Finding Gold in the Locust Pile - Episode 211 - Acorn to Arabella: Journey of a Wooden Boat

Open House information: https://www.acorntoarabella.com/open-house Put your name on a plank: https://www.acorntoarabella.com/merchandise New products hit next week! Sign up for the newsletter to have first dibs on offcuts: http://eepurl.com/hn3Qyv Nearly every piece of wood in Arabella, from the backbone to the deck framing, came to this project as a tree. This means it wasn't ordered from the lumber yard or even from a mill, and that the many imperfections in each tree won't be known until it's milled—not just cut into boards, but put through a thickness planer. When one considers what is useable from a tree, it starts to become very real that our dwindling piles may present new challenges. For deckbeams and other important places where we want strength and rot resistance, we've employed locust for the job. The drawback? Locust grows quickly and wildly, twisting sometimes, the heart of it is sometimes gnarly and unusable for any woodworking project, let alone a boat. We open up the locust pile and discover that we've got to be very careful with how we use the rest. We get to an interesting steaming experiment as we try to figure out how we can use our stock for the locust covering boards. It's been a while since we've scarfed together some planks, but we get to the last two here. THE LAST TWO PLANKS. The sheer strake is of locust, the whiskey plank (the final plank on the boat) is of cedar. The last plank will go onto the boat on May 28th. More on that soon! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Acorn to Arabella is a boat building project taking place in Granby, Massachusetts. Steve started as an amateur boat builder building a 38' wooden boat in his backyard: designer William Atkin's Ingrid with a Stormy Petrel's gaff rig. These videos follow the journey from tree felling, to lumber milling, to lofting, to the lead keel pour and beyond—sharing details of the woodworking, carpentry, metal smithing, tool building, and tool maintenance that wooden boats command. This ultimate DIY project will continue well past launch, when he and the crew will travel and learn to cruise aboard the boat that they've built. Just kidding about all that, this channel is about a Siberian Laika named Akiva. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you are interested in supporting/helping here are a few ways: https://www.acorntoarabella.com/how-to-help Acorn to Arabella's wishlist: https://www.acorntoarabella.com/wishlistpriority TotalBoat Referral: Need something TotalBoat sells? They'll send us 10% of your purchase to support our videos! Click here, then shop: https://www.totalboat.com/acorntoarabella To offer recurring support via Patreon, CLICK BELOW. Just $5 a month gets you an invite to our monthly patron-only livestream Q&A sessions! https://www.patreon.com/acorntoarabella Original Soundtrack available at benfundis.bandcamp.com FOLLOW US: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/acorntoarabella Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/acorntoarabella/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/acorntoarabella Website: http://www.acorntoarabella.com