Reply To: Ancient fossil

[Jim Chase]

Most of the wood in my sedan is still good but some bits like this aren’t. There is too much rot in the picture frame to fix, and some time in the distant past I think a couple of bows must have been replaced and they cut through the right longeron in two places to remove them. They put the piece back in place and spliced the resulting butt joints with wimpy perforated steel straps with only one screw on one side. Not the best structure! Actually I would like to know how they managed such a clean straight cut with the wood in place! I use a Dremel multi tool to make straight plunge cuts like that.

The finger joints of course are all bad and and there are a lot of them. I think that was done to avoid wasting a lot of wood cutting out the three dimension curve shapes from long straight boards. Years ago my father advised me that finger joints need really excellent tooling to make good structural joints, and probably can’t get there on a one-off hobby level with all the 3 dimensional angles they are cut too on these curved bodies. I plan to use long thick boards (ash) and not break and join them along the length at all. Less complicated and clearly better structure. Function over form.

When I get the new ones cut out I’ll post some pictures – might be awhile!

Jim