Wet week blues.

Friday short post. August 26 2022.

Note to readers – this is a short series of progress reports that I normally just post on the John Welsford group page.

Hello and good morning everyone, I hope you are all well. It’s the end of a working week again so, as usual, here’s another short progress report – or in today’s example, the lack of it.

What I should have been doing this week was working on the mast and it would have been nice to show how I went about building the mainmast by the birdsmouth stave method. What actually happened this week is that we went from our British ‘heatwave’ to much more normal summer conditions…..cool and wet except that we had thunderstorms and flash flooding as well.

In practice what that meant is that I couldn’t do any work on the mast staves because that all had to be done outside on the build frame which now serves as my spar bench ; instead the week has been mostly about making plans, ordering a few parts and finding small jobs to do in the workshop.

Instead, what I did was a lot of faffing about doing small jobs in the workshop – sharpened the planes and chisels, made some cleats and then had a first look at the next major job which is to set up the steering gear. I had to wait for the end of the month to have the budget to order the Bronze parts for the rudder fittings and I even had a bit of a senior moment doing that.

I knew exactly what parts I needed to order so this week I hit the internet and made the order….just before I completed the order I checked all the amounts and found a huge cost for shipping which seemed weird until I back checked the company and found that it was an Australian company and obviously the parts were going in an aeroplane.

Most of the rest of that day was taken up with finding similar parts in the UK and rather being able to order a complete set I had to order each gudgeon and pintle separately and then had something go wrong at the payment end…..checked that and ultimately ordered and paid over the phone.

The only real step forward was carefully marking out and drilling through the 3 layers of deck, stern seat and mizzen foot block for the mizzen mast tube……fitting the foot block and the lower rudder fittings are the last 2 things I have to do before closing the rear compartment.

Anyway…..this week’s actual report is the main post from my blog this week which is just to talk about the end of main construction and what happens next.

Hopefully we’ll get the dry and cool mornings forecast which will mean dry assembling the mast and then gluing up…..hopefully as well I’ll have the rudder fittings so I’ll be working on that and hopefully it will make a lot more sense than it did this week.