Ready for the next deadline
plus 
equals about how close we got to missing our deadline. Phew. Not that it would be huge deal, the price is that you have to come in an hour early every day for a week, but we prefer to have that be voluntary.
In the past few days we finished fitting and painting the sole
and now the inside of the boat is a consistent, boring shade of Beetle Gray. We’ll have all our fun with color on the deck and hull.
The main projects to finish up the deadline were getting the rudder finished and installed and adding the mast wythe. Let’s start with the rudder.
This one was Kev’s baby. We had the option of rounding the edges or doing a more hydrodynamic taper, and naturally, we went for the taper. We want this Beetle to sail circles around other Beetles, and a sleek rudder is just the thing to do it. Uh huh. So, here it is after the aft section has been nicely tapered.
Planing plywood is made easier by the fact that the wood layers are more or less of a consistent thickness, so that when you plane through them at an angle, the glue lines show you how far you’ve gone. It’s like contour lines on a map. So here you can see that Kev has planed a taper into the last third of the rudder. He’s also done the initial fit with the pintels and tiller hardware.
After this, it was time to install the gudgeons (drilling the holes at the proper angle this time)
and voila! Beautiful!
The next part was tricky: fitting the rudder to the boat so that the tiller would enter in through the hole in the transom, and also miss the aft deck beam.
You can see how it just bumps into the lower edge of the deck beam here. The shavings in the boat are from shaving down the deck beam a little bit to allow the tiller to have more room. Kev and Lou worked on this for a while to get the proper balance of rudder placement, top of rudder shaping, and deck beam modification.
The Beetle Cat rudder, and indeed, most of the cat boat rudders, is a huge, ungainly thing. It looks like a fish tail.
Once it was all fit nicely and nothing bumped into anything, we drilled the holes for the pintel and tiller hardware and struck the rudder waterline. This last thing was simple: just stretch out a level from the waterline along the rudder, and mark it. How easy is that?
So, Kev painted the rudder with primer on the top half, at which point someone pointed out that the entire rudder needed to be sealed with epoxy first, prior to any painting.
Oh.
But, the paint was wet, so on Monday we’ll sand it all off, epoxy the dang thing, and be back in business. We were told that this little detail wasn’t enough to make us officially miss the deadline, even though the deadline was “rudder sealed and waterline marked.” See what I meant about skin of our teeth?
In the meantime, I carved down the top of the mast to accept the wythe. This involved essentially making a round tenon at the top of the mast so that the wythe can slip over it. Seems simple enough, but the mast is slightly tapered, and you want this to be a tight fit so that water doesn’t get trapped in between the wythe and the mast. So, once again, precision is your friend.
This one started with centering and scribing a 1 5/8″ circle on the end of the mast to match the internal diameter of the wythe.
Using a center finder.
As you can see, the mast isn’t perfectly round at the very end, so it took a little fudging to get the circle acceptably centered.
Next, you have to define the shoulder of your tenon. This should be as perpendicular to the axis of the mast as possible. An old plumber’s trick form marking pipe to cut it evenly is to wrap the pipe with a piece of paper and mark the edge. This worked well for the mast too.
Next, you make a saw cut down to the depth of your tenon. You get this depth from looking at the circle you drew on the end of your mast. If you mark your saw with tape at that depth, it’s a simple matter to saw consistently to the right depth.
You need to do this step before you do any chiseling on your mast, particularly with a brittle wood like sitka spruce. The cut stops your chiseling from lifting out a huge chunk of mast below your tenon.
You also have to be mindful of how the grain runs when doing something like this. You can see here how the grain wants to run down into the mast in the upper part of the next cut. You can see the slightly rounded start of the cut, and then the rough surface where the grain ramped down to the base of the saw kerf. With grain like this, you have to cut the face side of the tenon by cutting from the kerfed edge outwards.
As you get things roughed out, it’s handy to come in with a sharp rabbeting plane to keep your tenon surface even. This is a low angle, skewed blade rabbeting plane, and it’s the ideal tool for this operation. The low angle and skewed blade do a great job slicing across the grain.
Once you’re pretty close, you test fit the wythe, and finesse the fit with a strip of sandpaper pulled across the surface, like you’re buffing your shoes. In the end, you get a nice, tight fit.
Now, someone may write in and tell me that the wythe is on upside down. That may be, and a number of the wythes that we’ve see are oriented with the ring at the top. The thing is, this one has a rounded edge on one side and a flat edge on the other. This just screams to be installed this way as far as I can see.
Oh: non sequitur time.
Boat builders (and probably timber framers as well) have the biggest circular saws on the block. They are just the thing for cutting up massive timbers. When someone starts one up, people stop what they’re doing and come by to watch. Here’s Toma slicing into a huge chunk of oak.
Now tell me that ain’t fun.
Lastly, here’s the dutchman that I let into the mast, it’s nearly invisible.
You can see it better if you’re closer, but it fades to nothing at the right.
Given that this thing is along the top 3′ of the mast, no one will ever know it’s there, providing they don’t read this blog.