Building the TotalBoat Sport Dory: Episode 29 - Installing the Seat Risers 

How about it! I thought he was going to trim his thumb nail there for a second.

arkansas13 , yes, a great solution alright.

I lost the end tips of two fingers after 25 years of using my table saw. My new rule is push sticks within 3" of the blade !

Not the sign of a master craftsman... bold, careless, reckless, over-confident -- but not the same as good craftsmanship.

Accidents happen most often in the most familiar of situations. It's called unconscious confidence. Lou still has all his fingers so maybe he is more than lucky......grin

Watch closely and you'll see he slows or stops his cut at least four times to readjust his grip and pick up the stick - a good board push tool with solid handles would have let him finish his cut faster with more control over the stock material, and barely any risk to his fingers if something distracted him. Getting your fingers that close to the blade isn't a sign of a master, it is a sign of having been lucky, and I really don't get why so many in society like to uphold ignoring safety standards as some kind of virtue or sign of manliness. I really hope that his luck holds out till he retires completely and stops doing videos, but I also expect Lou could teach a hell of a lot of good lessons on boat building even with both hands tied behind his back.

William Jones Are the folks that are trying to learn from him well aware?

I agree, but who am I to question someone who is obviously a master craftsman. The comment was somewhat tongue in cheek.

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Bad Obsession Motosport calls it card aided design. They use a lot of cardboard...

or Clay Aided Design

An inch is as good as a mile. Regardless of how far away, it's still not touching. Second place, no-matter how you look at it, is still the first loser.

Mazda rx7 slip an inch when you're a mile away, and you're still a mile away. Slip an inch when you're an inch away and you're in trouble. Every single man I know missing a finger, hand, or more due to catching it in equipment was "totally safe and confident with their equipment". For a table saw I find it faster and easier to use a large long base push block right from the start of the cut. I don't have to stop and adjust my grip or pick something up to finish the cut with because I'm already using it.

If you slip, you don't have the right grip. Not everyone has slippery fingers. If you want to stay safe, stay in bed.

If your fingers can touch a saw blade, you were using it wrong... I really don't get the macho "I'm a better man than you because I can't be bothered to use modern tools or practices" mindset that many adopt. My productivity went UP after switching to consistently using push-grips, sleds, fingerboards, etc. I don't have to readjust my grip, I feed material cleanly, and the large hand grips mean I'm less tired at the end of the day. But do go on about how NOT using those tools somehow makes a trades person better or demonstrates more skill. They're not called accidents because you were planning to do them. I can replace stock material if something goes wrong, but replacing my fingers takes more than walking across the room to the store rack.

If you have a firm grip on things and paying attention to what your doing, no problem. Don't try to make a problem where there is none. The guy in the vid is over 60 years old maybe more than 70, I'm well over 50. Having used these and other tools since teen years and still got all our appendages, pretty sure we know our way around tools. Now if your not comfortable with your tools, take all the precautions you like. You never know what might happen, you could be driving home and a train fall on ya.

Howdy Barry, you'll want a good balance of strength and light weight. We just built a nice set of spritsail spars for a Penobscot 14 from spruce, available close to where we live. We laminated the mast and sprit from 2x stock, hollow is extra work for spars that size. Douglas Fir and Southern Yellow Pine (SYP) gets used a lot for masts. And for gaff and boom you might check lumber yards for European spruce or cypress, sometimes they keep it in 2x lengths for custom carpentry, example our Mom and Pop lumber yard carries 2x4 and 2x6. You won't find it at Lowes or HD. That said, with the size of your rig you might peak at the closet rods for gaff and boom, already rounded. 2x4 usually comes from center of tree, so maybe look at 2x6 and there might be better grain orientation (vertical) off to the edge. Buy extra so when you cut a piece and it curls up like a curly fry you can toss it in the scrap pile or make a boat hook out of it. Keep it simple on the sail rig, we went with boomless sprit. The classic rig stems from workboat design which was practical and safe vs a racing rig. We had a balanced lug, twin actually and having booms to duck wasn't our favorite. A sprit has just the mast and sprit, easy to rig, brail or just take down and lay inside the boat when the wind gets up too much. Row when the wind is light then choose a conservative sail plan for when the wind is up. Here is a link to a Wood Selection Guide by Sam Rabl: smallboatrestoration.blogspot.com/2017/09/wood-selection-table-by-sam-rabl-27-sep.html Cheers!

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Terese Duffy I

vettepicking episodes 26 & 27 when he was at the wooden boat show

thanks d miller

Don’t see them all!!

The fence is not parallel with the blade. It's closer to the back side of the blade which is why the rotation is lifting the piece. It's not a dull or gummy blade that usually causes this.

Todd Coutu looks to almost be 4\4. Super solid.

I assume he will chamber the edges too after a small blend-in transition

Boatbuilders generally, have an instinctive cringe reflex against any sapwood showing anywhere in wood stock intended for boat parts. Because sapwood of most species (with a rare few exceptions), will be drastically more prone to rot, and often somewhat less strong, than the heartwood of the same log. I wouldn't presume to answer for Lou on a lot of issues... but on this point I can confidently state: All knowledgeable "traditional" boatbuilders would recoil in horror (or at least disbelief), to see any "live edge" wood parts left in a finished boat. Admittedly this ancient hard-and-fast rule, is of course now being watered down by the advent of penetrating epoxies and related modern high-tech finishes and preservative chemicals. Species that were formerly considered unsuitable for boat work due to rot vulnerability, can now be somewhat protected from such in some applications. Especially if strength-to-weight is the prime concern before all other properties. (E.g., Structural hull parts from Spruce, which was classically only for spars.) But despite Lou's engineering innovations in the bottom structure (and plastic frames!), this is still basically a traditional design in terms of recognizable type/configuration/shape/materials, and the overall aesthetics thereof. So even mere visible sapwood, let alone the full-on live edge style popular in landlubbers' coffee tables, would still stick out here as a glaringly obvious violation of accepted practice.

Makes sense, form follows function!

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There is not too much talking at all, it's called learning from a master shipwright.

The narrative is not the problem; the repetition is.