Award Winning Pictures

Well, I'm still working on the boat..... I just haven't been working on the blog.

The next step after putting the seats in was to install the seat backs. The original seat backs I made just would not bend and stretch enough to attach all of the edges to the stingers. When it fit good against the seat bottom, it would not reach all the way up to the deck like it should. I'm pretty sure that they didn't fit good because the plans are wrong. Certainly I haven't made any errors. I know all of my cuts have been perfect! Gotta be the plans. 

My apologies to the Stevenson's. I'm sure their plans are correct. They even tell you that at this point you need to custom fit your pieces because of small discrepancies that either cancel themselves out or accumulate. 

After mulling things over a bit and having no luck finding a right handed wood stretcher - left handed ones are all over the place but not a right handed one - to be found anywhere, I decided to re-cut the seat backs. 

I cut them over-sized this time and just cut them down to a perfect fit once I knew where that needs to be. I started by screwing the seat back down to the top of the seat bottom.

Over-sized Seat Back

Here is a picture that shows how much I had to cut off. I drew a pencil line along where the deck and the seat back meet.

Excess Seat Back

Then I cut off the excess and glued and screwed the the seat backs in. I painted the outboard sides of the seat backs before gluing them on because it would be hard to get back there after they were installed. 

They look fantastic. I took some of the best pictures I have ever taken after the seats were all installed. They were so good that I could have made a calender with the pictures. Magazines offered me tons of money just to get the rights to them. They were easily the greatest pictures ever taken of any boat anywhere. Debbie started crying when she saw them because they moved her so! 

Then disaster. When I went to download them so that you can see them they were not there. I just got this message that said "bad disk" or some such thing. Now I was crying. Evidently, the card went bad. I didn't even know that the memory card can go bad. Remember when pictures used to be on film and all you had to worry about was over exposure? Oh, the good old days. 

On top of that, I got my neighbor to help me flip the boat over so that I could start working on fiber glassing the hull and paint it. So right now, I can't even take new pictures of the seats. You will just have to believe me when I say I put them in until I can flip the boat back over. 

Flipped