Jim Dabrowski

It’s taking pleasure in the little things in life that helps keep me happy.

My dad was an electrician. As a result, growing up I would help him with various electrical tasks around the house (usually amounting to “hold that damn flashlight steady!”) and I learned some things. Then, as I grew older and got a house of my own, I would have him come by and help me with various things like putting in light fixtures, changing switches, outlets, etc. Little things.

Throughout all that, I still never quite got a grasp on electricity (and I don’t mean that physically). Despite having a Ph.D. in computer science, I still struggle with the simple concept of the flow of electricity through a circuit. Something about it just eludes me. Despite my father’s trying again and again to explain it to me and teach me through numerous projects, I just don’t get it. I can wire up a switch, outlet, light fixture, fan, etc. but it is still pretty much rote memory in me without quite understanding what I’m doing.

A few weeks ago we put up ceiling fan in our bedroom. We moved into our current house over a year ago and the house had no ceiling fans in any of the bedrooms. Having had them in our old house, we really wanted them here in our new one. So I installed one in our bedroom. However, when I installed it, I didn’t quite know how to wire it up so that the light would be controlled by the switch on the wall and the fan would be controlled by the pull-chain regardless of whether the switch was “on” or not. So for a while, I lived with having to leave the wall switch on and then come bed each night in a dark room flailing around with my hands towards a running ceiling fan trying to find the pull-chain to turn the bedroom light on. Not a good solution.

Well, finally the light-bulb came on. (Yes, that pun was intended.) After talking with my brothers and sister and hooking up another fan in my daughter’s room, I finally figured out what I had done wrong in my room and thought I knew how to fix it. So, yesterday (on Labor Day) I got up there and rewired it and TA-DA! I can now control the light from the switch on the wall and the fan from the pull-chain on the fixture. It exciting being able to walk into the room, hit the switch and see the light come on all while the fan is still running. No flailing necessary.

Like I said, it’s taking joy in the little things that make my life worthwhile. I think my dad would have been a little happy with me.

JIm

OK, I think I’m a jogger.

Over a year ago, my wife decided she needed to exercise more. Unlike most people, she actually went out and did it. She decided she wanted to run a 5K to start, bought the Couch to 5K app for her iPhone and started training. My daughter decided to train with her and the two of them were happy joggers all summer. I resisted their entreaties to join them. Come fall, my daughter went off to college and stopped running while my wife kept at it, ran her first 5K last September, has done several since then and is now in training for a half-marathon (yikes!).

Last May when my daughter came home from college for the summer, she decided she needed to get back running. After pestering me for some time, I finally decided to join her (I couldn’t resist her pleas) and she and I completed the same app and ran our first 5K in August! Now, my daughter is back at school and I’ve decided to keep running. She suggested posting my runs on Facebook so that we could nag each other to keep running. So, I picked two apps: Map My Run and Run Keeper to try out. (My wife said these were the two leading apps.)

I’ve used both apps today on my first non-Libby run. Here is what Map My Run looks like:

And here is what Run Keeper looks like:

Thus far I like Run Keeper more. The app seemed more intuitive to me, presents the data more clearly and overall I just like it. I know that’s not much of a review but I plan to keep using both for a while and write a more in-depth review later.

Stay tuned.

JIm

Welcome to my blog reboot.

This blog has completely languished for a long time. No, I haven’t been working on my boat either, hopefully that comes next. No, I’ve been experiencing paralysis by analysis.

I wasn’t really happy with MoveableType as the engine of my blog. Call me stupid but I just couldn’t get the hang of tweaking the templates and the CSS to get things to look the way I wanted. So, I decided to move to something else, but what?

There began my long, lonely search for a new thing to generate my blog. I knew I wanted a static blog and I wanted one that had would generate some clean, neat HTML and CSS that I could understand and tweak as I desired. I looked at a bunch: Jekyll, Pelican, Octopress, Nikola, Cactus and many more that I can no longer recall. (I actually kinda wish I had kept track and kept notes, it would have made a great meta-review of static blog posting enginges.) In the end I chose wintersmith. What you see is the result of this search (update a year later: no it’s not. I just switched again, this time to Jeckyl).

I like wintersmith. There are some things I don’t like about the organization of the files. I would prefer it if I could have all my files organized in a hierarchical directory system organized by year, month and day (the articles currently all just reside in one big directory) and I don’t fully get the templating system enough quite yet to tweak it completely to my liking. But, I can live with the directory structure, I probably won’t be posting more than one time per day anyway and I can learn the template system over time.

So now hopefully I will start to actually write here on a regular basis. Next step is to get back to work on my boat. I’m embarassed at how long it’s been since I’ve worked on it.

JIm

OK, I succumbed to the whole “May the 4th” thing and decided to get my geek on and watch Star Wars tonight. My mistake. When we moved last summer we decided to set up the home theater in the basement and leave the TV in the living room as just a TV (with an AppleTV hooked up to it). Up until now that arrangement has worked just fine.

Tonight I wanted to watch Star Wars. No problem.

Oh wait, problem, my TV upstairs doesn’t have a DVD/Blu-Ray player hooked up to it and I don’t feel like sitting in the basement.

Oh, wait, no problem, I’ll just stream it from my computer to the AppleTV. Cool.

Oh wait, problem. My recent MacBook Pro doesn’t have a DVD drive in it. Damn.

Oh wait, no problem, I’ll just use my older MacBook computer that I use for work. That has a DVD drive in it.

Oh crap. That machine is too old and can’t stream to AppleTV. Grrrr.

Ah hah, I’ll just use Apple’s drive-sharing feature and share the old machine’s DVD drive with my MacBook Pro and stream to the AppleTV that way. I’m so clever.

No dice. My MacBook Pro froze up in trying to do that and I had to force reboot.

I know, I’ll drag out that old USB DVD drive I have sitting in my desk drawer for just such occasions. OK, I’m good to go! Movie playing, stream to AppleTV. Grey box. WTF? The movie is playing, I’m hearing video, but the DVD player window is only showing a big grey box where the movie should be.

Quick google search…

Yep. Apple does not allow its DVD player app to stream to AppleTVs. WTF Apple.

What does…google search…VLC. Ah hah! Download VLC, easy to install, get it running. Playing, streaming to AppleTV. Ta-da! Whew.

30 seconds later…

WTF?!?! The movie just froze on the TV. Still playing on the computer, but froze on the TV. Now, the computer is locking up. Hmmm, now the movie stopped playing on the computer and AirPlay is no longer an option available on my menu bar. sigh. I give up.

I get the whole anti-piracy stance that Apple takes. I’m against copying, I don’t steal content just because I want something and it’s not conveniently available to me. But what is the point of all the above? I’m not trying to steal anything, I just want to watch a DVD I purchased. I ought to be able to view it on whatever device I want without Apple or the DVD publishers deciding that certain screens are forbidden to me. Furthermore, who is this stopping? Grandmas? Anyone sufficiently technologically capable can work around all these stupid precautions. The only people these roadblocks actually stop are people who would never be interested in pirating the videos in the first place.

I guess instead of watching Star Wars tonight, I’ll rip the DVD to my computer with Handbrake and watch it that way.

JIm

You may recall, when we last left off I was about to embark on making the nibbing strake.

To refresh your memory, take a look at the picture below:

You see how in the bottom left corner the planks no longer run smoothly into the waterway, but instead are notched in. That notching is called nibbing, and the plank into which the deck planks are notched is called the nibbing strake. Why is this done? Well, on a real boat, as the angle between the deck planks and the waterway becomes more acute, the deck planks would be coming to sharper and sharper points. Attaching and sealing such narrow strips of wood would have been too much trouble on a real boat, hence they just cut them off square and notched them into the nibbing strake. So, to maintain realism, I am supposed to notch them in the same way.

I was a bit stumped at first. I didn’t quite know how to measure and cut them to size so that they would look good. Well, Google to the rescue! I was able to find a site that described the process well enough for me to copy it. That’s what I’ll describe here.

Step one is to lay out the next plank over the top of the nibbing strake and mark where it should end. Cut it off there.

Then, lay the plank back down and mark where it just begins to overlap the nibbing strake.

Now, on my boat, I wanted the end of each plank to be one-half the width of a full-sized plank, so I marked the mid-point of the plank and then cut the plank on a straight line from where it overlaps the nibbing strake to the end. (After I completed all this, I found another post that suggested making a jig you could lay the plank in that would cut them all to the same width. Darn! Should have found that one earlier!)

Next, lay the newly cut deck plank back over the nibbing strake and mark where it overlaps.

Now, carefully cut the nibbing strake along that line. I was so nervous doing this the first few times. I did not want to mess this up because then I’d really want to rip it out and start all over again. You should then have a nice notch where the plank will fit perfectly!

Here you can see I’ve gotten a couple planks done on both sides of the boat. Looking pretty good if you ask me!

Making more progress. As you can see, I didn’t do such a good job on a couple of them and the gaps between the planks and the nibbing strake are a bit wide. Hopefully a little wood filler will take care of that.

Finally, the fore deck is complete!

Notice how the last two planks are just little wedges. Those were kind of a pain to put in place properly. They took a bit of cutting and sanding to make sure they fit right and could be glued in place. Overall I really like how it turned out.

Sanding and staining come next. Stay tuned!

JIm

Now it’s time to move on to planking the deck! I’ve decided to start with the fore deck (the front half of the boat).

Unlike the outer hull, when planking the deck, you work from the inside out.

Here I’ve laid the first two deck planks right down the middle over the center keel of the boat frame. Luckily(?) the width of the two deck planks together equal the thickness of the boat framing so that made it easy to lay two deck planks side by side and make sure they line up exactly over the center of the hull.

From there the process was pretty easy. Just keep cutting and laying on some planks.

What is that big “X” in the middle of the deck you say? Well, there are going to be two masts on this boat: a fore mast and a main mast. The masts must go through the deck and fit into slots in the hull frame.

Above is a picture of the slot where the main mast will fit. The big “X” on the deck marks where the slot for the fore mast is below deck.

So when I’m all done with planking the deck, I’ll have to drill a hole in the deck right at the “X” for the mast to fit. Hopefully I’ll get it right!

Back to planking, first I lay out a new plank next to the existing planks and mark where it overlaps the waterway.

Then cut on the marks and make sure it fits.

Like before, I then color one edge of the plank with a pencil. Recall, this is the way I’m simulating the caulking that would normally go between the deck planks. When I’m done planking, sanding and varnishing the lines will show up and look like caulk.

Then a little Elmer’s glue along the other edge and fit the plank in place.

A drop or two of super glue on the bulkheads to hold it in place. I’m trying real hard not to get any on the deck itself. The super glue ends up discoloring the wood and hardens it some too. Later when I sand, it won’t necessarily sand smoothly. I’ve not always been successful in avoiding that. You can see a bit of it in the picture.

Keep working outward.

Here’s a close up of the plans I’m following. Each sheet is about 2 x 3 feet and is drawn actual-sized. Notice the weird double-width plank on the plans marked “7” in the picture. Those are there because there is going to be a big winch mounted on the fore deck and this double-width plank is where the winch legs will be mounted.

Well, I’ve got those in place.

That’s it for today. The decking is going much quicker than the hull planking. The next step is the nibbing strake! If you look up above a little bit at the picture of the plans, you’ll see after that double width plank there is another plank along the waterway that is notched out to accommodate the deck planks. This is called the nibbing strake and will be the topic of my next post!

Stay tuned!

JIm

Just a minor update here. I’ve been working steadily on the boat actually, but there just isn’t too much to show you.

After completing all the trenailing I had to sand the hull all smooth.

After some sanding, I then took some wood filler and filled in all the cracks. I wasn’t looking to create a perfectly smooth hull with the filler because then that would just end up hiding all the trenails and other work I did. And it wouldn’t look like a wooden boat, it would look like fiberglass.

Finally I ended up with this.

Then cam time to prime.

First, I wanted to mask off the deck. That part is going to be varnished to keep the natural wood look.

Then, several coats of white primer with sanding and cleaning in between and it is all ready for its real paint job.

That will come in a bit once I am done planking the deck, re-adding the bulkhead stanchions and then finishing the planking above the waist.

Next time, planking the fore deck, stay tuned…

JIm

As promised, here is a little tale of how I made all the little sticks I needed for the trenailing featured in the last post.

After some research, I learned that the best way to do this is by using a draw plate and bamboo skewers. For those who don’t know, a draw plate is typically used to create wire. You stick a piece of wire into a hole slightly smaller than the wire currently is and pull it through. This will stretch it out and make it narrower. Repeat this process until you have a wire the diameter you want. This same process can apply to whittling bamboo skewers down to a needed size.

So I did. Start with a bamboo skewer and split it into several smaller skewers.

And now onto the draw plate.

I actually started with a different draw plate that wasn’t too well made. The holes in it weren’t very consistent and it didn’t work too well. So, I bought the one pictured above. Great draw plate. The numbers you see are thousandth’s of an inch.

Since we aren’t stretching wire but instead shaving bamboo, you use the draw plate “backwards”; by putting it through the back end.

When it sticks out the other side, I grab it with a pair of pliers and pull.

This generates lots of little wood shavings.

Basically repeat the process moving from one hole down to the next one. Sometimes it would take several pulls through to get it fully narrowed down before I could move to the next one. Since the drill bit I was using was .028″; I kept this up until I got down to the 26 hole.

Here is a shot of about what it looks like in a few stages.

I actually completed all the trenailing and have been working on filling, sanding and smoothing the hull. It looks good. I’ll post about that next.

JIm

Below is a picture of my boat work area. What’s wrong with this picture?

Notice the garbage can next to my desk? Very convenient. What you may not know is that the desk is somewhat unstable (it wobbles) and when it does so, things tend to fall off the edge of the desk right into that garbage can. See the sanding block on the edge of the desk? That is not my original sanding block. That is a replacement for the one that (I presume) fell into the garbage can and got thrown out with the trash (unbeknownst to me). Notice anything else missing? Of course not. I didn’t either until this morning while cleaning up a bit when I noticed that the instruction book for the boat is missing! Now I’m thinking that the sanding block and the instruction manual ran off together to have a torrid affair. :-( Sigh.

May not be a big deal. Model Expo (where I bought the boat) has the instruction book available for download as a PDF. I’ve done that and printed it out, so it’s almost as good as new. I just miss the old instruction book. It was all wrinkled, written in and glue spattered. The newly printed PDF just isn’t the same. But, at least I can still build the boat!

JIm

Yep, it’s pronounced tree-nailing because that is what I am doing. The planks on a ship are usually held in place with wooden pegs driven into the ends of each plank and into each bulkhead the plank spans. So, to simulate that on the Bluenose, I have to get a bunch of little sticks, drill holes in all the planks at each bulkhead and glue them in place. How small you say? How does .028″ diameter grab ya?

I’m doing this in columns at each bulkhead. While planking, I was drawing a pencil line along each plank so that I knew where each bulkhead was. I kind of stopped doing that toward the end of the planking.

First step is to drill holes with a .028″ drill-bit stuck in my dremel tool. Handy little thing.

I used painter’s tape to mark off a straight line along the bulkhead so that I could keep all my trenails lined up nicely.

Then drill.

Ta-da!

Once that’s done, I take one of my small sticks and dip it in some Elmer’s wood glue.

Then stick it in a hole I drilled.

Snip it off with my handy Xuron clippers.

And repeat until an entire bulkhead is done.

Then I sand it smooth and move on to the next bulkhead. The process actually goes pretty easily. I’ve got one side completed entirely by now and am about half-way done with the other side. The most difficult part of the whole process was making the little sticks out of bigger sticks. I think that will be the topic of my next post.

JIm

Well, I’ve been working on my boat some, just not posting here very much. Thought I’d give you all a before & after update.

When I last left you, I had just completed some creative destruction.

Which resulted in the boat looking something like this.

The next step was to smooth things out across the top of the bulkheads. Recall that the point of all this was to give me a smooth, level surface on which to put new stanchions and the last of the planking. So, how to sand smooth that curved surface of the deck? I came up with this idea.

Since the bulkheads were provided to me laser-cut, I still had the leftover frame from around the bulkheads (See! It’s important not to throw anything away!)

I figured that I could use those already pre-curved pieces of wood to make a sanding block. So I cut them all out. Stacked and glued them together.

And then glued a piece of sandpaper to the curved surface and voilà! A perfectly curved sanding block!

The next step was to start re-attaching the waterway. These are the deck planks that run between (cough, cough) the stanchions and for a couple of rows inboard. These are typically thicker than the regular deck planking. So, this is what I ended up with.

Another feature I implemented when installing the waterway was to color the edges of the wood with pencil. Why would I do this you ask? Well, on a normal boat, there would be caulk between the deck planks that is normally a darker color than the decking. I read online that an easy way of achieving this look is to color one edge of each plank with a pencil. Then, when sanded and finished, thin dark lines will show up between the edges of the decking and look like caulk!

That’s it for this update. Next up, trenailing! (I’ve said that before!)

Jim

Before:

After:

It’s been what, 4 months since I last posted here. A variety of things interfered with my posting, vacations, work on apps, etc. but the biggest reason I’ve not made any progress on the boat and on the blog has been my unwillingness to face reality.

In my last post I claimed I was done planking. Well, that turned out not to be true. I had forgotten about the waist. The waist is a strip of planking that is to go between the rail (the white painted stuff in the “before” photo above) and the hull planking. This planking is half the thickness of the hull planking. The idea was to fit it in between the existing hull planking and the rail similar to what I had done in finishing the planking earlier.

Part of me knew this was going to be difficult at best. Despite how I made it seem in the previous blog post, fitting in that piece of planking was not going to be easy. The big thing was that the rail, the deck planking and the existing hull planking were not all straight and level to each other. When I put the rail on I really wasn’t thinking about how straight and level it needed to be and how it would affect, and be affected by other parts of the boat. I simply followed the directions and put the rail on as I was told. Now that I was at the point where I had to fit in this tiny strip of wood, I realized it just wasn’t going to fit. I knew what I had to do, but didn’t want to do it.

In retrospect, I never should have installed the rail. Being my first boat project, I’ve been diligent about reading the instructions, making sure I understand them and following them to the best of my abilities. I’ve even found places where the actual order of the instructions didn’t make sense and when I was sure they were wrong, I would do something out of order. Well, the instructions called for the rail to be installed before the planking and I saw no reason not to do so. I was actually really happy with the way it turned out. At least until I had to put in the waist.

With the little bit of deck planking not really being level, the rail not really being straight and level and the hull planking being mostly straight and level I knew it was going to be nearly impossible to fit in that waist strip. I knew that I would have to remove the rail and take everything down to the bulkheads. So, I walked away from the project and took a break. I went back several times over the past few months and tried to fit in the waist, to no avail. Each time I did so I would say to myself, “You know what you need to do Jim” but I didn’t want to listen. I’d put a lot of work into this boat and the thought of tearing it apart to make it correct was not something I wanted to do.

Well, I’m too much of a realist and in the end I faced up to it and started to tear it apart. First, I got off the rail and kept it mostly intact. I hope to re-use it later. I then ripped out all the waterway planking (a small bit of deck planking next to the bulkhead stanchions) and then cut off all the stanchions down to the deck level. Now the boat looks like the “after” picture above.

While difficult, I actually feel pretty good about this. I now know that I will eventually have a more solid foundation on which to finish the planking and then attach the rail and then finally plank the deck and build upward from there. I’ve learned in this project that the littlest error can compound itself over the long run and it is better to get it right from the start than to try to make up for it later. It only gets worse the longer you let it go.

Stay tuned. Now that I’ve faced reality and done what needed to be done, I hope to make more regular progress with the boat.

JIm

Yay! I’ve finished planking the boat! I’m pretty excited that I’ve been able to complete what many consider to be the most difficult part of building a model ship (next to the rigging, I suppose).

I recently realized that I’ve just been posting pictures of the completed parts of my project and I thought I’d like to post more about the process. Below are some pictures of how I went about finishing the planking. Use your imagination, everything up to this point went pretty much the same way.

This is a close-up of the bow-end of the last belt. I need to fit six planks in that little space (it’s less than an inch wide).

This is the middle section. Notice the pencil lines on each bulkhead. Prior to starting each belt, I measured the width of the belt at each bulkhead, divided that amount by the number of planks needed to fill that space and then marked out those widths on each bulkhead.

As I plank, I use those lines to make sure each plank is the proper width stem to stern. First, I measure the width needed at that particular point. Here the width is .09 inches (the calipers are upside-down).

After measuring and cutting the plank to length (I try to span three bulkheads with each plank), I then drill a small hole (.02 inches) at each end of the plank for the pins to hold it in place while the glue dries.

Here, the plank has been glued along the bottom edge with wood glue and then pinned in place. After pinning, I then use a few drops of cyanoacrylate glue (super-glue) to finish holding the plank in place. I sometimes used pins in the middle to hold the plank tight against the previous planks due to the natural curvature of the hull.

Repeat the process. Here I’m down to the last row of planks. Unlike previous belts, this belt ended in the “garboard strake” the final plank that runs up against the keel. I installed that strake first and now I need to fit in the final plank in the remaining space.

I read about this technique online. I took a piece of paper and lined it up with the previous strake and then used a pencil to trace along the garboard strake to measure exactly how wide the plank needed to be.

I then cut the paper along the line I drew and laid it out on the new plank. I then cut along that line to get a plank that would fit the spot exactly (supposedly!).

Ta da! Well, OK, I still had to sand, carve and fudge a bit to get it to fit. But it was pretty close.

Last piece!

Stern view of finished hull. I like how the planks all sweep around and meet up along the center beam.

And a view from the bow.

Finally, a view of the finished hull right side up!

Next step, trenails! I need to drive wooden dowels into all the planks—one at each end of each plank and one at each bulkhead. To do this, I need to turn the bamboo skewers at the top of the picture into dowels the size of the one below (about .02 inches in diameter). I’ll show you how I’ll go about that in my next posting.

Stay tuned!

I’ve completed one entire side of planking! Pics below. This last belt is sort of weird in that I had to put the garboard plank (the plank closest to the keel) in first, and then fit in six other rows of planking in between. Furthermore, each of the rows of planks pretty much grew wider as they moved toward the stern. This last row is much wider than the previous rows. Things got a little messy at the end near the stern. I think that a lot of that will clean up with filler and sanding. Also, the boat is being painted in a dark red when done so that will help hide some of the imperfections. (That’s a terrible attitude to take, isn’t it?)

I’m three-quarters of the way done with planking the boat!

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to work much on it. Lacrosse season started and I was working furiously to get the Lacrosse Scorebook app up and running that I just didn’t have any time to work on the boat. But now, Lacrosse season is over and the app is out being beta-tested for the summer and so now I have some time in the evenings to get back to planking. I’ve now finished the third belt on the starboard side. Next step is to finish up each side down to the keel. I’ll keep you posted as it goes. Hopefully sooner than the last update! In the meanwhile, enjoy the pics below.