fixing the bow

Thursday 11 February 2010: Another 4 hours of shoveling today. Snow from the whiteout blizzard yesterday was only maybe 8 to 10 inches. I cleaned out the street in front and then did about half the downhill neighbor's street. He is getting pretty frail and I didn't see him come out today. Some clowns left their BMW parked in front of the fire hydrant all day yesterday during the storm. Possibly it was difficult to see when they parked, but not really. I had dug it out completely and the yellow painted curb as well. But then I guess there was the whiteout thing going on. They showed up while I was shoveling, apologizing and trying to shovel out for me with a little garden spade. I just laughed, helped push them out and got rid of them so I could finish things off.

I also got the ladder and cleared most of the snow on the front porch roof since it is flat, old and leaky and had probably over 20 inches of wet, heavy snow sitting on it. No, I did not climb on the roof. Just stood on the ladder and used the snow shovel to undercut, and slide the snow off. That got most of it and was pretty easy aside from wrestling the ladder out from the backyard, wrangling it around the porch and then putting it back.

I released the clamps holding the masik pieces and they held their shapes probably well enough to do.

 

So I slathered them with titebond and clamped them back together. We'll see how well this worked out tomorrow. 

I cut the bow apart and started carefully relashing it with the laser out of the way and lining things up by line-of-sight as I lash it all back down. I'm much happier with the result. Still have some more lashing to tie and then I'll re-peg the gunwales and chines to lock everything down. Hopefully it will look a little better this time. I'm obsessing a little much over alignment and symmetry although the whole thing is a bit like a basket. You can pull and stretch deform things in various ways. Presumably, when a paddler is sitting in it paddling, the whole frame will be shifting, twisting and flexing through the water like a fish. But it can't hurt to pay as much attention to lining things up nice and straight as I run the lashings.