3416Hrs – Routing Round Overs

Quite a fun day today, as planned I’d sneaked an hour in yesterday and sorted all my timber out so today I was able to crack on and do something with it.

I decided to start with the Iroko for the rubbing and lashing strakes and the first job I needed to do was to rout a nice radius on two edges of it all.

Given that the longest lengths are some 4.6m I needed to find a way of supporting it well so that I could rout it safely and accurately and it didn’t take me long to realise that I already had the perfect routing table already. It was the platform I built to build the crossbeams on, lying forgotten and neglected down the side of the barn. I dug it out swept it off and lifted it up onto two workmate benches….. perfect.

I added a couple of plywood stops to one edge, set up the router and machined a couple of test pieces until I was happy then set too for a couple of hours of making sawdust.

The photo below shows the finished result on one side.

Just so that you can see how much fun I had here’s a little video 🙂

Once I’d finished routing I had a clean up and then slapped a couple of coats of teak oil on it all. I was going to call it quits at that but I was dying to see what the finished item looked like attached to the boat, so I screwed one of the lashing strakes on. It looks great and now I can’t wait to get them all on, I think another appearance transformation is looming.