Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Our New Shop

Hello all. We have not dropped off the end of the world but boy has it been a whirlwind kind of a summer and now it's autumn and things are just starting to heat up around here.
We have done quite a bit to the vessel so far this summer and will continue to plug away at our beautiful Lena Blanche until the cold drives us out of the shop.
Then what? Usually we try to find little things to do in relation to the schooner throughout the winter but a lot of the smaller projects are finished or nearly finished.  So what do 2 boat builders do when the snow starts to fly?  Why, they build a heated boat shop and take on outside work. And that is what we are in the process of doing. We have laid a steel frame foundation and the building materials were delivered today. We will have the concrete pads poured later this week and then the construction begins. There will be heat (finally) so that we can be productive in the winter too. We would love to take on a couple of students who are interested in learning boat building but we haven't worked out a curriculum or pricing yet. If there is interest in this we'd like to hear from you. If you don't want to blog about it you can send a message through the fb page schooner Lena Blanche.
We would like to be building vessels both large and small and maybe have a few woodworking nights to teach the basics of wood working and using tools. We'll pick a small project to get started and for those who are interested we could do something a little more complex.

 Can you guess what this is????? It is a wooden fairlead traditionally made by native Canadians to be used on vessels. A friend of ours brought it in one day to show us. I tried to snag it but he only let me have it long enough to get a good picture and a lead on where I could find more.
 Unloading materials for our new 24' x 50' insulated and heated shop. So excited.


 Good old insulation to keep in all the warm

 Delivery fellows and fellow boat enthusiasts.
Steel frame for new  building all welded up and waiting for concrete pads and then construction.