Painting and trial assembly

I've spent the last couple of weeks painting, initially very slowly with a brush and then much faster with a small foam roller. The white is ordinary exterior gloss, and seems very soft at the moment. The wood colour is International Woodskin - a wood stain with a slight gloss finish. I've not yet done the full three coats but where I have I can see that each coat looks shinier than the last.

I'm very happy that I was persuaded not to just paint it all white, I love how it looks.

Here are all the pieces before and after assembly.

Doing up the bolts on the ama is fiddly and slow. The main hull isn't so bad but the rocker means that they don't naturally line up and I needed a helper to lift one bow.

Oh, there's also a trolley made from a cut down Optimist trolley. The kids had a lot of fun pushing each other around on it!

Laminating the beams

Many thanks to Mr W. the Design and Technology teacher at the girl's secondary school, who helped me saw two very large straight beams into a pile of long bendy strips - now I'm gluing the strips back together in a (hopefully) graceful curve. These will link the main hull to the float.

Everything else is this build has been fair easy for an amateur builder, but sawing three inch thick planks requires more than hand-tools!

Work is still going very slowly due to family pressures, and the start of the sailing season, but we have managed to replace the foredeck and patch another rotten hole in the hull of our Miracle dinghy and give it a coat of paint and varnish so it's looking better than I've ever seen it before. Kathy and I even got to sail it last week.