Visual Progress

Friday September 18, 2015

Two items of great news!  1.  The welding is almost done!  Ok, maybe not 100%, we’d float if put in the water kind of done, but done in the areas that we need for us to be able to start building back up all the areas we’ve recently destroyed.  And 2.  We made visual progress on the boat today!

Not only have the past few weeks been spent, we’ll, we’ll say visualizing and planning, while the welding has been going on under our feet, the projects we were able to work on during those off hours and on weekends were of the variety where you put in a bunch of effort but have to keep setting that project aside for touch-ups and adjustments.  Nothing we could assemble at the end of the day and say “Yay!, look at what we’ve created!”.

One of those projects has been creating a divider that separates the galley from the forward salon.  The cherry plywood that goes on either side has been a breeze to measure and cut, but the cherry hardwood pieces that cap it off have taken a bit more thought and work.  First we had to locate between our 2.5″ and 3.5″ pieces, sets that would match up together between color and texture so that when they were set side by side (for a final width of 6″) it was not a drastic difference.

Ok, honestly that part wasn’t too difficult although it did take a little extra thought and a lot of extra rummaging through every piece of wood in our storage unit up the road.  The two very tricky parts of this project were cutting the ends at perfect 45° angles so they perfectly matched up together and then routing those edges so they blend together seamlessly.  To try and get those 45° angles we had only our table saw and there were many unfortunate pieces that ended up and useless scraps and we spent a good portion of one afternoon adjusting everything possible on that saw to get a straight line at the perfect angle.

Then was the routing.  Not a hard project until it comes to the corners.  Then it’s just one slight slip of the hand and you create a dent much larger than you were intending.  And um, yup, that’s exactly what we did.  So now one of our perfectly color matched, measured, and angled pieces is now kind of useless.  In that spot at least.  We’ll end up using it for the vertical area sitting back next to the cabinet where we can chop a good 3-4″ of it’s length.

Today though we were able to take the replacement piece and route it perfectly which means it is now installed!  Yes, finally a place in the boat we can look and say, “That wasn’t there yesterday.  We’ve made progress…see?”.  Which is the best feeling in the world!  Now I can’t wait for next week to come around so we can attack the galley and get that feeling almost daily.

P.S.  Do you like the doors for our clothing cabinets?  I don’t think I’ve shown any photos of them since our last post on the project.