A Shipwright in Training

I really do like owning a house, and I particularly like the renters I’ve had in my house for the past couple of years. No kidding, they’re the bomb. So, when they mentioned over the summer that the house was pretty cold last winter, I wanted to help them out. At the same time I wanted to make sure that whatever I did kept the house looking nice.

My first instinct was to replace the old crummy double track aluminum storm windows. However, when I looked at the cost (around $5k), how hard it would be to access the upstairs windows, and the questionable gains for the investment, I started to re-think that particular plan. The excellent folks over at Fine Homebuilding (the Breaktime bulliten board) gave me the idea of building some interior storm windows and leaving the old ones where they are. Hmmm, I don’t have to work outside and it’s cheaper… Yes yes.

The challenge was to come up with something that would seal the windows from the inside without looking ugly and require doing a lot of work each season. For instance, lots of people put up plastic over their windows in the winter, or use removable caulking to seal up around the windows. Too much work and time each season. Looking online, I found a place that sold storm windows with a strip of magnetic tape around the edge. The problem was that you had to put a steel rim around your windows for the magnets to stick to and I didn’t like how that looked.

I use rare earth magnets a lot for holding things in the shop, and after a little thinking, I came up with a way to use them to hold storm windows in place. They have the added advantage of being easily hidden in the window frame so you never see them. You can paint right over them without affecting them at all. Here’s what I came up with.
I used:

• 1/8″ Acrylic and Polycarbonate (Lexan) sheets. The Lexan is clearer and won’t yellow, so I used it for the downstairs windows. The Acrylic was used for the upstairs bedrooms.
• 3/16″ x 1 1/4″ clear pine strips that I milled
• Outdoor carpet tape to hold the pine strips on the Acrylic
• 1/4″ x 1/2″ rare earth magnets (via Ebay)
• 1/4″ x 1″ bolts & nuts. Grind the top surface of the heads dead flat.
• 1/2″ x 3/4″ stick-on foam insulation
• A little super glue gel to anchor the magnets in the window frame.

It really is simplicity itself.

• Cut your plastic sheet to overlap the interior window opening by 1 1/2″ on each side and along the top.
• Attach the wood strips to the margin of the plastic with carpet tape. I couldn’t find thin carpet tape, so I had to cut mine in half lengthwise.

Here you’re looking from the window side of the plastic at the wood attached with carpet tape.

• Drill some evenly spaced 1/4″ holes for the bolts 3/4″ from the outside edge of the plastic. I put 2 holes along the top and 4 along each side for the larger windows. If you have many windows of the same size, you can drill them all at once.

• Place the assembly up against window frame and center it. When you’re happy with the fit, use the holes you drilled as a guide to drill holes into your window trim. Yikes! Use a bit of tape on your drill bit to get your depth right. You want to drill just deep enough so that you can sink your magnets flush to the frame surface.
• Attach the foam insulation. See, that’s why we drilled the holes 3/4″ in. Along the bottom, have the insulation sit about 1/8′ proud of the bottom of the window. You need a nice soft strip there to seal the bottom edge against the window sill.
• Thread a nut on the bolt, and then put them both through the hole with the bolt head just at or below the level of the insulation. Attach another nut to the wood side of the window to hold the bolt in place.

• Sink your magnets into the holes you drilled. Use a drop of superglue gel to make sure they stay. I had to tap many of my magnets in with a hammer. Use a rag between the hammer and magnet to protect the magnet… they can shatter. I sunk mine to just proud of the window frame.

• Now place the new storm window up against the frame. Adjust the nuts in or out so that they just grab the magnet and hold the insulation tightly against the frame.
• You can paint the wood to match your existing frames if you like. I left mine bare because I was short on time. Still, I think they looked pretty decent.

Oh, here’s a hint. When you pull the protective plastic off of the acrylic (this was less a problem with the Lexan), you’ll get huge amounts of static electricity. All the wood chips from drilling, or dust bunnies, or your cat will cling to the window. To lessen this effect, wipe down the window with a wet rag as you peel off the plastic.

I found it took about an hour / window to go from materials to installed window. I did 17 windows in 4 days and still had time to eat thanksgiving dinner with friends!

Professional Plastics will cut your plastic to size for you, saving you a step. They were also able to sell me pre-cut Lexan for cheaper than I could get at Home Depot, even with shipping.

The renters said that they could tell the difference the first night. Of course, this is a 1930’s house and the windows were pretty leaky to begin with.

This design requires that you have flat trim around your windows. It won’t work if your trim is textured, particularly uneven, or sculpted in any way. The Magnetite folks have the advantage of a system that works no matter what kind of trim you have. Unfortunately the metal trim is just ugly as far as I can see.

Next up: something about boats I think.

Blogged with Flock

I really must apologize for the paucity of blogs in the last month or so. All I can say I think that this condition will even out over time, but lately I’ve been a bit distracted. She has the most *amazing* hair. mmmm.

In the meantime, when my mind is on boats, I think about the binder. After fitting it to the boat and making sure that everything was fair, I took it back off the boat, and cut in the bead along the top inner edge. I wrote about that particular step on the binder I made a while back; unfortunately, adding that detail before I double checked the fit of my plank, made the plank unusable. If I’d waited to do the bead until after checking the fit, I would have possibly been able to do some more shaping to the plank to make it fit. Live and learn. Again.

So, the bead’s now cut, the plank is clamped in place, and the next step is to cut the lap between the binder and the sheer. This is essentially a very precise slope that is cut in both planks so that when they overlap they mate perfectly.

First step is to mark out how much the planks overlap. In this case, the overlap is 7/8,” a little fact we picked up by looking at the transom where the joint between the 2 planks is exposed.

Read the rest of this entry »

A while ago I wrote about making a nice plank. It was a very nice plank, and it had a funky wave in it along the top (sheer) edge. I thought it would all work out, but that was really just wishful thinking. When I steamed it and put it on the boat, it looked awful.

Dammit dammit.

So, a lot of head scratching and staring at things later, I decided to start from scratch and re-batten out the lines that I’d worked from. These lines had been worked out earlier by other students on our team, and usually I just trust what they’ve done. This time, though, when I re-battened out the lower edge of the sheer, things looked much better.

So, I spiled the plank again, found another board, re-cut the plank, backed it out, and sanded it. This one was even more fun because our cedar this year is probably a little more real-world than last year. There are knots to attend to, and that
means they get drilled out and plugs get epoxied into the holes first.

And this board had teh craziest reversing grain, particularly around the knots. Take a look at this one.

If you look at the grain directly above the plug, you can see how it’s tearing out a bit on both sides. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a little side project that was easy and fun. A friend had an old wooden chaise lounge for outdoors that needed a new wheel. Here’s the old one.

I was asked to just make the wheel and not do the spoke figure… just as well. It would have been relatively simple to do with a router jig, but I just made the wheel. So, here’s how you copy a wheel. Read the rest of this entry »

We had a half day last Friday since the latter half of the day was spent prepping the school for hurricane Noel. As it happened, the storm tracked east of us, and all we got was a good blow (4 private boats in the sound came off their moorings and were lost) and some big waves. No one really thought we’d be hit bad, but it was good to have everything battened down.

I mentioned using the Unscrew-em’s the other day, and I described their use inaccurately… probably because I’d forgotten how to use them until the day after writing that entry. What I’d said was that you wanted the body of the screw to go up inside the hollow Unscrew-em, and cut out the surrounding wood with the tool. Not exactly… Here’s the real deal.

You actually want the tool to be the same size as the screw. When you hit the screw correctly, you grind away the outside part of the screw and barely drill away any wood around the screw. Here’s a couple of screws that I removed:

By the way, they’re just sitting on a block of wood I had handy; these aren’t the holes left over from removing screws. Read the rest of this entry »