My interest is piqued by the history of the boats and the little island they come from.  I'm angling on a series of youth adventure books that orbit around the boats and people of Carriacou.  This is not a re-hashing of "Pirates of the Cari-somewhere".  More like the "Hardy Boys" meets "Blackbeards Ghost" with a generous splash of family and friend values.

Anywho, if you've got a word to throw in the pile it would be much appreciated.  WW

No, I don't fish! When I tell people what I own, they always ask "Do you fish for salmon?" My log-in name says it all. I just love to be "on the river". I spend most of my time just "messing about" on the Columbia exploring islands and sloughs and looking for anything valuable or useful floating down the river or along it's shores.

My favorite boat was a 25' Macgregor sailboat which I sold about 15 years ago because of problems with my shoulders. It was difficult for me to sail so I purchased a 23' Crusiers Inc cabin crusier.Sold that about 8 years ago when gas prices started getting out of hand. Since then I have had a couple of smaller boats until I bought the Smokercraft which I intend to keep forever!

One reason I came to this froum is because I would like to also have a bigger boat for overnight excursions, ( I don't like sleeping on the ground at my age!).I am an avid fan of SMALL CRAFT ADVISOR magazine and in issue # 80 they had an article by a gentleman who converted a small sailboat into a displacement power cruiser and I'm thinking that might be a great way to accomplish my desire for an inexpensive to run overnighter. If anyone on the forum has done that, I would love any advice that they may have on mods, etc.I'm thinking that a 20' to 25' shallow draft, trailerable boat would make an ideal cruiser.

I usually prune the member list every year or so, so that represents members who have been here, even if they don't post, at least once in the past 12  months or so.

The two choices I have on hand are some doug fir I've had laying around for about 5 years or so, or, some SYP I picked up a few months ago. Both options were got out of 2 x 12's, taken straight out of the center of the tree, such that both had a center pith section, plus straight, quarter sawn grain on either side. The pith sections were ripped out and tossed, leaving residual pieces of long, straight, quarter sawn grain.

Issue is that in both cases, it appears the tree started out in life in a dense stand, that was eventually thinned and the tree took off growing. Both have an area of very tight growth rings in the middle, but then those widen to nice rings of around 12 or so per inch. In order to get the width I need, I'm either working between the sapwood and tight inner rings, or have to include both tight and not so tight rings on the same board. Because these have to be laminated together, I have been trying to avoid using flat or plain sawn pieces to avoid any cupping down the road. The boards in these pictures are remarkably straight, with nominal warping or cupping. For some reason, the doug fir pieces are bowed about 3/8" from end to end, but clamped as they are shown, these bows cancel out and the lamination would be dead straight.

Issue with the SYP is to get the width I need, I have to include the transition from fine to not so fine grain, and will include some of the very cupped rings along the side as well. Is this going to cause problems, or do I need to keep looking?

As an alternative to these two choices, I also have several flat sawn boards similar to the one shown in Doug Fir that I marked out for the stem knee. You can get reasonably wide pieces of quarter sawn from those, but the grain isn't as tight and the concern I would have about those is cupping when they are laminated together. On the other hand, the laminations narrow down a lot so the cupping issue may not even be a factor.

May sound like much concern about nothing, but these will be permanent, structural pieces. No reason to build in a problem if it can be avoided.

Link to the project on Picassa    https://plus.google.com/photos/106668203767680037177/albums/5851234630766107153?banner=pwa

Thanks for looking ,

Jim

I have also added a CDN feature. CDN stands for "Content Delivery System" that caches images and other content and serves it from the server nearest to you. If you had slow loading pages on the site, it should be a bit faster now (especially for our members from Australia, New Zealand and the EU).