Delays - May 2010

Well – of course – there would be delays wouldn’t there!

For the first few months of this year, the workshop/polytunnel was too cold to work in – below 5C anyway, which is the minimum temperature for using epoxy resins. Now – in May – the temps. vary between 7 and 25 which is OK, but now other jobs are claiming my time – the rear steps and the front fence have both collapsed and need replacing, and my van is complaining that I take it for granted. The real problem, however, is not these distractions – I could afterall just ignore them all – it’s that I’ve reached that inevitable stage in boat building when serious money has to be spent on materials, and this requires two types of decision.

Firstly, with limited resources, I have to decide that building this boat is actually important enough to me to warrant the expenditure; is it, in short, an idle whim, a bit of fun that could easily be put on the back burner until a later date, or does the building go deeper than that? – to do with who I am and what matters to me. With loads of cash and leisure or if building for a paying customer, this question happily doesn’t arise, but for those thousands who are obsessively driven to persue some equivalent project or enterprise, the question is always there - not easily answered and often ignored.

The second decision is far more practical, concerning the quantities and sources of materials. Specifically, the coble requires 9mm marine ply at around £70 per sheet (8 x 4ft) but, in order to minimise the number of sheets, I need either the profiles or offsets of the 9 strakes – not given on the plans. With the mould completed, however, it’s possible to use lengths of relatively cheap 6mm ply to take patterns for each strake which can then be arranged on two 8 x 4ft sheets of the 9mm marine ply scarphed together. As an alternative, you can create a table of offsets from each pattern and then use a CAD programme to shuffle around the profiles in order to fit the maximum number on each pair of scarphed sheets. Alex Jordan of Jordan boats suggests that 6 sheets should do the job. 

If we accept a minimum of 6 sheets for the strakes, then we find that Fyne Boats offers good discounts on 8+ sheets whilst Robbins Timber offers even better discounts on orders of 10+. Given that I need a half sheet of 18mm for the transom, this would result in costs ranging from about £650 – 830. OK. Gulp! This probably means hitching up the trailer and visiting Fyne Boats in the next week or so.

In the meantime, I must give some thought as to how best to scarph and glue six 8 x 4 sheets – so expect more pics.