Some Inspiration - and a Puzzle

Lately that progress has become invisible even to me. Precious little progress was made last week as winter-time temperatures (single-digit lows, mid-teen highs) pretty much made the shop unworkable. Oh, I did a lot of plan checking (more on that in a bit), listing needed hardware and supplies and planning what to do when the temperature improved.

Late yesterday the temperature began rising and by night-fall, it was in the 30s. This morning's 4:00 AM thunderstorm - complete with heavy rain, high winds and lightning - signaled warmer weather. I was back in the shop shortly after breakfast!

Today I cut out the spine/stem (the backbone of the boat) as well as the two doublers for the stem. I clamped these three pieces together to sand them to the same shape. Now, the pile of boat parts has grown over the last three months but it is still a pile of boat parts... Sometimes I get impatient so this afternoon I test fit Frame #1 to the (very rough cut) spine/stem assembly.



What do you know? It fits! Seeing this very rough sub-assembly is quite inspirational for me. I can see real progress!

I'm going to need that inspiration. The last frame for the boat is a puzzler. I thought I had it figured out - what doublers went where - but before gluing anything, I looked at the plans again, you know, just to make sure. And now I'm not. There is one cryptic note that I cannot make any sense of and there is a reference to "slots" for intersecting pieces but the dimensions of those slots are not given. Complicating my confusion, the intersecting pieces are not slotted so I don't know exactly how these pieces interlock. I'll pose the question to John Welsford's Yahoo Group and seek knowledge and inspiration from those who have gone before.