July 26, 2026
It never happens, but the past few weeks have been absolute hell in the workshop. The custom milling of the bases for the side stern went fairly quickly and smoothly, but then came the task of installing these blocks with the side mirror frames mounted on them.
Getting both sides exactly the same—with the right measurements and dimensions—took quite a bit of sweat and tears. Yesterday I was finally able to install the last support and fine-tune everything to fit just right.
I really have to admit that over the past few weeks, I’ve stormed out of the workshop cursing dozens of times. Either it wasn’t sitting right, or it didn’t fit, or it didn’t match the drawings—let alone the left and right sides being the same. I had to break things down a few times, rebuild them, and so on, but the result is worth it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s okay to admit that things don’t always go smoothly and that not everything is easy!
Fortunately, the lady of the house was always there to listen to my grumbling for a bit, cheer me up, and so on. Since the drying process sometimes took a long time, I’ve since started on the next subproject: The 68-pound Carronade. I’ll cover that in a separate blog post.
And this project…… I’m glad everything is finally in place as far as this unpleasant work goes… now it’s time to continue finishing up the structure, and then we’ll start on the windows.
To be continued,
_______________
Henk
17 July 2026
I’ve now also started work on finishing The Stern Gallery, also known as the stern and side mirrors. This is taking far more time than I’d actually anticipated. That’s why I’ve started this blog, ‘The Stern Gallery’. It’s simply too much work to combine this with other tasks, and I’ll also be working on a few other sub-projects.
I’d already made the Outer Stern Timbers a few weeks ago – or at least the basic structure. They’ll eventually need to be cut to size. These timbers are attached to the deck clamps but actually rest on a solid block on the side of the hull. Whilst these blocks form the basis of the Outer Stern Timbers, they’re also concealed as a sort of decorative feature beneath the side mirrors.
The most labour-intensive part was determining the exact position of the rear inner/upper corner of these blocks. As well as involving a lot of measuring, this also creates a certain amount of tension – purely to check whether Vic’s width at the stern is in line with the drawings.
After attaching two temporary measuring strips, it turned out that everything was accurate to within half a millimetre. After that, it was simply a matter of marking out the basic shapes on the blocks, and we could start milling and further customising these base blocks.
So, a new blog post – to be continued......
Regards,
______________
Henk
