Right Side Up

Last weekend I applied fillets to the the keels and glassed them with 6 oz. biaxial tape. On Tuesday my brother and I flipped the hull over from its inverted position so that work on the interior could begin. Wednesday and Thursday evenings were spent saniding the hull, especially the places where the exterior fillets squeezed all the way through. Friday morning the sanding dust was vacuumed out and the interior hull was given a thin coat of epoxy (second photo). On Friday afternoon  after the epoxy had begun to harden I began to fillet the interior plank seams, finishing the port side but ran out of gloves so I was not able to start the starboard side. Yesterday I went fishing with my brother and our dad so no work was done on the boat. This morning yesterday's catch was cleaned and a trip was made to Harbor Freight to purchase more disposable gloves and the fillets on the starboard side were completed. The bow (third photo) was especially difficult to get smooth as space is tight and the angle between the bow planks is constantly changing as you go from top to bottom. It will require some sanging before the hull is fiberglassed. There are also some small blobs and ridges of fillet material that need to be sanded smooth before glassing

Keel Laying Part II

Last Sunday while waiting for the keel to dry I decided to make a sculling oar from a cypress 2x6 I bought from the sawmill. I used the sketch on the bottom of Figure 2 here http://councill.home.mindspring.com/sbjournal/sculling/scull2.html  as a guide, but I made it 10' long instead of 7 1/2'. If it is too long it will be easy to shorten it. I first made a template fron some scrap plywood left over from the hull panels and used it to mark the cypress plank. I then cut the oar out using a jigsaw. The blade was too wide to completely cut with the jigsaw so a circular saw was use to rough it out and an electric planer was used to shape it to its final size. The shaft was made into an octagon using the jigsaw set at a 45. The shaft was then rounded off using a power sander and some emery cloth. The result is not very pretty, but it should be functional. The oar is visible in the first photo between the boat and the remainder of the board from which it was cut .

This morning my brother came over and helped me glue the keel and bilge keels in place. We dry fit the pieces in place and masked the area of the hull adjacent to them with masking tape. This kept the glue in the right place and made clean up easier. The excess glue was used to fill in the gap at the bow as the keel there is wider than the plywood hull. The process went smoothly with the extra help. Monday I will remove the temporary screws and fillet the keels so they can be glassed.

Laying the Keel

Progress on the boat this week was slowed by a stomach ailment but by Friday I was feeling well enough to begin working again. Using the electric planer I planed the gunwhale pieces and bilge keels down to the same thickess and started planing the spacer blocks for the gunwhals to thier final thickness. This morning I started heating a large pot of water in preparation for mounting the keel. When it neared the boilin point I pulled the keel out of the trough it had been soaking in since Sunday and screw it to the bottom of the boat leaving enough overhang to bend it around the bow. I wrapped a towel around the overhanging wood and affixed a clamp to the end of the wood and hung about 20 pounds of lead decoy weights from the clamp. I then began to ladle the boiling water over the towel and wood. After 30 minutes the end of the keel was about 3 inches from the top of the bow. I bent the keel the rest of the way by hand and clamped it to the bow. I then added a few more screws to the stem but left the clamp in place so the screws are not bearing the full pressure of the wood trying to straighten itself out. The process of bending the keel was muchin easier and quicker than I expected, heating the water was the longest part of the process, and my fears of hearing a loud crack and seeing flying splinters never materialized. I will let the keel dry for at least a week and glue it and the bilge keels in place.

 

 

Launch Day (of sorts)

Progress has been slow as the last two weeks, But things are starting to move forward again. On Tuesday I picked up a load of cypress lumber from a nearby sawmill ( www.customcypress.com ) to make the keel, stem, bilge runners, outwhales , inwhales and floorboards. The rest of the week was spent trying to convert rough cut lumber into boat parts. The first few days were spent sanding the sawmarks out with my R/O sander. Yesterday a trip was made to Harbor Freight and an electric planer was purchased.  I now have the bilge runners and the keel complete, 3 of 4 gunnel pieces are finished to their final width and have to be planed down to their final thickness. The first photo shows on of gunnel pieces (laying on the 2 x 6) The end of one of the bilge runers can also be seen on the hull of the boat. Also visible on the ground is a large pile of shavings from the planer.

The next photo shows how I am temporarily storing the lumber to allow it to dry. The sawmill had 4 inches of rain on Monday and most of the wood was thoroughly soaked. The rope slings allow for good air flow around the wood. Temperatures in the tent reached at least 96 degrees Fahrenhiet today. After working for an hour my clothes were completely soaked from sweat. The last photo shows today's launch. The finished keel/stem has placed in a trough of water to soak in preparation for bending it around the bow of boat later this week.

Continueing the glass work

After taking most of the week off from boat building, today I sanded the edges of the fiberglass we laid last Sunday and covered the transom with glass. I also laid some more glass on the bow, and picked up some mahogany planks to use for thwarts. In the center of the close up photo you can see a small black spot. This spot is a love bug, a local insect that hatches out and mates in mid spring and early fall. They are attracted to gasoline fumes, uncured polyester resin (discovered that fact a few years when I restored an old fiberglass skiff) and apparently to uncured epoxy. I will sand them out after the epoxy cures for a few days.

Alot has happened since my last update; I had finished stitching the hull but when I tried to attach the transom I had a setback. Some of the planks were twisting severely to attach to the transom. I attributed this to distortion caused from the weight of the hull sitting on sawhorses.  I removed the transom and the temporary frames and strated building a strongback in order to build the boat inverted. The first photo shows the strongback and the uprights to which the frames and transom are attached. I removed the stitches from the top four planks on each side, laid the bottom six planks on top of the frames, and restitched the hull. I began to reattach the transom, this time staring at the keel and working out to the gunnels and discovered the real cause of my transom problems. Apparently my planks were each a millimeter or so too wide as the top edge of the gunnel ended up a 1/4" higher than the top of the transom. In my first attempt I started with the gunnels and tried working in toward the center which started forcing a twist into the third and fourth planks. The wood on top of the gunnels was shaved off using a block plane. Last weekend I began the process of gluing all of the joints in the planks between the stitches with System Three's EZ Fillet. It took the better part of Saturday and Sunday to complete this step. I also crawled under the hull and glued the transom and bow together as there was not enough gap to get the glue into on the outside of the hull. I let the glue cure a few days and removed all of the stitches on Tuesday night. Wednesday and Thursday evenings were spent glueing the gaps and holes from all the tyraps that were used as stitches. At the top right of the picture the dark brown fillet mixture is visible in some of the holes. Friday and most of yesterday were spent sanding the hull joints in preparation for glassing. I did take a four hour break at noon to attend a crawfish

boil at my brother's house.

The two photos above were taken this morning. They show the hull sanding complete. If you look closely you can also see the 6 oz. biaxal tape I added to the keel and around the transom joint. I also coated the rest of the hull with clear epoxy last night.

The next photos show the glass on the portside in place and wet out with epoxy. The photo on the right shows my brother Ricky, (on the left) and his brother in law Jeff (on the right) smoothing out the glass on the starboard side so we could wet it out. Have the extra help available made the process go smoother. It also helped that Jeff lays up fiberglass as his day job. In all we laid 11 yards of 6oz. glass with 72 oz. of epoxy. My cost for this extra labor, 43 lbs. of crawfish for yesterday's crawfish boil.

Yesterday I continued the process of stitching hull panels. After completing the fourth pair I decided to add the the temporary frames to help make sure the hull took the correct shape.

The first two photos are before and after shots of the first frame.  The stern end of the boat was very flat prior to the frames being tied in place. Plainly visible in the first photo are the short pieces of dowel rod under the tyraps to help align the panel edges. They do help in this regard, and I found if the panels were still uneven after the stitch was tightened they could be rolled slighly in one direction or other to straighten things out.

The third photo shows three frames along with the fifth and sixth pair of hull planks in place. The foward frame (nearest the camera will have to be removed and retied because I forgot to wrap the edge in packing tape. I don't want this thing epoxied to the boat. 

   

The last two pictures show the seventh and final hull panel in place. Today I took a day off from boat building and went fishing with my brother and his father-in-law. Monday I am off and hope to get the transom in place so I can start gluing the boat together.