Still Planking, Part 2

The days are getting longer, the shop is getting warmer, and the boat is getting heavier. Only a few more planks to go.



It is getting pretty cozy underneath the boat. Jamie recently went out and bought us some Christmas lights to hang up inside. The mood lighting is nice. I'll have to get a late night picture for the next post. We also have a new team member, Dylan, so there are 4 of us now.

The planking is getting a little more aesthetically tricky. Now that we are getting to the very end, we are running out of room for the plank edges to run. We are constrained by where the last plank was placed and where we know the final plank must go. We want a nice fair curve that results in a plank that starts wide in the middle and ends up skinny at the ends. It shouldn't go from wide to skinny, then back to wide again, which is known as fishtailing. We are running a delicate balance in the front end of the boat between having a fishtail or having a sheer line (that final plank line) that is too flat (i.e. not fair... i.e. ugly). This is the kind of stuff you don't learn from a book or a two week boatbuilding course. You have to build the whole thing. Now I know to pay a lot more attention in the lining off phase (you can read more about that on a prior post... we took our best shot, but we didn't know the implications... now we do).

Now a little shout out for my IBM compatriots (** geek alert **)... this planking stuff has all sorts of opportunity for lean manufacturing. I'm constantly doing tact time calculations on the process and finding tombstones. There were 3 of us working on a process that takes 1 person about 1 week/plank. We should be able to do 3 planks/week then right? Our average for the last month and a half has been 2, an output that would have any mfg manager breathing down my neck (our managers are pretty lenient here.... probably has something to do with our pay scale) Now that we have an extra person, our potential goes up to 4 planks/week, but this potential is mitigated by the reality that we can only work on 2 planks at a time on the boat (one on each side). But there is plenty of work that one can do on a plank before you get to the boat (see Planking! post from last Dec.) It is the classic case of 4 rowers going at a steady pace being able to go faster than 4 at different paces. We'll see how it turns out. I wonder if the IMEC conference would accept a paper on this.

In other news, I met Nicole out in the White Mountains for some snowshoeing. We climbed Mt. Madison on a beautiful Feb. day. The views were fabulous, although the wind was a little rough. Nicole didn't like her crampons very much.