Seats fitted

The seats are all fitted to the boat. The glue is cured on the supports, the vertical supports have been cut to fit (they will be glued next session) and the seats are in place. The side-arms for BH2 and 4 are cut and ready to be glued. The knees are cut and almost finished. Inwale spacers are cut, the inwales need to be scarfed and theyll be ready too. Things are moving.

Heres a great example why you want to diagram out the dimensions of the front seat per the plans, and then trace something to what youve actually got in the boat before you cut:


Unless youre a very gifted woodworker, of which there are many out there (this is an AMATEUR BLOG, remember?) tracing will be beneficial. The dark black lines are per the plans for the GIS. What you see is what my front seat ended up being to fit in the bow. A little wider up front, very close in the middle, and then wide again in the rear. Ive got a few ideas how this came about, but Im glad I didnt just cut and then try to fit it only to find huge gaps both in the boat and in my wallet as I shelled out 60 bucks for another sheet of ply. This is not a big deal in the end, its truly a slight variation of shape up front, and so it goes.

Heres a few exposures of my beautiful craft as she comes together. Looking good!

Gluing gunwales spacers and BH2 side arms

Ahoy mateys!

Another bunch of small items taken care of over the past few days to share with you.

First up, I decided to bite the bullet and glue those gunwales on. Pretty much the whole show was waiting for this to happen. Ive also decided to delay gluing on the rear seat until I get the rudder hardware. Technically, the rear seat should be glued down along with the front seat, and then the gunwales, and then the spacers at BH4... However, everything fits really nice, and the boat is dialed in really sweet. Id rather just have the space to work with rather than screw around through an inspection port to get my rudder installed.

The gunwales, as you may remember, were already clamped into position and screwed in place to suck them in where need be. I carefully removed the gunwale, left the screws in position in the sides, and coated everything with epoxy. Then, I mixed up a bunch of glue, made it quite thick, and coated it on the gunwale. With the bow end propped up on a bench, I screwed in the stern, and worked my way forward. I then inspected the gunwale for gaps above and below the sheer. The gaps on the underside of the gunwale can only be corrected really with screws. Fortunately I had my can of ply-backed screws nearby, and added a few more per side depending on where they were needed. A line of packing tape kept things nice and clean.



Then, I decided to throw in the side arms for BH2 and 4. It had come to my attention through the Storer forum that the side arms for BH2 are oversized. I had cut mine like the others, and theres not enough gluing area for this high stress location. This was a bummer, because my sidearms were really nicely shaped with a good fit. I whipped out some cedar, traced the old BHs down, and in a few minutes had new sidearms. You can see the difference below.


Tonight, I glued up the starboard inwale spacers. They fit so nice, only a little bit of glue is needed. Some very gentle playing with the clamps and some thick glue and I got every spacer to sit where I wanted it. PHEW. It takes two hands per spacer but theres a definite feel how to get them to stay in position so they dont float.



Heres a nice picture of my boat with her gunwale glued on, and planed to match the ply. Shes looking good!



AND, heres a quintessential boatbuiling pic that I swear was not staged. Clamps, hand planes, shavings, inpsection port, this picture has got it all.

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.

Screwing around with the timer on my camera

Im in the process of gluing the forward seat into place. This will seal the forward water-tight compartment. I have epoxy-sealed the compartment, now I just need to glue the seat down. In a final fitting session, I cut open the hole for the mast and the inspection port. However, I noticed that I needed to push down on the starboard side in order to make contact with the seat cleat. I thought I had everything pretty level but apparently not. Its not much, but to be sure I took pictures from inside the compartment with the seat in place, using the automatic timer on my computer. These were taken before I epoxy sealed the ply.

The bow, notice the faint shadow smudge on the starboard side:


More pronounced in the aft section of the tank:


Nice fit on the port side:


Anyway, neat idea to see what was going on in there. Its not perfect, but close enough. I also slightly angled the seat cleats up from the BHs to the stem in order to facilitate draining so water didnt pool up front, so that may have skewed some things a small amount.

No glue yet, just still fitting and getting ready.

Oar Prototype 1

I lost power and internet for a bit during the big blow the other day, and never posted pictures of the oar. The following day I decided to shape the oar up. Using my plane, block plane, random obit sander, chisel, and wishing that I had a spokeshave, I went to work. In about three hours I got the below product. As you may notice, there is a kink where the blade meets the loom. Also, I screwed up the shaping a bit.



I mean, for a first oar done in three hours, not bad.

The blade is kinked to the loom most likely because each measurement station was taken off the edge of the board as opposed to off a theoretically straight line connecting the two ends. So if there was any deviation in the way the board has been originally cut (most likely) then the oar would reflect that in waviness-- and thats what happened. My next oar measurements will be based off a straight line down the board.

Second, I started shaping the oar without squaring it first. This would have been an easy endeavor, however I was excited to get started and planed the thing into an oval. If I had made sure all 4 sides were square, it would have been a circle.

The grip is also oval, I think it might be rough on the hands. I should not have cut it out in the blanks, and shaped it at a block, that way I could have made it a circle with a 1 1/4" diameter as opposed to the 1" it is now (a little small for me).

In the end, an easy plan, a nice looking oar, its light, and with the pine was easy to shape.

Prototype #2 is in the works. This too, will probably be a scrapper because I already cut out the grip and then realized the advantages of cutting it out when the blank was glued up.

Bottom trimmed centerboard trunk and bat house!

Today was a productive day, the boat went upside down and back again.



My friend Peter ambled over with his router. This, combined with a flush-trim bit for the router, is a fabulous tool at dissolving the extra overlap left over from the over-sized bottom. It was either going to be a hackfest at sawing/planing it off, or this. The router was mucho easy to use, I cleaned up the enter boat in mere minutes. It left a little lip, which was cleaned up by my handplanes. Long strokes parallel to the boat to get it close, and then the smaller block plane held at an angle to the hull to get it finally flush. This took longer but was enjoyable work. The boat got dropped once, and it was not any worse for the wear.

The centerboard trunk components are also all glued up, but in two pieces. They will not be glued together until the daggerboard is complete, and then I can appropriately take the down the spacers inside (made from daggerboard jetsam, hence same width pre-finishing) to match the daggerboard, plus 2mm for a cozy fit. The daggerboard is being worked on on the side... I think I have a tempestuous relationship with the board and Im taking it slowly.


Peter, while he was over, made a three chambered bat house for his own house. Hes hoping to attract a small colony of bats to summer with him in his moist woods. One brown bat will eat 500-1000 mosquitoes an hour (yes, read that again) and a large bat house could contain tens upon tens of bats if not well over a hundred. Thats a lot of mosquitoes that are going to bite the dust. Additionally, bats eat truckloads of insects that attack farmed crops, help in seed dispersal and some species can be key in plant pollination. Bats do not equal gross, bats equal important. In New England (and spreading south!) we are afflicted with "White nose syndrome" which is hacking away at our bat population. The more bats we get, the better off we all are.

Each chamber is 3/4 of an inch. There will be a plastic grated landing zone below the chambers. The box will be painted a dark brown, and affixed on his house. They like it hot, and hot it will get. Bring on the bats!

My gunwales scarf themselves

Thats how I roll. I dont have to scarf my gunwales, theyll do it themselves!

Check my mad scarfing skills:




So I decided to officially scarf my gunwales today, since Im using temporary cheapo cedar to hold the shape of the hull. Last week I milled two .75"x4s (approx) into .75"x2s. Very close to the metric shape called for in the plans, actually, a little thinner and a smaller, but close enough. So I take one gunwale and just for kicks gently bend it around the starboard stern and CRACK!!! it breaks in two. Im a tad perplexed, I didnt even it get it close to boat. So I grab the other gunwale from the 2nd stock, and it bends fine, as does its mate. Now I suspect the wood itself. I pick up the mate from the broken gunwale and ever so gently press it against the floor... CRACK! it splits in two with hardly any pressure what-so-ever on my end. I am dissapointed and perplexed. Its very fine Douglas fir with a nice even tight pattern, but now it would take multiple scarfs to get it to work.

Otherwise, I removed the screws from the bottom, ended up breaking the heads off of three of them, leaving the shafts in the wood (dammit). I also sat her down on the floor to see how she balanced and to enjoy that beautiful rocker. Shes pretty.

Rudder and daggerboard ready to be shaped mast lumber!

Today was a surprisingly uneventful day in the my personal Goat Island Skiff world.  Ive been stumbling around lately trying to get traction on a number of projects, some held up by other projects that needed to be completed.  Two large steps forward happened today.

First:  I wandered into Goose Bay Lumber haphazardly and found 4 pieces of 20 x1x4 finished Douglas Fir boards.  All of them were straight, maybe three knots in the bunch, and relatively nice straight grain to boot.  Just four, all four were good, I grabbed them.  These will be my mast that powers my vessel.  I had them cut to 15 8", since the mast is just a smidge over 15 6" tall, this gives me an inch of "oof" space.  Also, they had a 15" planer, I had my daggerboard, and we fed it into the mouth of the machine.  It spit it out a little thinner, and nice and smooth on one side.  The planer was not a precision machine, and while I can lose 0.75mm, Id rather do that by hand than take out a huge chunk or something.  But it helped.

Second:  I called my bro-in-law and he was home, with his 13" planer.  I strapped my mast bits onto the roof of my sedan in a fashion that screamed "I will impale the person in front of me if you rear-end me" and roared up the interstate to the second planer.  In short order I planed my rudder down to the requisite 22mm and it came out amazing.  Then, away I planed my mast stock down to the 1/2" it needs to be.  Back on the roof with a little less mass and a little more wobbliness and back to my garage where I trimmed the trailing edge of my blades and got them ready for shaping.

 

Heres my mast stock. Hmmmm Hmmm delicious stock.

 

So I need to shape the rudder, to make the rudder box, so I can install the rudder hardware to the boat, so I can finally glue down the rear seat.  Then, daggerboard so I can glue down the centercase.  Then, make the mast, make some spars, and then I can start finishing my boat.  One day, one step, at a time.