Wing Leading Edge Part Deux

So I figured that once the wing leading edge blanks were done it would take all of 5 minutes on the table saw to cut the compound angle and get it ready to go. Boy was I wrong! First after racking my brains for 3 hours, making a jig and trying things fifteen different ways I cam to the sad conclusion that my little Ryobi Portable Table saw was not up for the task. It has a sliding tray on left side of the blade for making miter cuts, and no way to make miter/angle cuts on the right side. Combined with the fact that I have a right tilting blade vs. a left one made it impossible to make the cut.

In steps David from work. He has a full woodworking shop in his garage and I figure he can do it easy - 5 minutes tops!! Well it actually took closer to 2 hours to get everything figured out and get the saw set up to make 2 acute compound miter cuts!

I then took the cut blanks home and proceeded to trim and sand them so the would have a good solid fit to the side of the boat. After both sides were fitted I marked the location of the second cut to make it flush with the wing. It's interesting to note that the 750mm minimum length for the blank made it with very little extra to spare!

I finally made one more cut to the outboard end of the rabbited portion so that it was perpendicular to the wing so that it would space for me to glue up the wing support beam.

Next step will be to flip the boat and glue the wing tips and wing support beam!

Wing Leading Edges

Once the epoxy fully set up on the boat I decided to start finishing the wing leading edges. First I cut the rabbits on the back side with the dado blade. Next step was to shape the "airfoil". On the plans there are a couple of suggested cut lines to make the process easier, therefore, I grabbed the protractor and a scale and measured the two different angles of the cut and also the resultant width at the end of the tip. I set the table saw up to cut the angle and ran the pieces through twice in order to cut the two different angles. Its always a little uncomfortable (as in nerve wracking) when you work with the fence on the opposite side of the table saw and you have the blade way high and at an angle. For safety's sakes I made sure I fully understood how I was going run the blanks through prior to turning on the saw. The resultant was a pretty close facsimile to the final shape.

After the blanks where cut out I used a combination of my hand plane and long board sander to sand the tips to the final shape. Next step will be to cut the compound angle in both blanks so that it interfaces correctly with the hull.

Blank set up in a jig to hold it while planning/sanding

The Finished Product!

More Epoxying

Cathy came through for me one more tine as we applied 2 coats of epoxy to the boat today. Looks good! Its amazing how pretty the okume plywood is with just a clear coat of epoxy!

I will work on the wing tips next as I give the boat a couple of days to fully cure prior to flipping it to work on finalizing the wing structure.

Lots Accomplished!

The past few days I have gotten a fair amount of different tasks accomplished. I stopped by the lumber store and picked up some Mahogany, Poplar and Cedar so that I can start working on the gunwale trim, the wing tips, and the trim pieces for the wings. I had never used Cedar before and I was amazed as to how light it was compared to the board of Mahogany that I bought! I have a good friend of mine at work that does a lot of woodworking and he compared it to being a notch above balsa wood! (A little exaggeration, but not much!). I spent a fair amount of time milling and ripping the wood into the required dimensions and ended up emptying my shop vac a couple of times from all the sawdust generated from the milling operation required to get the wood to the correct thickness. Its great to have the right tools for the job!

Next step was to glue up my wing leading edges blanks. I ended up making a composite of Cedar and Poplar for the main portion. My intention was to use strictly Cedar, but the piece I purchased was not big enough and Home Depot was a lot closer than Woodworkers Source. In order to make the 40mm thickness I ended up gluing a 19mm piece of Cedar to two 11mm pieces of Poplar (Yes thickness planing an 18mm piece of Poplar down to 11mm makes a lot of sawdust.

 I let it set overnight and this AM I used the joiner to clean up the epoxy and true the face of the wood for the second glue up operation. I measured the thickness of the glued up beams and noticed I it was 43mm thick, therefore, I used the joiner one more time to reduce the thickness to 40mm.

Next step was to glue on the Mahogany nose piece and let it set up.

After keeping my wife happy by taking care of some much needed yard work I decided to tape up all the  seams on the deck. In Dudley's instruction he has you taping up the wing and deck seams, doing a bunch of additional work, then coming back and doing the nose and sloping panel seams. I decided that I might as well knock them all out at once. My goal is to let the epoxy set up and then put a couple of coats of epoxy on the deck surface prior to flipping it over and working on finishing the wing.

Layout Out the Fiberglass Tape

Seams Taped and Epoxied

Since the temperature is finally dropping around here I went onto System 3's website and ordered the fast hardener for their laminating epoxy. When I ordered the epoxy from Dudley he had recommended the slow hardener due to the extremely hot weather we have here in the summer time, but after all was said and done I really did not work on the boat in the heat of the summer so I really should have ordered the fast hardener. Live and learn!

Starboard Wing Deck and more

I cut the new wing beam down to the correct size, put a couple of coats of epoxy on it and installed the starboard wing deck without any fuss.

I clipped out the zip ties and finished filleting the gap between the sloping deck and the wing deck. Once everything dried I went through and removed all staples that I had used to hold the decks in place while they where setting up. That ended up scarring the wood a little bit around the staples as I had to somewhat dig them out. No worries though since there will be no bright work on the deck and I used a little epoxy filleting material to fill in the holes!

I also went ahead and started to sand down the fillets that along the deck/sloping deck interface and also the upper deck to start getting it prepped for the installation of the fiberglass tape along the two deck seams. I am spending a little time on this since this is going to be visible and I don't want void under the fiberglass tape. I also added some extra filleting material to the rear starboard portion of the stern transom to fix a small issue of "Squareness"

Tomorrow it will be time to sand some more!

Port Wing Decks

This afternoon I decided to tackle the installation of the wing decks. I started by taking out by taking the hull out of the garage and into my driveway so that I could blow out all the dust etc with the air compressor prior to the final step of closing in the hull. Afterwards, I removed all of the zip ties tying the sloping deck to the deck, sanded the fillets, filleting the areas by the zip ties, filled in the zip tie holes and finished by filleting the sloping portion of the forward section of the sloping deck panel to the hull. I also went ahead and epoxied the stern mound in place. Once this was done I drilled the holes for the zip ties on both of the wing decks and sloping panels and epoxied the port deck to the wing beams.

I then turned my attention to the starboard wing beams to try and figure out the solution to my one wing beam misalignment issue. I thought I was going to be able to re-align the existing beam and epoxy it back to the starboard sloping deck, but no matter what I tried it was not going to work. Looks like even with all the care I took with the my long level back when I installed them, the weight of the level acting on the bendy plywood caused it to be at an incorrect angle once I took the level off and the hull sprang back. Once I figured that out I decided to cut it out and install a new one.

Good news is that my harbor freight vibrating saw that I picked up for $50 a while back came in super handy and paid for itself by being able to cut out the wing beam without damaging the hull and without any theatrics. All I had to do was put the blade flat against the hull and let the saw do its job. I cut both the inboard and outboard sides out and then popped out the pine wafer that was left and I was back where I started! Pretty nifty tool!

I went ahead and epoxied a new beam in, making sure to double check the alignment with two sets of levels! (Cathy is doing a fine job of modeling it for me!)

Tomorrow I'll put a couple of coats of epoxy on the new beam prior to installing the starboard wing deck.

Port Sloping Deck

This morning I tackled the installation of the port sloping deck. I went ahead and clamped the board to the wing beams similarly to the starboard one. After everything was trued up I decided to set my long level on the inboard side of the wing beams to check for trueness. Much to my surprise I found out that even though everything was nice and true at the outboard side, one of the "floating" (as in not attached to a bulkhead) wing beams needed to be trued up on the inboard side also. I did this by adding the level/clamp combo as shown in the picture.

Of course I figured I better check the port side and much to my dismay I found out that one of the "floating" wing beams was out of alignment! So - out came by handy little backsaw and I cut the glue joint out! (In the process I also managed to do a number on my finger nail! ouch!) Tomorrow, once the port side is all nicely set up, I am going to grab all my clamps, board, etc and fix this errant wing beam. I am glad that I checked this ahead of time. It could have turned into a real mess if I found out the problem as I was installing the wing deck panels.

As far as I can tell the root cause of most of my alignment problems has been the extremely bendy nature of of 4mm plywood and its propensity to warp. My next boat project (The Aviateur) will be made out of 9mm plywood. I'm hoping not to have similar problems on that particular project!

While I was at it I also filleted the backside of the stern mound and added a couple of small pieces of plywood to the bow of the boat to fix another interesting alignment problem where the gunwales are about a 1/4 inch higher than the bow transom.... (I did notice that another builder had this exact same problem...)

This afternoon I went ahead and put the first coat of epoxy on the wing deck panels, and on the inside of the stern mound. I was going to finish up the dagger board, but decided to forgo the sawdust bath (Apart from that the afternoon heat did not provoke me to go out there and sweat!)

Dagger Board

While the starboard side panel was setting up I decided to tackle the dagger board. It was pretty much the same drill as the rudder with the exception that it was wider and longer which required more time behind the table saw and more time behind the belt sander / long board sander.

I did have to get my Dad's old HP 11c scientific calculator to do a little math to figure what the ultimate length needed to be so I wouldn't cut too much off the "blank" when I was cleaning up the edges.

I got the

leading edge on both sides planed/sanded, now I just need to go and tackle the trailing edge.

I was surprised to find out that all those little kerfs make the hardwood extremely sharp to the point that it permanently marred the painted finish on my table saw! (A little bummed about that).

I did notice that the dagger board has a slight bend in it. I'm going to do a little research online to see how to best fix that. I'm thinking that I just need to get the bend to relax long enough to let me put the fiberglass/epoxy on it. I'm pretty certain that once that is on there it will keep the shape.

Sloping deck and stern mound

Today I installed the starboard sloping deck panel. I decided to do the starboard & port side separately since I wanted to make sure that the wing beams where correctly lined up prior to the installation, and I only had the one piece of straight poplar that was long enough to do the job. Nothing to exciting to report as it actually was pretty straight forward. I drilled matching holes on the deck / sloping deck panel and loosely zip tied them together ahead of time.

I applied a good coat of epoxy on the bulkheadsand stringers and then laid the deck on it. I stapled the panel onto the stringers and cleats, and then tightened up the zip ties. Tomorrow I will do the port side.

Since I had plenty of time I also went ahead and started work on the stern mound. It took a little sanding to get everything lined up, but it should look pretty good. I guess those scuba weights can come in handy once in a while!

Time to put on the deck

Well, Cathy came through for me one more time and helped apply the second coat of epoxy to the inside of the hull and deck floor on Monday. I followed this up on Tuesday by tackling the first part of the deck installation. I started the process by carefully locating the daggerboard slot on the deck floor and undercutting the opening about 1/4 inch in all 4 directions. I sanded down the deck cleats with my nifty long board sander that has the vacuum hose attachment (It works great - you don't have to clean up the sanding dust mess after your done!), and laid on a thick coat of epoxy glue. I carefully installed the deck floor on-top and made sure it was aligned prior to stapling the flooring the cleats. For good measure I added clamps at the rear end of the boat.

During the deck installation two things popped up:

1. the daggerboard locker alignment is about 2 mm off center. I'm pretty sure this has something to do with my previous issues that I had with the alignment (see older posts for details). I'm confident that I can overcome this with the

installation of the small wooden blocks that will align the daggerboard inside the daggerboard locker. The good news is that the daggerboard is 15 mm thick, and the locker is 20mm. this should give me enough play to align everything up perfectly and get it true to the hull.

2. There was a bit of a gap between the deck floor and portions of the bow sections. I fixed this by wrapping a tie down around the nose of the boat to bring the hull in contact with the deck floor, and by laying a thick coat of epoxy at the joint. I followed this up today with the filleting

epoxy which I will let sit for a couple of days.

Finally I got the first coat of epoxy on the underside of the side deck panels today. I'm hoping to get the 2nd coat on tomorrow and install them on Friday. I'm still pondering how to line up the wing beams correctly for the gluing operation. More to follow!

First Coat of expoxy

Cathy and I spent a couple of hours getting the first coat of laminating epoxy on the inside of the hull and the bottom of the main deck panel. I mixed batch after batch of epoxy and she used a small foam roller to epoxy the inside of the hull. After she got the bottom of the hull and sides epoxied she used the roller to epoxy the back bone and bulkheads while I used the brush behind her to catch the areas she couldn't reach and also to make sure that the bottom of the deck cleats got a coat of epoxy also. Took a little longer than anticipated plus the weather is back on a warming trend! Again my wife ROCKS!

The inside of the boat looks a lot more uniform with everything epoxied. One more coat to go before I start joining the deck to the hull!

Prepping the hull for the deck

Today's effort revolved around sanding all the bulkhead / backbone cleats so that they were good and fair so the deck would lay down flat. I also went ahead and filleted the rear 45 degree wing / deck support in place along with adding the final cleats on the transom.

It's worth noting that I have a little strange issue going on between the height of the gunwale, the top of the wing / deck supports (same height as the gunwale) and the top of the transom

(1/8 below). I had noticed that the top of all the bulkheads adjacent to the wing where about an 1/8 inch below the gunwale level, but had not paid too much attention to it since the wing gets attached to the wing beam which I installed level with the gunwale. Once you hit the transom there is a noticeable gap. In order to combat this I went ahead and glued the transom cleat at an angle so that it is flush at the inboard end of the wing, and at wingbeam/gunwale elevation where it matches up with the 45 degree beam. It will create a small gap once I glue the deck on, but it will be filled fairing compound when I start the finish on the boat.

I went ahead and dry fitted the deck panels to the boat to check fit. Looking good!

My wife is a saint!

Well I convinced my wife once more to give up her coveted parking spot in the garage for a few weeks so I could get going on the boat again. Sunday I set the boat cradle back up and with the help of my wife took the boat down from the garage ceiling and got back in business!

1st step is to get the last 45 degree wing supports installed. This was something I was dreading at first, but turned out to be pretty easy. I got the slots cut out, the supports glued in and while I was at it I also glued in a couple of missing cleats on the bulkheads.

The plan for the weekend is to make sure the deck lays completely flat by sanding the cleats on the bulkheads then it will be time to give the interior of the hull a good sanding and give it two coats of epoxy along with the bottom of the deck. This will get it ready for joining the deck to the hull.

Let's build a Rudder!

Ok, nothing too much has been going on in the boat building realm due to the fact that it's been too oppressively hot to do anything in the garage. Also, I'm not sure that working with epoxy when it's over 100 degrees outside is the smartest thing!

Well finally I decided to get back on the project and work on something that is small and easily manageable in small doses so I decided to start working on the rudder. First things first - I went to home deport and bought a new 60tooth fugro saw blade for my table saw.

I photocopied the template for the rudder, cut it out, and glued it onto one end of the board I had previously glued up. I started the process by cutting kerfs at 1/8" intervals on both sides of the board using the glued template as a guide.

Once it was cut I started by cutting down the ridges using a #5 plane until it got close to the bottom of the ridge

. I then switched over to the belt sander to get it really close to final, and finished it up using a long board sander. Initially I was a little tentative with the belt sander and tried to use the long board sander to do the bulk of the sanding. This ended up being a lot of work. Once I switched to the belt sander it went a lot quicker!

As you can see it turned out pretty nice! Next step is to apply the fiberglass.