Bulkhead 3

Things have been progressing more slowly than I want, but this is due to several extenuating life factors. First, my work takes me on the road for days at a time, and then Im home for a few days where I need to cram in my errands, my personal life, exercise, sleep, etc. To boot, the weather has been fantastic, and I cant justify being in the basement. SOOooooo, during my last time home, I was only able to frame BH3, which is very straight forward because there are no curves. Im back on the road again, and will be for a while.

Once the winter rolls around with its bad weather, this boat is ON.

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!

My big day

Today was quite the day. Im over my cold, as in, I dont feel like super-crap anymore, but my head and chest are still congested to hell and back. However, since Im slowly on the up and up, off to the basement for a little R+R.

Last night I realized that I had beveled the bottom of BH1 in the wrong direction. Today I fixed this by re-beveling it flat, and just leaving it as such until later. If I have to bevel it in the correct direction, so be it. Its only 2mm so its not too tricky.

Second, I found this:

Delamination in the ply on my Starboard bow, inboard. Approximately 4"x6" or so. Nothing on the "mated" side, the Port stern, so Im assuming it is only this piece that has the problem. I sounded it out with a pencil, and Ive got a good idea of its shape. I poured straight epoxy into the hole, then squashed it with bricks.

Third, I discovered this:


Thats my finger pointing at where the bow SHOULD be. OOPS. Im slowly coming along with the dreaded stem, and I went to match the stem to the bow and it came up a couple of cm short. Either my stem was wrong or my bow was wrong. I busted out the lofting map for the sides and for some damn reason, I measured 55mm from the end of the ply to the point of the bow rather than 55mm from the last 300mm mark. Damn, bro, good catch! So I re-marked the bow and cut them anew on both sides. The stem fits perfectly now, with room to spare for the bow knee.

Then, I got gutsy and ripped two of my cedar planks and and scarfed them for the chinelogs:

This is my scarf. Some of you are really going to hate this, but I eyeballed it on the table saw, and then planed them to match. Not perfect, but close enough for this amateur! I used a 1:6 ratio, so that would be 1 1/2" : 9".

THEN, I cut out the buttstraps and glued my scarfed chinelogs and my side together!


Here we are now in the garage. The buttstrap gluing kinda blew, I was by myself and I rushed it. I was sure I put on enough glue, but very little actually oozed out from underneath the straps. Im actually a little concerned I may not have put enough, but maybe I put just the right amount, I tend to go overboard with the glue. So well have to see about this.

Finally, I glued on a little piece of ply for backing on the transom for el rudder. Thats Spanish. That in itself was a mini-adventure, because the ply I chose for it initially starting sliding around after I glued it up on the old epoxy from the frame and the seat cleat. WOOPS. So I pulled it off quick, tore apart the garbage for an old jigsaw blade, and holding the jigsaw an inch above the ply ripped a small piece of one end so it could sit better between the frame and the cleat. Of course I got wood dust all over the backing, and I scraped it off, threw on some thickened epoxy, and called it good. I thought this would have been a simple operation, so I didnt wear gloves and holey moley my hands got sticky.

On a blog-related note, I am deleting the timing scoreboard from the blog. Its beginning to get inaccurate and more difficult to keep up with. Today I did a million things and Im not keen on attempting to figure out what was what. So maybe from now on just a tally total.

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Filling stem gap w a fillet

Yesterday I glued the boat together and was stymied at the end with a gap that had appeared between the sides of the ply and the stem. See picture in previous post. My wife came in and suggested using an icing pipe thing-a-ma-jig, much like many people use ziploc bags. Ive used ziploc bags in the past and found them somewhat cumbersome to use, but most importantly, I really wanted to get epoxy deep into the crevasse to maximize bonding.

So she jigged up a icing pipe and lined it with packing tape so we could re-use it, and then, using the patient steady hand of a culinary expert, she filled in the voids around the stem and made a nice fillet. Damn! What a woman!


In other news, I crawled underneath the stem to cut away some epoxy and saw this:


When I was dry-fitting the boat last week for the first time I heard some ***crack***ing noises, and since I didnt see anything, I figured it was some epoxy somewhere settling or what-have-you. NOPE it was the chine logs right where they abut the stem. Youll notice the taper I put in to give them some room to fit together, and youll also notice where the wood actually separated from itself. The glued face stayed firm to the plywood, which makes me feel like my gluing jobs are satisfactory. Im bummed the wood split, but again, this whole area will be filled with epoxy and all will be good with the world again.

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.

Second Gluing

I just went back and glued on the side arms to BH1. This time it went much better than the first time. First, I used 1 pump of resin to 1/2 pump of hardener. Again, I tried to put it in a ziploc bag, but the whole thing turned into a mess, and I said screw it. So another pump and a half pump into a yogurt container, and I mixed in enough silica to make it thick like peanut butter, and then I spread it over the plywood with a stick. I took the remaining to coat in the inside of the arms. This time, it was much easier to work with. Im relatively pleased this time around, but Im still getting "creep." As in, my side arms are slowing sliding around to where they want to go, not where I set them and want them. Im not screwing my frames into the BH ply, but maybe I should? Theres not real method to the creep, the top and bottom frames crept inward, but my side arms creep outwards. I hover over the entire assembly and readjust as necessary to keep things were I want them. I dont know how else to do it.


What a mess. Again, "mY Fisrt Baot."

Im definitely saving the transom for last.

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.

SUCCESS!

One of my big problems from the dry-no-screw-fit the other day was that I could not suck in the chine logs around BH1 and BH2 enough to easily screw the drywall screws through the ply to hold everything in place. I wrastled and wrastled with it and then the screws pulled out and I almost threw my drill through a window.

Today I put the boat back together for another dry-no-screw-fit again and hemmed and hawed over it with my sister-in-laws husband for an hour or so. We came up with many ideas, like driving eye screws into the chine log and getting a turnbuckle to pull the chines together. Another idea was to join two clamps together underneath the boat and use a block to keep them from sliding forward along the hull... but how to defeat gravity from dragging the clamps down? BEHOLD MY GENIUS:







The above sequence is from starboard to port.

There is definitely a beautiful curve to the bow now that I got it sucked in, the boat looks sublime!


Take note that the boat is resting on three different sized objects so not everything lines up great right now. ALSO my notches in my BHs are too big, except for BH1. Thank goodness for the filling power of epoxy! Its not going to be the neatest boat in the world, but it will work, by Jove!

SO now Im going to mark where things go, and then precoat the panels with epoxy, and varnish the BHs so I can just drop everything in place and not have to sand upside down, etc.