up to my clavicles in paint and varnish the last few weeks getting ready for TIBS which opens this weekend! As usual we are honoured by the organizers and their donation of a space in the South Foyer - right beside our chums, the Toronto Chapter of the ACBS.
One project has been the new Beta version of our own sea flea. Mini-Hopper you can see in previous posts and it has been a great and hardy little boat. Our intention is to offer sea flea building to kids-at-risk and to youth in general as well.
The transition is from an epoxy built boat to a SikaFlex and boat-nails built boat - much like our skiffs. This required a surprising degree of re-design which Bernie and Bruce got right into (of course).
Here are a few shots:
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| rigid frame with Sika Flex applied |
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| Bruce, Matt & Bernie glove up! |
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| Bernie locates panel on keys |
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| nailed, scraped and clamped. |
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| Ray uses George's Viking Clamp! |
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| MB sands and varnishes |
then the best trick of all, the coaming board. If you check out the Mini-Hopper, you'll see she has a half wrapped oak coaming, well this time we decided on a one-piece oak coaming...
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| George with the biggest sea flea part in the world |
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| MB's soaking jig. |
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| George, Matt and Steve with steam up |
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| bent and in - perfecto! |
Meanwhile the Mini-Hopper was showing her war wounds of two seasons of testing and needed serious restoration before being in the show.
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| Wayne sanding very carefully |
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| whew! few tricks used here - worked |
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| still looks great! |
OK, so one of the tricks came from noticing that the gold paint protected by varnish, survived far better than the green painted areas. So I varnished the whole thing from coaming to chine and it looks great - time will tell about survival.
Plus we needed a finished skiff for the show and the one in the shop just wasn't quite ready. A real crunch of filling and fairing by Anton, sanding by many and paint and varnish by MB.
We are trying a different look this time - only the stem, knees and transom have been stained - the rest is natural wood colour.
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| Anton in his element |
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| done and done |
and lastly (just kidding), we needed some more presentable stands for the outboards Jim wants to display at the show so with Steve's help....
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| still in the works but nice |
And we made it - just. Last Monday and Tuesday we moved into our space in the South Foyer at the Toronto Boat Show. New signage is in the works but much cleaner layout. Our feature this year is kids (actually) messing about in boats and carving paddles. Should be a blast.
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| boats on the floor plus Shepherd |
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| getting there! |
If you would like to volunteer on our booth, we'd love to have you - even if we haven't met you. After all one of the reasons for being there is to invite new volunteers to jump in!
Register through our new website http://www.kidsandclassics.com/
Toronto Boat Show website is http://www.torontoboatshow.com/
