Dec 20. Install Front Seat

Here is a close up of the front seat installed. You can see the 100  3/16" holes I had to drill all the way throughout the 1 1/2" piece of oak. I had to make a small drill jig to get them all in the right place and mostly straight through. It took a couple hours and a couple cordless drill battery recharges to get it done. Next time I should use a wall plug. 

You can also see the rabbet for the edges of the rope seat, hand-chiseled to round in the corners. That's love. 

You can also see a partial seat-back slot, but not shown is the vane on the bottom of the fore-and-aft piece that helps support the lower tongue of the seat back. Very solid. Pic later. 

Here is the whole thing. Note the color difference between the oak and the ash. Other than the plywood, all the wood you see that is not golden-orange is ash. And it has a coat of plastic on the ribs supporting the seats. Not much difference on the ash when finished. 

I have to take a week off from working on the boat for a family trip to San Francisco. But before tomorrow's flight, I had time to cut the seat backs and the fore and aft decks from the remainder of the 1/2" plywood. The bottom football shape is only 12' long, leaving a 4' X 4' piece for the rest of his stuff. You can barely get all this stuff out of it, and only by cutting the decks on the diagonal out of a square shape. Note the diagonal grain below. 

Here the seat backs are resting in place (they are never tied down), and the front and rear decks are not yet exactly fit. Lots of tedious nibbling will go into that. 

The back deck is not actually in the plans. I decided to put it in as an enclosed box for flotation foam, and as an extra seat, though we should discuss that. 

This is a somewhat small boat, probably fully loaded with 3 people either in their seats or with an angler standing at the casting station. Adding another person in the stern will most likely overload this boat. The books often recommend walking all the passengers around major rapids to lighten the load and make the boat more maneuverable. Running through a rapid with someone on this rear seat will probably be a very bad idea. 

Plus, the guide books all suggest that ideal distribution is 3 people in tandem -- two anglers casting simultaneously from the from and the rear, and the oarsman low in the middle. But those boats are usually 16' or larger. This one probably can't handle three in tandem. Plus there is little room for a rear casting support, so the rear angler would have to cast from a sitting position. 

I put that "seat" in for the flotation. I've built two boats of this size previously. One with foam floatation locked under the thwarts, and one without. I did a swamp test on both boats. The one with floatation rides with the gunwales 3" out of the water when fully swamped and will stay that high even when a body gets back in, allowing effective bailing. The boat could even be flipped to right side up by one person in the middle of a lake, with the righted boat ending up only half swamped. The one without flotation was basically done when swamped. The only way to get things going again was to drag it to shore and tip the water out. Not an easy proposition. 

This boat is intended to navigate rough water, and will likely ship a lot of water at times, so I'm putting in flotation so the boat will still act something like a boat when swamped.

The front deck loosely fitted. 

The front deck is supported by the forward angler thigh support cross member, as shown in the plans. What is not shown is the bulkhead I intend to install under the deck for the foam compartment. This boat could break in half, and each of the halves would still float.