Some Snaps

Just a quick snap of the foremost frame, and some of the concertina shavings that suggest that its getting to be time to touch up the edge.


The layout board is the 3 ply plywood that I had bought in the local builders providers. I had to find some use for it.

Once you have the lines drawn out on a board, it becomes a lot easier to make sure things line up just so.

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.

A centerboard case.

Having a lifting keel or centerboard in a small sail boat seems like a wonderful idea. A nice deep fin for beating upwind, and a nice shallow draft for coming in to shore. And it makes trailering easier.

Of course there's the whole problem of the big hole that you make in the bottom of the boat to allow you to lower and raise the keel.

The design calls for a centerboard case which passes through a slot in the oak keel, and there are two oak bedlogs (planks) either side of the box which sit on the keel.

That would be fine if the keel were flat, but the 5/4th thick oak keel is actually curved. The bedlogs have to match perfectly, or the centerboard case will leak like a Government Department. And they have to be aligned so that the trunk case sits vertically upright.

To make matters more interesting, the ends of the centerboard case need to butt up perfectly to the frames - So I need to build the centerboard case before I bend the oak keel over the frames, but I need to bend the oak keel to find the shape for the bed logs.....

- Here's the plan.

I'll build the CenterBoard case with the logs just tacked in place with a screw or two. I'll shift the logs away from the keel so that they only touch the keel at the frames. I'll also just screw the Case to the frames that it buts against.

Then when I've bent the keel into place, I can trace the curve of the keel, cut them, take the case out and complete the assembly and replace it. Glue and screw the whole lot togehter and I'm sorted.

What do you think ?

Plywood

There's plywood, and there's marine plywood and there's Marine Plywood.

The local builders providers sells marine ply. Excellent. Less than half the price of the stuff sold by Waller Wickham. What's not to like.

Well - specifically, there's only 3 plys on the 6mm boards. And the veneer ply is as thin as paint, leaving a big fat ply in the middle with all it's strength along one axis. Not likely to hold up to much of anything.

So I bit the bullet and wandered down to Waller Wickham and got a sheet of 5 ply 6mm to make up the gussets and the centerboard case. I believe the ply they stock is Robbins Elite.

Who was it that said "Light, strong, cheap, pick any two". This stuff is light, strong, well made, but not cheap.

I didn't feel as though I even had a decision to make though, the builders yard marine ply was totally inadequate, even though it was stamped with BS1088.

Fun with Epoxy

In the end I went with GRS for my epoxy. They were very prompt about delivery.

I mixed up a small batch and epoxied some glass cloth across two peices of ply. I let it set for 24 hours and then tested to destruction.

With a lot of abuse, the cloth delaminated where boards were joined together the. Not easily - I was jumping on the boards where they were set up against a step. The plys actually separated.

In addition I glued two scrap prices together with thickened epoxy and a very quick and dirty fillet. After much jumping up and down, I managed to break them apart - the wood broke, not the glue.

I am quite certain I could do a much better job, both of glassing and gluing, so I have every confidence in this Epoxy stuff. 8-)

Next tests,
* Gluing Oak to Ply.
* Gluing Oak to Oak.
* Glassing a trailing edge.

Ruining Wood

I'm getting to the stage where I will start assembling the various odd shaped bits of wood onto a frame to make the skeleton for my boat.

In order to do this I need to build the Center Board Case, as two of the frames but up against this.

The Center Board case needs to be glassed. Since I'm making up the Case, it seemed appropriate to make up the Centerboard at the same time.

This means I need to Shape and Glass the Center Board, and Glass the Case.

I have never used Epoxy before for much beyond fixing the pendulum of a clock - please don't ask. So I reasoned that I would make up a test rudder from cheap ply instead of the good marine stuff, and glass it. This would be a learning experience, and I would not ruin anything expensive.

Along the way I figured out the following

* Prime the epoxy pumps by pumping out a little into a scrap cup and bin it. It means wasting a little epoxy, but not nearly as much as if you pump out too little hardener and work everything up only to find it doe not set.

* Epoxy goes a lot further than you'd expect. I made up what I thought was about half what I needed for my test piece only to have twice what I needed.

* How to glass the trailing edge is not obvious - try this link, go to the foils section - mothboat

* You can use the glue lines in the plywood to keep you rudder or center board symetrical.

I made a lot of mistakes, which was good, it meant I learned at least what not to do.

Beale Park Boat Show

I went along to beale park boat show, Wonderful place. I got to sail around in a deben lugger which is a lug yawl, using carbon fiber spars. A nice mix of the old and new. I saw the Bay Raider and a build in progress of a Secret. There was a Thames Punt with a nice rack at the back to hold one Champagne bottle and Two glasses. Just two mind, three would be a crowd.



The real highlight was meeting the builder of this, a retired pilot's first build. If he had told me he'd been doing this for a living for most of his life, this boat would have made me believe it.


And along the way I came across an interesting car...

Getting Epoxy in Dublin

Prices in EUROs, as converted June 07.

Note: DiscountMarines info is from their OLD web site.

As far as I know this information is correct as of today 6th June 2007. This is not a comprehensive list. If this infomation is incorrect, or you have another supplier that I could add to the list, drop in a comment and I will try to update the list as and when I have time. Free information is worth what you pay for it. If you are buying large quantities, go do some further research 8-).

Epoxy and boat shows.

Currently trying to source epoxy now in Ireland. I will post a table here soon with prices, delivery, and landed cost per liter.

I'm also off to the Beale Park Boat Show on the thames this weekend. Expect Pictures.

I've cut most of the plywood peices that I traced out on the 18mm ply. You really gotta love a decent JigSaw.

From Ply to Sheaves and Bronze Strips.

I've marked out a 4x8 18mm Marine ply for the transom, centerboard and floors and laminations for the stem and breasthooks. Now all have to do is to cut it out.
Marking it out was made far easier by
* a little spiked wheel with a handle, bought in a fabric shop. Put down the carbon paper and roll the wheel along the lines.
* a T Square made from two offcuts of PLY screwed together at right angles. Or you can buy one for €20 - really if you are building a boat, a T Square should be trivial to make :-)

The only down side is that the forecast for the weekend is rain, so I doubt that I'll get much cutting done.

In the mean time I've been trying to find a good source for for the cute little bronze bits and for fibre glass and epoxy (ouch that's expensive stuff, and it's considered hazardous for shipping which means I can't just buy it in from the US.).

I plan to make the cleets from wood - just for fun. But for things like the strap that holds the sheave for the centerboard, all I need is about 8 inches of 1" x 1/8th" bronze strip. Fine. Only nobody wants to sell less than an 10 foot strip. And shipping a 10 foot strip of anything is expensive.

It's the little things. It's always the little things. The Devil is indeed in the details.

A weekend off

Life is full of deadlines, work, college and full of things that need to be done, like putting up a security light, or wiring a light in a cupboard, or handing up another stats project. I need another deadline like I need an itchy rash.

Building a small boat, should not be like that. And this weekend I did nothing on the boat. We visited my parents in law. Went out in the evenings, looked at a house for sale that we couldn't afford anyway - didn't like it much. But there was no progress on the boat.

In my actually free time, a scarce commodity when you have a rug rat, I read - admittedly I read books about boat building, scarfing short lengths of wood to make up a mast, and books about woodwork jigs.

So there's not much to report about the boat, other than when I am working on it, I really do enjoy it. I don't work on it just because I feel I have to.

A little off topic

We have a general election coming up.

The immediate impact of this is that

• A tribunal set up to investigate corruption is going to defer questioning our glorious leader until after the election.
• There's speculation that the winning government may reform stamp duty on houses. So no-one is buying houses in advance of the election.
• Everything that stands still for more than 35 seconds has a poster on if of some politician grinning smugly, usually in a suit that costs more than most peoples monthly pay cheque.
• The Canvasers are coming. You get home from a hard days work and have dinner, then sit down to read a good book and the door bell rings. Some twit with a badge whom you have never seen before in your life feels he's perfectly entitled knock on your door and ask if he can count on your vote -
  I'm trying do decide on a new sign - "No dogs or Politicicans*" or "No peddlers of politicial ideology or other useless tat"
• And finally the graffetti artists are stepping up to the mark. "If voting really changed anything it would be illegal"

So please make the effort, go out and vote 1,2 and 3 in order of your choice

• The Corrupt
• The Inept
• The Idealogically Bankrupt

* Actually dogs are ok if they are house trained

The Keel

This weekend I cut the Keel. It's basically a 12'x4"x5/4" board. 5/4" being the thickness that when planned will end up 1" net thickness.

One thing that I did along the way was to put a fresh set of blades in the planer/thicknesser. Big difference, huge. Oak really is hard on steel power tool blades.

Now I need to put a 7 degree bevel either side of the center, and to cut out the slot for the centerboard. The slot will be interesting. I see some test cuts first in a peice of scrap. Actually I see a lot of test cuts in a lot of peices of scrap.

It seems like a milestone. I still have one frame peice to cut, then I start trying to assemble things. I can imagine having to recut some of the frame peices, but it should be easier now that I have learned a few things along the way.

I can see me recutting the transom frames. It was a bad plan to start cutting them first. What was I thinking. Cut the bevelled frames first. I also cut them with a jigsaw. Fine for the curves, but the long straight edges to be cut at a bevel really do cry out for a tablesaw.

People keep asking when it will be done. Work has deadline, my maths degree has deadlines. I need another deadline like I need and itchy rash. It'll be done when it's done or shortly thereafter.

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.

More general progress

Yesterday I made a cross cut sled for the table saw. This rocks. Table saws should all come with with a cross cut sled. Only then saws would cost more and you can make them yourself. There's so many pages showing how to make one, this is just off the top of google. It makes cross cutting and angles soooo much easier.

I also started cutting the peices for the frame that I will use to build the boat on. That feels like a big step. I know I have a bit more to do before I start setting it up, but it's all progress in the right direction.

Since I had no good oak, I made use of some bad oak. I took some long thin strips that I had ripped for test peices and made up a test bed by simply screwing some scraps into a scrap plywood board. Then I bent and glued two strips around a bend that one one single strip twice as thick would not have bent around. The glue up went fine.

This is how I intend to deal with curves. Forget steaming, rip and laminate. Now that I've tried it, I will feel more confident about doing it for real on the boat. A test scarf on a batten and on a scrap plywood board are next.

Oh yes, any more toys, a bosch power planer. Much and all as I love hand planes, beveling a 12' oak keel will be difficult on my PT85, so a power hand planer it is. And as a bonus, the guide for my bosch belt sander, which makes bench sander out of it will fit the planer and acts as a parallel guide so that I can plane rebates. (for all the rebates I make 8-)

General Update

I put a decent blade in my table saw, a Freud LP30M. Cuts straighter, and quieter.

I also got one of these Digital Angle Gauges. Put it on the saw table, zero it, put it on the blade, it's magnetic, and you can set the angle of the blade to 0.1 degrees

I started cutting the last frame peice only to discover that I had board made up entirely of sapwood. See my earlier post on sapwood.

This put an end to the boat work for the day, so I planed a peice of scrap to the thickess of the mitre slots and ripped 8 battens for use as runners when making various table saw jigs.

One thing that I found very useful was a cheap grout float. The sort that you use for grouting tiles. It's basically a handle on a small metal board with a rubber surface. It give you great control as you feed the wood, with the advantage that if anything slips and makes contact with the saw blade you stand a really good chance of ruining a €10 float rather than your hand.
(It's since been pointed out that the metal in the grout float would catch in the blade rather than simply being cut by it - this could be a really bad thing)

Wet stones and good blades

I had thought that shaving the back of your arm with a plane blade was an urban myth, perpetuated by the Old Woodworkers to make us new guys feel perpetually inadequate.

However, in search of sharpness, I bought some high carbon plane blades from Hock Tools and a set of Ice Bear Waterstones from Axminster. (Nice fast delivery on both counts)

So I spent the time flattening the back of the blade, then honing the front till I found the burr, then removing the burr.

And there you go. It lifted a few hairs from the back of my arm, not quite up to Gillette's standard, but sharper than anything I've managed previously.

I am converted. My old wet and dry paper collection will now be reserved for flattening the wetstones. I've already ordered a course 220 grit wetstone to do the back of the cheaper blades, which have far move visible machine marks.

Curves

They say that to mark a curve, use a batten. They don't say you need 15 hands.

With a batten held in a curve by a peice of twine, you must shorten the twine until it curves the batten to the correct length. This proves difficult. How do you shorten the twine and tie it off at exactly the right length.

I used course twine and twisted a pen into it. Now I can set the curve by simply pulling the twine further up the pen. I can slide the loop of twine up the pen away from the batten, and this curves the batten a little more.

It gives me very fine control over the curve in the batten.

If the pen is in the middle of the batten, then the curve will be symmetric. If I need the curve to be asymmetric, then I move the pen nearer one end than the other. The curve will be more pronounced at the end where the pen is.

Then I just clamp it in place and draw the line.

All with just two hands.

Progress

I know the photo looks like the logo for kids space toy, but to me it's progress.

This weekend I managed to cut all of the 4th Frame. Now I have the transom, Frames 1, 2 and 4. I'm mising frame 3 as I did not have a clean peice of Oak large enough for the cross beam. Frame 3 is next.

(The cross beam on Frame 4 is left long for fitting.)

Once that is complete, I have to get some marine ply for the gussets and for the stem.

And for the Centerboard.

Then there's the keel. That is a 5/4" * 4" * 12' Oak board, and Brookes only sell 9' boards. I think there's a little bit of work with the phone book in my near future.

More Planes

I've inherited these from my Grandfather. They look like they've been left on a shelf for quite a while... I guess some clean up is in order...

D