March 13, 2019

Scupper 99

Wednesday

To begin the day, I applied a second coat of the semi-gloss white paint to the cabin areas and loose hatch covers.

After solvent-washing the new cherry fiddles, I applied a highly-thinned sealer coat of varnish to all sides of the various pieces.

Next on my list of trim to mill and prepare were the ceiling strips, or hull liners for the forward and main cabins.  Using some rough measurements of the spaces that I’d taken earlier, I chose enough cherry boards for the job (I hoped) and, in a series of steps, milled 2″ wide blanks from the boards (plus a couple 1″ wide pieces as by-products), then resawed each blank more or less in half  to create two thinner pieces of roughly 5/16″.  The two halves ended up slightly different thicknesses, and I could have made another saw pass on the thicker pieces, but that was unnecessary since my next step was to clean up and dimension all the planks to 1/4″ in thickness using the planer.  It took a couple extra passes on the thicker pieces first before I could run all the blanks through the planer to achieve the final thickness.

The planer left the surfaces smooth and clean and ready to go, but to finish the work on the blanks, I used a block sander to ease the top edges of each piece, creating a small v-groove between boards that looked nice and would help hide any inconsistencies in the planks in whatever installation lay ahead.  Sanding these small chamfers on all the blanks took me through the close of business.

Total time billed on this job today:  8.5 hours

0600 Weather observation:  12°, clear. Forecast for the day:  Mostly sunny, 41°