Atelier Lalonde
Paul Lalonde's Weblog

I finally started back in the workshop over the holidays after a long hiatus. I’m still having some eye troubles, but now that all the machines are fitted out with guards and that I’ve adapted some, I’m getting productive. And that means that the disaster area that the space has been turning into over the last year is getting cleaned up.
The first thing was to sort out the dust collection. I had built a cyclone a couple of years ago, but had choked it’s throughput by recycling my bag filters for the last stage of collection. I just replaced it with two cartridge filters as recommended by Bill Pentz in his excellent how-to pages. You can get them (and many other filters) from Wynn Environmental or any decent HVAC supplier. Wow. What a difference - there’s real air flow through all my pipes. The next step is to drop my table-saw run under the floor.

It’s been a long time since my last update. I had about a one year absence from my shop caused by some vision problems in my right eye that have led to the loss of my stero vision. It’s taken this long to adapt and re-learn where things (like spinning blades and chisel tips) are in the world and keep my fingers safe.

So for a warm-up, I thought I’d finish the craftsman bookcase that I had started so very long ago, and that had been sitting languishing in a corner. For finish, I fumed the piece in ammonia, did a few coats of thinned linseed oil, and then several coats of shellac to finish. Next time I’m going to at least pre-finish the shelves - they were a bugger to get the shellac on.

It was a pretty busy weekend in the shop, but with only two small pieces of visual progress on the boat. I build the daggerboard case, knowing that it would be easier to fit it before the planking went on than after, and I cut my transom-to-keel joint. In non-visual progress I finally glued and screwed the apron to the keel - there’s no going back now.

The daggerboard case has been the fussiest bit of joinery to date - I really don’t want a leak there and to hear people talk there is no avoiding a leak there. The sides of the case are of vertical grained fir, with the rails and posts of local Garry oak that I had left over from putting together the apron. The inside of the case, and all the joined surfaces have been painted with red lead - you can see some in the top and again in the mortices that will eventually accept the frames that butt up agains the box. It’s kept watertight (touch wood) by lots of Sikaflex in the joins.

The case has two legs that sit at either end of the daggerboard slot at an angle (the slant of the box isn’t really obvious in the photos, but is about 10 degrees). Then the rails screw down through the apron and into the keel. I’ll be gooping a pile of sikaflex around it when I stand it in place. It’s all pre-drilled and dry-fitted, but I’ll wait until the planking is on before dropping the screws in permanently - I don’t want it getting in the way when clenching nails.

The last job was to get the transom set up on the molds. To do that I had to finish up the transom joinery. I decided to house the end of the apron in the transom - my friend Mark Reuten is just finishing up a similar boat and wan’t happy letting the apron show through at the transom - it’s yet another joint line that can be a little off. Housing it means it won’t be as visible, and I won’t have to re-cut my transom - my pattern had gone all the way to the deadwood instead of the apron.

A big step for me today. I finally got the keel of the small boat I’ve been building (Paul Gartside’s number 130 clinker dinghy that I wrote about earlier. I’ve been stalled for a while - it’s summer and I’ve been spending a lot of time kayaking instead of in the shop. But today I gave it a push, did the much-awaited shop cleaning, and got the molds up. I started fairing them as well, but that will take me a while longer to finish.

You’d think I had enough qajaqs… But I just had to build another. It was to travel to the World Traditional Games in Montreal next month, but they have been cancelled due to some funding errors. I don’t know if the Greenlanders will still be coming to visit, so our holiday may turn into a non-paddling vacation.

This qajaq is considerably flatter on the bottom than the previous ones I’ve built - I’m hoping that will help with my forward recovery handrolls, which have been eluding me. I might decide to leave this boat in Vancouver for wednesday night rolling practice.