what Vivier calls the “false stem,” which is the part you’ll actually see. The inner stem is made up of three 15mm CNC plywood parts, laminated together.

It turns out that the hard part was getting the board prepared because these last steps were pretty straightforward, and not too time-consuming. To be fair, having the transom already cut out in plywood made the process much easier. The plywood transom came in two layers (which were to be glued together) – an inner layer with a mortise for the stern post, and an outer layer. The outer layer is a bit smaller than the inner layer, as there’s a bevel eventually added to the edge between the “layers” to accept the planking.

In my last post on the transom, I detailed the issues I’d had with the first attempt a gluing up a “blank” to cut the transom from. I basically made three mistakes in the process: I started with 4/4 lumber, which ended up a bit too thin once I’d milled up the stock. I used a really wide board, which ended up cupping a bit, even after I’d milled it flat.

I’ve recently started to think about power. Specifically, auxiliary power. Of course, the sails are the primary power source. And I figured that I’d include oars as a backup. But, the Beg-Meil is, I think, a bit heavy to be great under oars. So, I’ve been planning on some sort of electric motor, too. I’d also figured that this was a topic I could push off until farther in the build, until I realized that I’m going to need to soon make decisions about the transom that relate to the auxiliary power plan.

As I hope I’ve made clear on this site, I’m very much still learning boatbuilding and woodworking. And when you’re learning, you make mistakes. It’s just a part of the process. So, I thought it’d be illustrative for me to narrate my latest mistake. In the last post I outlined my plan to make the transom out of solid wood instead of plywood. More experienced woodworkers may have caught at least one potential bad idea I outlined, but let me lay out the story.

I an earlier post, I mentioned that Vivier specified “marine sapele” plywood for the sheet with the rudder and transom parts. None of the suppliers I checked had sapele plywood, at least not anyone local, so this sheet, along with the rest of the sheetings, is okoume. Now, okoume is a softer wood. (Not a softwood. It’s a hardwood. Believe it or not, hardwoods can be soft and softwoods can be hard.

The thing about building a boat like this is that there aren’t super detailed step-by-step instructions. On the scale from “building Ikea furniture” to “you’re totally on your own,” this process lands closer to “on your own” than to Ikea. (To be fair, it’s still somewhat at the mid-point, although leaning to the right.) I am, however, surrounded by resources. Vivier provides a 39 page booklet specific to the Beg-Meil. And 71 pages of more general boatbuilding instruction (although that document is in French).

Now that I have the plywood, it’s time to start planning the next steps. In his book Every Tool’s a Hammer, patron-saint-of-makers Adam Savage extols the virtue of making lists. (See also: The Checklist Manifesto.) I’ve been known to make a list or two in my time, and this post is no exception. To be fair, this post may not be the most interesting to people who aren’t me since I’m mostly thinking out loud about the next phases of the project.

In an earlier post, I outlined some of the things I was considering around the big plywood purchase. (By “plywood,” I mean “marine panels,” which is apparently the term of art here.) I’d made a brief aside about tariffs, and some concerns about how the new administration’s trade policy might impact the cost of goods. (Yeah, this is small potatoes, and there are plenty of other things to worry about. Still.

One of the little side-quests I’ve had on the agenda is to build some clamps to help out when the eventual planking process. Now, you might say, “hey, there are plenty of clamps available for purchase in stores, why would you want to make your own?” Fair question, and to answer it, we need to remember that this particular boat uses lapstrake (or “clinker” for those across the pond) construction. (The Wikipedia article I linked to has a nice diagram explaining it.

The next big step in the boat project is buying the plywood that will be used to construct the hull. There’s a few things to note about the plywood: This isn’t the stuff you buy at the big box store. It’s marine-grade plywood, which is higher quality and more expensive than the normal stuff. The plywood gets CNC cut – think: a computer that controls a router to cut out precise shapes.

Sometimes I wonder why this project takes so long. (Most people I talk to are too polite to ask why the project takes so long, so these are mostly conversations I have with myself.) After all, I prepped the wood for the mast back in February, and here we are, a few days from Halloween, and I’m still finishing up the mast. (Of course, I did take a bunch of detours, building a guitar, a tool chest, and a few other little things.

The release of the Lost Art Press “Make a Swedish Tool Chest with Whitney Miller” video course coincided with an expansion of my free time. And so, it was an easy decision to take this on as a new project. (And before you ask “what about the boat??”, yes, I am still working on the boat. I’m still doing final finishing on the mast, which is rather tedious. And the next big step involves paying thousands of dollars for CNC cut marine plywood, and I’m going to wait a bit before making that expenditure.

In the last post, I’d expressed some concern about the bow in the wood. I’d had two solutions in mind: clamping the bow out, and just making the diameter a bit thinner. I ended up going with both approaches. First, here’s what it looks like to clamp the first layer of the four-layer glue-up to a cleat: This worked pretty well, at least until I got to the later stages where the mast was too high for the clamp to reach the cleat.

Near the end of my last boat-related post, I described my plan for a “spar bench” – basically a really long flat surface that I can use to glue up the mast. The spar bench is made with 2x4s, on edge, topped by plywood. One of the keys is making sure the bench is flat and not twisted. It’d be a shame to go to all of this trouble only to make a twisted spar.

I’ve devoted a decent portion of my shop time over the past six months to building a guitar. Now, you may note that a guitar is not a boat, and this blog is about me building a boat. And you’d be right. But, the older child plays guitar, and he’s outgrown the cheap guitar we bought him a while back. He had his eyes on a ’70s style Telecaster Deluxe, which combines the classic Telecaster body shape with a few extra knobs – each pickup gets it’s own volume and tone knob.

While a good deal of my woodworking time is still being taken up by the guitar-building project (which is progressing nicely, even if I’ve decided to not blog about it), I haven’t forgotten the boat. In the couple of months (!) since my last post, I’ve been working to prep the wood for the mast. Given that the longest mast board I have is about 17 feet long, I needed to be a bit creative in how I jointed and ripped the boards.

I’m fortunate to have the week between Christmas and New Year’s off work, and that affords me the opportunity to spend some quality time out in the garage, working on various projects. I knocked together a little cart for a new drill press using leftover wood from the workbench project. I was also able to build in some extra storage, which is always welcome in the workshop. My other big project was to plane down the Sitka spruce I picked up in early November.

The boom is “done.” Well, there’s a couple of things I’ll need to do before actually rigging it, but I’m calling it done. According to this very blog, it was way back in July when I started to apply finish to the boom parts. In the intervening months, I put a bunch of coats of varnish (D2) on the boom. I didn’t exactly keep track of how many coats, but the boom itself seems well covered.

When last I reported on the workbench, I’d flipped it right side up, applied some finish, and drilled the dog holes. My next step was to install the shelf boards. Like everything else in the bench, they’re made up of 1¼" boards. The only trick was to notch out two boards to fit around the legs, which wasn’t too tough. I didn’t bother to screw them into cleats. I suspect gravity will keep them in place just fine.

You know how, in the last post, I decried the price of Sitka Spruce and hatched a plan to make the mast out of fir instead? Well, Reader, I bought the spruce. Now, you might ask why I paid $20 a board foot? The short answer is that I already had about 40% of what I needed in Sitka Spruce, and so it turned out to be about the same price to keep going with the spruce instead of starting over with fir.

Remember that boat I’m building? The one this blog is ostensibly about? Well, I haven’t forgotten about it, despite the litany of workbench posts. In between putting the finishing touches on the workbench (of which there will be one more post when all is said and done), I’ve been slowly chipping away on boat projects. Specifically, I’ve been varnishing the boom and associated parts. There’s not much to say about that, though the phrase “watching paint dry” comes to mind.

I’d been a bit worried about how exactly I was going to flip the bench over, but between my wife and teenage son, we were able to get it flipped over with no injuries to either the workbench or the workers. Below, you can see it in the permanent location under the one window in the garage. Fits just perfectly in the space. (It’s almost like I measured and planned it!

The next big task I had was to drill two holes into the front (and back) of the benchtop in front of each leg. The holes are for the drawbores (pegs) that help keep the whole thing together. I once again used my drill guide, only this time clamped to the side of the top, and propped up with some scrap wood. This method worked pretty well. (We’re going to ignore the holes for one of the back legs that are slightly askew.

(Don’t let the one day between posts fool you. The last post reflected about a month’s worth of work, and this one was about a week’s worth, including a long weekend.) After gluing up the stretchers, I needed to clean them up before trying to fit them to the legs. Try as I might, I wasn’t able to get the two boards perfectly aligned, and, of course, there was glue squeeze-out.

It’s been about a month since my last post, but I haven’t been idle as we enter the dog days of summer. When last I reported on my progress, I’d just glued the three sections of the benchtop together. The glue-up was mostly successful, although if I had to do it over again I’d have jointed the faces that were glued. The gaps between the three sections aren’t bad, but in spots they are slightly wider than the rest of the joints.

The next step in the workbench project was to take the 20 boards I’d bought for the benchtop into the Tool Library shop and mill them to size. Neighbor Joel and I threw the boards into the back of his truck, and headed to the shop. Knowing that the wood I’d bought wasn’t of the highest quality (it was #2 lumber, all Douglas Fir), I’d bought a couple of extra boards.

When people ask how the boat building is going, I often say something like “slowly.” I’m not sure I have a good frame of reference for how fast I’m actually moving here, but I do sometimes reflect on just how much time it takes to do something that, superficially, seems simple. In this case, I’ve: Made a new set of boom jaws, having decided that the first attempt wasn’t going to work.

I’ve been actively working on this project for just over a year. One of the things I’ve learned is that my workspace is rather inadequate. The inadequacy manifests itself in a number of ways, but one of the more obvious is the lack of a decent workbench, and the attendant workholding options a “real” workbench provides. To date, my “workbenches” have mostly been sawhorses with plywood on top. (As an aside, I’ve been really happy with these folding metal sawhorses.

The solution to my varnish woes turned out to be mostly about putting on very light coats of varnish. I also made a point to check back 10 or 15 minutes after putting a coat on to make sure there weren’t any drips forming. Once I had the technique down, it was just a matter of repeating the process over and over and over and over again. With the gaff and the two jaws varnished, the final step was to bed the parts, and attach them.

After applying a bunch of Deks Olje D1 – a saturating wood oil – I started in on the first of many coats of Deks Olje D2. But, I’ve hit a bit of an issue. The photo below shows the problem, although it is helpful to know that I’ve flipped the gaff upside down to take the photo. The bumps you see are actually drips of the varnish that have collected on the bottom of the spar.

After lackluster results with my initial attempt at making gaff jaws, I set out on “take two” aiming to avoid the issues I had with the previous attempt: I’d make the boards thinner, and thus easier to bend. I’d cut them to shape after bending them, reducing the chance for the wood to crack. I picked up a nice piece of 6/4 (about an inch and a half thick) ash, and took it to the tool library shop.

Redo Travel, illness (my first bout of covid!), and other obligations have slowed progress on the boat a bit. I’ve also decided to redo three components: the gaff jaws, the boom jaws, and the reef combs. I’d mentioned that I wasn’t happy with my progress on the gaff jaws. I’d ended up with pretty thick pieces of wood, and they’d cracked a bit while attempting to bend them. I decided to shift gears – this time, I’d cut thinner strips of wood, and steam bend them before cutting them to shape to minimize the chances of cracking.

The plans show two options for connecting the boom to the mast. You can either use a metal gooseneck, like the ones made by Davey & Co and sold at R&W Rope, or you can use wooden jaws, similar to the gaff jaws. I’m not exactly making what you’d an “informed” decision here, but I’m going with the jaws. Maybe it is an inkling that they’d be easier to attach to the boom?

No, not this guy. This is much less dramatic. And hopefully my boat fairs better than the one in the movie. The gaff jaws are simply the way the gaff (aka the piece of wood at the top of the mainsail) connect to the mast. They basically wrap around the mast, holding the gaff to the mast. The gaff jaws consist of two curved pieces of wood bolted and screwed to the end of the gaff.

Preface: I’m by no means an expert, and you should absolutely do your own research before deciding what safety equipement to use. Don’t just take my word for it. Boat building involves coming in contact with a number of substances that aren’t the best for humans. (Or, I suppose, other creatures, but I’m mostly concerned with this particular human.) Sawdust, epoxy, and finishes (paint, varnish) all have safety concerns, especially when it comes to respiratory health.

Last summer when I bought some Sitka spruce for the spars, I’d hoped it’d be enough for the bowsprit, boom, gaff, and mast. It wasn’t. (This was largely because I hadn’t ever bought wood at a lumberyard, and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I knew roughly how much wood I needed, but I wasn’t sure what size boards they’d have at the lumberyard. That made it hard to come up with a gameplan.

You may be wondering what a “reef comb” is. I’m not entirely sure, either. Given the name, I’d assume this is a thing you can tie the reef points (aka, little bits of line on the sail that you can use to shorten the sail in higher winds) to. There’s also a way to attach the main sheet (aka the line you use to control how far in or out the mainsail goes) to.

The folks over at Lost Art Press have apparently been offering a reprint of the 1914 Stanley Tools (“Stanley Rule & Level Company”) catalog. They’ve recently sold through their stock of the paper copies, and decided to not reprint it. Instead, they’re offering a free PDF download of the catalog. Back in October I fixed up an old wooden “transitional” plane and figured out that it was a Stanley No. 29, made from 1869 to 1917.

The plans call for four cleats on the boom, four on the gaff, and one on the bowsprit. There’s also two needed on the aft deck, but since those aren’t related to the spars, I’m less worried about them right now. The four on the boom are specified as about 175mm, and the gaff cleats are 100mm. (Interestingly, the fittings/hardware list in the plans doesn’t mention the ones in the gaff – they’re only mentioned on the drawing of the spars.

I’ve been slowly making headway on a number of projects to build the bits and bobs that get stuck onto the spars: cleats, jaws, and reef combs. I’ve got a number of long posts detailing those projects in the queue, waiting for me to finish up the projects. In the meantime, I’ve been buying stuff. I’m not sure if placing orders online counts as boatbuilding or not, but I sure do spend a decent amount of time on that particular activity.

“The only motivation for building a boat is because you want to do it. Because you just love the challenge of building something complex. And that’s a perfectly valid motivation. And that’s the only one, really.” – Paul Gartside, in the “Chapter 2” video in Wooden Boat Mastering Skills, Season 2, Episode 12 ($) I thought Gartside’s insight was rather wise. He was pointing out that if just want to go sailing, there are lots of used boats available, and often at pretty reasonable prices.

The gaff jaws need to be bent (foreshadowing for an upcoming post!). There is, of course, more than one way to achieve this. Laminating a whole bunch of thin pieces together would do the trick. But, I’m going to try to steam-bend a couple of larger pieces of ash. In order to steam bend, I need a steam box. And, it should probably go without saying, a source of steam.

With a (mostly) functional spar lathe and temperatures that climbed back up into the more-reasonable 40s (before Christmas it’d been in the teens and 20s…a bit too low even with a garage space heater!), I set to work rounding the gaff and boom. The basic operation looks like this: Basically, I plug in the motor and hold sandpaper to the spar as it turns around. After a few minutes, the spar goes from having 16 sides to having the corners sanded down.

When last I wrote about about my attempt to make a spar lathe, I’d thought I’d solved the hardest part. After all, the big wooden wheel was no longer falling off. I may not have been entirely accurate with that prediction. My next step was to make the other end of the lathe – the part that’d support the spar as it was spun around. I ordered four rubber wheels, and cut out some pieces of plywood to help surround the spar with wheels.

In an earlier post, I’d mentioned that I was thinking about building a spar lathe. The basic idea is to rotate the spar around so I can evenly sand it. The hope is that I can take the somewhat lumpy spars (especially the boom, which I’m not entirely happy about) and get them nice and round. As I mentioned, the inspiration for this came from an article by Chris Cunningham (editor of Small Boats Monthly) in WoodenBoat issue 176 (Jan/Feb 2004).

There are a number of bits and bobs that need to be attached to the boom, gaff, bowsprit, and mast. Things like cleats and jaws. (Cleats being useful for tying up rope, or “line” as one should say on a boat, lest one gets chastised by someone with a more advanced nautical lexicon. Jaws are basically how both the boom and gaff marry up with the mast, ensuring that these big sticks aren’t just flapping around randomly.

With the boom roughed to size, I then took it from four sides to eight, and then sixteen. I followed the same process as I did with the gaff, so I won’t repeat myself. In short, I used my spar gauge to draw lines, then knocked off the corners to those lines, and then kept knocking off corners until I had a roughly round (in cross section) object. So, for this post, I’ll focus on a few things I noticed while working on it.

The nice thing about working on the boom is that I think most folks who have even a passing familiarity with a sailboat know what a boom is. This has not been true of the gaff. When I’ve told people that I’ve been working on the gaff, I’m usually met with a blank stare, and then I have to explain that the gaff is the wood bit at the top of the sail, which is also confusing to people who are used to sails being triangular, instead of the four sided sail found on the gaff rig.

Take the gaff from eight sides to sixteen was one of the easier steps in the process, mostly because there just isn’t that much wood to remove. And because there isn’t much wood, the plane takes off these lovely ten-foot-long shavings of wood. The end result is something that approximates round. When I went from four sides to eight, I’d carefully measured the width of each side up and down the gaff to make sure that all eight sides were the same.

With the lines drawn using the spar gauge, it was time to knock off the corners and go from a four-sided stick to an eight-sided stick. To do that, I first needed to make some jigs to hold the spar in place. I picked up a 2x6, cut off four pieces, then used a little bandsaw (checked out from the tool library) to cut notches in the pieces. I also shaped them so they’d be easy to clamp down to the table, and made another little notch so I could clamp a piece across the top to hold the spar down.

As I mentioned earlier, when searching for the right boat to build, I’d compiled a list of about 30 different plans. I thought it might be fun to look at some of the boats I’m not going to build. Perhaps it is my Scandinavian heritage, but I love a double-ender. Sjogin is a great example of a small and beamy double-ender, but at just over 20 feet, it is quite a bit larger than what I’d want to tackle as a first project.

To go from a square-sectioned spar to a round spar, one first needs to go from four sides to eight sides, and then to 16 sides. To make it easier to create eight equal sides, pretty much every tutorial on the subject recommends a spar gauge. A spar gauge is necessary because of the spars taper. In the case of the first spar I’m making, the gaff, it goes from 58mm at the thickest to 36mm on one end and 50mm on the other.

For now, at least, I’m using hand planes to shape the spars. Pretty much every how-to video you’ll see on spars shows the use of a power plane (perhaps after a band saw has roughed out the shape.) Well, I don’t have a power plane (although one could be had at the tool library), but I also rather like the notion of shaping these pieces by hand. Hand planes are quiet.

With the help of my neighbor (and tool library shop steward) Joel, I hauled a couple of ~14 foot Sitka spruce boards to the tool library with the intention of turning them into smaller pieces of Sitka spruce that could then be glued up into blanks for the boom and the gaff. (The gaff, for those who don’t know the term, is the spar at the top of the sail in a gaff rigged boat.

I decided to start with the bowsprit (aka the pointy bit at the front of the boat). It is the shortest of the spars, although, except for the mast, perhaps the most complicated. And, since I have to start somewhere, why not start at the front? I started by turning one of the spruce boards into three spruce boards. This was done at the table saw at my local tool library.

I’m going to start by making the spars – the mast, gaff, boom, and bowsprit. There are a couple of reasons for this: Once the hull is done, it’ll provide me with a faster path to the water if I don’t then have to make the spars. More importantly, they take up less space in the garage, meaning the garage doesn’t have to be completely cleared out in order for me to start.

“Yak Shaving” is a term that comes out of the technology space (where I spend my days). It is best defined as: yak shaving is what you are doing when you’re doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you’re supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you’re doing to the original meta-task. In the software world, it isn’t uncommon to be working on adding a feature, then realize that that feature needs a updated version of some software library.

As I start out, I wouldn’t consider myself much of a woodworker. As a kid I built plenty of balsa wood model airplanes (a good number of which met an unfortunate end via unscheduled landings at an excessive velocity). And I’ve done plenty of standard homeowner light DYI projects. But, I wouldn’t say I really knew what I was doing. So, I thought it prudent to get some basic instruction. I started with a woodworking class at the Center for Wooden Boats.

I decided I wanted to build a boat. Among other questions, it does raise the issue of which boat? A few years ago, I took some sailing lessons, and been sailing occasionally ever since. So, it’d be a sailboat. (If I were to get a powerboat, sign me up for something in the style of a Lake Union Dreamboat.) The boats I learned to sail on are Blanchard Junior Knockabouts at Seattle’s Center for Wooden Boats.

Deciding to build a boat is a sign you’re planting your feet firmly in the “journey” camp, not the “destination” camp. Which is to say, if you’re interested in going boating, there are plenty of easier and faster ways to get on the water. But, I’m up for the journey, and under no illusions about how long this particular journey might take. None of that really answers the question of why I want to build a boat.