A Shipwright in Training

This week has primarily been about paint. Or, to be more accurate, it’s been about primer paint. The Beetle Cat gets 2 kinds of primer, red oxide below and white primer above the waterline. After Kev finished caulking and puttying his side of the boat, we were ready to go.

In order to conserve brushes and rollers, it seemed like a good idea for him to paint his white section while I painted my red section. Then we’d switch. One set of red brushes, one set of white.

Guess how many times people came over and said “Hey Kevin, you realize that you’re going to get white paint all over yourself when you lean over to paint your red section, don’t you?” The answer is, “many, many times.” People are just So Helpful, don’t you think? Still, it helped Kev practice his eye rolling, and that has to be good for the ocular muscles.

Primers dry quickly, so the plan was to put a coat on in the morning, a second coat near the end of the day, and flip the boat the next morning. Flipping the boat is a really exciting, and involves a bunch of people picking the boat up, molds and all, and turning it around all by hand. It signifies that you’re done with the hull (other than painting it) and moving on to a whole new patch of tasks. And you’d be amazed at how different a boat looks when it’s right side up. Here’s Angie and Jen’s boat after they flipped it.

It looks so small in this orientation.

Anyhow, back to painting. Somewhere along the line, we noticed that the white wasn’t drying nearly as quickly as we were expecting. And it was shinier than primer should be. Uh oh. Kev went back and looked at the can he’d picked out, and sure enough, it was regular semi gloss. In his defense, the can looked identical to the can of primer. So, the plan changed to waiting until the next morning, doing a quick scuff up of the white areas with a Scotch Brite pad, and painting it again with actual white primer. No problem, just means we’ll wait another day to flip the boat. The boat looked nice anyway.

So, yesterday morning we got right to it and put on a second coat of red oxide primer and a coat of actual white primer. This time, I did the white side first while Kev did the red side. Guess how many people came up to me and said “Hey Tom, you realize you’re painting the white part first and you’re going to get white paint all over you when you lean over to paint the red section?” Not a single, solitary person, that’s how many. Age has it’s advantages, my friends. People simply assume you know what you’re doing. Man, that chaffed Kev. heh heh.

We assumed that te paint would dry by noon or so, and we could flip our boat. The white primer dried within the hour. Noon came and went, and still the red top was still shiny and tacky. “Kev, are you SURE that was red oxide we put on there?” Having been burned once on this issue, Kev was Not Happy, and he immediately found the can of paint we used. “Lacquer Resistant Metal Primer” and at the bottom, “Red Oxide.” The previous primer was simply labelled “Metal Primer, Red Oxide.” What’s with this Lacquer Resistant stuff?

Now it was Jen’s turn to panic. After all, she ordered the paint. Turns out, she recalled noticing that the latest shipment was this slightly different stuff, and she called the paint guy about it. He assured her that it was fine. Lacquer Resistant primer just means that you can put lacquer on over it with no problems. However, it dries very slowly, and very shiny. Observe the difference. The first photo shows the normal primer, the second shows the newer primer:

So, total score: 4 different kinds of paint so far, and we haven’t even gotten to putting on actual bottom paint and the final color. Sometimes it’s like the 3 stooges around here.

While all that paint was drying we busied ourselves with a variety of other projects. We’d glued up the 14′ long mast from some stunningly nice sitka spruce the other day, so that was dry and ready for shaping. We traced the mast taper on one side and bandsawed close to our line (actually right UP TO the line at times… when you’re cutting a heavy, long chunk of expensive wood, getting that close is unnerving). Kev then planed down to the line to get a nice smooth face.

Checking for square as he goes…

Yep, the BFD is open (that’s the Big Door behind Kev). Temps in the 50’s and 60’s. Spring is in the air.

Of course it’s snowing right now as I write this. Whatever. Remember, Global Warming is a myth perpetrated by leftist types who want to take away your guns and force your daughters to become lesbians and drink latte. I’m just sayin’.

I worked on the other side of the mast yesterday, we steamed up and bent a couple of gaff jaws (more on that later), we steamed and straightened our boom… lots of little things to do.

We had a brief scare yesterday about plank thickness, and for a moment we thought that one of Kev’s planks had been overly thinned. Ideal thickness is 1/2″, the lower limit is 3/8″. His came in at 7/16″ (exactly halfway between 1/2 and 3/8). One of mine looked like it might be a problem, so I checked it as well… 7/16. Big sighs all around.

There’s a big St. Paddy’s day parade here in Newport this weekend, so we wanted to do a float. We used basically the same idea as they had last year: have 2 Beetle cats, one trashed out, one restored. We painted up the trashed out one and it looks great:

There’s the restored one in the foreground. I think we wrote “Me father has a wee problem with the drink” on the side in Gaelic, but no one really knows what it says.

Back at the boat shop, the hounds are moving along smartly. Finally, I remembered to bring my camera, so here’s what I’ve been doing. You can just see 2 hounds on the left there, and a third one on the right that looks much bigger.

The first two are finished and glued on. The one on the right is still being fitted, and will then get shaped on the outside to match the other two. They taper from about 1/2″ thick down to about 3/16″ at the bottom edge.

You’ll notice the blue tinge to the mast on the right. That’s from chalkline chalk. You rub it on, then press your hound up to the mast, pull it off and look at the mating surface. The chalk transfers to the high points on the inside of the hound. Plane off the blue bits, place it back on the mast, repeat. This hound is getting close, but there’s still a gap near the center and along the left edge. You can’t do anything about the edge as it’s getting to the point where it wraps around the mast. I eventually just cut that edge back to where it mated flush.

So, today hopefully we’ll flip the dang boat.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 6:23 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.