“What did you do?”

For our first class of the spring semester, we welcomed a new classmate to our class! Yay! We also just jumped right back into working on the boat. This past week we worked on hinging our keel to the backbone, sanding the centerboard and starting to seal and varnish certain sides of the ribs and the entire centerboard. 

Aside from that, we as a class talked about some ideas of painting our boat. We were introduced to a specific style of paint that some boats would use back during world war II called “razzle dazzle”.  It’s a technique that aesthetically looks very funky and interesting but its purpose is to offset the direction the boat was heading from the eyes of  enemy ships to avoid being attacked. The paint was also an indicator that it wasn’t a war ship and would often be used by merchant ships to notify war ships through their passage. 

“What did you accomplish/contribute?”

What I did specifically this week was focus on the centerboard case. Zoe and I worked together to sand the case by hand as well as seal it too. In between sanding and varnishing the centerboard case, Zoe and I also worked on creating bungs for the transom. We searched through some wood scrapes and found a piece thick enough to use and created several bungs to choose from. We took our time to find bungs that would make the transom look like it’s one full piece.  

Varnish

“What challenges did you face and how did you overcome them?”

This week there were hardly any challenges that we faced. Everything seemed to run smoothly and we were able to accomplish everything we hoped to do with ease. 

“What did you learn?”

This week I learned some interesting things about the painting technique Razzle Dazzle. It’s such an interesting style of paint for boats to use and I found it very fascinating to learn and hear about its purposes from our professor John. I also learned that when it comes to sealing and varnishing pieces of the boat, it’s said that two coats are equivalent to one year of the boat’s life.  For our boat, we are going to add about twelve coats of varnish so that it can last about six or so years. 

Razzle Dazzle Ship Models

Journal Response