Shaving oak in winter landscape

It’s been quite cold recently, with temperature fluctuating around -15 or -17 Celsius so I had to limit my boat-visits to couple of hours per day. Still - it’s quite a joy to have a reason to leave home and to be in this landscape.

Few boats stay in water the whole winter, among others is Colin-Archer ferrocement boat whose owners live on her year round. They keep open water around them with under-water propellers for keeping slow current around the hull and preventing freezing-in.

Meanwhile in our boatyard it is silent and white. Perfect environment for “active meditation” or, in plain English - physical workout with hand woodworking tools.

I continue to prepare stock for making floor timber #3. After cutting out live-edge and sapwood I started squaring one edge as a reference for cuts on table saw. Louis Sauzedde’s method of plaining with bench plane on its side works perfectly for that purpose - plane being perfectly square, sliding on flat plank will bring plained edge to good-enough squareness without bothering about twists or bumps.

Once done I could rip the big plank into more manageable pieces of roughly the size of my floor timber. Table saw came into service at this step.

I can’t say I really enjoy using it but with oak it saves a lot of effort. But after that - back to plaining and sweating. This keeps me warm and happy at freezing temperatures in my workshop.

It’s a pure, pervert joy of turning wood into thin shavings.

For my purpose I don’t need to be perfectionist since these parts will be glued together with epoxy and further formed to make floor shape but just for practice and fun I followed Matt’s tutorial on hand-squaring rough timber.

Few hours of work, a pile of shavings on the floor and I ended up with a nice stock for gluing my floor timber #3. Part of the struggle was to find pieces which didn’t have severe checking in the wood.

The problem with kiln-dried oak is that it tends to split. For making stairs or furniture, as long as split is hidden inside the plank, it is no problem. Floor timber is a load-bearing element so it should be as perfect as possible. Well, I’ve almost managed, with some tiny cracks present in one element - but that caused me to waste 3 otherwise perfect blocks as they checked quite severely.
Too bad but I will use them for less critical parts.

It became quite hefty pile of heavy timber!

Next step is to align them according to cardboard pattern, glue them with epoxy and start shaping to final form.

But - I want to play it smart and I will not glue as yet the bottom piece.
Instead I will first drill it according to other pattern for accepting new keel bolt. Once drilled I will shape it to fit into the bilge. Being happy with the fit I will only then glue it to the rest of the laminate.

By doing so I hope to avoid dreaded task of drilling long hole through all these pieces, shaped already for perfect fit, just to discover that I’ve missed the keel bolt hole by few mm!
Having the bottom piece already aligned I will use it as a guiding for further drilling.

If total height will fit I plan to use drill press. If not - I will drill free-hand but the bottom match will anyhow be perfect.

At least I hope so.