A Shipwright in Training

All right, still on fairing.

This may be dull for you, but hey, I’ve been doing this All. Week. Long. Wax on, wax off.

Here’s an idea of how much wood you’re removing from your boat when you spend the day planing up and down the length of the hull.

I feel like a hair dresser sweeping the floor after a customer on these days. Now the trick of course is to not take too much off. You want hull thickness for strength, but you want your hull thickness to be even, and smooth. Once you take thickness off, you can’t really put it back unless you use bondo or some type of fairing compound. A little spot, ok, but a big section? That’s cheating in the worst kind of way and people who do this are not well regarded.

A little bit of putty
A little bit of paint
Makes a carpenter
What he ain’t.

Kev has gotten his shutter plank installed and has started fairing as well. He started out strong on Thursday.

But by Friday, he was looking a little faded. Yes, he’s sitting in a chair as he planes, scooting up and down the boat.

Fairing the boat is long, tedious, hard work.

Sanding is no easier. Like I said before, you use a longboard. The technique is similar to how you plane: You take long strokes on the diagonal one way, then crossways to that, and then along the grain. The main difference is that when you sand with the grain, you hold the longboard at an angle and push it sideways. Like a car in a skid. This sands in the direction you want, but distributes your sanding pressure across the curve of the hull and gives you a fairer curve.

While sanding is still very tiring and dusty, you get some neat effects.
For one thing, the seams begin to fill with wood dust and the effect is that your boat looks very smooth, almost like it’s been caulked.

You can really see this effect here. I’ve vacuumed the forward section of the boat but not the aft section. The plank lines disappear where they’re filled with wood dust.

It’s tricky though. All that soft wood dust makes the boat appear smoother and more fair than it might actually be. The solution? Close your eyes and run your hands across the boat. You’ll find the unfair places.

Another slick effect is that plane marks show up really well on a sanded surface. Say you find a high spot and decide that you can fair it more quickly with a plane. You can see exactly where you planed if you’re working on a sanded surface. See?

Finally, sanding reveals the shape of the boat more clearly. Here, it looks like the boat is just flat on the right side.

And, in fact, it is somewhat flat there. And that’s just the way Beetle cats are designed, so no need to fix it.

And then, you realize that every time you check the boat for fair, it feels good. You can stop sanding for now. Hot damn! It took me 2 full days of planing, followed by a day and a half of sanding to get to that point.

Next step: fill all those screw holes. First make sure you don’t have any problems that would require you removing a screw… say you drove a screw through a frame sideways or something like that. You fill the holes with a mixture of epoxy and #410 fairing compound (we use West Systems). Mix it up to peanut butter consistency, spread it on and leave it a bit thick so it doesn’t suck into the holes as it dries.

This actually took me a long time to do because I was trying to be very careful and not pile on the putty. Here’s about 2 hours of work:

Turns out I really didn’t need to be so careful. It sands off easily.

We cleaned up extra well today. Tomorrow is Career day… lots of folks will be coming into the school to meet with reps from boat yards and other marine industry places throughout the area. So here she is, all sanded, vacuumed, and cleaned up purty.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 3rd, 2007 at 1:07 am and is filed under Classes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.