Wooden Boat Magazine

Had a nice cameo appearance in the current issue of Wooden Boat Magazine .

The issue actually has two articles by my mentor, Hilary Russell, of the Berkshire Boat Building School.  I happen to lend Hilary a hand when he needed to check the seat placement of his New World Coracle.  He snapped some photos at the same time, and this one found its way into the article.  Unusually, I also got a mention in the caption, and a note that I am one of the instructors (along with Hilary) at the Wooden Boat School, in Brooklin, ME.

Two weeks into the spring trimester

Back at it.  Things are going along pretty well.  This is a time when there are lots of little bits and pieces to deal with: floorboards, rub rails, seats, thwarts, etc, but these are nearly done, and we will be installing inwales this week.

The Sassafras is coming along nicely.  Ready to glue on the decks.

This skin canoe is furthest along.
Ready to glue in the gunwales.

Using the CNC machine to personalize the thwarts.

For a number of years, we were getting these nice little bronze makers marks from a guy in England.  Alas, no more, so we've taken to doing this in a more personalized way for each builder on the little DIY CNC machine we have in the shop. Since this particular CNC machine zeros off the lower left corner of the work space, rather than the center, this can sometimes be tricky - the second photo below shows that we add some blocking around the thwart and plot the origin based on our measurements. I suppose we could cut the thwart itself AND the design at the same time, but for us its just easier to band saw out the thwart.

A test carve of one idea
for the thwart markings

We did this one on the decks of the Sassafras:
the full school seal.

Gluing up the floorboards.