Catching up

Haven't posted in a while. Been busy opening the house up for summer. De-winterizing boats. Planting a garden. Building a rack for our kayaks and stand up paddle boards. Training my hop plants. Today, I picked spruce tips for a spruce-tip pale ale, with a Norwegian farm-house yeast (Hornindal Kviek). Planning on brewing tomorrow. Here's what 1 pound of tips looks like:

The tips taste very lemony, and only very faintly has a piney taste in the background. In fact, it is a natural source of vitamin C, and was used by Native Americans to treat scurvy.

Bow Nailers

Got the hull sides cut apart. Made my bow nailers. Slight confusion, as both the plans and the booklet reference 1x6, but the materials list calls for 1x8. Bought by the material list, so I had plenty of spare layout room. The 2 boards don't quite fit 8 ft on the same side of the board, so you need to lay them on opposite sides. Looked to match the curve of the cut-off pretty well.

When I went to glue it down, following Dave's suggestion to use small chunks of 1/2" plywood as spacers, the curve wasn't quite deep enough. I don't have a plane (yet), so I used a sander with 60 grit to shave a slight bit off each end. Also, you can never have enough clamps when boat building!

Here is the first glue-up done. The nails weren't nearly as soft as I feared. Not quite enough glue squeeze out as I thought I was going to have, so opened up the GluBot's nozzle a bit more. If you are still using the bottle the glue comes from, it is totally worth picking the glubot up.

Spaced the nails 1" from the edge.

 And a picture of the glubot, you can see how squeezing the very soft plastic pushes glue up the tube, meaning you don't need to shake the bottle to get glue down to the tip in a half-empty bottle. The cap is also on a lanyard connected to the cap, so you don't loose it.