This was a real team effort.  Like I said before, thin wood like this cools quickly and forces us to act fast.  To give ourselves a little extra time to work we steamed up a 1/2″ piece of cedar that was about the same size as the mahogany at the same time.  We brought them both out of the steamer and clamped them on together with the cedar on  the outside. 

The effect of the cedar was to act as a hot blanket on top of the mahogany while we bent it down, and it gave us a little more time to work.  It also spreads the clamping pressure of the blocks out just a little bit, so there’s no danger of getting indentations from the blocks in the coaming.  A twofer! 

While we were doing that, other folks measured the canvas and ironed it good and flat.

They trimmed the sides to give some overlap around the edges, but got rid of much of the excess width. Once it’s all nice and smooth, they roll it back up and sit it at the bow of the boat. 

After that, they taped off the covering board and inside edges of the cockpits.

The canvas decking is held down with a special glue.  Excess glue will squeeze out down the inside of the cockpit openings and covering boards when we smooth out the canvas.  We want these surfaces to remain glue-free, so we tape them off with paper and painter’s tape.  We also put plastic down on the inside of the boat to protect it from glue drips. 

The glue is about the consistency of yogurt, and we mix it up with an anti-mold agent. 

In the old days, canvas decks were often bedded in white lead.  Now that’s some great stuff.  It kills everything, and gives boat builders all kinds of interesting neurological damage.  I thought there was no way that we’d be using it for this project, but then I looked at the side of the bucket.

The shipping label conveniently covers up the part of the statement that says this product DOES NOT contain the various asbestos, lead, and mercury compounds that you see mentioned on the bucket.  Woah!  For about 15 minutes I was convinced we needed to be in full tyvek suits, rubber gloves… Oh, wait, it’s relatively safe? 

Never mind.

So on the glue goes.  We spread it out on the deck with notched trowels, just like spreading tile mastic.

As soon as the glue is on, we follow behind with the canvas, pressing it down and smoothing out bumps with a rounded batten.  Right behind the batten guy, a few of us start stapling the canvas down in the dado.  A guy follows behind the stapler setting the staples flush with a hammer and punch.  Behind him comes a guy painting on a thinned glue mixture that soaks through the canvas and completely bonds it to the underlying layer of glue. The drying of this wet application also helps to tighten up the canvas and remove wrinkles

It’s a production line.  Here you can see the whole line in operation:  staple, set, paint. 

Jamie setting staples.

Here you can see where the thinned glue has been applied to the forward portion of the deck.

Those dark colored moving blankets have been set over the cockpit openings to stretch the canvas a little bit down in those areas.  This assures that the canvas is held tight against the glue at the edge of those openings.

The aft end of the boat, all canvassed and stapled.  Next, we run a razor knife down in the dado to trim off the excess canvas and clean up any glue that got onto the covering board.

Here we’ve reapplied the painter’s tape on the covering board in anticipation of painting the deck.  I put the first coat on yesterday so it’d be dry for Monday.  From now on we’ll keep the deck covered up as much as possible to protect from shoe marks, dust, the odd tool the falls.  I discovered recently that the rivets in my Carhart pants were perfectly placed to dent the deck when I sat on it and swung my legs over into the cockpit.  Rrrrr.

Meanwhile, the boom has been cut and glued up.

Nice. 

The mast is coming along too, and we’re expecting it to be glued up soon as well. 

3 weeks and counting.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: deck, canvas, glue, coaming, boom

First off the list, the winch post . 

I think it looks like a piece of Danish modern furniture.  It’s all shiny with its 2nd coat of varnish.  It’ll get at least 7 coats before all is said and done. 

For those who care about such things, the large blocking in the center of the 2 uprights will back up the winches.  There will be a jib halyard winch on the right side of the top block and a main halyard winch on the left side of the lower block.  The two smaller blocks are there to help stiffen the whole affair and keep it from twisting from the force of the lines pulling on the winches. 

At the base, right next to the post members, you can see two lighter pieces of wood… those are oak braces that go in between the 2 sole bearers.  The braces are screwed down to the floor timber below it, and into the sole bearers as well.  These are there to brace the post and keep it from racking. 

And just to save you a trip to the glossary:
The soles are the floorboards.
The sole bearer is what the sole sits on.
The floor timber connects the frames to the keel. 

Ok, tick that off. 

Next up, making a new bending jig for the aft cockpit coamings.  The original jig seemed good enough at the time,

but the coamings were left on the jig out in the sun and rain while other things took priority.

They didn’t fare well.

We think the break had as much to do with a hard spot (i.e., a too sharp curve in the jig) as being left in the sun.  The long checks (the splits running left to right) were probably due to the sun and rain.

The upshot: those coamings are toast, and we’ll need to bend some new ones.  We decided to make a new jig, a solid one.  It’s possible that the coaming wood failed because the wood ran straight in the spaces between the 2×4’s in the previous jig, and then had to bend sharply when it curved across them.  A sold jig provides a continuous bearing surface for the wood to bend against.  It’s more trouble to make than the original jig, but it’s close to foolproof.

Mike traced the shape of the cockpit opening, and cut and faired it out to make a pattern.

This is half of the opening where the coaming will go.  The cockpit is symmetrical, so you can make both coaming sides from the same pattern.

The bending jig is a positive mold.  This means that the wood is bent over it, and the face that contacts the jig is the inner face of the coaming.  However, the cockpit butts up against the outer face of the coaming.  Here’s a simplified picture in case this seems obtuse.

So, the problem is that we’ve got a pattern based on the edge of the cockpit but the jig has to be based on the inner edge of the coaming.  The coaming is 1/2″ thick.  Luckily, it’s easy to fix this.  Trace the pattern on some stock for the jig, and then, using a small 1/2″ thick block, subtract the coaming thickness by making little marks all around the inside of the tracing.

You can barely see the little tracing I’ve made on the right side of the block.

You end up with a series of dash marks along the inside of the tracing.

Now, just connect them with a flexible batten

and trace the new line from the batten.

That’s the line you cut to.  I like to cut close to the line, and then get right on it using a stationary sander.  The sander has the advantage of allowing you to fair in your curve a bit more as you make smooth, sweeping motions across the sander.

Once you’ve got this piece done, it becomes your master template.  For this jig, we want a final thickness of about 5″.  This means we need a stack of about 7 layers of plywood. 

I like using a flush-cutting router or shaper bit with a guide bearing to make exact copies from a template like this.  The process would be easy if we had a cutter that was tall enough to handle the whole stack at once, but unfortunately, our longest cutter is about 2 1/2″  This means we have to assemble and cut these layers in stages.

First, we trace out the template onto a piece of scrap plywood and cut it out a little big.  Here’s a slick trick to cutting out a large shape like this.  Put half of the sheet of plywood on a bench, and the other half on a rolling cart just set away from the bench.

Ok, this only works really if your cart fits entirely within the shape of the cutout.  In this case, it does.  You can barely see the cutout line drawn on wood here. 

Then cut your shape out.

Voila!  The cart holds it up and nothing falls and binds the blade. 

All right, it’s not a huge trick, but it’s handy if you’re working alone. 

So, stack up 3 of these guys on your template and screw them all together.  With the template on the top of the stack, use a router with a top-mounted guide bearing to flush cut the 2 layers below it.  Yes, the 2 layers, because that’s all the router will reach. 

We’ll get to that 3rd layer in a minute.

By the way, this goes MUCH FASTER if you use a sharp bit rather than a chewed up dull hunk of junk like I started with.  Word to the wise…

So, after you make this cut, stack two more layers on top of your template, and screw them down too.

Now change your router bit to a flush cutting bit with a bottom mounted guide bearing.

Now when you rout, the bearing still rides along the template and cuts the stack above the template.  Flip your stack, add one more layer of plywood, and use this router one last time. 

In this case, you will be riding on the layers next to the template, rather than the template itself, but if you’ve been careful, it’s all the same.  The only problem that may arise is if your plywood has voids… the bearing will dip into them and give you a little dip on your path. 

That’s why I always use marine grade plywood for my first pattern if at all possible… no voids.

At the end of it all, you have a thick stack of wood that perfectly follows the shape of your template.  A very heavy thick stack of wood.

Now add some holes for the clamps.  They don’t go all the way through, they’re just deep enough for the clamps.  The other side has a mirror set of holes.

(that clamp is in place to show why the holes are there by the way, it’s not doing anything important like solving world hunger or clamping a right wing talk show host’s mouth shut)

With a two cleats screwed to the bottom of this beast, you can now clamp it to a couple of saw horses.

Here it is, all set up and ready to go.  The clamps are hung on the saw horses to that we can pick them up and use then immediately. 

The 1/2″ thick mahogany that will be bent on this form will have been in the steamer for about an hour, but will cool very quickly.  Thin wood cools almost immediately after coming out of the steam box.  This means we’ll have to work very fast, preferably using four people. 

It goes like this:  take the hot board out of the steamer, put it on the top of the jig, have 2 people bend both sides down immediately and hold it there while the other two start clamping in the middle and then work their way down to the ends.  The board has to be held down with one edge running right along one of the jig’s edges to keep it from being bent at an angle.  The whole process should take 30 seconds or less if we’re good.

That’s tomorrow’s job.  But for now, the jig is ticked off the list.

Tags: jig, coaming, stem bending, winch post

Normally when you fill screw holes, you get your fairing compound to about the consistensy of peanut butter, press it into the hole and leave it just a little proud of the hole to allow for shrinkage.  That’s how most of the holes are handled in this photo.  When you do it this way, fairing becomes a simple matter of hitting those spots with sandpaper or maybe a plane and you’re done.

However, one guy didn’t really like people telling him how to do things, and you can see his work in the upper left of that photo.  Yes, the Blob.  The guy who did this was not really thinking about the consequences of his technique.  It was more a git-r-done approach.  He got-r-done.

And we planed and sanded for half a day to get that done.

Yep, those are just epoxy shavings.  No wood at all.  I’d say we removed 90% of what he applied.  At some point, I switched off this job and went below to install the supports for the halyard winches.  These guys are mounted on the sides of these twin posts.  The main, jib, and spinnaker halyards are led down through the center of the mast, and come out near the base.  This gets rid of some of the deck clutter from these lines.

In progress.  They’ll have blocking between them to stiffen them up.  You can see that the sole is starting to be installed as well.  This is in the forward cockpit, or the pit, where the grinders will work.  Here’s the aft cockpit where the boat steerer will sit.

Yesterday we were finally ready to seal the deck with primer paint treated with an anti-mildew agent.

Looks nice.  There are a few unfair spots left, but they’re quite minor and only visible to people who’ve obsessed over the deck.  Soon we’ll get some canvas on this puppy. 

Tags: deck, six meter, madcap

Before making the swallowtails, I fabricated 4 bronze plates that will become the base of the U-shaped running back stay anchors.  The trick was to make them all exactly the same without the benefit of a CNC or other automatic milling machine. 

Thank god for copiers.  I did the same trick with the plates as I did for the swallowtails:  draw them up, xerox the drawing, glue the drawings to the stock, and then carefully cut, drill, and grind to the lines.  The result was 4 identical plates. 

Now the tricky part was making 4 identical U-shaped, threaded bolts to fit into these puppies.  Luckily, IYRS came through again with the perfect bending machine from their systems program.  It’s really a pipe bender, but we modified it a bit to work with the bronze rod stock we’re using for the bolts. 

First I threaded each end of a 15″ length of straight 3/8″ bronze rod.  Then I put the rod in the bender.

To make sure that the bend was even (i.e., that both ends of the rod ended up the same length) I started the bend with the centerpoint of the rod just touching the middle bending surface.

In this case, that surface is a socket from a socket wrench set that gave us just the right bend diameter. Next, bend the rod to 90 degrees, take it out, reverse it so that the leg on the right is now on the left, and complete the bend. 

Not bad, the legs are almost exactly the same length.  No problem, because it’s a little long and they’ll get trimmed down when they’re installed. The legs are still just a little splayed out though.  Seems that bronze has a bit of springback to it.

That won’t do.  So, over to the vise with it.

The wooden pad protect the rod from getting scraped up. 

Overbend it a little more…

And voila!  It fits the plate just right.

We’ll weld the plate to the U bolt soon, but in the meantime, I wanted to fit it in the boat to make sure that I had the right lengths for the legs. 

Not bad.  You can see here how the bolts come down through the sheer clamp and into the swallowtail.

The problem was that they came down a little farther than I had originally thought, and I ran out of thread. 

Hmmm, this creates a bit of a problem.  How do you put more thread on a U-shaped thing?  Normally you’d use a die cutter to cut more thread.  However, the handles bump into the other leg of the bolt when you try to cut one leg.

Luckily, Lew had the perfect solution:  Hex Shaped die cutters.

Hey hey hey.  Check this out.  Put a 1″ socket on the die and you can now use a ratcheting handle to turn it!

The handle doesn’t get in the way of the 2nd leg.  Problem solved.  I cut another 3/4″ of thread and everything fit like a glove. 

Now, on to the deck! 

The astute observer would have noticed that the deck was being started as I was doing the test fitting with the bolts a few photos back, but here’s another view. 

Four deck strips (technically “planks”) laid.  Many more to go.  Mike contemplates the task. 

The process is simple really.  Start from the inside edge of the covering board, and screw and nail each plank in place. 

Screw and nail?  Why both? 

Well, you screw them down to the deck beams, but you nail them to each other to help stiffen the whole affair up.  After all, these planks are only 1/2″ thick.  The nailing is the tricky part.  We nail sideways through 2 1/2 planks to tie them together using copper nails.  These all get pre-drilled because otherwise the nails would split the thin planking.  However, there is very little room for error, and if you’re not careful, you’ll angle your drill up or down just a hair too much and blow out either the top or underside of the deck.  Like this, for instance.

The red lines show the path of the nails inside the decking, going from bottom to top.  You can just see how they’ve emerged at their tips. 

Each plank gets 2 nails in the middle of each bay (the space between the deck beams).  There are 51 bays.  I think we used about 2,500 nails.  That’s a lot of chances to blow your angle by a degree or so.  It also gives you a lot of practice getting it just right.  By the end of 4 days, my Drill Fu was very strong.

Mike and Phil made up some nifty metal jigs to make the drilling process easier. 

They discovered quickly that while it gave them a good, consistent, side-to-side spacing for the nails, it didn’t stop the driller from blowing the up/down angle.  Oh well.

Sometimes we’d drill a hole and find that we’d bumped into a nail from the previously installed plank.  So, we’d leave that hole alone and drill next to it.

My technique was to make a little mark at the location of every nail as I set it in.

That way I knew exactly what was in the way, and it pretty much eliminated hitting any embedded nails. 

The deck curves in, so we herringboned the planks where they met in the middle. 

We got pretty quick at making those cuts, but they did tend to slow things down a bit. 

Ok, Ok, enough on technique!  Here’s the progress with 3-5 guys working solid:

Monday.

Tuesday.

Wednesday.

And finally, today.

Done!  Now we fair up the deck, trim around the cockpits, and get ready for canvassing. 

It seems like we’ve done a lot, and we have, but there’s LOTS more to do, and only 4 weeks left. 

For one thing, there’s the mast.

That’s the setup for the 60′ long mast.  it’s made up of 6 staves and will be oval and tapered.  It’s not easy.  Looking at it up on the catwalk, it seems to go on forever.  Hard to believe it will stick out of that little boat.

I’m making a point of staying at least an hour or 2 late most every night to help get this project in on time, but we’ll see if it’s enough.

More on that in a bit. 

Just when you get your head ready to do something, it’s helpful to stop said head and scratch it.  Is there anything that Must Happen before this process?  In the case of installing the deck, the answer is, “yes, yes there is.”  Here we’ve got the beams faired, the covering boards are on, the decking is cut and varnished on one side… seems like all systems are go.  But wait, after the deck is on, we’ll put canvas on.  And where does the canvas go?  Into a little dado along the covering board.  And how will that dado get there?  We’ll rout it in, using a fence running along the inner face of the covering board.  So, since the decking gets installed starting from that same edge of the covering board … gotta do the dado first before the decking gets in the way.  But wait, there’s more!

We’ve been getting some updates from the folks who are designing the rig for Madcap and one of the things that they wanted was a pair of running back stays.  These require some serious fastening in the aft end of the boat, and luckily, we haven’t put the deck on yet.  Installing these suckers would have been impossible if the deck was in the way.

So, let’s get the dado done.

There we go.  One long groove carefully routed into our beautiful covering board.  This was a bit nerve wracking because one slip with the router and the covering board is seriously hosed.  An electric tool can make mistakes much faster and nastier than most hand tools ya know.

The limitation of the router setup is that we have to stop for obstacles. 

The chain plate, for example.  Can’t fit a router next to that puppy.

Or the corner at the transom.  The solution of course, is to batten out the path of the dado and cut the missing segments in by hand. 

That light strip of wood being clamped down is a batten that will be used to connect the dados in a nice, fair line.  Do that for both sides of the dado, and you now know where to cut your dado.  Chisels and a saw should do the trick.

The dado is there to hold the edge of the canvas decking by the way.  We make a T-shaped toe rail that traps the canvas in the slot.  Here’s a mock up.

The toe rail will be low with a slight rounded surface on top.  The original boat just had a strip of wood holding the canvas down that was flush with the covering board as far as we can tell.  We’ve decided that a toe rail is better.  It gives a more finished looking edge I think.

So, metal smithing.  This was a blast, and I want to do it more.

The task was to take the designer’s drawing of a metal plate called a Swallowtail, and fabricate it so that it fit snugly to the frames and sheer clamp.  The running backstays need a lot of support, and this distributes the load across 2 frames and the sheer clamp. 

The process of fabricating this was pretty simple really.  I scaled up the swallowtail from the design plan, and made a paper template.  Then I fit the template onto the frames to make sure that it would actually fit the real boat (as opposed to the ideal boat drawn in the designer’s computer).   Once I tweaked the template to where I thought it would fit, I xeroxed 2 copies of it, cut them out, and spray glued them to some sheet steel we had in the shop.  This way I had a perfect pattern right on my piece to guide me when cutting it out on the metal-cutting band saw.  Easy, yes?  Of course.

Next step was to bend the cut out parts to fit up against the frames.  I patterned out the the frame shapes and used these to guide me as I bent the steel.  Bending the steel?  Yes, with my teeth, like any good bodybuilder.  Yaaah!  More Steroids!!!

Ok, not true.  No steroids.  But this thing is a bottle jack on steroids.

This jack presses Down, instead of up. Ok ok, it pushes both Up AND Down at the same time, but it only can move in a downward direction so the net effect is that it pushes down.  Lord.

My silver sheet metal is being pressed down by the rod welded to the vertical steel plate there.  You can just see that the sheet is resting on one edge on a thick piece of copper stock in the back.  When the rod presses down in front of that copper, the sheet metal bends up.  This gives it a little curve.  Do this along the face and you get a nice curve to your piece.

Here’s the plate with the paper template still glued on, and a curved tempate of the frame next to it.  If you get too much curve, just hammer the plate out flatter on the anvil.  Wear your hearing protection… yow!

There it is getting flattened out a bit.

So, the process is simple.  Bend, check, flatten or rebend… use a ball peen hammer to ease any sharp bends, and voila!   Check your fit to the actual frames until it’s just right.

Next, we weld a couple of side pieces to either leg of the swallowtail.  This stiffens and strengthens the piece.

We used a mig welder similar to this one.

It’s way cool.  The welder uses electric current to make the super bright/hot arc that melts your metal.  At the same time it feeds a thin wire into the weld site to add metal to the weld.  It also blows an inert gas on the weld site to force oxygen away and stop the metal from oxidizing as you heat it. 

Let me just say, I bite at welding.  Sure, I can make welds that are strong, but they look like hell. 

A good weld looks like an even series of tiny ripples that run right down the seam.  Mine look like a lava flow.  Still, it’s my first few times and I expect that practicing a few thousand times will yield some improvement. 

Another thing that’s cool about welding?  The mask.  I thought the little window you look through while you’re welding was just very dark glass.  In the old days, that’s exactly what it was.  But these are modern days, bucko, and everything modern is better. 

Nowadays, the glass you look through is electrically powered and light sensitive.  When you look through it in normal light, it’s like looking through dark green sunglasses.  As soon as a bright light hits the lens, it darkens almost instantly to a level that allows you to look at your arc safely.  When you stop using the arc, it lightens up again.  Way way cool.  The fancier helmets even allow you to adjust how much light triggers the lens and how dark it gets. Nice.

So, now we’ve got this part that fits over the frame with side braces to stiffen it.

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That’s all well and good, but we still don’t have a way to attach this thing to the running back stays.  Right now, all this is good for is sitting on top of the frames.  We need to weld a plate across the top of this piece that will go underneath the sheer clamp.  The back stays will bolt down through the covering board and sheer clamp and into that plate.  The trick is to get the angle of the plate just right, so that the swallowtail is flush against both the sheer clamp and the frames.  We get that angle simply enough by placing the swallowtail up against the frames and measuring the angle directly.  Now, the tricky part is holding the plate in place at this exact angle while we weld it.

Not so tricky if Lew is your teacher. 

One of the cool things about working with steel is that it’s iron-based.  That means you can use magnets to clamp it in place.

The big red magnets hold the plate in place.  The plate is identified with the blue arrow.  You can see that the top of the plate is up against the magnet, but the bottom of the plate is held away from the magnet by a piece of scrap steel (green arrow).  The scrap transfers the magnetic attraction, so it holds the bottom of the plate away at just the right angle.  The vise grips (behind the blue arrow) then clamp the whole thing down tight.  A couple of spot welds and you can remove all this stuff and just weld away. 

This is easier than woodworking.  Sort of.

Once it’s all welded up, I grind down the welds to make them look pretty and fit it in the boat.

Not too shabby! 

Next trick is to drill holes for the running back stays.  The back stays are a pair of U-shaped bolts that go down from the covering board through the sheer clamp (with blue tape on it above) and into that plate we just welded.  The task is to drill them very precisely so that the legs of the U are parallel, they start in exactly the place you want them to up top, and they end in exactly the place you want them to under the sheer clamp.  Sounds hard.

Jig Time!!  Thank you Warren, thank you Lew.

Once again, a good jig makes a hard thing easy.  This little jig allows you to drill a hole to a precise location. 

Here’s how it works.  I attached 3 chunks of oak to this scrap cedar board, and drilled a 3/8″ hole straight through the 2 chunks on the left there.  These 2 holes now guide my drill bit towards the 3rd chunk, protruding right below the cut-out in the cedar. 

I drilled down to that 3rd chunk and just touched it with the drill bit to make a dimple.  Now I know exactly where my drill will end up when I guide them with the 2 holes.  I then put a little nail in that exact location, clipped off the head, and sharpened it to a point. 

The cut out is there to allow this jig to go around the thing you’re drilling through.

Now, all I need to drill exactly the hole that I want is the location of the entry and exit points.  I know that if I put the nail in the center of the exit point and start the drill at the entry point, the drill will go exactly to the tip of the nail.  How cool is that? 

Yes, very cool.  I know.  Yes, it’s cooler even than wearing your boxers way out above your low low pants.

I worked out the entry and exit points for the U bolts, and it turned out that they’d go right into the dado we made earlier.  This was actually pretty handy.  I made a stick that fit snugly into the dado, marked the entry locations, and drilled small starter holes in the stick. 

You can see it there below my hand.  I copied the spacing of the holes to a strip of blue tape (remember that tape that was on the sheer clamp above?) and stuck it to the lower edge of the sheer clamp.  This gave me the location of the exit fore and aft.  I knew I wanted the holes to end up in the middle of the metal plate, and the plate was 1 1/2″ wide.  So, I set the exit hole back 3/4″, and now I had the inboard-outboard dimension to locate my pin.  Stick the pin in that location, start drilling in those entry holes, and zowie!  A perfectly aligned hole. 

[See why the deck couldn't be installed by the way?  I made the opening in this jig extra large in case I wasn't able to start this until a few strips of decking had been installed.  You can see the first strip of cedar decking, in fact, installed just to the left of the mahogany covering board.]

The nice thing about having the stick with the holes in it is that I can then take it over to the other side of the boat and place it in the dado there, and voila!  I have a perfectly matched set of holes for my back stays on the other side of the boat.  So simple, so precise. 

To mark the holes locations on the top plate of the swallowtail, just hold the swallowtail against the frames and sheer clamp, take the drill out of the jig, and drill down through the nice holes you just made.  This puts little dimples in exactly the right locations on the top of the swallowtail.  You can then drill these out more easily outside of the boat.

Now, you may be saying to yourself… why are you using steel here?  Steel rusts!  And if you knew that the U bolts were bronze, you might be appalled.  Everyone knows that electrolysis is a big problem when you put dissimilar metals in contact with each other.  That’s what I thought anyway. 

The answer is… yes electrolysis is a big problem, but only when there’s something to act as an electrolyte.  Like salt water.  These parts will be high up in the stern of the boat and should not get very wet.  As a precaution though, we’ll be painting the swallowtails with epoxy paint to protect them from the elements.  The knees in the boat are steel, and they’ve been there since 1924.  As long as they’re not constantly wet with salt water, and protected from corrosion, they should be fine. 

Next up, making the nifty little U bolts.  Stay tuned, same boat time, same boat channel.

Well, these past few days, the future is here, and everyone knows that the hordes of tourists will soon blanket the town.  Sure the streets will be a log jam, but they’re here to see and be seen, and they’ve got money to burn.  Shops are opening back up.  Everyone’s sprucing up their store windows, and Ben & Jerry’s is open again. 

But the best part of all this is the biking.  I headed down to the south of the island today

 

and spent some time reading Atwood Manley’s wonderful book on the canoe builder J. Henry Rushton.

It was a perfect day for doing nothing.  Some folks were paddling their surfboards around the coast,

others were flying kites over on Brenton Point

and the kite sellers were ready for them.

After a long ride, my mind was focused singly on the Del’s van. 

Best damn frozen lemonade on the island. 

The Canada geese stopped by on the way up north.  They were strangely undeterred by a dog silhouette stuck in the ground to scare them off.  

Guess they’re not as dim as they seem…

Most of the week, however, I’ve been working on the Aurora and Madcap.  We needed to finish putting in the quilting screws (more commonly called liner screws) that bind the inner to the outer planking where I’d replaced the 1st broad.  Looking down into the boat you can sort of tell the new little screws there on the left.

Here’s a closer shot.

They’re little 1/2″ long #6 screws.  Not big, but there’s approximately 250 of them on each side of the boat for just this one plank.  I figured it was better to get this out of the way now before we get the deck on.  It’s going to be dark and cramped down there in just a few days. 

Now for a little dinner out on the front porch before it cools down again.  No complaints today!

You’re looking at the starboard side of the boat here. The quarter knees are in the foreground, and the mast partner is that big hunk of oak at the top of the photo. The jumper is also white oak, and it braces the mast partner against the bronze strapping that runs from the sheer clamp to the mast step.

THere’s the strapping, right under the end of the jumper. You can also see the metal knees that brace the oak deck beams attached to the mast partner. You bet, it’s a ton of bracing all in this small area of the boat. Good thing, too. The amount of strain on the partner is huge, and this is a race boat, it’s meant to be driven hard.

But of course, Mike and I were mostly concerned with making excellent joints here. The jumper is another one of those tricky bits to build, mostly because of all the odd little bevels that need to be considered. For instance, the end you see above where it butts into the strap is a compound bevel. The strapping angles up and slightly forward, and the jumper is also angled up. Thing is, you can’t get the jumper’s angle by placing the jumper in and measuring it before you cut it. There’s no room… the jumper is only at that angle when everything is cut to length and fit in place.

Luckily we had the old jumpers that we replaced and I just copied the angles right off of them. Ha! If I hadn’t had that, it would have been just a little more trouble to template the bevels out with a piece of scrap held to the right angle.

The other end of the jumper butts up into the sloping face of the mast partner.

Here we just cut an angled slot into the partner, and then fit the jumper to the slot. Seems simple, but the problem is that you have to pivot the jumper down into the slot, with the outboard end set against the strap. As you swing the jumper down into the slot, the angle of the end changes and the length increases. So, I started the end long, and gradually adjusted the angle and length as I brought it down into the slot. Tiny tiny tiny little adjustments. After all, there are Big Forces acting against this puppy and I want the mating surface to be perfect.

Right next to the jumper is a little half beam with an interesting birds mouth fit to the partner.

Here you’re looking forward from just inside the grinder’s cockpit. This is one of those joints that people may actually see when looking inside the boat, so we wanted it to look good as well s be functional. The previous deck beam just notched into the underside of the partner and was held in with a screw. That seemed a little weak to us, so we made a birds mouth (a V-shaped cut, like when you make the peace sign with your fingers) that fit into a mating notch in the partner. It took a little more time than the original way, but since this supports the deck we wanted to give it the extra oomph of having solid wood resting on the top of the partner.

Mike had milled up tons of decking stock a while back, so we spent an afternoon thickness sanding (yes, we have an actual thickness sander… we are so spoiled) and varnishing the underside prior to installation.

Did i mention how long it was?

That’s about 30′ of noodly 1/2″ stock.

Unfortunately, once we set it up on deck to dry, we noticed that Mike had underestimated how much to make.

Back to the machine room next week to make up a lot more. It would be easier if we didn’t have to scarf so much stock together to get these lengths.

In the meantime, we’ve been growing increasingly concerned about how dry it is in the shop. The hull is clearly drying out, and we decided to work a little harder at getting moisture into her. We put the steam hoses under the plastic skirt last week to get it all jungley and tropical in there.

There’s the steam escaping from a hole in the skirt. Looking through the hole…

2 guys actually worked for a few hours bunging in this. Thanks, but no thanks.

The real solution of course is to get the hull sealed up. Notice how often that topic comes up when working with wooden boats?  We’re on vacation this week, so the focus last week was getting the boat ready to be sealed before we left.

That meant we planed and sanded and generally faired the hull for 2 days. This is the exact opposite of doing the fiddly little joinery this post started with. Just long hours of running a longboard across the hull.

Hours planing and sanding out the marks left by the initial shaping of the garboard and broad.  I’m progressing from left to right here…

Hours spent carefully fairing out the starboard broad because it had been made with mahogany that had a birdseye grain pattern. Absolutely beautiful to look at, and it should have been used for a veneer in fine furniture rather than as a plank that will be painted and never seen again.  Oh well… you use what you have.

Unfortunately this insane grain is just a bear to plane smooth. It tears out if you look at it wrong. After a few hours, I was looking at it very very wrong.  Still, lots and lots of shallow passes with a a very sharp blade, followed by lots of sanding wrestled it into shape.

Hours filling little dings and surface irregularities above the waterline with surfacing putty followed by more sanding. Finally, we were ready to seal the wood below the waterline and put white primer above…

And there we go… it almost looks like it did when it came in the shop from this angle! That should stop any annoying wood shrinking in the near future. Remember, this is just primer, thus the jagged edge at the paint / sealer boundary.

So, a week with detail work, aching shoulder work, dull repetitive work… that about covers the gamut. And in the end, we get a product that is better in ways that most people will never be able to actually see because it just looks like it all goes together the way it should.

I can live with that.

Tags: sealinghull, jumper, decking

Warren gave me the sour milk face when I suggested that we didn’t need to bond those joints with that permanently adhesive and flexible stuff, and that’s all I needed to go back and coat the both sides of the joint liberally before jamming it back together and screwing everything down.

You can see a little squeeze out here. We cleaned it up and that joint is now impervious to the elements. For that advantage, we lose a bit of glamour as you can now see a tiny line of 5200 along the joint. The pragmatist in me says that’s excellent, it shows that the joint is sealed. The furniture builder in me says it looks like an open joint that someone fixed with putty.

That’s the aft joint, the one I had to get right on the first shot. There’s a thin check starting to creep in, but I think it’ll go away with moisture.

Mike cut off the excess overhang with a 5 tpi ripsaw that he’s fallen in love with. I keep telling him, it just won’t work between the two of them. She belongs to Ben, and he’s not about to let her go. But, he’s a man possessed, and the saw just keeps flashing those perfect sharp teeth. What a tease.

And here’s the aft end finally attached, needing only some planing along the aft edge to clean it all up.

And a view of the whole boat showing what all the fuss was about.

Next up: installing a couple of half beams between the mast partner and the quarter knees, and a jumper between the mast partner and the bronze strapping.

Hoo boy, I’ll bet you’re waiting with baited breath to see what in the hell that means. Well, while you wait, check out Barrett’s excellent boat project page. That might hold you until Monday. At the very least it’ll activate purpleheart lust deep in your bosom.

• get experience
• learn as much as I can
• make some cash
• think about how these experiences lead to the eventual goal of a job that I want.

Today it paid off in spades. I was offered a job starting as soon as I get out of school working on a new build of an Olin Stephens design six-meter named Cherokee. There’s a little bit about it here. Here’s a quote from the IYRS blurb about it:

That will keep me here in Newport through October I think… it’s going to move fast. We’re talking about 4-5 months start to finish.

Later on in the day I got a call from the guy who’s in charge of maintaining the USS Constitution… yes, Old Ironsides, docked in Boston harbor.

He also offered me a position! Either all this work is paying off, or folks are desperate for people to work on wooden boats for not too much money. Or both.

Since I already said yes to Cherokee, I had to turn this one down, but there may be space still open come October… I liked the fellow in charge of the boat, and working for the Navy (yep, it’s a civilian Navy job) has some real benefits like insurance and retirement. We’ll see… living around the Boston area is hard financially. Luckily the train system is excellent.

The downside is that I’m still an hour away from my sweetie throughout the summer, and Boston adds another hour to that.  Damn.

I’m ready for teleporter technology now. Honest, any time soon is fine by me.

I’m proud to say that I haven’t taken 3 weeks to fuss over the nibbed scarfs on the covering  board.  We started last Thursday and 4 1/2 days later we were done with all the fitting.  We could have probably trimmed a day off of that it we hadn’t worked so hard to get these joints just right, but they’re some of the most visible joints on the boat, and we wanted them just right. 

The covering boards have 3 different joints.  Up at the bow they meet in a simple miter joint (like the angled joint at the corners of a picture frame) where the boards butt up to each other at an angle.  Along the length of the boat, they connect to each other with a nibbed scarf, and I showed some photos of those going together in the last post.  At the stern, they meet in a stopped half-lap miter joint.  Sounds fancy, but it’s really just a miter joint with some tricky stuff underneath the visible joint that helps to hold the joint together when it may want to open up with changes in temperature and humidity. 

So, bragging time to start.  I’m very happy with the first scarf joint. 

It came together quite quickly and accurately. 

Even close up, the seam is almost perfect.  There is the tiniest opening at the ends,

but those will close up as the wood swells and will fill with the first coat of varnish as well.  So, from my perspective, it’s perfect. 

Remember, though, as Voltaire said, The perfect is the enemy of the good.  Get one right, and it’s hard to settle for less. 

Case in point, the second scarf.

Here you can see the line opens up to about a half pencil-width by the clamp.  It too will fill with the first coat of varnish, and will swell completely tight, but it’s not as perfect as the first one.  La Dee Frickin’ Dah..  If that’s the biggest problem I have this week then I’m a lucky man indeed.

The last joint is the trickiest because there’s no wiggle room.  With each of these joints so far, if something was a little off, you could plane and adjust things to get it right.  Of course, doing that meant that you lost some board length as you adjusted forward to fill in the space you just planed off.  Sure, we’re talking about 64ths of an inch here, but you can see that when the tolerances are at the level of hundredths of inch, a couple of swipes of a plane could make a big difference if you have a joint at the other end of your board.

So, the stern joint.  The side covering boards meet up with another covering board at more or less right angles at the stern.

The starboard covering board is on top of the stern covering board in this photo.  The clamp is holding the stern board down because it has a little camber in it, and wants to spring up.  The stern board hasn’t been trimmed down to the right width yet, so it looks extra wide.  We’re going to join these two along a line that stretches from where they cross inboard to the corner of the transom.  That’s the miter part of the joint.  It’s complicated a little by the fact that the the transom is angled up (called a raking transom), so the point where the transom meets the bottom of the covering board is inboard a little of the point where corner exists at the top of the covering board. 

Looking at it from the side in cross section:

It’s not a huge deal, but you have to pay attention to it. 

So, looking down at the stern covering board, you can see I’ve marked the inner corner where the two boards will intersect.  The starboard covering board is just at the bottom of the photo.  The older wood here is where we routed out a slight rabbet for these covering boards to sit in. 

I should probably mention at this point that Mike has finished the joint at the port side.  That means that the stern covering board can’t move now.  If I move it at all, it will open up Mike’s joint.  I can’t move my starboard covering board either, because I’ve finished the scarf joint at the other end of it. 

In other words, I have to get this joint perfect, or very close to it, on the first shot.  That’s why I’m taking so much time to measure and lay out things just right.  I’ll have room to move things around by maybe a 32nd of an inch when I’ve made my cuts.

Yes, I was very nervous about this.

But at some point, you have to just say that you’ve measured and laid things out as well as you can and get to sawing.  And that’s exactly what I did.

This is the end of the starboard covering board.  My first cut is close to my layout line.  I want to be able to sneak up on the fit using a few strokes of my plane.  I’ve only cut halfway through here, because it’s a half-lap miter. 

Almost down to the line.  Next, we make a few more cuts that will act as witness marks for cutting half the thickness off.

They go just to to the depth line that I’ve marked on the side of the board. 

Next, start chiseling off the waste wood.

The cuts act as guides to tell you when you’ve reached the right depth.

Almost there.

Finish and flatten with a rabbeting skew plane.

There, now we’ve got the miter and the half lap cut.  Next, we cut the miter on the mating piece.  In this case, that’s the stern covering board.  Here I’ve cut the miter and laid it up on top of the starboard board to check the fit. 

It’s as good a fit as it gets.

Now, the stern board is sitting on top of that half lap we cut a minute ago.  We need to cut a recess into the stern board to receive that half lap.  However, if we do a standard half lap, we’ll expose end grain on the starboard piece as it sticks out of the back end of the boat.  That’s a bad thing.  End grain soaks up water, and we want as little end grain exposed in a boat as possible.  So, the solution is to find a way to hide it.  The way to do that in this joint is to do a stopped half lap.  Here’s what I’m talking about.

Take the half lap we just cut, and mark it about an inch in, parallel to the back edge of the stern covering board.

Then cut that off.

Flip your boards over, line up the miters, and mark the outline of the half lap on the underside of the stern board.  Now cut a recess into the stern board that’s the same depth as the half lap.  In this case, I routed most of it out because it was quick and easy.

Starting out.

Almost there.  Just clean up the edges with a chisel and the underside of the stern board is done. 

Like that.  (actually that’s Mike’s end, but mine looks the same)

And yep, I could have routed out the half lap too.  Just wanted to practice my hand skills on that one.

Now when you lay the stern covering board on top of the starboard board, the only thing that will show is the straight miter seam.  The half lap is completely buried in the joint. 

The advantage to this joint is that when you sink a fastener though the half lap, you pin the joint together and it can’t open up later.  It’s a lot of work for a cosmetic thing.

When I put it up on the boat, it was very close to exactly right, but I had to do just a hair more fitting before it was right.  Unfortunately I got so caught up in working on it that I forgot to take photos! 

D’oH!  Film tomorrow.  I’m happy with it.

Before and after school I’ve been working on projects for the Aurora.  I’ve mentioned making  long bolts from bronze rod stock, and I thought I’d show you what that looks like. 

It’s another one of those things that has you operating in very tiny measurements.  Luckily, with a lathe it’s all marked out with dials, so the precision is far easier to control. 

Here’s our nifty old Jet lathe that allows us to turn screws.  It was donated not too long ago and it in excellent condition.  I tell ya, we are so spoiled…

Chuck up your stock…

Take off the roughness at the end (not necessary, but it makes it look nicer)

Do this by running the side of the cutter into the end of the stock. 

In case you don’t know how a lathe works, the stock moves and the cutter stays stationary.  You can move the cutter in and out by very precise increments using a series of levers and wheels.

Next, figure out where the zero mark is… the place where your cuter just barely touches the stock.

Once I know where zero is, I can use that to know how far in I’m cutting with each pass.  I usually take off about 15 thousandths / pass.  That’s pretty conservative, but the stock can vibrate if you take much more off, and that leads to a lot of of chatter in the cut.

This lathe has controls that coordinate the turning of the stock with the cutter moving right to left along the stock.  The result is that the cutter traces a very precise spiral down the stock as it goes. That spiral is what makes a screw… a screw. 

Each pass, you increase the depth a little more until the valleys that you’ve cut meet at points in the middle. 

I tend to get close to the right depth and then finish the work by taking the stock out of the lathe and cutting the final few thousandths of thread using a die.

This tool cuts the threads at exactly the right depth

and it cleans up any chatter or imperfections from my lathe work.  So, I’m mainly using the lathe to do most of the die’s work for me.

I also use the lathe to turn down the diameter of the rod just a hair so that it will fit in some bushings I have. 

That’s what makes the rod shiny on the right side.  The bushings will only ride in the center of the rod, so I don’t need to turn down the entire length. 

One of the payoffs of doing work on the lathe is that you get very nice looking metal shavings.

Hey, beauty’s where you find it.

Tags: coveringboards, miter, stopped half lap, madcap