But.. we can’t build the boat until we finish up a bit of other nonsense. Like blowing the apartment walls full of horrible pink oobleck.

And pouring the concrete to complete the new bridge. Oh crap It snowed. Which means the shop roof might avalanche right into the wet concrete.

Roy to the rescue.

Ty, my concrete wizard, clued me in that moving the concrete uphill through the narrow gap between the shop and the woodshed was not something we wanted to do with wheelbarrows and herniated disks. So we called the local man whose machine moves heavier-than-air stuff uphill. His name (no shit) is Orville Wright. God, I love that. Orville pumped all the grout for my shop walls seven years ago.

Here are Orville and Ty swapping lies as we pump almost fifteen tons (about a thousand zorks) of mud into the forms. And it didn’t explode. Awesome.

But gray is boring.

Crime scene.

Okay, back to the boatshop.

This boat we are about to build is to be a scaled up version of the classic Briggs Grand Canyon Dory–the sweetest looking craft to ever run the Colorado. Since I have something along those lines in the shop already–an oversized Briggs-like Aluminum boat–I thought it wise to take the lines off it for comparison. Because, see, if you make a boat, say, 15% wider, it will have proportionately more buoyancy. So the gunwales will rise up higher above the water. So if you also increase the height of the boat the same percentage, your oars may no longer reach the water. Which is problematic. And my head hurts trying to figure out how to figure that out. But this boat has the same bottom width we are shooting for, and a similar profile, and I’ve rowed it, and it’s about right. So I need the point of reference.

We lofted those lines, then used them as a guide to expand the Briggs lines we pulled of Andy’s stock Briggs last year. We lengthened the boat 8.5%, widened it 14%, and expanded the heights 11%. Don’t ask precisely how I came up with those numbers. We lofted that right on top of the Alumitub lines. Very similar but dramatically different. Then we made a mini-strongback at a 1/10 scale.

And wrapped on a transom and side panels made from an old screwed up panel of veneer I had been saving for way too long.

Then superglued in a mess of cross braces so it could mot change shape and pulled it off the strong back. To our amazement, we got a very pretty, very Briggsy boat. I’d go so far as to call it sexy. It’s name is BOB-1, for Big ol’ Briggs #1.

We’re going to make a slightly longer one (BOB-2) tomorrow and let the owner chose which pleases his eye more.

THEN we’ll build a boat.

Oh, but first we have to deconstruct the bridge forms and push a little dirt, and spackle the holes in the apartment walls…