Pico Boating: Templates

It’s at a time like this, just as my build gets underway, that the best vacation would happen in my driveway.  Early in the build every step seems so big, each newly cut piece of wood seems to leap from the pages of plans, none more than the creation of the frames of a boat.   Frames and the backbone combine to form the skeleton of your craft, a dream in 3d.  My wife, however, doesn’t share my enthusiasm for a vacation like that, so when a cabin a few hours drive south in Mazanita, Oregon, became available, we headed out.

April showers are just about guaranteed on the coast in May, so instead of reading books and sipping hot teas by the crackling cabin fire, I poured over plans for my Selway-Fisher Micro 10 project.   Boat plans really come as boat vague ideas, a series of geometric drawings requiring considerable study in order to fit all the disparate views into a boat in three dimensions.   Step by step directions aren’t possible.  It’s all there, but you really need to get it in your head, studying and then studying some more.  It’s there, but much of it lies between the lines.. implied or inferred more than painted explicitly.

After a good ten hours of that, off and on, I was ready to build, an impossibility in a small cabin on the coast. So I set out to build templates.  Manzanita is mostly cabins and tourist shops.  More kites, candy and conch shells than art or engineering drawing supplies.  But the lone hardware store’s shelves seemed to have one of everything, including a 3 foot wide and easily 50 foot long roll of a tough brown paper that is used somehow in flooring projects.  They also had what my huge Seattle area Lowe’s failed to have, a 3 foot long steel rule with metric markings.  $16 later I set off to tackly my new vacation project.

Within a day I’d created the front and rear transoms on my ten foot pram, as well as all three middle frames. In paper templates, at least.

I did a double layer, taping the two sections together along one side to create a center seam, thus allowing me to draw just one side of each frame, then cut to shape and fold out to reveal a cross section in full width.   This allowed me to align each frame by both the Water Line and by the top deck.  All fit together, save one frame, which required just a touch of trimming to line up.  It’s so much easier to do in paper than in wood.  The same is true with miscuts, as adding paper back to paper is much better than trying to return wood to wood.  Masking tape being much simpler than epoxy.  I highly recommend taking this approach in a boat with frames of this sort.  There are a couple of serious details missing in the plans, the central layout of frame B for example, but getting the shapes laid out together on the floor cleared that up to my satisfaction.   A sheet of plywood is at least $32.   I could cut out the equivalent of 20 or 30 sheets of plywood from my $12 roll.

And then… I see the “frames” lying on my cabin’s floor.

In the picture above the top template, the smallest one, is the  bow transom.   Now that I’ve seen it, it seems ok for me.  Not too big.

This is one wide boat for it’s length.  The metal ruler below is three feet long.  The beam maxes out at 5 feet 5 inches.

The cabin sides at top, will be angled in later.

 

 

 

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Author: Bryan Lowe

A website about Shantyboats and affordable living on the water. More than 800 stories to date, and growing.