One of the frustrating things about making your own furniture and making it up as you go along is that there are so many steps involved that require a wait for parts to set, most of the time it is edge being backfilled that create the wait. And because I am pretty much making it up as I go along I am not able to pre plan to do a lot of filling at once so that I have all parts ready to go. Not that I would want to edge fill all day, it is time consuming doing a little at a time but I cant imagine how boring it would be to have to do edge filling only for a day. I do manage to have parts set aside that are pre filled for front rails and the like and they just then need to be cut to length but for shaped parts like bench tops I really have to make the part then edge fill it as I go.

I was on quite a roll on the weekend making the aft bedroom furniture and cutting all the various parts to shape and then de-core the edges and back fill them took pretty much all day Sunday. Then being away for a couple of days in Melbourne meant I couldn’t do any further work until this evening. The top on the inboard cupboard has a hinged lid and is a angled on one edge, and all of my tops have been double thickness of 16mm duflex (or polycore) so there are a number of parts that need to be de-cored and edge filled and sanded before they can be glued together so in effect there is 2 lots of setting to wait for, the first being the edging then the gluing together before I can glass it all into the boat. The hinged lid will rest on the protruding 20mm of panel that I have glued to the top, it will all make sense when you see it go in.

So having edge filled all the exposed edges on Sunday evening as I finished up, tonight all I had to do was glue together the parts that needed to be glued to each other, and let them set. Then finally tomorrow I will get to glass the parts into the boat that will finish the inboard bench.

Another milestone has passed this week. It is exactly 5 years now since I started building the boat. I built the strong back in the first weeks of Oct 2005 and then glued the first panels in the last week of Oct 05. I had thought I would be finished by now, but it is most likely that I will finish this time next year. A year longer than I had intended but I have enjoyed the time I have put in, enjoyed nearly all of the work involved and maintained my interests and relationships other than boat related, and Jo and I have maintained our travelling. Its true that I am now getting impatient for the boat to be finished but I have to be realistic and enjoy the rest of the build, because I think i will miss it when it is over. Not that I wont have a myriad other things to keep my busy, like snorkeling, fishing, exploring islands in the Whitsunday’s, nah I dont think I will spend much time missing it! And I am impatient for the boat to start looking shiny.

Anyway, on we go. A lot changes in a year, and there are so many unfinished loose ends of the build that will soon be finished so the boat will start to change a lot over the coming months. A lot of shiny things will get bolted on, only to be removed again before being finally bolted back on just before launch. But each part that gets glassed in permanently is one less job that needs to be done.