9-29.

Sanding down all the epoxy mess.  I am the abominable sander - I'm super good at gouging out the plywood above or below where I'm actually supposed to be sanding.  I wish they made a petite sander to go with the petite drill we bought for this project.  This belt sander is massive and weighs a ton!
 

Sanding on top of the boat is fun and scary.  The sander wants to pull me right off the edge when it starts.  Now we have a nice clean-looking hull, just the bow remains to be worked on.  And there are lots of imperfections left to fix from my terrific handling of the sander.  Then we can slap the fiberglass on. 

9-27.

Avast there she'll float - a hull! 

Gooping on the glue.  Of course we ran out of 406 silica after starting to glue, so we had to switch to 405 (the chocolaty icing) which is supposed to be for filleting (see the white vertical line of epoxy running the length of the spine where the frame and spine meet - that's a fillet).  There's no stopping once you've gotten started, and you have to work fast before the glue dries - tonight we were finishing clean-up and filling in countersunk screw holes with really really viscous epoxy.  When the port bow chine panel springs a leak we can blame it on the 405 silica.
 

Tonight was a bittersweet evening.  These are the last views we'll have of the innards of the boat from this angle.   

 From here on out she'll look like a Boat!

So as you may have noticed in the previous post, the boat has already looked like this during the dry fit.  Everything was all lined up and fitting pretty (pretty sloppy, but what good is epoxy for but to fill all those gaps!)  Anyhow, as we screwed down the last chine panel, all of a sudden the pre-drilled holes in the plywood weren't matching up with the holes in the stringers below.  Which meant that the plywood panel wasn't lining up with the bottom or side panels, or with the other chine panel at the bow.  This was a problem - the bow especially needs to line up so the boat isn't totally off-centered!  We managed to get the holes to line up with Daddy putting lots of pressure on the plywood while I quickly screwed it down hole by hole, progressing forward, checking that the screw holes lined up with a loose drill bit.  Still the bow didn't line up.  Fortunately, without even unscrewing anything, Daddy was able to shave off enough wood from the front end of the chine panel with the circular saw to make it squeeze into place at the bow.  Whew. 

And here is the nicely fitted bow!  Once the epoxy mess is all sanded and shaped and fiberglassed, it'll look like a streamlined, well-constructed bow, worthy of a ship's figurehead. 

Here's a shot of the skeg - the brass strip hasn't been attached yet, but will be soon.  There is much sanding ahead of us, and then fiberglassing, and then I think, just maybe, we'll finally flip this boat over and start work on the seats and deck and everything else on the insides!

Back in Action - September roundup

We basically took August off due to vacations, heat (the epoxy hardens super fast in hot temperatures, meaning you have to work fast and it's hard to clean up), and bugs (mosquitoes biting us and lovebugs loving the epoxy liquid as it dries - we have all kinds of fossilized bugs in our boat!), but now we are back to work and moving along at a nice clip. The hull is almost complete (minus fiberglassing and finishing touches).

Here is the curly maple lumber we used to make the skeg. In order for the skeg to fit the curve of the bottom of the boat, we used an ingenious device: pencil and a block of wood.  We drew a line on the board, and once we cut that line, it fit perfectly to the bottom of the boat. The skeg is two pieces of curly maple to add width at the base.  After we had one all cut out with the tail end how we wanted it, we just traced it onto the other piece and cut out a matching piece, then glued them together.

Here's the skeg with glue drying - no nails or screws to hold it together.  After the glue had dried, we tapered it so that it is narrower at the top and wide at the base.  Then Daddy had a brass strip pre-drilled and we fitted this onto the top of the skeg and pre-drilled into the wood.  The brass strip will be attached to protect the skeg from wear and tear on sand, shells, etc when it's beached.  We sanded down the whole skeg nicely and glued it to the bottom of the boat before we finished the side panels - it's hard to crawl under the boat, but it's about to get much harder once the sides are all glued on.  We also filled the pre-drilled holes with liquid epoxy, and then we'll pre-drill again so that the screws that will have direct contact with the water will only be in epoxy and won't be touching any wood - no chance for water to get into the wood.

Dry-fitting the side panels. Once we had these shaped right, which was much harder than first imagined, we went ahead and screwed them onto the stringers and frames temporarily and then pre-drilled holes to be used to permanently glue on the sides.

Shadowfax supervises.  (Actually she doesn't like to be 5 feet away behind the gate in the backyard.  She would much rather be tied up right next to us.)

Again dry-fitting the sides and chines.  The side panels are the at the top of the boat and the chine panels are the middle panels that fit between the sides and the bottom.
We have completely glued the sides on and the two short sections of chine panels are glued on.  The sides were scarfed to make long panels that run the whole length of the boat, whereas the chine panels are each being connected with a butt block - a small piece of plywood that is glued to the inside of both panel sections where they meet.  We have made our butt blocks and are just waiting for a non-rainy and not-too-hot evening to glue on the long chine panel sections, and then the hull will be complete!

June

Attaching the stringers was an adventure in patience. I did not relish this part and am glad we're finally past it, although there is more to come that will be very similar...

After bending the wood we fit it into the notches and had to cut the ends to meet up with the bow at the right angles. This is tricky when you haven't had geometry since 7th grade, and when you were never good at geometry to begin with! Trying to visualize how two pieces of wood will meet up if you cut one at a certain angle is not in my grasp, so Daddy figured most of this out. Only one spot didn't come out right, and it was simply remedied by adding a little chunk of wood between the stringer and the notch in the bow (the stringer got cut too short, so it didn't come up to meet the notch). In the picture you can see where the extra piece of wood is on the left side between the stringer and the bow.

Once the stringers were glued and screwed into place, we planed them down to the correct angles so that the bottom, chines, and sides will fit. The stringers are where the bottom, chines, and sides meet and what they are attached to, along with being attached to frames. Planing with Brian's electric planer is fun, lots of sawdust shoots out and it does the job fast. Just have to be careful to keep planing everything evenly and not to hit the frames as you pass by.

Then we went across with the belt sander for fine tuning, checking the angles often with scrap plywood to make sure the panels would fit well when they are ready to go on.

More June

A rough approximation of the bottom. A nice scarfed joint (where the pieces of plywood come together). Scarfing is fun - more to come in July.

Cutting out the hole for the centerboard. This was sort of tricky to figure out exactly where to put since we couldn't just go underneath the boat and draw lines around the edges of the case. We were careful to cut inside the lines and then just had to go back many times to slowly widen the hole until it fit snugly onto the centerboard case.

Once we got the centerboard hole cut and fit, then it was time to shape the bottom and attach it!

June-July

Getting the bottom of the boat on was not very exact as you can see, but it worked out well. All we needed was the special pencil to draw the lines for us. But really, we didn't follow any plans to draw the bottom panel, instead after scarfing two pieces of 9 mm ply, we laid a rough cut-out over the frame and drew an outline along the stringers with a flat-sharpened pencil (a normal pointy pencil wouldn't reach into the recess between the stringer and plywood. We left a little wiggle room when we cut it out that we can sand off later. We also decided to make the bottom panel come flush with the edge of the stringer so that it will butt up with the chine panel (the piece between the bottom and the sides), leaving a v-shaped gap at the seam that will be filled with epoxy, rounded off, and fiberglassed. This was our decision since there wasn't any guidance in the plans.

Cutting along the curvy lines...

A view from underneath after the bottom panel has been glued on. Soon the boat might actually float!

July

The sides of the boat are going on next. Again, the plywood is too short, so we have to scarf two pieces together. Here is the beginning of the scarfing procedure. After following the plans (we hadn't done that in a while) to draw out the side panel on both pieces of plywood, we lined them up approximately and clamped them onto the stringers to make sure we'd have enough wood at the bow.

The two pieces of plywood will soon become one!

Once we've determined exactly where the scarf will be, we turn one board over and line up the top edge with the line drawn on the bottom piece. There is a certain ratio for the width of the plywood that determines how far back the scarf has to start. The sides are made out of 6 mm ply and I think we had to go back 48 mm, so that would be 8 mm for every 1 mm of ply.
Then we screw down the boards onto the sawhorse so they can't move and start sanding. On the bottom piece, we used the planer since it was 9 mm ply, but the 6 mm went really fast with just the belt sander. You make sure each layer of ply is sanding down evenly by checking that the strips of wood you see are about parallel and even. The trick is to not sand above the pencil mark on the top piece and to get the pointed edges down to a feather edge (the very last ply) without sanding away too much. I'm pretty bad at using the belt sander, so Daddy worked on this one.

Once it's all sanded nice and evenly, the top board gets flipped back over and should fit perfectly onto the bottom board - the angles match up and it is like you have one piece of wood. Then we glue the two together, nail them in place (also to the sawhorse), clamp them in place, and let the glue dry. And then you've got one long piece of plywood!

After scarfing one side, the parents are on vacation, so building is on hiatus. I'll probably work on filling some countersunk screw holes on the bottom while Daddy's gone, but the sides will actually go on when they're back from vacation.