Making A Boat (Part 2)

The boat's base was probably the easiest thing I had made so far since it was literally just a wooden plank gotten from the center of the 5-foot wide log. As for what wood joinery technique I chose to youse for the base, it was just the Kinegata-Chigiri-Tsugi technique.

Basically, it was just making an hourglass made out of straight lines and no curves out of wood, and then carve a whole that could fit half of it on each side, that way; you just inserted the hourglass-shaped piece of wood from the top, and the wood couldn't separate since the two ends were too wide to fit through the hole that the hourglass' wood center fits in.

So just like I did with the two planks that made up the sides of the boat, I just made twelve of them per side. So, once I did that, all that was left for the outside 'shell' to put it that way was to make the two faces of the boat or edges clearer.

After all, to get the boat to float, it had to have two ends where the sides intersected, so the faces would basically be like a sideways pyramid split in half. And although I would have preferred just to get a tree that was 6ft thick, I would have to get everyone else to help me, and I didn't want to bother them after all of the work they had done.

So defeated, I just brought two 4ft wide trees back to where we were using the snakeskin since both ends were only at most going to be 5ft long, and the trees were already longer than 12ft.

From there, I just positioned the log right next to the side of the boat's 'shell' and cut it from there since I didn't want the two ends of the boat to be any shorter than the sides. Once I did that, I cut the log in half and then cut off wood from both pieces until they were 3ft long.

I grabbed one of the pieces and began cutting diagonally from the top down, making sure to match the curve that the sides had before having to hollow out everything except for the top and bottom, making it look like a C that was flat on the top. And then repeating the same thing on the other side to complete both pieces of the first face.

From there, I choose just to use the Hirakake-Komisen-Tsugi joinery technique to connect both sides of the font face to the sides and connect both sides of the boat's front end to each other not only on the outside but also on the top.

As for how many there were per connection, I used 3 to connect each side of the front end to the sides, 8 connecting on the front side, and 3 on the top side. So, all in all, by the time I was done, it was already 6:21 pm. Still, I wasn't about to wait another day to finally finish a boat that I wasn't even sure was going to work, so I just set up a campfire next to where I was working and continued working on the other side, only finally being able to finish both ends by 8:49 pm.

Just like that, the 'outer shell' of the boat was done, leaving me only having to finish the seats of the boat, of which I was planning only to have two, one for a 'driver,' and another to be able to hold either another passenger or some sort of cargo.

Thankfully though, since I had already finished the 'outer shell,' I used the Yose-Ari-Hozo-Shikuchi joinery technique to connect rectangular pieces of wood to both sides of the boat, having two on each side.

After that, I just cut down a tree and made two almost 7ft long and 2ft wide planks which I then carved a rectangular hole through in each corner before doing the same thing on the rectangles of the sides of the boat except that the ones on the sides of the boat stopped right before making it to the end.

Plus, in the middle of the ship (directly under both spots that the planks would be over), I added a double-sided Yose-Ari-Hozo-Shikuchi one connected to the base and connected to the actual wooden plank.

All that was left was just to connect everything and chop down one last tree to make rowing paddles. And although I was certainly proud, I could still not celebrate as I had not tested it yet; I slowly made my way over to the river that was already right next to me.

From there, I simply pushed the boat into the river to see if it sunk or not, and although it was able to hold on for a little bit, it still sunk. So since I knew that I couldn't get any RP to ask the system the answer until tomorrow, I brought the boat out of the water expecting the water to just fall out from the bottom.

To my surprise though, once I managed to get it back onto land, the boat was still full, meaning that it had not sunk because of it being built incorrectly, at least when it came to being able to sink, but because either the water level was way to low for the boat to be able to float or I just built the boat incorrectly.

Just to make sure though, I decided to wait a while to make sure the water level of the boat didn't go down, which thankfully it didn't. So I just emptied the boat and left it next to the river before deciding to clock out for the night; after all, it was already 10:05 pm, and I still had to wake up early in the morning tomorrow.