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Slow progress. But reasonably steady. I made and epoxied in softwood rails to mount the seat to. (The seat for a Wee Lassie II goes in the bottom of the boat--rather like a kayak--rather than bolted to the gunwales. However you need something between the seat and the hull that you can drive a screw into without piercing the hull.)
Making the rails was reasonably easy--I started with pieces of my 1 x 1.5 inch (true) white pine. Those who have been reading this blog for some time will recall I ordered three times as much of this as I needed to make the boatshop doors; the remainder has been hanging around in the boatshop, periodically being pressed into service to make cradles and such. With so much of it around, finding two fourteen inch pieces without knots was no particular problem. I did have to cut off quite a wedge of wood so that the bottom side would fit the slant of the V hull, while the top side would sit horizontally under the horizontal seat. I ended up doing this by securing the rails one at a time between a bench dog and a wonder dog, and then hacking off big chips with a chisel, and finishing up with the low angle block plane. The rails looked really haggled after the chisel work (not my best work, that, but I was in a hurry) but cleaned right up with the plane. The only trick was that I ran the plane blade into the wonderdog a couple of times. Fortunately the wonderdog is made of some soft, lead-like metal, because it made bright chips in the wonderdog but didn't seem to hurt the plane blade at all. Whew.
I also used the bandsaw (and the plane again) to make the rails narrower so I could creep them up farther under the seat and keep the rails off the butternut stripe, which I worked hard to make and don't want to obscure. I made the rails 1/2 inch thick at the thinnest edge, to make sure there was enough wood there to drive a screw into without compromising the hull.
For "clamping" I used bags of rice and lentils to weight the rails to the hull. They're cheap; they go where clamps won't, and as long as I don't get hardener on the food, they can be eaten afterward. I had to go buy an extra bag of brown rice, but I needed to go to the store anyway.
Once I had used the seat to check the placement of the rails, and glued the rails in place, I varnished the seat and hung it from my plank rack. At about 7 pm I can (theoretically) give it another coat of varnish. That would make it ready to cane tomorrow.
Walnut looks really nice with varnish on it. I see why people are willing to put up with its evil ways.
Making the rails was reasonably easy--I started with pieces of my 1 x 1.5 inch (true) white pine. Those who have been reading this blog for some time will recall I ordered three times as much of this as I needed to make the boatshop doors; the remainder has been hanging around in the boatshop, periodically being pressed into service to make cradles and such. With so much of it around, finding two fourteen inch pieces without knots was no particular problem. I did have to cut off quite a wedge of wood so that the bottom side would fit the slant of the V hull, while the top side would sit horizontally under the horizontal seat. I ended up doing this by securing the rails one at a time between a bench dog and a wonder dog, and then hacking off big chips with a chisel, and finishing up with the low angle block plane. The rails looked really haggled after the chisel work (not my best work, that, but I was in a hurry) but cleaned right up with the plane. The only trick was that I ran the plane blade into the wonderdog a couple of times. Fortunately the wonderdog is made of some soft, lead-like metal, because it made bright chips in the wonderdog but didn't seem to hurt the plane blade at all. Whew.
I also used the bandsaw (and the plane again) to make the rails narrower so I could creep them up farther under the seat and keep the rails off the butternut stripe, which I worked hard to make and don't want to obscure. I made the rails 1/2 inch thick at the thinnest edge, to make sure there was enough wood there to drive a screw into without compromising the hull.
For "clamping" I used bags of rice and lentils to weight the rails to the hull. They're cheap; they go where clamps won't, and as long as I don't get hardener on the food, they can be eaten afterward. I had to go buy an extra bag of brown rice, but I needed to go to the store anyway.
Once I had used the seat to check the placement of the rails, and glued the rails in place, I varnished the seat and hung it from my plank rack. At about 7 pm I can (theoretically) give it another coat of varnish. That would make it ready to cane tomorrow.
Walnut looks really nice with varnish on it. I see why people are willing to put up with its evil ways.
