Building a Headwater 14 Drift Boat

I once built a drift boat. 

I got very wordy on this one, and it's more that a month of entries, so I made a separate blog linked here: http://bzdrift.blogspot.com/?m=1

Entry Table and Boot Stand

Beer Equipment Cabinet

Counter Extension

Old Growth Fir Shelves

Yet another set of shelves, but this one is for good reason. I'm working on cleaning out the shop and this pile of wood has been taking up 20sf of floor space since 1993. 

Here's a side panel. 5/4" thick (1" actual). Nice and sturdy. My usual black painted panels. 

Dados on "the shelf-making-machine". 

Only pipe clamps are long and strong enough to tighten up the shelves into the tight-fitting dados. 

Tighten until the gap disappears. 

And the real trick is "trammeling" the shelves -- measuring and correcting the diagonals until the shelf is square, before the glue dries. 

Hey, back panels on and square, sanded and ready for finish. 

First coat of Minwax semigloss varnish. 

Here are the plans. The shelves were designed to use ALL of the remaining old growth fir that I had been carting around for 22 years. That is why they are exactly the size they turned out. 

13 Ball, an Electric Chopper

It's a mid 70s Kawasaki, but the frame was heavily cut including significant take of the head tube and making it a hard tail and welding in changes for the batteries and motor. A friend of mine twisted my arm into buying this bike when it was in the mockup stage because he needed to liquidate some cash and some garage so excited so he could get started on a business idea. I really didn't want it but I obliged him anyway. 

I sat on the project for a while because I had a job and too many other projects. But then I decided to quit my job and the first thing I wanted to do was open up some space in my shop. All of the parts for this project were here, I just had to integrate them right. Just labor. Zero cost (yeah, sure). It came with a nice charger than float charges each 12 volt battery independently, unlike most chargers that just pump 48V in series. Independent charging is better because now the overall charge is to limited by the toughest battery. But the charger was not mounted on the frame. The original mockup had 8 banana plugs for charging. I didn't like that so I took the whole thing apart, moved the controller under the seat, stuffed the charger just forward of that, and moved the accessory battery up the the back of the top battery tray. It was in a small tray hanging lower than the frame, which was already quite low. I also reconfigured all the battery tiedowns. Now it was all configured, I just had to wire it all up and make it work. 

Project selfie. 

I didn't like the factory seat and springs that came with it for a couple of reasons, but mostly it was just too high. I needed a seat that would more closely hug the frame. This one I made is a little to flat and wide, but it is strong and well mounted. I think it works. Price: plywood and foam lying around. $5 for the seat cover fabric (not shown). 

It's all coming back together, but I couldn't get the used Curtis controller to work. I got down to measuring voltages on the control pins with two different throttles and, based on the measurements, the manual said that the controller was bad. I've never really liked Curtis controllers, so I bought an Altrax 4834 programmable instead. $350. Damn. 

Notice the 13 ball on top of a long steel rod?  That's a suicide brake. There is a left hand hydraulic brake for the front wheel, but the back brake is a drum and an old school chopper trick is to operate it by a vertical handle instead of a foot pedal. So you have to take your hand off the throttle to operate the rear brake. Suicide indeed. 

The bike was mocked up with a copper tube for the drum brake stay. This is a rally bad idea because that stay is holding a lot of braking torque and copper is very soft. Wish I'd thought of that before it broke. In fact, the first two times I used the suicide brake, it broke the back end of the bike. I'm pretty sure it's solid now, but I'm a bit scared of it now. 

Late in the project I got the bright idea of painting the fenders to look like the 13 ball, including the very yellowed white part of this particular ball. I like it. It looks a bit like a cream-sickle. Just rattle can, nothing fancy. 

Not bad. Three weeks to completely rebuild this thing to working condition. I've yet to license the bike, so I haven't had it out much. Also, the raked head tube makes for about 5" of trail, which makes the steering heavier. And it was already heavy due to 200# of lead acid batteries. Armstrong steering. Get it up to speed quickly. And it's scary. It should go 55+, and should be able to burn out due to the electric motor's high torque at zero rpm, but I've yet to go over 30mph. I'll let you know. Please visit me in the hospital. 

Here's a video: https://youtu.be/N6Nb5gjjVEo

A Quick Shelf for Elaine's Dorm

Here's a quick shelf I made for Elaine's dorm room. She's in the LLC (Living and Learnibg Center) with 3 other women and there isn't enough storage for cooking stuff. So I popped over on Sunday to measure and hacked this out by Wednesday. 

I typically use 3/4" shop oak or birch plywood to make the basic shelf, with a nice-ish facade, sometimes country cove pine trimmed, sometimes modern stylish shallow oak curves, which I've leaned on too heavily of late so I decided to try something new. I found a nice piece of hemlock with lots of grain and a sweeping hook on the last two feet that I didn't notice until I got it home. Oops. 

Then I hand-drew half a curve that reminded me of an overhanging curtain valence. It looked ok in cardboard so I transferred it to wood and tacked in on for a facia. It could use a bit more detail -- something like a keystone and a bullnose crown, but I'm in a hurry. The semester has begun and their kitchen stuff is piled on the floor.

All the assembly was done in about 6 hours on a Wednesday. 

The quick assembly was possible because I cut out the shelf, sides and back (and painted the back) on Tuesday. Lucky I did all of the math right. Well, most of it. 

It turned out more square than my usual work because I recently got a better blade for the radial arm saw (a shelf-makin'-machine!) that Nan bought me for Mother's Day sometime around 2009. Somebody was feeling guilty. Don't ask. 

Here's some nice detail, with the shelf facia set back a quarter inch behind the side facia. 

And on the upper corners notice how the curve spans two pieces. 

Here are the plans, which I drew up in about 30 seconds on the textured wall of the dorm room. The dimensions and style all changed. 13" deep x 61" tall x 49" wide. Those dimensions used all but two square feet of a 4x8 sheet of plywood. And all of the facia came out of the previously mentioned piece of hemlock. A single 11'x 5 1/4" x 1" piece.

Who's Your Daddy!

Shelves for Nan's Sewing Room

When we moved to the Palouse in 1995, we had a hard time finding a suitable home. As a last resort we purchased the old Kenworthy home -- you know, Kenworthy Theater, Kenworthy Plaza, etc. it was the first house built in this area in 1959, and its way too large for a family of four. One side benefit of that is lots of extra rooms for special purposes. I got a "den" and Nan got a sewing room. Well, her room was a dank dungeon basement room with old moldy carpets and leaking windows. 

Well, we finally (after 20 years) got around to fixing up Nan's sewing room. The windows got fixed over a year ago, and we finally moved everything out of that room and replaced the carpet and removed the green crushed velvet from the west wall and re-mudded and painted that wall. 

The sewing (quilting, actually) stuff that came out of that room completely filled the other downstairs room, and to avoid cluttering up the new room we decided to put shelves in. 

The shelves are simple things with 2"x2" posts on the front holding up plywood shelves of 18" depth, tacked through to the studs on the back wall. It's in there solid. Here's a picture with the shelves in with no trim yet. 

Ditto shelves with no trim, from the entry door side. 

Done. Here are the shelves with trim and doors. Looks cleans and neat, but I think we have provided space for only about a third of the stuff that needs to go back into this room. 

Did I mention this room has a mirrored ceiling. Mirrors were a big decor thing for the Kenworthys. We've taken a bunch out, and were planning on removing these too, but it would have been a lot of work. We were surprised to find that the mirrored ceiling looked a lot better when it was reflecting new carpet and walls.