I think there might be a boat in this pile of parts!

Who could imagine that you could hide a boat in less space than a one car garage? Well you can if it's all in pieces. That's what hit me like a ton of bricks. I've been hiding a boat in my son's garage. You know how it is, you work on something for a while and you know that you're making progress but you don't see anything yet. Then one day you realize that if you stand up a few of the parts you've been messing around with, and arrange them relatively in a fashion that resembles the plan, .......well you finally have a reasonable facsimile of the project you're working on. In this case a Navigator!

A "reasonable" resemblance of the boat that is to come.

 Now remember I said "reasonable" resemblance of a Navigator. No worse than any of the others I've seen researching the design on the web. At least not at this condition anyway.

So I showed up at my son's place to mess around in the garage attempting to construct pieces and parts that will be used at a later date to assemble a boat resembling a Navigator. Dove into the pile of parts and pieces, (it was really getting to be quite a tall stack) and came up with my transom.

Dragged it over to the table saw and proceeded to trim up the edges, then laid out the holes for the tiller and boomkin and cut them out. Then marked where the seat top will attach and the stiffeners that the seat fronts will get glued to, and also where the doublers for the boomkin hole and tiller hole will be glued.

Then I turned my attention to the #1and #2 bulkheads.

Bulkheads #1 &2 all trimmed and ready.

All trimmed and ready for gluing the fiddly bits on. So I said to myself, "Self," and myself says "yes", "what say we take a sneak peek at what it might look like if it were ready to assemble now?' And myself says, "yea man, let's check it out!" So I did and was pleasantly surprised at the resulting images. So I grabbed some more parts and fiddled with them some and added them to the set up.

The #3 bulkhead and frame. Notice the centerboard case in the shot too.

So then after fiddling around with the stem and doublers some, I decided to add them to the shot too.

"the boat" from the starb'd bow,

and from the port bow.

The aft frames are up on the shelf still. I was too giddy to get them down and just play build'a'boat with all the pieces. This all started when I wanted to make sure the cutout for the king plank would fit the plank. The rest just sort of happened, I guess.

This was what started all the fun today. I really enjoyed it even though my knee was up to about a 14 on a scale of 1 to 10. Such is life, even in the midst of our pain there is happiness.

So until next time,

Geoff