Glad I decided to practice!

I am still working on my build space in my garage, but I did manage to make some room in my shed to start practicing my boat building skills I will need. I built a temporary table that sits on saw horses to work on. It has also been a while since I have used a lot of my tools and I have some new ones I need to become familiar with like a router I borrowed from my dad and the new orbital and belt sander I bought.

My plan is to use some scrap wood I have and lumber from CLCBoats to work on stitching and "fillets" .  I just ordered some work lights to heat the work and some 4 mil plastic to work on. I read on one of the forums to get 4 or 6 mil. As soon as that arrives, I plan to test clue the practice nose block. I will then attempt to shape it with the table saw and hand plane per the plans.

As for the title of this post, I am very glad I used a practice piece! I started to cut out wood to make the nose block and was ripping a piece of the wood. It turns out that my blade on my table saw needs to be replaced. While trying to rip a piece of practice stock, it was burning the wood. See picture below. Glad I didn't use the piece of sitka spruce. I will pick up a new rip and cross-cut blade before trying to cut into the good stuff.

A Little History

This blog is about the building of the Chesapeake Light Craft www.clcboats.com  "PocketShip". I am new to sailing and recently picked up the sailing bug this past year 2015. Looking for a trailex trailer part, I stumbled upon the CLC website and fell in love with "PocketShip". Now I have the building bug! I purchased the manual and have been reading it as well as reviewing all the blogs I can find on the web. There are a lot of great blogs and I will share the links as well as review them on regular basis in the future.

I attended the CLC open house last Saturday and purchased the plans, a plywood project pack, some MAS epoxy and a piece of Sitka spruce to use for the noseblock. I plan on practicing "fillets" on the project pack and using the spruce to start my build with the nose block. I will probably use some scrap wood to make a practice nose block before cutting into the high dollar spruce. I am hoping to purchase the CLC kit in a few months. In the time being, I am setting up my workspace and purchasing everything I will need. I will post as often as I can.