Milling my own lumber in the pacific northwest

Building a catamaran designed in Europe while living in the US does present a particular issue.  Since the rest of the world stubbornly refuses to adopt imperial units, I am building this catamaran to SI measurements.  I knew this was coming and already had on hand a metric tape measure. I had to order it since stores here don't stock much of metric anything.

What also is not available in metric units is lumber.  Living in Seattle clear vertical grain douglas fir is easy to find, So I found 5/4" X 6" decking (actual measurement is 1 inch by 5.5 inch) turns out this rips nicely into 5 20X25 mm strips (actualy 20 by 25.4mm). For the 20 X 35 mm pieces I'm planning on using 1" X 2" (actual measure 0.75 inch X 1.5 inch) these will give me pieces that are less than 1 mm too narrow (19.05 Vs 20), but just over 3mm to deep (38 Vs 35).  I will ask Bernd if this is acceptable. I try not to bug him too much. So here are some pictures since that is what is really fun about a blog anyway.

Update: I did ask Bernd and within minutes he had responded that the 1X2 material is OK. See post for how I chose the 660 on Bernd's awesome support.

Not following directions

So I caught a screw up before it became a real mess. But it brought me to thinking a bit more about this process.

Start with the fact that I follow directions only with what seems like herculean effort.  So of course where the directions said to cover all the plywood sheets with 2 coats of epoxy before beginning, I didn't do that. I figured that it would waste a lot of expensive epoxy since a good chunk of the sheet would end up as scrap. So I cut my bulkheads and then applied epoxy. Now I know why the directions were written as they were. Turns out its alot easier to control the epoxy on a large flat surface than on small flat surfaces with lots of edges. So at this point fine, I "learned" once again to follow the instructions right? But then this happened:

I misread the dimension on the drawing for the location of the stringers (treated them as stacked instead of all coming from the CWL). But I already had one coat of epoxy on the bulkhead.  I discovered that it is really hard to mark epoxy covered plywood with a pencil.  So all my layouts would have looked really bad if I had followed the instructions.  And fat smeared marks will surely lead to inaccurate cuts. So for now my plan for the nex ama will be to double epoxy coat one side of the plywood sheet, and use the other to layout cuts. Basically I will split the difference.  

I got all the bulkheads for the first ama cut.  It took awhile because I generally work on the boat in 30 minute increments in between doing other things. I did invest in a Makita track saw and I have to say I love it. It gives you perfectly straight and clean cuts. It cost $400 at home depot, which seemed to have the best price.