"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." - Archimedes, Greek Mathematician, 287 - 212 BC
"Give me enough clamps and ratchet straps which to place on it, and I shall stop the world from moving." - Rick Laporte, Amateur Boat Builder, 1960 -
One of the more interesting challenges to this project is laminating two sheets of 1/2" marine plywood together to form the curved transom. That's the reason for the funky transom mold I showed you earlier.
I tried a few different approaches to getting one sheet to conform to the mold. There's a tremendous amount of energy stored up in a sheet of plywood when you try to torture it into a shape it doesn't want to go into! I found that out when I tried to release the ratchet straps after the first trial! Yikes!
Anyhow, I quickly realized (in my dream last night, yeah exciting I know) that I need more grip to wrangle this part into shape. Adding some cleats in the right places are the ticket.
This gave me the advantage I was looking for. Places to put plenty of clamps.
As you can see the plywood now follows the mold pretty well. A few minor adjustments and it'll be perfect.
That's it for now. Off to clean up the old boat. Got a prospective buyer coming to look at it today. ;-)
Update: Bugger never showed up. Figures. Plenty of fender kickers but everybody wants a nice shiny Sea Ray to impress their friends at the Yacht Club. Yeah, right, like you're gonna do that for 8500 bucks.
Anyhow. After much consternation (not constipation) I weighed my options and selected the brute force method to whip the transom panels into shape.
We'll see how we did tomorrow when I pop the clamps and straps off of it.
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