Secrets to happiness
A while back, I left it up in the air about what the final decision would be regarding the mast: does it get a Dutchman or does it have to be remade completely? Well, here’s the photographic answer:
Woo hoo! That’s a jig for making a very straight slot in the mast so I could put in a Dutchman. This is exactly the kind of thing that I love to do: to come up with a way to save materials and time while working out an interesting problem.
The real challenge was to lock in the mast so that it wouldn’t move while I ran the router down its length. If you look at the very top of the mast there, you can see 2 little blocks wedged into either side of the top. Those hold the top centered and straight. The box around the mast is just a track for the router sled to ride on. It worked very well, and I got a nice 1/8″ slot straight down the mast along the epoxy joint. Looks like this:
Add in a spline of sitka spruce and you get this:
It came out nicely. Epoxied that puppy in, planed it down to just barely proud of the surface of the mast, sanded everything round, and it’s just right. From start to finish it took about 2 hours. Compared to the time and materials it would have taken to build a new one… that was a total bargain. For some reason I didn’t take a photo of the finished product. Later I reckon.
So, secret to happiness No. 1: find something interesting to do that will save you time and materials, and then do it.
This past week has gone by quickly, which usually means we’ve been busy. Jen asked us if we wanted a somewhat accelerated schedule so that we could have a little extra time at the end of the year to do more sailing, and we all said YES. From now until June 2nd, we have a series of weekly deadlines that are more ambitious than in the past, and it’s keeping us moving along smartly. Here’s this week’s list:
- construct, install, and paint all the sole bearers
- construct, install, and paint the sole
- cut out, shape, and seal the tiller
- shape the rudder, attach the pintels and gudgeons, and scribe the waterline on the rudder
- attach the mast wythe
- attach and fair the nailing blocks behind the sheer plank
It looks like a lot to do, and it is. However, it’s not an impossible list if both people on the team are working steadily. Kev had kind of a rough Monday (he was at a bachelor party in Myrtle Beach all weekend) so he took on the task of putting in all the nailer blocks. Simple work, but necessary and time consuming.
So, what the heck are all these parts?
A sole bearer is not, as one might instantly guess, an Egyptian Coptic Vase. That’s for entrails. The Soul is more ephemeral. No, Ephemeral is not a tv cook either. That’s Emeril.
The sole bearer holds the sole of the boat. I personally think the sole should be called the floor, but Kev reminded me that the soles of your shoes go on it, so it’s the sole. Ok, a small stretch, but I can live with it. In many other boats, the members that we’re calling sole bearers would be called floor timbers, but there are enough differences between what we’re building and actual floor timbers to necessitate calling them something else.
Floor timbers are structural members of a boat. They look like sole bearers, are are placed in the same part of the boat, but they serve to strengthen the boat as well as hold up the sole. For this reason, they’re usually made of oak or something else tough. Floor timbers are also bolted to the keel and frames, and thus help to form a thicker, beefier joint between the frames and keel.
Sole bearers, on the other hand, are made of cedar, and sit on the keel without being directly attached to it. They are held in place with a few ring nails driven through them into the frames. This holds them upright, but adds little to nothing as far as structural strength goes. In fact, this is one of the reasons that when you see an old Beetle Cat, you will almost always find that the frames in the aft end of the boat are broken near the keel. Here’s what’s happening.
The Beetle Cat has this big skeg sticking out of the bottom of the keel. When you drag this boat up on land, the boat sits on that skeg. That means that all the weight of the boat is concentrated along the line of the keel, all pushing up against the frames. Take a look:
All those frames in the aft part of the boat are just screwed to the keel, and then to the planks. All that pressure on the keel exerts a substantial upwards force on the frames as they cross the keel and snaps them on either side of the keel. Farther forward, the frames are interrupted by the centerboard trunk, and so they can bend upwards where they butt up against the trunk. So, the frames deflect in the forward section, and break aft.
But we’re really talking about sole bearers. No, not the people who tell you every emotion they feel without editing. Those people are on Oprah and you should never EVER allow them to go sailing in your Beetle Cat with you. The cockpit is simply not large enough for you and their feelings.
Here’s the 2nd secret to happiness: find something sort of hard to do, do it right, and then keep doing it all day. You’ll feel wonderful.
That’s how it was with the sole bearers for me. Making a sole bearer requires you to scribe the shape of the bottom of the boat onto pattern stock, transfer the pattern to your cedar, cut it out accurately, and then fit it to your boat. In a perfect world, your sole bearer sits perfectly flush with your planking and keel. Don’t forget to include limber holes to allow the bilge water to run through.
Here’s the first 3:
The way they do the sole in the Beetle Cat is to have a set width for the sole bearer at the aft section and a set height for the sole bearer just aft of the centerboard trunk. You can see how wide that aft sole bearer (ok, from now on I’m calling them SB’s) is? You can imagine that if the SB was wider, it would have to be taller, because the wider it gets, the more it climbs up the sides of the boat. Same goes for the the SB behind the trunk; set the height, and the width will also become fixed by the distance it takes for a board that high to intersect with the planking.
Once you’ve these 2 SB’s set (in this case, Kev tried to make his SB on Monday… bad idea… couldn’t pull it off, so I just used a 2 3/4″ block to substitute since that’s the set height of that SB), you make all the other SB’s between these 2 just high enough to form a flat surface between these 2 points. What I’m doing in this photo is using the level as a straight edge, and I make each SB just high enough so that it touches the underside of the level.
I was a SB makin‘ fool. Seemed I could do no wrong that day. Each one I scribed came out just right and fit with only minimal fussing. OK, except the 2nd one. The one with all the shavings around it. I got cocky after making the first one (the aft most one), and I nailed the 2nd one in without checking the height. I had made a fundamental error in how I calculated the height and was off by 3/4″. It was a total beginner mistake. And since we nail these things in with ring nails (essentially barbed nails… they hold like grim death), taking it out non-destructively was out of the question. I had to either destroy it by removing it, or plane if flat and true where it lay. I chose the latter. And, like the mast spline, I worked out a way to remove a lot of wood quickly and accurately. It was actually really easy: I took a circular saw, set the blade depth to 5/8″, made tons of crosswise cuts along the SB, chiseled out the blocks down to the depth of the cuts, and then I only had 1/8″ left to plane flat with my hand plane. Woo hoo! Secret to happiness No 1!!
After that, it was just careful scribing (ignore most of the vertical and horizontal lines on this template stock, it’s left over from lofting. The only lines that matter are the centerline for orientation and the curved hull shape that’s being traced with the compass)
cutting out the pattern and tracing the shape onto the stock,
and adjusting the height, and then installing the next SB.
Nice flat plane we’re constructing.
While I was doing this, Kev put in the nailer blocks along the sheer. Later on, we’ll nail the decking to them, rather than nailing into the sheer plank. Nailing into the sheer plank tends to trash it.
It was slow, boring, necessary work.
Kev had made a couple of stabs at that SB just aft of the centerboard trunk, and discovered that his rejects worked nicely for the helf-width SBs that sit just forward of the aft end of the trunk. That was a huge help and a big relief to both of us.
So, by the end of Monday, we had all our SB’s installed and ready for the sole. You can see the 2 half-width SB’s on the right here, and only one on the left (it was on the bench getting an epoxy plug in place of a knot). You can also see all the nailer blocks installed.
After that, I worked on the sole itself, while Kev worked on the tiller. Unfortunately I don’t have a tiller photo yet… tomorrow.
The sole follows the curve of the outside edge of the sole bearers. In a perfect world, the sole is symmetrical, sits flat on the SB’s, and just touches the frames.
We had an almost perfect world. The outer sole has a pleasant sweep and it just kissed each frame and lay flat on the sole.
Ahhh.
Secret to happiness No. 3. Take time out to enjoy it when things go just right.
The sole had a few tricky bevels in the center section aft of the centerboard trunk, but otherwise was pretty straightforward. It took about a day and a half to finish, and that was being fussy to get everything exactly even and properly spaced. I figured that the people who will be in the boat will see this part of the boat more than any other, so it might as well look really good.
Kev finished up the tiller, did all the shaping on the rudder, and we managed to drill the holes for the gudgeons in at exactly the wrong angle. So, filled the holes with donkey toothpicks (normal people call them splines or pegs, but we like dt’s), which are essentially pointed, fat toothpicks epoxied into the wrongly drilled holes so that you can drill them properly next time as if they were solid wood.
And then we painted. Lord, let me not be a painter for the rest of my life. I’m not cut out for it. Kev is doing the inside of the boat and I’m painting all the sole pieces.
Tomorrow we’ll install the pintels and gudgeons, strike the waterline on the rudder, install the mast wythe and make our deadline. Excellent.
Oh, the pintels are the pointy bits that are mounted on the rudder, and the gudgeons are the brass parts with holes that pointy bits slide into. Together they make a hinge for your rudder to swing from. And the mast wythe is a bronze ring that goes around the top of the mast and both holds it together and has a ring cast into it. The main halyard block hooks into that ring.
Secret to happiness No 4: Find art in your world. Today’s example is entitled “Still life with plane and wild shavings”:
