Acorn To Arabella Archive – Page 2

We decided that our previous ballast keel mold made of concrete had the possibility of being too dangerous. So we made a new one. Out of wood this time. As we say in the video, we would like to start putting out a short segment in between the longer cha...

In anticipation of pouring our 9500 lbs lead keel we have had many questions, comments, suggestions and concerns. Thank you all so much for all of them! We wanted to start a question and answer segment to be able to answer questions in a more thorough an...

We finally poured it! Watching 100 gallons of molten lead drop into a wooden mold is not something you experience every day. In this video we focused more on the pour itself and not on the details of our setup. We will go into that in our next video. If y...

Need a setup to pour a lead keel? Here's how we set up to pour the 4.5 ton keel for our wooden sailboat build. We are building a 38ft wooden sailboat and needed a solid 9500lbs ballast keel. No easy task! If you haven't seen the video of the pour, you...

It took us about three days to move the keel out of the ground and into the boathouse. No easy task moving an object that heavy. It's great to know that we now have our keel and it is sitting where it needs to be in the boathouse. Next we'll need to fai...

We just broke 24000 subscribers and reached our Patreon goal of $1200 per video so we thought we would talk a bit about our expenses and how we are affording to do this project. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------...

After the arduous task of dragging our lead keel out of the ground and onto the cribbing in the boathouse, it was time to start working on flattening both keels in preparation for them to be mated together. See how we set things up in order to do that. Al...

There are differing ideas out there on what time of year is best to harvest trees for lumber. In our case, winter was ideal. Due to the cold and the lack of heating in the boathouse, we aren't able to work with certain materials such as paint, epoxy, fai...

After the video of our lead keel pour came out, we received a lot of comments regarding the safety of the pour and about concerns or contamination to the surrounding area. We did our best to get information regarding such issues and went as far as calling...

We're still waiting on the weather to start warming up but we can still get ourselves as ready as possible for when it does. We start to work with the lumber that will become our deadwood and we shoot a propane tank to help us melt lead into the major div...

Over the winter we decided to try out a little experiment we would share with everyone. While doing our research we heard a lot about the effects of different metals on one another. The nobility of a metal will determine how it reacts to others with diff...

What a winter!.... We felt that this would be a good time to put out our dissimilar metals experiment back to back and then hit it hard next week with a full length video. When mixing metals in a build, there are a lot of things to consider. Not only do t...

We are clawing our way out of winter! Work is getting back on track and what better way to start finalizing our keel timber. We spent the first tentatively "warm" days finishing getting the keel timber to its final thickness along with a couple of outing...

Having sharp tools is important. As temps are warming up and we are getting back into the thick of boatbuilding work, we felt this would be an appropriate video. Well kept tools lead to fun, productive and safe work. There is nothing worse than trying to...

Despite the arrival of Spring, weather just doesn't seem to want to let up. We've been struggling with the weather so as to start painting the keel timber and the ballast keel. With temps too cold to work on that, we switch gears and start working on the...

Ryan bought a plane ticket, rented a car, and took a one week visit to come from Colorado to Massachusetts to help us on our project... for free! Thank you Ryan. We were curious as to what he thought of his week here and everything we accomplished. Also!...

This is one expensive piece of lumber! We wanted to make sure that we accurately cut the keel timber to shape so our initial cut was only getting us close to the final shape, so that we could see whether it warped/checked/shrank etc. afterwards. Now that...

Sometimes, you just have to flip things on their heads to work on them. As we finished fairing our the ballast keel, we flipped it and the wood keel in order to be able to work on the underside. With everything upside down, we will then be able to work o...

With the ballast keel poured, faired and painted, it is now time to start building out fore and aft of it. Due to the naturally dense aspect of the ballast keel requiring such a condensed shape, deadwood pieces are necessary to fair it out into the wood k...

The deadwood shaped in the last episode is capped with a wormshoe. The wormshoe is a protective sacrificial piece that can be replaced if it is ever damaged from running aground or any similar mishap. We have help from Michael, who drove all the way from...

In the last episode we shaped the wormshoe to fit into the keel timber. We had many requests for an explanation on how we found those lines to cut to. This video is simply that explanation. Skip this video if you aren't interested in that. ------------...

After seeing the fore deadwood and the milling in detail, we thought it would be interesting to see another side of these two processes. In this video we show how, where and why we stacked all the lumber from milling. We also get into making the Aft dead...

We love going to the wooden boat show at Mystic Seaport and wanted to share some of that with you all but it didn't really fit well in one of our longer videos so we thought we'd share that with you along with a code to save at Jamestown Distributors. They...

Yes, we are starting to finally put her together. It's been a long time coming and we have many pieces ready, but we are steps away from bolting things together. That means, we need to drill holes and make sure the bow assembly fits perfectly together. S...

Ever wondered who we really are? Well here we go! (at least a little bit of an insight...) Doug from SV Seeker has been kind enough to have interviewed us for his new video series, The Mind of a Boat Builder and has passed on the video for us to share he...

It's taken two years of prep before getting to the point of being able to start bolting things together but we are finally there! The stern assembly is up and the bow will be up by next week. In celebration of this moment, we are doing a limited run of c...

We're getting the backbone assembly up... but there is so much to do before we can actually put it all together. We go through all of that in this video, along with a quick run through of the backbone actually going up! We'll go over everything in deta...

The backbone is bolted together! We finally have some timbers bolted together and what a great feeling. It has been a long journey up to this point, with a lot more to come, but we can finally start seeing some of Arabella's shape coming together. We ha...

Need an explanation of bent frame construction? Here's the first part. We've been working fast now and after assembling the backbone, it was time to install the molds. Which proved to be a bit more challenging than expected in our boathouse. We will be ...

The build has been coming along nicely so far. There is only one thing that has really stymied us... The rabbet and bearding lines. Being such an important cut, we have been anxious about not being absolutely sure we are doing it right. So.... we called ...

We had a lot to do in order to get ready for the steaming of the frames. We cut the frame sockets as well as milled up all the framing stock, and just in time. By the end of the weekend we had 26 of the 74 frames steamed in place. ----------------------...

Winter is coming and we need to get ready for it! We are planning on working through the winter, therefore it is important for us to be prepared with all the necessities we will need to get through it. We heat primarily with wood, so that is a priority a...

In the last video we showed a bit of the process for steaming in Arabella's frames but it's such an important part of the build that we wanted to do a full video talking about the intricacies of this part of the build. From selecting lumber to our steam b...

Before the bent frames can be permanently fastened in place they need a final inspection, a coat of oil and their respective socket cleaned up and sealed. We show you how we are going through this process in this video. Also, we are launching another com...

Winter is coming and there is always something to do. We worked on getting Victoria buttoned up for the winter and hosted a middle school class for a field trip. With all that out of the way and frames well sanded and oiled, it was time to bed and screw ...

Yep, we are making our own square shanked copper rivets for Arabella. Not only are they bigger than the biggest commercially available rivet we could find, it is also saving us thousands of dollars! We also wanted to address some concerns people had with ...