It has been a bit of a dry spell in the building of the Dauntless. That’s not very good when the project is a boat. The bones of the hull have been setting in plain sight and the assembly is too big to ignore, so it is not like it was forgotten. In fact, I would lightly touch it every time I walked in and out of the shop. Kinda weird right?

The stopping point was the two chine strips that run down the sides of the hull. I spliced the kit wood as the stock lengths are too short. That was planned and part of the build. The problem is the kit word is very hard and does not like to conform to the bending near the bow.

I have been thinking of steam or ammonia water but of course I have neither readily available. That was the original excuse for the pause in the work. Then I just became overwhelmed near the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays with cookie presses and other “pressing” projects including glass stamps. (Check my other blogs for all that.)

Well, it is now mid March of 2012 and I cleared the workbench for the first time in quite awhile. Looking at the Dauntless I realized I had planned to have at least the hull in the water by now but is is obvious that did not happen. So I am correcting the situation. At least I am taking steps in the proper direction.

I have soaked the chines in plain hot water (I don’t know if the temperature matters) and you can see I am preforming the chines to near the proper shape. Like I wrote, the bow is the hard part.

Once the wood is dry so the epoxy will adhere, I will glue the chine strips to the frames. There will be some shaping required of the chines, but then the hull will ready for covering. I will start to look like a hull and not a dinosaur exhibit.

The point of this project is to have a large platform (the Dauntless) so I can experiment in several ways. One is to test a network based control scheme using micro computers and XBee radio modem links. The other is to test my engineering skills and CNC machine shop making special components for the boat. Having a really cool large model boat is just the spin off benefit!