The Main Gaff

The spar that is.

After twelve seasons of using, living with, and working on our Friendship sloop, we started off this year with only one spar that we had never refurbished, and that is the gaff for the main sail. I had slapped a little varnish on it once, but basically it has been without maintenance since we became the caretakers for this vessel in 2000. It was time to pay attention to this important spar.  On surveying the spar, we found that although the condition of the wood was generally good, the finish had disintegrated, and the service on the slings and horse were overdue for attention.

Gaff before work started

If you look at these pictures you will see that the wood is just starting to degrade where the finish is gone and that the service is worn and in need of repair and that the blacking is essentially gone.

Wear on the gaff

Service in need of attention

 

We have been working for the last month to make-and-mend the needs of the gaff.

We removed the slings and the hardware from the gall and then stripped the finish to bare wood.

Gaff stripped of varnish

Next we faired the spar and gave it an even closer examination. All of the questionable areas disappeared with the removal of what finish was left and with the fairing process.

Thus we started the two pronged process of re-finishing the gaff itself and repairing and refurbishing the service on slings and horse.

Starting to re-varnish the gaff

Refinished service

The same section of the gaff shown above after we started the refinishing process

 

One of the things that I noticed when I first surveyed the spar was that the service on the slings was wearing into the finish and resulting in damage to the surface wood where the weight of the spar was carried by the slings. We decided that the best way to protect both service and gaff was to leather the service where it makes contact with the spar.

Leathering is sometimes dismissed as overly “yachty”, but where bights of standing rigging make contact with any spar, I have found that leathering extends the life of the finish on the spar and on the service significantly. It is also an easy, clean and meditative chore that I don’t mind at all.

Leathering

Finished sling

 

We are working on the last coats of varnish now (ten in all) and then we will reassemble the hardware and walk the gaff back out to the boatshed from the shop. By then it should be warm enough to start on the rest of the painting and varnishing for this season.

Wooden Toy Car

I have been tied up with a bunch of other projects for the last six months or so and this blog has suffered as a result, but it is time to make up for that. First a toy post:

I have a nephew who just turned six. For some reason he likes old cars. I mean really old cars, as in from the 1920s. So for his birthday he got the touring car below.

The doors and trunk open, and close and the car came with a bear driver and a bear passenger. If you are new to this site you might want to read  “the whole bear thing’ for an explanation.

The hood ornament is a bear, and as with the saber jet in the last post, a little acrylic for a windshield adds something to a toy which is otherwise made entirely of wood.

Wooden Toy Saber Jet

Well the winter holidays have come and gone again and as usual I have been making toys. I have not written about toy making (or anything else) in a while and I wanted to put up a post or two on this subject.

For me, the hardest part of making toys, and in some ways the best part, is figuring out what to make in the first place. In this case I have a five-year-old nephew who has always got pictures of planes around and before the holidays, he was showing me one of a Saber jet from the 1950s. So that is what I set out to make him.

It is a pretty simple toy. Other than the wheels there are no moving parts, but it does have an interesting shape, and capturing and interesting shape is always a fun challenge in a toy. I want to create toys that a child is drawn to and toys that a child wants to touch and hold. So for me, there is always an element of toy making that is sculptural. I am drawn to shapes that echo those found in nature, and shapes that explain visually the purpose of the object. Put in simpler terms, I like a ship to look like a ship, a toy plane to look like it could really fly, and even a toy fire truck to look like it could rush off at any minute to put out a fire.

Toys that get broken through handling don’t bother me, toys that sit on a shelf and are never used do.

Saber jet

Another challenge is to figure out how much detail to include.  I like to leave some details to the imagination and I like to have some details that balance the shape and texture of the wood.

First ideas for a unit insignia

With toy airplanes I have a lot of fun with insignia. Coming up with nose-art or unit insignia is always a challenge and a fun one. If you have

read my post “the whole bear thing” then you know that most of my toys are flown, driven, or sailed by bears. So with insignia I try to mix in something bear-like, or that a bear would like, and I also usually play with numbers that reflect either the child’s age, or in some cases a birth date.

The finished insignia

In this case the unit is the 5^th Ursus, with the constellation ursus major on the tail, and group number VF 56. The child in question is five, thus

the unit number, but he is almost six (which he will tell you given any opportunity) so the unit group designation VF-56.

Mixed mediums. This is basically a wooden toy, and I like my toys to be obviously hand made, however, there are always exceptions that prove the rule. This is one of those exceptions a clear canopy over the cockpit is a key design element of the saber and how it looks. Without one, the plane looks wrong.

I have said many times on this site that it is not a how-to blog. But I thought I would break with that

Vacuum jig

tradition to explain how I mold the plexi for toys. In this case we have a fairly simple “bubble” type of canopy. To get the shape right I use a vacuum jig that I made several years ago. The jig is fairly simple, a small table with a hole in the middle of it is set up and an edge made of self-stick foam insulation is put around the outside edge. In the middle of the table a piece of plastic plumbing pipe with a right angle bend in it is set up like a drain in a sink. Now fold up a piece of old wire window screen and place it over the hole. Add a shopvac, a metal spoon, and you are ready to make a canopy.

Vacuum jig with the plumbing pipe in place

The method is fairly simple, make a wooden mold of what you want the canopy to look like. Make the mold smaller than you want the finished canopy to be in every dimension except height, in this one dimension you want the mold to be taller than the finished cockpit canopy so you can make adjustments.

To make the actual canopy, plug the shopvac into your vacuum table and turn it on so that the

Mold on the vacuum jig and shopvac running

vacuum is pulling air down through the window screen. When you have that set up and running take a piece of plexiglass or acrylic sheeting and using a heat gun or a propane torch slowly heat up the center of the plastic in a well ventilated area. If you have any questions about what kind of gasses might be released by heating the plastic, WEAR A RESPIRATOR.

Vacuum at work

The trick with this method is to heat the plastic slowly, if you heat it too fast, you will get air bubbles in the plastic and it will ruin the canopy, so go slowly, but get the plastic hot, hot enough so that it starts to sag in the middle. When you have got the plastic hot enough that it is sagging in the middle, carefully place the hot plastic over the mold and push down so that you get a seal between the edge of the plastic and the foam rim of the vacuum table. The vacuum will pull the plastic down over the mold. If it does not do a perfect job grab the spoon and use the rounded side of the

The canopy ready to cut out

spoon to push down and help shape the plastic where it is needed. Allow the plastic to cool and cut out the canopy. It is pretty simple, but I would advise getting enough plastic to make several tries in case your first effort does not work out.

I attached this canopy with thickened epoxy because I wanted a smooth transition between the plastic and the wood.

That’s it—end of lesson. Have fun, I certainly did.

The Fleet Is In

After what seems like the busiest summer yet, our fleet is home again and we are starting the chores to get all of our boats ready for winter. This includes fresh bottom paint, winterizing the diesel on the Friendship Sloop, cleaning and stowing sails, cushions, pillows, and mattresses, packing up the galley, and most importantly making lists of repairs that need to be done over the winter.

Typically, once the boats are bedded down for winter, they are allowed to rest for at least a couple of months while we focus on the autumn chores  at the cottage,  and then the winter holidays. Come January and February, though, I know I will start thinking about winter boat projects that need to be done before spring-cleaning and painting begins in earnest. Having made a list in the fall saves time and helps push the process along.

When we built the shed it seemed huge—much larger than it needed to be—and I remember wondering if we had not gotten a bit carried away. Now, twelve years later, part of the autumnal ritual of putting the boats to bed is the process of figuring out how to get everything into the building and still leave enough room to move around.

I know I will enjoy puttering on projects in the boat shed over the next six months, almost as much as I enjoy being on the water. And there is something very satisfying about putting all the bits and pieces away, making sure everything is tagged or labeled, sometimes adding a shelf or box somewhere in the shed so that another piece of gear can have a better place to winter over. Like stacking firewood, the process of putting things away, brings a sense of order to what is usually a frantic end-of-season rush, and a knowledge that I will benefit later from the work I do now.

For the moment though I am taking a deep breath and savoring the fact that the boats ate all back safe and sound in the boat shed.

The leaves have begun to change colors, the equinox has come and gone, the boats are in the shed: autumn is here.

New Boat Part 22

Observations:

Before I continue with the building of mast and sail for our new Penny Fee, now called Fee-Fie, (the dinghy has become Foe-Fum), I wanted to record some observations on the performance of the boat thus far. We have had the boat in the water and have been using her for about three weeks. We have used the boat to ferry loads to and from the Friendship sloop, and have towed it to Rockland from Boothbay and back, and have basically rowed it around a bit. As of this weekend we have been sailing it too, but I will save my observations on sailing qualities for the end of this post.

Penny Fee: Fee-Fie

Towing:

The first surprise was how easily she tows behind the Friendship Sloop. She is heavier than our dingy, but she also has a much longer waterline and appears to sit high in the water when unloaded. She also tracks well, partly due to the longer waterline and partly due to the lap-strake construction.  The result is a longer heavier boat that does not squat down in the water behind our sloop but that slips along with less resistance than I would have imagined. Part of our trip back from Rockland was in 5 to 8 foot seas with 15-25 knot winds. We found that in every condition except heavy following seas; this is a very well behaved boat. In following seas she tends to surf and surge and a long towline and a watchful crewmember to tend the towline is advisable.

Rowing:

We have noticed that when under oar power it is more comfortable to sit on a seat cushion that raises up the rower about 2 ½”. I don’t think that this is the result of the benches being placed low, either by the designer or in our construction, but rather that we deliberately raised the height of the oarlocks so that the oars would be less prone to rub on the fender of the boat. She does take more back power and a longer stroke than the dingy to propel, but she carries her way beautifully and once moving is easy to keep moving. The other aspect that will take some getting used to is that she rows a little easier with a load rather than without. This is both the opposite of our dinghy and is also a bit counter-intuitive.

Stability:

Another impressive feature is the stability of the boat, it has greater secondary stability than I would have imagined and, in some ways this drove us to make the sail because we wanted to see how she handled the pressure of the sail and how that effected the stability. We have experimented by having a helmsman stand in the back of the boat and steer with the rudder while the rower provides the power from the front bench. Our experience is that she provides a stable platform for the helmsman, to say nothing of the fact that it is just plain fun to stand in the back of the launch and con the boat.

Now on to the last pieces of construction:

The Mast:

I bought two pieces of 2”x 8” spruce stock that were not flawless but that had long, relatively clear sections in each. I got them at the local home center, total cost was about $20. I then ripped out the two best sections and using a dato-blade on the table saw cut a ¾” channel in each that started a bout a foot below the truck of the mast and ended about a foot above where deck level would be. Then the two halves were glued together giving me essentially a mast blank with a hollow core.

The two mast halves with dato ripped

The two mast halves glued together

When the glue was dry I cut a taper using the table saw so that I had a long, tapered, spar that was square in cross section. Next step, cut off the corners of the square so that the spar becomes eight sided, and then move to hand planes to make the mast round in section.

Mast with taper cut and corners cut off to make a long octagonal spar

Spars varnished and ready for hardware

The sprit is made of solid spruce about 1 ½” in diameter, shaped in the same way that the mast was shaped.

The mast has four, unfinished teak cleats; one each for halyard, brail, snotter, and downhaul. There are two heavy cleats set inside the gunwale, port and starboard aft, for the mainsheet. These too are made from unfinished teak. My experience has been that cleats do not hold finish, due to lines running around them, they are also a pain to keep finished. Raw teak weathers well and always looks pretty good without much care.

Cleats on the mast

Building the sail:

We used as a reference the excellent Sailmaker’s Apprentice, although sailmaking is not new for either me, or the woman who will willingly get up in the middle of the night and stand an anchor watch. It is also worth noting that first, the sprit sail is one of the easier and more forgiving sails to make, and second that we are using canvas that we were given free, so, in many ways this is a prototype sail and we might make a more durable version once we have learned all we can from the performance of this canvas model. On the other hand if this sail works, why fix it?

The sail is made of four panels and will take its shape partly from the cut of these panels (particularly the two closest to the mast) and partly to a slight curve built into the luff of the sail. A bolt-rope is hand stitched along the head, luff and foot of the sail to help minimize the stretch in these sections of the sail. We used 3/8” brass grommets for the reef points and the robands on the luff of the sail, and the brail-line grommet in the leach of the sail. The rest of the sail hardware is sewn in by hand. The thimbles and metal rings are all solid brass.

The building process:

One thing we did that made the whole sailmaking process much easier was to recycle the boatbuilding table and use it as a sailmaking table. All we did was cut the table in half into two eight-foot sections. This allowed us to either push the sections together and make one long table to lay out panels and pin seams and that kind of thing, or we could pull the two apart and put the sewing machine in between them and pass the sail from one surface to the other over the sewing machine table. If we were making a larger sail I would have raise the levels of the tales to the same level as the sewing machine table, but with a sail that is only 85 square feet it seemed unnecessary.

Work table with sewing machine in the middle, sail in the foreground

The sail took about two weeks to build working in the evenings and in what free time we have, but I would not want to be misleading about this. As I said before both the woman who will willingly get up in the middle of the night and stand an anchor watch, and I have sailmaking experience, added to which I have a fairly comprehensive collection of sailmaking tools and supplies on hand. It would be a different story if we were having to figure out each step from scratch and then purchase the appropriate tools, materials and hardware. As it was there where plenty of choices to make regarding where to put in grommets, cringles, and thimbles.

Details of the sail showing the hand-sewn hardware at the clew and head

Anyway the finished sail looked great, the question was how would it perform in collaboration with the Penny Fee? The short answer is: far better than I expected.

Penny Fee under sail

This shot shows the boat well

Sailing in light air

There is a tendency to make leeway with very light air, but that disappears when there is any real wind. The boat points higher than I thought it would and virtually flies downwind. Beam reaching it is remarkably stable. The other factor that I love about this rig is how easy it is to haul on the brailing line and collapse the sail and sprit against the mast. It was really fun to sail right up alongside the Friendship sloop, touch the side, and collapse the rig by pulling on one line.

Sail brailed up against the mast

The two aspects of the rig that I question at this point have to do with the mast and the foot of the sail. I went to great effort (explained above) to make the mast hollow and light, it now appears that that was not necessary and that it may in fact be a weakness, because the mast does flex alarmingly in strong gusts. However, if the mast breaks it will be easy and inexpensive to replace. My concern about the foot of the sail is simply that now that we have seen the sail and how it takes shape in the wind, I think we could have easily added twelve to fourteen inches of length to the foot of the sail and gotten her to round up a little faster when tacking.

In both these cases, however, I am splitting hairs and speculating. The factual evidence that we have so far is that this is an easy rig to sail, to break down and set up. It brails quickly so that if the wind dies you can row without taking down the rig, and you can dowse the sail quickly when coming alongside. In short, it is everything we had hoped for and we had a fantastic fun day testing it out.

Really fun to sail

If you would like to read all the posts related to this project together, go to the category at the right called “Penny Fee” and click on it. It will pull all the posts on the penny fee onto one page for you.

New Boat Part 21

This will be a long post because while I have been writing and chronicling what has been going on in the boat shops, I have not been good about putting up posts. so now it is catch up time. First we needed to focus on the Friendship Sloop, getting her ready for the season. Then launching and rigging her and even getting in an occasional weekend cruise.

Friendship ready to move, picture taken early in June

Transport day June 10th

Then we had a little time to re-focus on the Penny Fee, we got to do some of the fun jobs. The rope fender, floorboards, rudder, and oars. I would have liked to have slowed down and tried to savor these jobs more, but then we never would have gotten the boat in the water this season.

The rope fender:

As described in an earlier post, we designed the outwale of the gunwale to have a groove or gutter running the length of the boat so that the rope that we are going to use as a fender will lie evenly along the edge of the boat. The fender is attached to the boat with stainless steel screws. The installation is fairly simple, the idea is to place a screw within the twist of the rope so that only the innermost strand is pierced by the screw and secures the rope to the outside of the gunwale. We started at the transom and worked along to the bow, around to the other side of the vessel and back to the transom again. At least that was the plan.

I had bought 36 feet of 1 1/8” rope, which should have been enough to do the job easily. I back spliced an end with almost no waste and started to attach the rope. I got most of the way down the starboard side and noticed that it looked like there was not enough rope. An optical illusion, I thought. To be safe, I felt I had better double check, I checked and found that there was not enough rope. Then I measured the rope and found that it was not 36 feet long, but 32. Oops.

Some desperate calls to Hamilton Marine, and we determined that whatever I had bought was a closeout and not a standard rope. Since they could not match it, the only plan was to replace it. They offered to do so free of charge and a new length of rope was on the way. The new rope arrived in 48 hours, and I have to say that the customer service at Hamilton Marine was excellent. I had found that to be true in the past, but when things go wrong it is always nice to find someone who is going to go out of the way to help you out. Anyway, removing the fender we had already installed took a lot of time and then the screw holes had to be filled. Still, in all the new rope went on fast (under two hours) and looks great.

Rope fender in place

Oars:

We started the oars back in March, but we simply did not have a great deal of time to work on them until recently. All we did was to glue up spruce blanks that were oversized oars. Then we simply shaved the first one down until it was the shape and weight that we wanted. Once we did this it was only a question of whittling down the second oar to match the first.

One oar shaped and the other still in the rough

Matched pair

The oars are quite long (9 foot 6 inches), we decided to leave the loom of the oar above the oarlock position square in section to act as a bit of a counterbalance to the long outboard section of the oar. The oars will be painted to minimize the amount of maintenance that they will need each year. Varnish looks great, but is more of a challenge to maintain on oars.

Oars painted and waiting for their leathers

Floorboards:

This is an area of the boat that we wanted to keep simple. 1”x4” pine boards were a relatively inexpensive option, we have been cutting and shaping them so that they lie on top of the floor-timbers and are fastened to cross-pieces of 5/4” pine with bronze screws, countersunk and bunged. The floorboards will get no sealer and will be allowed to weather naturally. The end result should meet our needs, were quick to assemble, and require little or no maintenance.

Floorboards

The centerboard pin:

A very important piece that sometimes gets overlooked in the rush to launch is the centerboard pin. In our case a piece of 3/8” bronze cut so that it is short. In other words, it is recessed about 3/8” from each side. This leaves plenty of pin to do the work, but it also leaves a space to squirt caulking goop. The goop is covered by a rubber gasket, and that is capped with a bronze plate that is held in place with four screws.

The hole for the pin, with the pin in place, the rubber gasket (red), and the bronze cap-plate

The goop has been squirted into the end of the hole with a caulking gun

Bronze cap in place

The Rudder:

The plans for the boat came with two options for the rudder. One was a traditional wooden rudder, and the other was for a kick-up rudder made of wooden parts. Unfortunately for us, neither of these designs will exactly meet our needs. We do need a kick up rudder, but we need something that will need less maintenance than the one provided in the blueprints. That design is also a bit more complicated than I would like, and requires some hardware that I was not sure I could find in the limited time I had before launching. So I set about pulling together a kick up rudder design of my own, one I could put together with some off-the-shelf hardware, and one where the lower section of the rudder (the kick up part) is made from a single plate of 1/4″ aluminum.

Design showing rudder down

Design showing rudder up

The rudder design is still not what I would call simple, but the dinghy dock is only in about two feet of water at low tide, and we intend this boat to take us ashore on rocky Maine islands, so a kick up rudder is necessary. The top section of the rudder is glued up from three pieces of plywood, the middle piece is slightly thicker than the aluminum plate. This middle piece of plywood is cut in such a way that it not only provides space for the aluminum bottom plate to pivot, but it also provides stops for the up and down position of the lower section of rudder. The weight of the aluminum  section of the rudder will keep it in the down position unless it strikes a submerged object, then the lower section can kick up. A manual line and jamb-cleat on the trailing edge of the rudder allows for locking the lower section of the rudder into the “up” position for extended periods, like when the boat is beached.

Bottom part of rudder with cardboard template.The aluminum was cut with a saws-all and a metal cutting blade. Then hand filed.

Finished rudder in down position

The launch:

Before we trailered the boat to the coast I wanted to launch her here at our local pond where all of the boats we have built have been launched. On a lovely summer evening we sprinkled some hard cider over the bows, slipped her off the trailer, and went for a row. I was too busy checking to make sure there were no problems, but there were not, and as I slowly relaxed, I realized that this was a delightful boat. Stable, she caries her way well, although she does make noise with those laps and a little chop.

The first launch

The next evening we brought the boat over to the sea by trailer, and launched her again, this time in salt water.

Sitting in salt water

The new tender

We need to use her more before we have any real idea what her performance will be like. We will tow her with us to the Friendship Sloop Gathering in Rockland this week, and we will find out how well she tows, then I need to finish the mast, sprit, and sail. Can’t wait to get a sail on her.

If you would like to read all the posts related to this project together, go to the category at the right called “Penny Fee” and click on it. It will pull all the posts on the penny fee onto one page for you.

Summer Reading

If you are looking for a good read this summer, I can recommend an excellent memoir:  the RIME of the ANCIENT UNDERWITER (Hobblebush Books, 2012) is sailor Jim Salmon’s account of his 19 month circumnavigation aboard the barque Picton Castle.

Jim Salmon worked as an insurance underwriter for years before a family crisis created an opportunity for him to retire early and go to sea and fulfill a dream to to sail around the world. I have read more of my share of “how-I-sailed-the-world” tales, and was not prepared for such a refreshingly balanced take on an old theme. Jim does not waste much of the reader’s time with describing personality squabbles and the “he-said-she-said” nonsense that has become all too typical of books about expeditions. Instead Jim paints his shipmates from a respectful distance, adding color to the tale but allowing the reader to focus on the places visited and life aboard the ship. In fact, in many ways the barque Picton Castle is the real main character of the book.

The RIME of the ANCIENT UNDERWRITER  is a delightful combination of travel-log, memoir, and description of life aboard a traditional  square-rigged ship. If you are looking for a great summer read, look no further.

Happy 4th!

New Boat Part 20

The hull is done….

Basically we have a little more varnish to do on the transom and we need to seat the centerboard and pivot pin and install the rope fender. For now though we need to shift gears to the Friendship sloop. We have been going over the rigging and the blocks and will soon start the yearly varnishing and painting. When that is done we will return to the Penny Fee. At that point we will be working mostly on accessories.

The finished hull. Look carefully and you will see standing rigging for the Friendship sloop hanging around the shop as we mend the service, redo the blacking and, and overhaul leathering.

Blocks for the Friendship getting an overhaul.

It will then be time to go to work on the oars, rudder, finish the centerboard, make up floorboards, attach hardware, look at making up some spars and a sail.

Gee other than that we are done.

In the meantime, here are some pictures of the finished hull all painted and nearly ready for those last touches and accessories.

If you would like to read all the posts related to this project together, go to the category at the right called “Penny Fee” and click on it. It will pull all the posts on the penny fee onto one page for you.

New Boat Part 19

More painting and the foredeck

With the benches in and the hanging knees in, the main job was painting.  Working in two shifts, we managed to get three topcoats of paint on the entire interior over a week. Each day I would go to the shop early and either do some painting, or more often some prep-work. Then, in the evening after work, we would paint for an hour or so.

Two other projects were going on at the same time; I have been trying to get the centerboard finished up, and getting the foredeck finished.  The foredeck was a design change of my own and was based, originally on three factors. The first factor is that I don’t like and never have liked open bows. The “V” shaped bow area of a small boat is a place where ankles get twisted and people lose their balance; a foredeck largely eliminates this factor. The second factor is quite simply that we want to have storage space and the space below the foredeck will meet this need. The third factor was that when we started this boat, our ship’s wolf, Saxon, was having more difficulty getting from the dinghy to the deck of the Friendship. The foredeck was intended to give her more height and a better, more stable place to stand and jump for the boat. Since she passed away, this factor no longer applies, but it was an important element, when we were making our original design choices.

The foredeck will be installed as one panel, and creating that one panel by laminating pieces together and then shaping it so that it fits snugly where it will be installed has taken a lot of time and head scratching. With any luck I will make the last adjustments and prime it over the next few days.

Dry-fitting the foredeck

The centerboard has been difficult only because of the many coats of epoxy, 4oz fiberglass cloth on the leading edge, and subsequent paint. It is just one of the projects that to date has had eight gluing sessions, three paint sessions, and will have six more paint sessions before it is complete, and the end result will just be a single piece that has a hole in it on which to pivot. It gets more complicated because after four fittings to make sure that the centerboard fit correctly when I went to check it a fifth time, it did not fit. The combination of layers of paint, epoxy and fiberglass has added enough thickness to cause the centerboard to jam. So, I have had to start sanding and removing layers and veneers on the centerboard, and then we will have to start the painting again.

Despite this annoying delay, the painting continues and the foredeck will get glued in this week with the caps for the centerboard well. At this point in the project, it is hard not to work on it. A few minutes spent looking at and enjoying what we have created makes me want to pick up a tool or brush and do just a little bit more, and then a little bit more, and perhaps just this little bit more….

I think this shot and the next show off the shape of the boat well

Just a little more work…

If you would like to read all the posts related to this project together, go to the category at the right called “Penny Fee” and click on it. It will pull all the posts on the penny fee onto one page for you.