It's true, I believe, that we have solidly hit what I consider to be the shoulder season. Let's not be crazy and call it "fall", down here in SouthCentral AK it's far from the autumn that I dig into in Fairbanks or New England. This is a much wetter, grayer season with some slow changes to yellow and red in the trees and the fireweed. The Anchorage Daily reported last Sunday that indeed this was one of the coldest summers Alaska has seen in many many years. Fantastic. No serious complaints from me, though - the times of sun we've had have been lovely, and the rains have been sporadic enough to not make me feel entirely cooped up and crazy. Boat building has been fairly slow-going, given my outdoors workspace and the daily rains that hit us seemingly whenever I have a spare moment to drive over to the boat....
However, some pictures for an update:
this is the jig I used to start the bending in the ribs. I was rather concerned about the use of spruce, as I hadn't heard great things about it as bending stock. However, spruce is what I had, and so not truly knowing any better spruce is what I set out to bend.
Here are the ribs, cut to size, pre-bending, making a beautiful circle.
HaHa!!! Success! A few of the ribs, mainly the for-most one, had to be re-bent 3, 4, 5 times as it kept breaking. And then another rib (you can see it in the close-up rib view above) had to be re-bent the next day when I fully realized how wonky the shape was. All in all, however, it was a much smoother process than I had anticipated!