But here we are, three years later, ready to pick up where we left off. And a tumultuous three years its been. We bought a house, got married, started and finished grad school, and are finally settled back down to living like normal people. So you'll have to forgive us for the long hiatus, but we had some things to do.
 |
| The light at the end of the tunnel. |
Now on to Skidny....
The boat has a new home here at our house. Before, we had it crammed into our dilapidated little 2 car garage. Now Skidny has a whole RV carport (almost) to itself. It's not as wide, and nor is it weather-tight, but we closed off the sides and that keeps the driving rain out. T is much happier, because now he doesn't have to share his shop with the boat. It's a much better setup for building because all the messy glass work stays outside and all the itchy fiberglass dust we generate won't linger in the shop for weeks.
The carport itself was probably the best piece of sheer dumb luck. We were doing our first walk-around of the property through the hip high grass and my mom tripped right over it. Apparently, someone had bought, and then forgotten a whole, 40 ft long 12' tall carport out there!!
And that has been Skidny's home for the last two years. When we finally pulled the boat out, it appeared that the feral cats had been marking the inside, so we had a lot of cleaning to do and there may be a couple areas in the front storage compartment we need to repaint, because the cat pee stained the paint (sigh), but I suppose that's what we get for waiting so long.
 |
| Before cleaning and unpacking. You can see the bracing and stabilization we had in place for moving. Also at the bottom of the picture, you can see the foam we cut out for the rear flotation compartment. This foam is not mentioned in the book, but is shown in the drawings. |
A little bit of soapy water and some sunshine and it looks just like we left it, better actually, because we never saw the cabin sole out in the sun before, and it looks pretty stunning.
When we moved we put the Pocketship cradle on castors so that we could roll it onto the trailer we rented to transport. The first set of castors were pretty crummy and collapsed, so T has been slowly adding and tinkering with the setup. We finally having something that allows us to roll the boat around easily and then shim it up for when we need it stationary for working. It's not perfect, but it is a lot better and the cradle still seems to be dimensionally stable.
We stabilized the cradle with extra plywood/OSB plates and created an offset castor setup using 2x6s that extend longitudinally down the port and starboard sides. This allowed us to use some pretty heavy duty castors without significantly changing the working height of the cradle.
 |
| T adding extra bracing to the castor system. |
This weekend I unpacked the last two boxes we had left from moving, when I unpacked all our wood flour and fillers and brushes and squeegees and gloves. They now have a home right next to Skidbladnir. I don't have the camera set up yet, but that's coming soon, we just have to figure out how to place it somewhere reasonably accessible and then we'll be back to capturing the time lapse build.
And now its time to build.
