Gluing down the bottom

After gluing together the hull, I came to several decisions, one of them being that gluing is a pain in the ass.

Yesterday I glued down the bottom, and yes, gluing is still a pain in the ass. So much so, that I swore off building another glue-only boat next time, that Ill take fasteners thank you very much, this sucks!

This morning, when I peeked into the garage at my nemesis glue-job-boat, my heart softened a bit, and I feel a little better. But I came close-- In my mind I saw a big bonfire at one point.

Yesterday I smoothed out the seam between the two bottom pieces, scoured the chinelogs and BHs with a rasp to provide a rough gluing surface, planed the transom flat, and screwed the bottom down in place. This took a while, and I was so concerned getting it on straight that it went on straight, but offset by about 2mm or so. I realized this after I screwed it on. This is not a big problem, theres supposed to be a gap of 90mm between the buttstraps for the daggerboard trunk, and I left 95mm for just this scenario. Storer recommends placing the bottom on with the centerline marks on the inside, to line up with the centerline marks on the BHs. A good idea, but then I would lose out on the markings up top that showed where the edges of the boat were (bottom is overcut by 2omm) and they provided a good guide as to screw placement. A better idea would be to have a centerline on both sides. Needless to say, lots of crawling under the boat and back, and shifting the ply ever so slightly.

Screws were placed every 300mm (lines from lofting) and along the BHs (3 for 1+2, 5 for 3, 4, transom). This was insufficient as you shall see later on.


After the bottom was screwed on I made special note of where I had some larger than normal gaps between the bottom and the sides. In these areas I would apply extra glue. Everything appeared tight and for the most part, everything fit together really well. I was impressed.

Next up, I unscrewed the bow of the boat, lifting it with 2x4s. After pre-coating the chinelogs and bottom with unmixed epoxy (more crawling around under the boat), I applied what I thought was copious amounts of glue, using the ziploc-bag method which I still dont like, but it seemed to make the most amount of sense. Mixing the glue with the silica is still a bear, I still dont know how to judge how much silica to add so I eyeball it until I get the appropriate consistency. This takes time. Then, the application. 3 pumps of resin with 1.5 pumps of hardener covered approximately- maybe- 4 feet. Hardly anything. This was going to take a lot of glue.

I moved down the line, sending the 2x4s down to the stern and gluing and screwing in their wake.

(notice me mixing always mixing more mixing in background with knee pads that didnt come off between 10am and 11pm)

I think I made 3 moves aft, covering large sections at a time. The port bow had a little bit of a gap between the bottom and the side, and needed even more glue. This was going to take a lot of glue, as I mentioned before. This is when I started getting frustrated. When I put too much glue during the BH construction phase, it poured out all over the place and was a giant mess. Now, I was putting large amounts of glue onto the chinelogs and when the bottom came down, nothing. No excess squeezage, nothing. Let me just say this: Gluing the bottom takes a lot more glue than you think it will.

About halfway down, I realized I forgot to line the sides with packing tape to ease clean-up. SOB. So I had glue dripping down around the bow, which means Ill be sanding forever. Out came the packaging tape around the aft sections and the transom. By this time my wonderful wife took pity on me and she applied the glue while I mixed it. This doubled the speed of the operation, since mixing takes a long time-- at 3 pumps of resin per bag, there was a lot of mixing to do. She has a knack for how much glue to apply and when we screwed down her end, a perfect amount squeezed out. Damn.

With all the screws down (she held up the stern bottom and gently lowered it as I screwed it down moving aft), we inspected for a gaps. There were a couple small ones along the chine, and a few gaps that needed more screwed to hold the ply down. I would recommend a screw every 200mm at least, as opposed to every 300mm.

Then we flipped her over:






Hot damn, I have a completed hull (above pics are after the "clean-up" (used loosely)).

Clean-up was a super pain in the ass, by this time a lot of my squeegees were gluey and tacky and my rags were used up and I was running out of mixing cups and no matter how many new gloves I put on, I was sticking to everything. Some glue was firming up nice, which meant a struggle to clean it up as is smeared everywhere. Be ready to spend some serious time bent inside the boat cleaning it up. My glue station aftermath:

This took me a few hours of prep, followed by about 7 hours of gluing/cleaning up. Solo, it was slow going, no doubt.

The bottom is still not done, I have to trim the excess off, which will be another pain because its covered in rock-hard epoxy, but as far as Im concerned, the big jobs in this are completed. From now on things can be accomplished in short spurts as opposed to 12hr marathon sessions. Thank goodness. Im tired.

Did I mention this takes a lot more glue than you may think?

Small progress daggerboard gunwales mast step partner

Ok!

I continue to slowly progress on the boat. I am really stymied by the fact that its been all of 0 deg. F (-18 C) here at the house for quite a bit now. The garage has been holding temperature at just under freezing. Im not interested in doing major epoxy sealing work in these condititions because: a) its cold, b) the epoxy thickens and is difficult to spread.

However, I can do small spot gluing jobs. For instance, I installed the mast step and partner yesterday:



My Step was placed in first (obviously) as a whole piece, as in the 6mm ply backing was already glued in position. The fit was relatively tight, but not perfect because my BHs are not exactly perfectly parallel along the bottom. Im talking a few mms here, but still. Anyway, when you drop something into a tight spot to be glued, pay attention as to how youre going to place it in and glue those places accordingly. To clarify: Dont put the glue on the location that is going to get scraped by the incoming piece, put it where it will be squeezed in so the glue remains.

The partner went in nice and simple, except I dropped it on my heater fan. My partner deviates from the plans as in it is two pieces, with the bottom piece extending underneath the seat cleat on BH2. This is for stability issues, I could twist the top of the BH with my hand. This partner makes it very burly.

Notice my heater and my brick compression system. Its a $12 heater I bought at Lowes. With a plastic sheet, temps went up quick.

Next up I screwed the gunwales into place. I didnt want to necessarily do it, but its almost essential.

The next picture illustrates a non-screwed gunwale. Basically, the flare from the sides of the boat in the stern and amidships is translated to the gunwale to the bow, where there is minimal flare, the sides are relatively straight. Only muscling the gunwale with my hands could I make contact. Not conducive to gluing, as you can imagine.

Storer (el designero) promised that screwing the gunwale would pull it in. I had doubts and didnt want to deal with it, but I tried. Working from the stern forward, I placed one screw in the stern, two amidships, and two right in the bow area where the twist was most apparent. I used the 1 1/4 screws with the ply pads from the bottom screwing event.

SOB, it worked:


Nice and tight, all pulled together. This makes me happy. All ready for gluing. Screws were hidden underneath the areas where I am going to place my inwale spacers. Speaking of spacers, all of them are cut, and I have marked where I will be adding them. I started at the seam between the two pieces of ply for the sides, one will join them at the top, then one will be place next to each BH sidearm, with BH3 sidearms getting two small ones on either side due to the fact that it does not meet the side near the top. Re-enforcements, if you will. I need 52 spacers for this scheme.

Next up, I glued my daggerboard together.


I precoated the sides to be glued, then made a thin epoxy mix with the filler, not too much since the wood had been run through the joiner. The typical GIS clamp scheme as seen below:

And were off to the races! Looking good. Looking good.

She arrives, one step at a time boys, one step at a time.

The hardest rowing challenge he could think of

When it comes to challenges of any kind, the enormity of the challenge is depends on the individual as well as what it actually involves. If youre rowing an ocean, the challenge is pretty much built in: theres no such thing as "taster" ocean. That said, the Pacific Ocean is a heck of a lot bigger than the others: I mean, you can position a globe so that its all you can see. But when my friend John Beeden, who already had an extremely fast (53 days) solo crossing of the Atlantic under his belt, was planning his Pacific crossing, he deliberately sought a route that was proper hard.


How to make a hard thing harder
First of all, he decided to row mainland to mainland, rather than make use of any offshore islands that still technically constitute an ocean crossing (my own Atlantic row, for instance, was from the Canary Islands to Barbados – not a mainland in sight). This may sound like just a couple of hundred miles more, but the extra distance isnt just any couple of hundred miles. Continents sit on shelves (please bear in mind I dont even have an O-level in geography), or something like that. This makes the edge of the ocean thats on top of the shelf relatively shallow. The wavelength of waves coming in from deep water gets shorter when it gets shallower (I DO have an O-level in physics). And short waves are a pain to row in. Its bad enough near islands and their small shelves, Proper mainlands are way worse. And then there are the onshore currents and winds, which can be either permanently unhelpful or swirly and unpredictable. Not sure which is better. Or worse.

Then, he decided to do it across the Equator. Again, this might sound a bit arbitrary, but it meant that he would have to get through the "Inter Tropical Convergence Zone" (ITCZ – remember that, it will come up later), commonly known as the doldrums, that spans the Equator, and features crazy currents and wild winds as well as really extreme heat.

And thats why John set off from San Francisco on the West Coast of the United States on 2 June 2015, around my bedtime, bound for Cairns, on the West Coast of Australia, 7,020 statute miles away as the crow flies, with not a chance of taking that direct route.

"Go."

What happened?
In the fine tradition of The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy which reduced all of the detailed reports, graphs, and data that Ford Prefect submitted about the planet Earth to "mostly harmless", Ill summarise: he made it. 208 days later, after travelling 8,829 statute miles, landing on 27 December, exactly where he intended, albeit somewhat later.

Seven months. In a 6m-long, 159cm-wide (at the widest point) boat. Thats a metre longer than my Volvo V70. And slightly narrower. And whilst I can pack a good deal of grocery shopping into the car, I dont think I could get 28 weekly shops into it. And thats just the toilet roll...

You can read about each of Johns incredibly arduous journey, including the 22 soul-destroying (well, it would be for most of us) days when he was blown backwards away from cairns including one ghastly stretch of eight solid days during which he lost 217 nautical miles (396 km), in his blog.

So when I caught up with John once hed started the process of "re-entry" to normal life (actually, he was on a business trip already), I made sure I didnt ask him to repeat any of the things hed taken so much care to write about, or ask the obvious ocean rowing questions like "What did you eat?", "Did you anchor when it was stormy?" and, of course, "How did you go to the toilet?", the answers to which will be familiar to the well-informed readers of this blog.

Instead, here are some insights into the mindset of a man who not only thought up this incredible challenge, but also achieved it.

Q. What were the standout memories?
A. Crossing the equator was a big day, being only the second person to reach the equator from north America was a big deal. It also made me think I could get all the way. The other big memory is making it through the ITCZ  which was such a difficult process, rowing 28 hour stints to break free of swirling currents, dealing with the heat and equatorial convections.

Q. How did you get through the sheer difficulty of it all?
A. I think it was a day by day process, writing the blog actually was a good release, it cleared away the days negativity. There is a point in the blog at which I stopped looking at the trip as a whole and it became a daily challenge to get the best out of the individual day. I was a true example of living in the moment, the day, the hour, the mile, the stroke.

[I didnt ask John whether he had studied the recently-popular concept of mindfulness or whether he just worked this out for himself. I suspect the latter.]

Q. You’re a lean runner at the best of times, but by the end of the trip you had very serious muscle wastage, pretty much all over and especially on your bum. Do you think you will suffer any long-term physical side-effects from the trip?
A. I lost 17lb, ending up about 10/11lb under my normal weight. I actually gained upper body weight but my legs (surprisingly) and behind changed substantially. Running has been difficult since I returned [Note: he went for his first run on 30 December. Im not sure if this is actually more incredible than his 209 days at sea] he and until I rebuild the muscle will remain so. I also managed to damage my Achilles tendon after 10 days or so, this is now healing well but holding me back. Long term I don’t expect any real issues.

"Plump" is not a word that the judges of the "Rear of the Year" award would use about Johns backside when he landed.

Q. How many pairs of shorts did you get through? [a question prompted by the saggy look of his shorts in the above picture]
A. I only wore clothing for about three weeks, I then packed all my clothing away and just pulled out a shirt and shorts for the big finish. [Serves me right for asking.] I did wear through five sheep skin seat covers though. [Stop press: Mans bare bottom proved tougher than small flock of sheep.]

Q. Ginger Nuts were mentioned frequently in your blogs with enthusiasm and later wistfulness (when they were running out). How many packets did you eat?
A. 82.
[Respect.]

A true fan.

Q. I know your family and friends kept you informed about important stuff from the outside world by satellite phone message during the row [including F1 race reports from one of his daughters]. Have you had any instances of things being referred to since you’re back where you’ve gone “hey, WHAT?”?
A. Not so much news but a lot has changed. Nearly everything I do on my laptop now has updated software layouts, and my online banking sites are totally different. It’s been a nightmare trying to do anything, updating and finding my way around new layouts and navigation.

And finally.. Wit amidst weariness
The video below was shot as John was approaching Cairns harbour: a local journalist is interviewing him as he rowed. The bit I particularly love is where the journalist asks "How are your emotions?", a fairly reasonable question as someone approaches the completion of such an utterly epic and unprecedented challenge. In similar situation, interviewees might, with justification, use words like "overwhelming", "incredible", "fantastic". And what does John, a native of Sheffield, say? "Im from Yorkshire so Im not very emotional." Not only is it quite clearly true, but dont you just love his quick thinking to come up with that when hed only had seven hours sleep in the previous 90. Cracking, lad.

Photos © John Beedens Blog on solopacificrow.com, with permission.

Seat cleats gluing daggerboard

Ok my pretties:

Today I decided to start gluing again after a long hiatus. My back is good enough now that I can bend into the boat now if Im really careful. We had a couple days where the temps were above freezing by a few degrees, so the garage temperature came up as well. With a well placed $12 heater from Lowes, I glued up the seat cleats for the bow, center, and stern seats.

This was another typical gluing disaster, messy and sticky. The bow went first. I decided to use two screws to get the side cleats into position, the ply-leverage method is a good one, but I didnt need the added stress of a cleat swimming out of position. Two 1 1/4" drywall screws and I knew nothing was moving. Youll notice that the vertical post has yet to be glued, Im waiting for everything to harden up so I can just get an accurate measurement.


Afterwards, I threw some plastic over it to make a heating tent thing. Very rudimentary, but quite effective.


Next up was the stern seat cleats. You may notice the bricks holding down the cleat along the floor. I did not use fasteners for this one, or its mate in the bow. Alternating the bricks supplied the weight and kept it from sliding around. Also, two screws per side cleat.


I did get some small gaps along some cleats, but when I pour glue all over them for the seat fitting, these will fill adequately. These are not necessarily structural, though they hold the seat which through its fillet along the side will be, but theres enough glue there. Also, no water gets in here anyway. Or put another way: If water gets this watertight compartment, Im really screwed anyway.


AND FINALLY

Ive started on working on something other than the hull. The daggerboard/centerboard and the rudder. Technically, its a daggerboard. Storer and others likes to use the word "foils" which I guess it correct, they are foil shaped, as in airfoil, but Ive never heard that term before, ever. Its always been "blades." So Im sticking with blades. Maybe its a New England thing.

I ripped up my 5/4x6" cedar planks to strips between 1-2". My bro-in-law is making a cherry countertop for his renovated kitchen. I was welcome to the scraps. So my daggerboard has cherry leading and trailing edges, with a middle spice-it-up stripe. The rudder, whose stock is not complete due to wood lackage, will most likely get two strips, for and aft, though I really would like a center stripe to match. This blank was also joined, as in, I used a joiner. Tight. I really went all out for this one!