there's just a few more things

The engine mounts is done. Since the transom is angled, I made a rookie mistake and set the mount too low, then I had to fill the bolt holes and re-mount it higher. (Luckily I popped the engine into place with the mount dry fitted,  so at least I didn't have to clean up bedding compound.)

The Self Bailers are dry fitted. If you are ever mounting these, it's hard to drill holes square to the hull while lying on you back reaching under the trailer. So drill the holes from the side where they go through the bailer. (ie if it's an outside mount, drill from outside) otherwise it's hard to get things to line up.
It does take a moment to get up the courage to cut a big hole in the bottom of your boat. I did make up a test piece first with some scrap.

The bracket for the Jib was fun to mount. It is thru-bolted. Of course that means that you need to climb into the bow to put on and tighten the nuts. A 6'4" tall 200 lb man can fit in past the centerboard case, and under the deck. But for a few minutes, it was entirely unclear if the same man could climb back out again.

Thanks to Caroline for holding the screwdriver outside while I crawled inside.

(Yes, she is smaller, and would have fit easier into the bow, but there is a limit to how far I was prepared to push my luck.)

The weather got better, so I got some stuff done.

1 more coat of paint(1 evening)
*Flip her over and back onto the trailer(1 evening) Thanks Alan !
Bedding compound for the mast track & fittings (1 evening)  
Mount the rudder (1 evening)


Mount the Engine (1 evening)
Fit the drain plugs / self drainers (1 evening)
Mount the Hardware for the forstay and Jib (1 evening)



+ Repaint the deck, it looks pretty grubby.


This weekend is looking touch & go, but it's getting close....


* It's amazing what you can do with a ground anchor* (think gigantic corkscrew), a whole lot of rope, an A-Frame, and a figure of 8 descender, and a few double blocks. Oh yes, and a few packs of rubber kids play tiles to keep from scratching the paint to bits.


** Trees make good anchors too. Anything 10" in diameter or so is not going to budge under any loading I'm likely to apply.

The Lady Caroline in a Blue Dress

I finished painting, and had her covered about 3 minutes before a small shower. One more coat and she's going for a swim.

The todo list is down to

1 more coat of paint(1 evening)
Flip her over and back onto the trailer(1 evening)
Bedding compound for the mast track & fittings (1 evening)
Mount the Hardware for the forstay and Jib (1 evening)
Mount the rudder (1 evening)
Mount the Engine (1 evening)
Fit the drain plugs / self drainers (1 evening)

I also need to fit wooden trim/bumpers, but they can be added after her first sail.

Undercoat

A nice even mid grey.

I can almost feel the salt spray.

Work in progress

 

Hopefully she will look a lot better shortly...

And most of the high build primers ends up in the bin....

It's the weave of the fibreglass cloth.

You see you have to fill the weave.

So you paint on the high build. Then sand it off again. The hollows start to fill up with High build 2 part epoxy.

You could make up your own, but based on the smell (and after one whiff, I pulled out my organic respirator) you have epoxy, fine powder, and a whole lot of nasty solvent to keep it flowing. If you just mix up Epoxy and Filler, it's much harder to work with.

You can use a different colour each time. So it's easy to see when you have sanded enough. And the dark colours tend to have a very dark surface, and be less dark underneath when you sand them back. So you can tell when you have left some hollows.

I think I'm done with this last coat. I'll know after I sand it back.

Then I start painting proper.

I guess the 90% of the work in painting is prep is about right.

Right now the boat looks like a patchwork of white, grey and blue depending on the high and low spots. (Where high and low is measured in small fractions of a mm).

It could probably be made more fair at a larger scale, but hell, it's going to get scratched the first day it sees the water, so I'll go with the 10 feet rule.

If it looks good from 10 feet away, it's fine.

I want to go sailing THIS year.

The Mast Track

 

When Monday comes, I need to order some more high build primer and wait for it to arrive. In the mean time, I set to work on the mast. The last big job there was the Mast Track.

It's all screwed into place.

I was a little worried about the join (the track only comes in 3 meter lengths), but I used and adjustable spanner to hold the two tracks in line while I screwed them down. I also ran some sand paper back and forth on the inside of the ends of the track to make a tiny bevel so there would be nothing for the slides to catch on if the pieces were slightly out of line.

The sail go up and down nicely.

Buy cheap, buy twice....

My DIY Random Orbital Sander gave up the ghost. Sanding back the entire hull of 2 part high build epoxy was beyond it. So I went out and got the Makita one I should have gotten in the first place.

I have also found that the weave on the glass cloth is a lot harder to fill that I thought. I have 2 coats of high build epoxy primer sanded back, and there's a few spots that will need special attention. I see another tin or two of High build Primer applied with a brush to the affected areas.

I'm starting to tire of sanding.

D

The Painting has Started

The heavy filling is done, the first sanding is done.

I've started the undercoating. The stuff is a high build 2 part epoxy undercoat. It's got some manner of solvent in it cause it stinks something nasty. As soon as I opened the tin, I went straight for the Organic Respirator. Spread a litre of that stuff out and you really don't want to be leaning over it and breathing it in.

My set of Charts for the local waters arrived. Now I've started buying sailing stuff, not building stuff.

That alone is a big step.

Upside Down again

Thanks to Andy & Caroline for helping me to flip the boat and to Andy and Nick for helping me to pop it up on a stand.

The last sheet of fibre glass is done. Now I'm sanding and painting.

The mast has it's first coat of Varnish, and before I flipped the boat I added various fitting like the eyes for the main sheet traveller, and the jib sheet leads.

There's 3 liters of EasyFair fairing compound on the way, I had not realised how much the glass cloth would "print" through the epoxy, and mixing up your own fairing compound is dusty, messy and expensive.

The todo list is getting very short these days.

In truth, It could go in the water without being painted, but I've waited this long.

I should have done this when I was assembling the CB case

The randomness of the weather, children, Maths projects and life in general has slowed work on the boat.

I did manage to fit the Centreboard Case Cover, and the Centreboard Pin Covers. The Case Cover was easy. The Pin Covers not so.

It would have taken about 30 seconds to drill the pilot holes for the screws before the Centreboard case was installed in the boat. The Covers are very close to the hull, which is of course angled upwards.

Good luck getting a drill in there, or even a 90 degree adapter for your drill. In the end I used a 45 degree adaptor for a power screwdriver (much smaller) and a drill bit with a Hex Adapter built onto it, and I had to cut the drill bit short.

Then to get the screws in, I used a ratchet screwdriver with the 45 degree adapter. Using a power screwdriver risked making much of the screw head, and getting a messed up screw out from there was not going to be fun.

The first Pin Cover took about 2 hours ! It involved a lot of trial and error. Particularly the error part.

The second, about 20 minutes.

You can get ratchet offset screwdrivers and I see one of these going into my tool kit. Should there be any problem with the CB which required removing the cover, I'd be toast without one.

D

Experience is what you get just after you need it.

Or experience is what you get when you do something wrong....

Either way, now, I'm pretty good at dealing with poly-sulphide bedding. Now that the four coamings are in place:

I know that if the tape is too close to the wood for the radius of your bead, then the bedding will be quite thick on the tape and you leave a nice groove when you pull the tape out.

I know that for the brand I used, 5-8 minutes is about right to lift the tape, sooner and it's still to runny. Later and it tears.

I know that you should use 2" masking tape, not 1", as the bedding will surely get out over the 1" tape when you are not paying attention to something.

I know that you should not try to fix any problem once you have lifted the masking tape.

I know all these things now.

It would have made for a better job if I'd known them all at the start.

The unfortunate thing is that reading about these things only helps a little. There is no way to learn that is quite as good as Experience.

Also you will find that the notched spreaders used for spreading tiling cement are prefect for spreading bedding compound.

You can get them for close to nothing, which is good, 'cause I for one would not want to try to clean the poly-sulphide off them.

What was that old line? Son, if you're going to insist on making all your own mistakes, you'd better get cracking, you have a lot of work to do.

Sails Up

 

To figure out exacly where the boom needs to be attached, you need to raise the Main Sail.

 

And to figure out where the jibsheet leads need to go, you need to raise the Jib.

It helps that there was virtually no breeze once it started to get dark.

A splash in June looks at least credible now.

The mast is Up

With a little help from my supervisor.
I managed to get the mast upright.
And I made up the wire stays in place.
It all worked quite well.
But it could do with a little varnish I guess.

Awkward big feckin' stick

My first attempt to step the mast ended rather quickly when I realised I had no way of stopping it from swaying from side to side. It was a bare inch out of the bracket when it became obvious that disaster was beckoning.

For all the remaining lifts, I moved car more than 20' away from the boat !!!

I used a 4 part block and tackle and a 5' gin pole to give me leverage.

Round 2 involved putting 2 dead eyes into the deck. (Since the mast base is over a beam, the dead eyes are screwed into oak, with 1 1/2" screws (ie they ain't coming out any time soon). A pair of tangs about 6' up and some 8mm double braid sorted out the whole side to side thing.

For any such braces, they must be attached in line with the point where the mast pivots.

My second attempt left me realising that a certain amount of give in the two mini side stays would help a lot.

Eventually after a lot of raising and lowering I had the mast approximately vertical, and in it's step.

The step suffers quite badly from the whole operation, I see the need for some form of pivot.

I used some light rope as temporary stays until I get the wire ones sized. But I am now a little concerned about how I would adjust the side stays with a 20' mast hanging out of them.

I am leaning away from peg and pin adjusters to just using good old fashion lashings which can be infinitely adjusted, and can be loosened or tightened without disconnecting them.

Photos will follow, hopefully of a vertical mast, rather than a scene of devastation.

A mast Step...

I made up a mast step. It's just half lapped joins, on a plywood base. The plywood is mostly just to give it an extra 1/4" of height, but the alternating grain won't hurt the strength of the step. I thought it turned out quite well.

Ticking them off

The todo items that is

• Glue the mast
• Plane the mast after gluing and & Round the corners 
• Sand the mast 
• install the hardware
• rudder fittings need bedding
• standing rigging

The mast step's mostly done.

Varnishing a 20' long mast out of doors is going to require a little bit of thought...

Plaining the Mast

When you glue up a pair of 20' long sticks to make a mast, there's going to be a bit of work with a plane to be done afterwards.

You could use a Power Planer, except that :

• It's noisy
• You have to wear Ear Protection.
• You can't listen to music.
• It makes a mess (dust and chippings by the bin load).
• The wood dust means you need to wear a mask.
• And the dust gets right into your very soul.
• Your neighbours won't feel the love if you fire up a power planer in the late evening.
• Power Planers are about as subtle as a Felling Axe.

So out came the Stanley jack plane.

It does have a Hock Blade, (a +4 sharpness modifier).

And I have gotten to the stage where I can sharpen and hone a blade to the point of shaving with it.
You'd be surprised at the difference this makes.

After about 2 hours, swapping between each arm, and alternating between pushing the plane, and pulling it Japanese Style I now have a mast which would no longer looks like builders waste.

That may be an easy task for a Full Time Carpenter, but a 2 hour workout (with breaks to hone the blade) is a lot for a guy who pushes keys for a living.

One thing to note:

Everyone says it 'cause it's true: sharpen more often. 

Every time I honed the blade, I thought "damn, I should have done that 10 minutes ago".

However, as you need to take off the Plane Iron Cap to sharpen / hone, you need to reset the blade each time.

To reset the blade, put the plane down on a flat wooden surface, put the blade into the plane but do not clamp it. Adjust it so that it's resting on the wood. Push it gently down into the wood with your thumb. Clamp the blade. Now that the blade is more or less in the right place it's just fine tuning.

Thoughts on 5 years of building a boat....

Someone asked me recently if I'd gotten what I wanted out of building my boat.....

I could have just bought a second hand dinghy for a couple of grand, less than I've spent in tools, materials, etc.
But I wanted to build a boat.

It's taken 5 years, and now it's nearly finished.
I could have played golf, and now I'd have a nothing but pitiful handicap and a load of expensive sticks to show for it. And as someone pointed out on one of the forums, it would still have taken me 5 years not to build it.

It has taken up a lot of my free time. (and time that really was not so free)
Yes, but I could have spent the time watching TV instead. But I grew up watching "Why Don't You?"
so I did.

Soon I'll get to put up the mast and see the sails up.

Then a little while later, I'll get to float it.

I'm looking forward to that.

There's lots of things I would change, now that I have the experience that I needed when I started. But I wouldn't go back and not build it.

Thanks Caroline, for putting up with me, and for giving me the time to do this. I could not have done it without your support. You may not have turned a single screw, or cut a single piece of wood, but this boat would not be here without your support. I'd have given up and used it for firewood a long time ago without you.

Dave

ToDo List

The pieces for the mast are cut, but still have to

• Glue the mast
• Plane the mast after gluing and & Round the corners
• Sand the mast
• Install sail tracks.
• Varnish the mast
• Varnish the boom
• 1 panel of the hull still needs glassing
• Paint the hull
• install the hardware
• rudder fittings need bedding
• standing rigging
• running rigging
• various cleats
• Install Centreboard Case Cover
• Buoyancy bags
• Add some form of rubbing strip where the deck joins the hull

So I should be in the water this year !!