Turn That Boat!

Big day today! Went ahead and glued the stringers down with a combination of epoxy glue and screws to hold everything down while it set.

I promptly followed it with that milestone event in every boat's life - The hull flip! Very exciting stuff. Cathy and I turned it over while my daughter took pictures / video

Filling the Holes

Boat was put on hold over the weekend as we went down to Mexico for a nice relaxing trip! (As you can see the Kayaks have yet to be put away!). Interestingly enough while we were down there somebody had a Laser out in the ocean - Definitely made me look forward to completing this project and taking it sailing!
Between last week and this week I removed the zip ties from boat. It as a fairly easy process with the exception of the two zip ties at the forefoot of the bow that did not want to come off. One of them will most likely be ground off when the bow gets rounded. The other I just filled in with fillet material. I did find that the fillet material has a definite working time until the container gets super hot (as in literally smoking hot) and becomes toast. It took 2 batches to fill in all the holes - I made the 2nd batch slightly smaller and spread the fillet material in a thin layer around the inside of the cup so avoid excessive heat build up - That seemed to work. I anticipate one more time with the fillet material to fill in any other small craters after I sand the bumps of this coat.

Let's try this Again!!

Today was a big day for the boat! I attached the side skins on without too much theatrics! For the most part everything went smooth with the attachment, and I have it on and epoxied in place. I had a little bit of a challenge finguring out how to hold the front part against the bow transom since the clamps kept sliding off. I ended up cheating and drilling some additional holes through the side panels and the bow transom and using zip ties. I figured it worked well for the rest of the boat, therefore, it should work well here. There was a small gap at the bow transom where the side skin met the bottom panel which I could not get rid of no matter how much force I put on the zip ties. The good news was it is small enough that the epoxy fillet material filled it in without too many problems.

Talking about the epoxy fillet material... Today I learned that my handy dandy electronic scale that I bought from Cabelas only goes up to 100 g. I found this out as I was weighing the part A and B of the epoxy. Nothing worse than your scale going blank as you are part way adding the second part of the epoxy. I made the decision to toss the whole batch and start again - The fillet material is what initially holds the hull together prior to taping it, and I figured it was not worth having a bad batch of epoxy screw things up. Unfortunately for me the story does not end there. During the whole issue of messing up the 1st batch I accidentally hit the units button on the scale to the point where I had the exact same problem happen again (I thought it was reading 50 grams, but what it was actually reading was 50 dwt (dont ask I dont know) which was pretty darn close to 100 g... and so I had to throw out the 2nd batch! Luckily third time is a charm!!

Now I'm going to wait a good 2 -3 days to let the whole mess set up prior to removing all the zip ties and proceeding with the next step.

It's beginning to look like a boat!!!

O Crap Moment # 2

Ok so if you look at the sequence of pictures you might suspect that something is backwards - well they are not. Couple of interesting things materialized once I attached the side panels. Firstly there is a specific reason as to why the saw horses are located where they are on the plans, and just randomly screwing them to the frame where they fall does not necessarily work! I found that out when I attached zip ties to the bow and saw the huge bow in the wood where it was conflicting with the horses. So after unscrewing the horses and moving them back I tried again. This time everything went well until I got to the point where there was a joint in the side panels. At that point I noticed a 1/2 inch offset between the holes on the side panels, and that on the bottom sheet. Now, Sam @ Third Coast warned me that this was going to happen and I took extra care to mark the panels as I cut them out, but somehow I was not careful enough and must have mis-marked them (I suspect I sanded off the markings when making the grove for the tape and them mislabeled them). When I took them off the boat and stacked them on top of each other, it was plain as day that one was longer than the other. A quick emergency trip to Home Depot and $60 later I had a heat gun in hand to see how well I could take these apart without destroying them! Set the gun to 500 F and amazingly enough the fiberglass tape peeled right off! After a little sanding I began the progress of joining them all over again. And yes, this time I put both panels on top of each other to make certain they were the right length before I joined them together!! Looks like we will try the process of joining the side panels to the boat this Saturday!

Adding the bottom skin

Well things are continuing to progress nicely!

I added 3 coats of epoxy to the portion of the stringers located up by the bow during the week in order to get it ready for the attachment of the hull skin. I also trimmed off portions of the center rail that where adjacent to the bow transom to insure that it would not interfere with the side panels. As you can see I re-covered the whole area in blue tape to prevent any issues with epoxy.

Yesterday I took the day off to go sailing with a friend of mine on his boat so today it was time to get the first part of the hull skinning process going. The skin for the hull consist of4 pieces - 2 bottom pieces and two side pieces. Due to the twist between going from forward to aft, you have to slowly work you way backwards from the bow of the boat and start tying it together with zip ties. I read a couple of other blogs where people complained about the pre-drilled holes being two small to use the bigger zip ties and having to use wire etc to tie everything together. I took a more practical approach and grabbed my drill and just made the hole slightly bigger so I could get the bigger zip ties through them - especially at the bow area. Once I passed the bow I went ahead and drilled every third hole.

Cathy was a saint and spent some quality time in the garage helping me glue the bottom skins to the hull. It was very helpful to have her help thread the zip ties through the holes! Her help was also immensely appreciated while I was initially lining up the bottom skins. Definitely a two person job.

Interestingly enough I read on another persons Paper Jet blog that the bottom skins overlapped the transom by about 1/4 inch - I had the exact same thing happen to me although I would imagine it was closer to 4mm which interesting enough is the same thickness as the bow transom... I wonder if this is a coincidence? All of the bulkheads lined up perfectly with the 400mm stations as specified on the plans... Good news is that this is something that can be easily fixed with a hand plane.

I'm going to let this set up overnight and then hopefully if time allows I'll attach the side skins either tomorrow or in the next coupe of days. I must admit, the black zip ties give the whole thing a bit of a Frankenstein look!

The big day of flipping the hull is coming soon!

Confessions time

Ok - so I have to confess to a couple of snafus so far.

The first one was not too bad and I was able to easily fix. I noticed after I installed the Bow transom that even though I could have sworn that it was on there straight, that it was actually slightly crooked! Good news was that after carefully using one of the larger x-acto knives, that I was able to remove it, and re-epoxy it without to much troubles.

In the process of fixing this problem I noticed a second more serious problem: The dagger board casing was lying slightly crooked along the center line of the boat. I believe that the cause of this problem was the fact that I glued the dagger board casing frames onto the back bone before I had the rest of the boat fully tied down to the building frame. I found that this 4 mm plywood is very flexible and warps very easily which most likely contributed to the problem.

I ended up having to thickness plane some of the left over material that I bought for the dagger board and rudder to be the same thickness as that portion of the dagger board casing that protruded from the backbone. I then cut them to size and screwed them on to both sides of the backbone and on both sides of the dagger board casing to true up the backbone in those areas. Finally I connected both boards with a 2 x 2 that I had run through the joiner to get a nice true surface. After I screwed everything together, I got my handy laser level out to check everything out, and everything appears fair and true.

I'll cover the portion of these extra frames that might get glue on them from the hull skinning process in order to facilitate their removal upon the flipping of the hull. Once the bottom and side skins go on I am pretty confident that the dagger board will stay put and I will remove all this extra bracing.

Foils

Went ahead and unclamped the dagger board and ran it through the thickness planer. Again, a very nice piece of wood. I did find one minor issue: The Poplar is a nice white color on one side, and a nice green color on the other - oops! I guess it will just add character to the boat! on an unrelated note, I guess I need to keep better track of my shop vac when using it for dust collection on the thickness planer. I noticed when I was using it today that it started to kick out sawdust, and that I had little to no suction from the shop vac. When I opened the shop vac it positively erupted out sawdust and wood shavings!

Easter Weekend

Made a little progress this weekend. It was with much anticipation that I finally released the rudder from all the clamps and ran it through the thickness planer to reveal the beautiful contrast between the Mahogany and the Poplar. The thickness planer was a pricey investment but totally worth it! It's hard to tell, but somewhere in there, there is a rudder waiting to come out! Looks like I need another trip to the hardware store to buy a bigger hand planer, and also get a good sanding long board. So the shaping of the rudder is on hold until I do that.

Speaking of planes, I got a chance to use my little block plane to shape the bottom part of the dagger board to match the contours of the bottom of the hull. That and a little sandpaper did the trick. At the same time I released the clamps from the stringers on the nose and attached the forward bulkhead. Interestingly enough the forward bulkhead gives a better idea of the finished dimensions of the hull at the nose.

Lastly, I glued up the dagger board. Once again I dug up my assortment of cans etc. to give a little downward pressure. I'll let it set up a couple of days and release them from the clamps tomorrow.

Next steps will be to add 3 coats of epoxy to the stringers and get ready to start adding the bottom and side skins to the boat. Exciting stuff!

Rudders & Dagger Boards!

I decided that it's time to start on a parallel track with the foils. All this waiting around for epoxy to dry and set gives me plenty of opportunity to work on these! Today I went to our local Woodworkers Source and bought some African Mahogany and some Poplar ($50 dollars worth!). I have cut these down into 3 separate strips for each foil which I will epoxy together. The contrast between the Mahogany on the outside and the Poplar in the center should look pretty cool.

In the picture, under all those cans is the rudder! If you look carefully you can actually make out the "racing" stripe under the wax paper. Once the glue sets up for a couple of days I will go ahead and release it out of the clamps and get the dagger board glued up. Once both boards are ready, I'll clean up some of the excess epoxy with a hand plane, and run both boards through the thickness planer. Dagger board will be slightly bigger than 5/8" and the rudder will be slightly bigger than 1/2". This will give me some wiggle room when shaping the foils.

Stringers Part II

As predicted - not a lot of progress these past couple of days. Tonight I glued the front end of the stringers to the backbone. Lots of twist involved to get it to line up (The C clamps aft of the backbone and are zipped tied together to take the strain of the twist). This will definitely be a minimum 2 day set up to make sure things are good and solid prior to releasing the clamps.

Tomorrow I'm going to go buy the hardwood for the dagger board and rudder. That will give me something to do when I am waiting around for the epoxy to set up at different stages of the build