That was a PITA

First, I will refer to a previous post boats-are-easier-than-carpets

I decided that it would be better to remove the first laminate, and replace it with a correctly sized one, rather than try to just add more laminates and fair them down.

There is a concern that White Oak does not Glue up well with Epoxy.

I am no longer concerned about this. My Epoxy glues my White Oak just fine.

The only way to remove the laminate turned out to be cross cutting it down to the glue line every 1/2 inch or so, and chipping it out with a chisel, just like cutting a housing for a lap joint.

Even doing this, in most places the wood did not come off at the glue line, A sander with 80 grit will tidy up the mess this weekend.

I used some scrap ply to see how much extra material I need on the chine to ensure that the side and bottom planking meet at most at a 180 degree angle. It's about 5/8"

At least I think know what I need to do now.

I suspect some more time in the Thinking Chair before I set to it.

Steaming the Chines

I had planned to use a drain pipe. But a little reading led me to the inconvient truth about PVC. It starts to melt if you run steam through it, and it collapses under its own weight. So this is Aluminium Air Conditioning ducting. It arrives compressed concertina like and you simply stretch it.

Without a little insulation, it would not keep the wood hot, so some cheap attic insulation and a bit of cord and we are set. I just used a steam wallpaper stripper as a steam source and left if cook while I got on with some other bits and pieces.

Here you see the two chines clamped roughly in place. There's still work to do, but progress is progress.
Oh, yes, heavy gardenning gloves are your friend here, the Aluminium is hot, the steam is hot and the oak is hot.

Rain, Interspersed with Heavy Showers and Occasional Drizzle.

I had great plans for this weekend. I long list of things that I was planning on doing. The weather had other plans. This summer has really not been suited to outdoor boatbuilding. It's been best suited to getting on a plane and going somewhere else.

I did get some work done, I had to plane a simple Oak batten to fit between two plywood gussets, The slats for the seats will screw into these battens. Given that I had gone to the trouble of buying some decent blades for my planes and some waterstones and then going to the trouble of reading all about sharpening, I thought I'd leave the Bosch in its box and break out the Stanley.

The blade was sharp, bald patch on my arm sharp. Gillete eat your heart out. I set the plane to take very thin shavings and started. I had to take about 3/16 of an inch off the batten to make it fit, and I had to square it up a little.

Damn, It's hard work. Oak is hard stuff, and I had the "benefit" of trying to do this on a fold up work bench, so I had to use my weight to hold the bench steady and my arms to plane. I gather that with a proper bench you get to use your body weight to do the planing.

I found that Oak will blunt a blade quite quickly, you can feel it getting harder and harder to push the plane, and you find the shavings concertina. This is a good indication that 30 seconds on the waterstone is required, sacrifice some more hair from my arm to the Sharp Gods, and off we go again.

It was a great experience to square and thickness the wood the old fashioned way, but I will admit to dragging out the Bosch in order do the second batten, in about 1/10th of the time.

When you look at pictures of old wooden sailing ships, and think that they didn't have Bosch, Makita, or even Black and Decker, you start to look at them in a different light.

Oh yes, and never try a crushing handshake on someone who actaully uses a hand tools for a living.

Lisnavagh Timber Project

I went down to Lisnavagh yesterday to get some Oak boards, and picked out a few boards with the help of William Burnbury. They have a system to track every board, so they can show you where it came from. They even print you off a photo of the tree. They are very much into sustainable use of the resources. William was kind enough to email me the picture of the tree for my blog. From the history that William provided this fell itself so I don't even need to feel guilty about it being chopped down.

Now all I need is some good weather to turn this old tree into a boat.

A new frame...

This weekend I tried a simpler frame. Frame 1 has no bevels pre-cut. If you look closely, you will see that the two bottom parts have not been fitted correctly at the center yet. That's another days work. By the way, sorry about the quality of the photo, my sis has borrowed my DSLR for a trip to South Africa, so I took this with an Ixus. Nice Camera for snapshots, but you can hardly set up remote triggered flashes. I'll retake it with a more contrasting background when I get my camera back.


This time I cut the joints away from the mark and fitted them with a Stanley Bailey Block Plane. Using the ScarySharp method for sharpening; progressively finer silicon carbide papers and a glass plate.

I was able shave paper thin slivers from the end grain of an Oak Plank. Then suddenly as if by magic (well with a little bit of work), bits that are supposed to fit together do.

I have still to "fit" the join at the center, but I need to draw the frame out on a large plywood board to ensure I have the angles right.

Glue

Pretty much everything that seems simple is not. If it seems simple then you probably don't know enough about it. Take Glue for example. Put two bits of wood together, some glue in the middle and it sticks right. Well sort of.

It needs to be waterproof. So that means Resorcinol, Epoxy or Polyurethane adhesive.

• Resorcinol needs to be cured at relatively high temperature, won't fill gaps and need high clamping pressure.
• Epoxy fills gaps, but doesn't like the cold and there can be problems with gluing white oak.
• Polyurethane will fill gaps to .3 mm (small, tiny really), requires clamping, but doesn't mind the cold. It has a long open time that's not dependent on temperature.
  

Given that most of my work will be out of doors in winter in Ireland, I've just gotten 1Kg of Balcotan Super Fibre to try out. My plan is to glue the boat with this, then by the time it comes to glassing the boat, it should be a little warmer, and I can use a low temp epoxy. It's never really hot here.

I'm still kind of up in the air about glassing the whole boat, or just taping the joints and glassing them. We'll see.

More on Sapwood

Since I posted the detailed pictures of the planks below, the general consensus across the forums is that yes, the lighter wood is indeed sapwood. The holes gave it away. It's excellent for indoor furniture, worse than useless for boats.

Apparently it soaks up liquids, including whatever you might use to try to seal the ends of it, and then it soaks up some more.

Since being a rank beginner when it comes to working with oak, I will need to practice various cuts and joints. So I guess the sapwood won't go to waste. If I have Lots left, I may use if for the slats for the seats, then when it rots away, I'll just replace it.

Tracing Frames - inch by inch / Sapwood

The real world has been intervening as I have finally gotten around to breaking out the first row of tiles around the bath, removing the old seal, replacing the seal, and replacing the first row of tiles.

However I have made a little more progress on the boat, in that I have transferred the plans for the transom frames onto oak, ready for cutting tomorrow after work.



Unfortunately I have also found that one of the oak planks that I bought is almost 60% sapwood. I reckon that I can get about 2 inches down the middle of good wood out of it. Luckily, I only bought a few planks, as I knew I did not really know what I was looking for. Though I have been told that spotting sapwood in unplaned oak can be tough at the best of times.


Some days are good days, some days are less so.

I have ordered a set of roof bars for the car, so that I can carry longer planks, and I will be heading down to lisnavagh to see what they have in stock.