Building Lemony
Building
There is a lot of initial work where you don’t see the boat taking shape or making progress. Buying wood, building the frame that holds the bulkheads in place until the hull is self supporting. A solid frame is important. We bolted it to the concrete ground with 8mm screws, just to make sure. I hope our Landlord, IRRI, will forgive us the 6 holes I had to drill in the pavement:-)
When transferring all the measurements from the plans to the plywood boards and trying to maximise the utilisation of the board Miriam said: “Now I see what all this math I learned in school can be used for.” Maybe they should make boatbuilding part of the curriculum in schools.
The fun begins
On 28 September the fun began. The actual work on the boat started and Miriam and Kata got really excited and helped a lot.
The first problem: Wood quality
4 October: Fitting the bottom stringers at both sides was the most difficult job so far. The wood we bought at the local wood shop in Los Banos in the Philippines is just too poor quality. Lots of cracks and bends, it is hard to find a straight piece.One stringer broke right away when we tried to bend it in shape. We then wetted the wood and then bent it in shape slowly over several hours using ropes that we tightened slowly while keeping the wood moist. It did work at the end.
Fitting and glueing the plywood boards on starboard and port took significant time on two weekend days. We had to buy additonal clamps first after we already had depleted the stock of the local hardware store. Still we did not have enough and therefore we cut around 40 ‘Krampen’ out of the 1/4 inch plywood board. They worked very well for fixing the boards until the epoxy had hardened.
Completion
Lemony sailed well but the bamboo spars were too flexible. It was difficult to rig the sail properly. We bought a proper mast, boom and sprit during our trip to Germany in 2010.