Why Working With Old Wood is Hard and Soft at the Same Time...

If you google old wooden vintage boats on Google, you will find images of beautifully varnished, pristine, magazine worthy boats. Mine is nowhere near that at the moment! One of the things I discovered as I examined Project Gilligan was ROT. There are several spots on the boat that succumbed to enough rot to compromise the structural integrity of those areas. 

 

I am faced with two options, do I sand as much rot off as I can and epoxy and wood fill my way to completion OR do I remove the components that have experienced rot and figure out a way to replace it with new wood? As mentioned in my materials list and earlier blog posts, I consulted with a local wood shop (https://woodshedlumber.com/) in order to find the right wood for my project and acquire enough clear Western Red Cedar to replace the rotten pieces of the boat.

The next step was researching techniques on how to attach the new pieces of wood to the rest of the boat, and make sure they fit properly. This brought me to the magic that is scarf-jointing. Scarf-jointing is a technique to marry two pieces of wood seamlessly that maximizes the the amount of surface area that gets epoxied and glued together. In the following image you can see the first half of a scarf joint. This part of the scarf-joint is the original wood of the boat, the other half will be the new Western Red Cedar.

(from left to right we can see where I stopped cutting out the rotted wood from the back left side of the boat, and an example of a scarf joint being formed on the front right side of the boat. I can definitely see my scarf joint skills improving the more I practice, but I am content with this one for now!)

 

 Until next time,

Cpt. John signing off! (not really a captain)