Eastport Pram Build: Blades...

So, not a lot of noticeable progress yesterday.  I hauled all of the parts and the boat out into the parking lot because I was going to create a lot of sawdust.  This last week, I had cut out the rest of the parts for the boat.  My method is to get as close to the outside of the Sharpie marker line as possible with either the japanese pull saw, the circular saw or the jigsaw as possible, then laminate the parts as needed (remember, most of my parts are two-plies of 1/4" glued together), then sweeten them up with the 5" oscillating palm sander or the 22" belt sander.

Blades shaped!

So, one of the most fun parts of building a boat using plywood to build boat parts is that you can use the plywood laminations as a gauge on how to grind your contour lines.  The directions call for shaping the daggerboard and rudder into a hydrofoil shape.  The leading edge is shaped for 3/4" and the trailing edge is feathered down across 2".  This is pretty tricky and you have to be careful not to grind the edges too thin.  If I was making a set of racing blades for the Laser racers, the trailing edge would be as thin as a butter knife.  Since this is just a pram to mess about with, there's no need to make anything that fragile.  I also checked to make sure the daggerboard fits in its case...

Sweet outwale lamination!

One reason why I drug the boat outside was to sand down the outwales.  They're solid oak covered with thickened epoxy, so it took a while.  Using 40 grit, it ground the laminations flush with each other and took it down to raw wood.  I also had to remove the table saw marks from the sides.  This is from the crappy portable table saw at work.  The outwales are now ready for the roundover bit in the router.  A seriously scary step since I'm used to routing flat surfaces.  The outwales have a compound curve due to the shear line.

Overall view of progress to date...

The other reason to take the boat outside was to sand the transoms flush.  This is a scary step because the oak veneer is so this.  I actually started to burn through the veneer in a couple of small places where it required more sanding due to epoxy pooling.  I used 220 grit and now the transoms are smooth as a spanked baby's butt.  I think I'll still be able to finish the transoms bright.

One of the other things I did was ease the edges of the transom doublers.  Since mine are 1/4", I can't use the router on them, so I hand sanded the concave arcs to make them smooth as they will soon be laminated to the interior of the transoms.  I also custom trimmed the doublers to fit within the filleted sides of the boat.  I'm still confused about the reality of the situation vs. the directions.  Every time there's a disclaimer in the directions about what not to do, I find that it makes sense to do it that way and several other bloggers have done it that way with no mention of ill effects...

So let's take another look at where we are on this project.  The same caveats still apply...

Where we were last episode:

• Layout and cutting parts used so far (not all parts)  = 20 hours
• Laminating parts (transoms, bulkheads and skeg)   = 5 hours 
• Wiring parts together                                            = 5 hours
• Fiberglassing bottom & inside                               = 5 hours
• Installing bulkheads, tabs & fillets                          = 5 hours

What's happened since:

• Cutting out and laminating additional parts  = 5 hours
• Sanding all parts to final shape                  = 5 hours

Total:  50 hours

Let's look at a rough estimate of the cost.

Using the retail pricing on Go2Marine.com and plywood from Home Depot, let's see what this project should've cost:

• 1/4" oak plywood 4' x 8' sheets:  $29 x 6 sheets                                        = $174
• System Three wood flour and silica thickeners                                           = $30
• Two gallons of System Three epoxy resin and one gallon of Slow hardener   =  $280
• Gloves, mixing sticks, syringes, cups, etc.                                                = $30
• 6 yards of 6oz fiberglass                                                                           = $45

Total:  $559

This does not count all of the tools that I've used so far.  Mostly, it was just the pull saw, but the jigsaw and table saw, drill, router, bits, etc. sure come in handy.

That's about it for this weekend.  Today, I order the sail kit from Sailrite!  We'll see if we can turn the rig shop into a sail loft...

Captain Skully out...

Eastport Pram Build: Progress as Promised - It's All Coming Together...

So, a bunch of stuff happened this week.  Mostly good...  With the understanding that I'm trying to show the process in a bit more detail, here's a closeup of how the middle bulkhead was tabbed in.  This is with a smaller radius than the finished fillet.  This allowed me to pull the wires out without dealing with the cured epoxy.

Closeup of tabs...

Here's the filleting tool that I made for the finished fillets.  It's a 2" plastic scraper that will create a 1" radius fillet as per the instructions.  I marked out the center and radius and cut/filed/sanded it to it's final shape.

Before...

After...

Here's what the finished fillet looks like after smoothing with denatured alcohol.  The seat supports are easy to fillet on the outside because the intersection angle is greater than 90°.  The inside is much more difficult.

Here's what the finished fillet looks like from on top.  1" radius on both sides creates a super strong joint because of all the surface area involved on the mating parts.  People kind of look at the wood flour fillets like they're ugly, but all I see is a strong joint.  Remember, a little sanding will make them prettier and when the adjacent wood is epoxied and varnished, it will be considerably darker, making the contrast between the fillet and the wood less noticeable.

Looking straight down on center bulkhead...

Finished fillets smoothed with denatured alcohol...

There are several places in the directions that I think they leave you hanging.  One of the easier to fix ones is that you're evidently supposed to install the center seat after you've created the fillets to hold the center support in place.  This means the slots cut into the ends of the seat won't fit over the fillet, so I cut an arc in the seats to match the fillet.  This will also be covered with a fillet when I secure the seat in place. 

Modified seat to fit around fillets...

After I got the center seat to fit, I immediately put the daggerboard case template in place to support the seat.  It fit perfectly!  It even matched the contour of the bottom of the boat.

Seat in place, supported by daggerboard case template...

It was now time to install the outwales.  I had been dreading this step.  I had to make a run to Harbor Freight to buy a dozen c-clamps.  The directions say one every eight inches, so on an 8 foot boat, that's 12 clamps.  At $2 each, that's a smart investment in making the boat turn out right.  BTW, I could've used more.  Anyway, I was now ready for the most challenging part of the build, the 8' laminated outwales.  I had an 8' piece of quartersawn white oak that when cut into strips fit perfectly.  I had a difficult time determining in the directions how large to make each strip (2 per side to make the bend easier).  Between the drawings and the directions, I found that each strip was 3/4" x 1/2", which would result in an outwale that's 3/4" x 1" (plus the 1/4" plywood, making the gunwales of the boat a respectable 1-1/4" thick piece of wood.  A perfectly structural and stiff edge to the boat.

Quintessential boat builders pic...

Because I only bought enough clamps to do one side of the boat at a time, I had to do four separate layups.  Because I'm using slow hardener, that meant four nights to cure.  That was another thing I was dreading because I'm sort of in a hurry to splash this thing.  Anyway, I was able to find all kinds of other stuff to do while the outwales were curing.  There were a bunch of other parts to fabricate that I had put off.  I had originally only cut out the structural parts of the boat, but now I had an opportunity to cut out the daggerboard, case and rudder assembly parts.

Lamination complete...

BTW, make sure you start at the bow.  The curve is compound, both outwards around the curve of the boat and downwards to add some beautiful spring to the shear line.  You will definitely need a gloved helping hand with this part.  Otherwise, You'd probably smear the "butter" all over the side of the boat.  I mixed up a batch of  that was stuff enough to spread like butter down the length of the oak strip (remember, I'm making an oak version, not the standard mahogany version).  Then I spring clamped it in place, close to it's final position.  While I was adjusting the oak and the clamp (make sure you have the clamps pre-set for the thickness of what you're clamping including pads - read scraps - to protect the wood), I had my buddy raise or lower the other end of the strip.  This allowed me to fine-tune the strip to exactly match the curve of the hull.  If there was ever a discrepancy, I made sure the plywood edge was higher because it would be easier to sand down than if the oak strip was too high.  This method worked really well, four times, and later that week, I had the outwales laminated.

The next step was to buy a flush cut saw from Rockler.  It was a flimsy piece of crap that barely lasted long enough to get the job done.  A flush cut saw's teeth have no offset, so they don't mar the surface they're sliding against.  I normally use these to trim off wood dowels that I use to plug screw holes in furniture.  I'm hoping that I'll be able to sand the edges without burning through the oak veneer on the transoms.  I was also amazed how the epoxy flowed in to the joints during the original lapstrake assembly process.  It's now all exposed.  It also shows why, when people leave their transoms bright, they mask off the edges of the plywood which gets painted at the same time as the hull.

Trimmed flush with transom...

Okay, the next major step is putting together the daggerboard case.  This is an important part of the process.  Not only does it support the seat, but if you're making the sailing version like me, you have to use the interior of the case as your template for cutting the slots in both the seat and the fiberglassed bottom of the boat!  This is step in the boat build that I'm fearing the most.  But first, you have to waterproof the interior of the daggerboard case.  Once assembled, you can't get into the slot to epoxy it.  I applied three coats of unthickened epoxy to the "bad" sides of the two daggerboard case sides.  Of course, my boss had to touch the epoxy before it cured, but luckily it flowed back and covered the fingerprint.  The epoxy on the case sides was also a preview of what I'll be facing when I epoxy the whole boat.  The sides had offgassing bubbles and dust nibs all over it.  If I'd been worried about how it looked, I would have had to do a considerable amount of sanding, which removes a substantial amount of the epoxy you just applied...  So after the three coats had cured, I mixed up a silica thickened cup and buttered both sides of the spacers.  The spacers were made up of three layers of 1/4" plywood glued together to create the perfect slot width for the daggerboard (which is made up of two layers of plywood.  The extra layer leaves room for all of the layers of epoxy that will be applied to the surfaces involved.  The daggerboard slides nicely in and out, which is what you want when you sail up to the beach and have to pull the daggerboard up quickly.  Keep in mind that if you run aground with the daggerboard down, the impact shock torques the hell out of the daggerboard and case, which can seriously damage the boat.  The daggerboard case is the most structurally important part of the boat and therefore the most difficult to fix if something goes wrong.  That's why I've spent the extra time to hopefully make the case assembly bullet-proof.

Daggerboard case glue up...

Daggerboard case in place.  Fits perfectly...

 The directions call for screwing the daggerboard case in place to the center bulkhead and through the boat bottom with silicon bronze screws.  These are preferred by boat builders because stainless steel screws would eventually corrode because the screws will be encapsulated in epoxy, thus starving them of oxygen, removing their stainless properties.  Ironically, my company is supposed to sell silicon bronze screws, but due to internal purchasing issues, we don't have them in stock yet.  As such, I have to go buy SB screw somewhere else.  Sigh...  At least they're not expensive.

While all of that was going on, I cut out the hole in the front seat for the mast and installed the doubler.  I epoxied the doubler in place then trimmed it flush with the router.  Make sure your ease the edges of things that are getting laminated first, because it'll be much more difficult to do later after it's glued without damaging the veneer.  This is especially important for before you install the transom doublers.

Slot for mast.  Note the doubler underneath...

Now it's time for another confession.  I used Titebond II, which is "weatherproof" vs. Titebond III, which is waterproof.  Possibly a very serious mistake, but it's what I had a gallon of already before starting this project.  My hope is that the epoxy barrier coat protects the wood and glue, and if not, won't the plywood swell and peel apart before the glue I used becomes an issue?  Marc Spagnola (aka The Wood Whisperer does a good job of describing this).

While we're talking about the front seat and the slot for the mast, my front seat support fit almost 2" farther forward than on the plans.  This was so substantial that I posted on the CLC boatbuilders' forum about it.  Nobody got back to me about it so I forged ahead.  Now, I think I'll have to modify the mast step base to properly secure the mast in position.  The good news is that the mast is still located in the same spot, so it shouldn't affect the design of the boat under sail.

Finally, I think I've decided to put a graphite bottom on my dinghy.  This will increase it's scratch resistance while launching and also provide UV resistance while it's upside down on my truck.  West Systems 423 is pretty much the only game in town.  I got mine from our sister company Go2Marine.com, but it's not listed on their website.

Anyway, I'm off to sand down the outwales, the edges of all the parts I laminated this week (i.e. daggerboard, rudder assembly, etc.).  I'm ready to fit the transom doublers in place (another place where I think the instructions erred).  Now I have to custom fit the transom doublers around the large radius fillets I created when I first put the boat together.  A lot of the blogs and even the directions show the doublers already laminated to the transoms when the boat goes together, with a note that says the doublers were installed too early.  A little frustrating because now I'll have to put another set of 1" radius fillets over the doublers after I get them glued into place.

I think that's about all for now.  I've been a bit busy actually trying to make progress to remember to stop and take pics of everything. Plus, I'm constantly distracted because I'm building this at work.  It's been really cool though, when a family comes in to look at the boat and the dad and the son both start drooling and asking questions.  That's pretty much the best part of this project, the product knowledge to gain and share.

Captain Skully out...

Eastport Pram Build: It's What's on the Inside that Counts...

Once the bottom had cured, I flipped the boat back into it's fully upright and locked position.  The fiberglass made the hull noticeably more stiff.  I also checked square and I was only a tad bit off.  The shimming concept seemed to work.

As instructed, seam is taped...

The directions call for taping off a region around the seam between the bottom and panel #1 to aid in making the fillet to cover the seam, which is necessary for a smooth transition for the fiberglass cloth.  There was a slight problem with this process though, which may affect the finished product.  In order to make the fillet small enough to span the gap between the tape and not leave a hardened shoulder when the tape is removed, I had to bear down on the squeegee enough to get the fillet to fit between the tape.  This caused the fillet to be a tighter radius, which caused a problem during the wetting out process.  On the next boat, I will make this fillet with a much larger radius.

Finished fillet.  Ready for glassing...

I also took the time to do a continuous, smooth, finished fillet on the transoms.  Because they intersect at greater than 90°, it's easy to do with the modified sqeegee/spreader/scraper.  You have to get the mix just right though.  New creamy peanut butter, not chunky, and not old peanut butter that's separated.  If it's too dry, you get a really rough fillet.  Too wet and it slumps.  Anyway, the glove and denatured alcohol trick worked really well.  The fillets are glossy smooth and should take very little sanding.  Also, keep in mind that these are great fillets to practice with because most of them will be covered when you enclose the air tanks.

Cloth all laid out and secured.  Note, not much extra cloth at the beam...

To glass the interior, I laid it all out and hand smoothed it again and taped up the excess cloth against the sides.  BTW, I got the cloth through one of our vendors at work and due to some purchasing issues got cloth that was a bit wider than CLC recommends.  As you can see, at the beam of the boat, my wider cloth BARELY covered up to the 2nd lap.  Whew!

Interior glassed.  Not without learning a few harsh lessons.  Next boat...

The wetting out procedure was considerably more complicated due to the filleted seam between the bottom and board #1.  It kept wanting to create a bubble under the cloth.  A tad more resin and some creative squeegeeing secured it.  By the time I got toward the other end of the boat, the first end was starting to tack up.

Once I was done wetting it out, I made the biggest mistake of the project so far.  I neglected to review the directions and I sliced the wet cloth along the lap seam between boards #1 & #1.  It kind of pulled the cloth and left strands showing and created some bubbles under the cloth.  Thankfully, these were mostly at the ends, which will be inside the air tanks, so no problemo.  I also had to pull tiny slivers of blue tape out of the seam because I sliced it with the razor knife while trying to remove the excess cloth.  I just happened to reread the directions for the nth time after wrestling with it and they clearly states to let the cloth cure then cut it out.  Since I cut the excess cloth off the ends of the transoms the next morning after glassing the bottom, I know how much easier it is to cut the saturated cloth after it has cured.  It slices like stiff carboard.  My ragged edge meant that I had to spend an extra half hour sanding the edge of the fiberglass, which may actually show in the final product.  Only after a few coats of epoxy will I be able to tell if this was a total biff...

Bulkheads tabbed in...

Flush with the lack of success from the fiberglassing, it was time to install some bulkheads.  When I removed the wired in bulkheads, the hull only flexed 1/16", removing the necessity of having to install the spreader mentioned in the instructions.

Next step, finished fillets...

Let's take a minute to examine where we are time-wise at this point.  These are extremely loose numbers, but I think are a very fair representation of how many "lunch hours" I've spent on this project.

• Layout and cutting parts used so far (not all parts)  = 20 hours
• Laminating parts (transoms, bulkheads and skeg)   = 5 hours 
• Wiring parts together                                            = 5 hours
• Fiberglassing bottom & inside                               = 5 hours
• Installing bulkheads, tabs & fillets                          = 5 hours

Total:  40 hours

Wow!  I wonder how long it will take me to recoup the hours building with hours sailing.  Hopefully some time next year.  Speaking of which, I'm already seriously considering building a Passagemaker...

Captain Skully out...

Eastport Pram Build: Wireless Connectivity is Flipping Awesome!

So, I'm a bit behind on my blog, but at least that doesn't mean I haven't been making forward progress!  Here's a catch-up blog for the last month:

First, here's the tool you'll definitely need for the "stitch" part of Stitch & Glue™, a wire nipper.  It allows you to cut the stitches without damaging the plywood because it cuts flush.  I first stumbled on this tool while stringing barbed wire fencing around an entire ranch during a summer in college...

I have a confession to make, I jumped the gun a bit on the woodworking and made a pretty serious mistake.  I cut out the handle holes into the transoms and immediately busted out the router to ease the edges.  Only afterwards did I remember that the transom doublers have to be installed before the edges are eased, so worse case scenario, I have to mix up some wood flour thickened epoxy and fill the slight groove the eased edges I created on the handles and top of the forward transom.  Good news is that at least I thought about it before I eased the aft transom.  I was so bothered by this that I actually seriously thought about remaking another forward transom, then I realized that I'm going to beat this thing up a bit by using the heck out of it, it's not a museum piece, so I'm not going to agonize over a bunch of silly details.  After all, I'm the only one that will know.  This is a constant theme for all of my woodworking...

Okay, so I finished the contours on the center bulkhead and fitted the transoms back.  Only this time, I was so jazzed to put the damn thing together that I didn't remove any of the glue squeeze-out.  FYI:  the directions call for using epoxy on everything.  I used a waterproof glue (Titebond II) to laminate the panels that are more than 6mm (1/4").  Since everything will be encapsulated in epoxy anyway, it shouldn't matter as long as the lamination is structural, which it definitely is.

So, I wanted to go into a little more detail about the stitching technique since it caused me such a quandry.  Below are examples of a stitch that I managed to pull together since I'm doing this by myself on my lunch breaks, and one that I replaced once the panels were all together and twisted correctly since it's neighbor stitches were holding it together while I did the intermediate stitch properly.  It's amazing how the rabbets and a properly twisted wire pull the hull together.  Remember, twist the properly located wire just enough to snug it up against the wood fibers.  A partial twist more will cause the wire to cut into the thin plywood edge.

Improperly twisted...

Properly twisted...

Oh, at this point I removed the transoms and scraped the glue squeeze-out from the lamination and reattached the transoms.  With a little help from a friend, I was actually able to get the transoms stitched super-tight onto the hull, which was really gratifying.  Then, I tweaked every stitch on the boat just shy of damaging wood fibers.  This stiffened the hull noticeably.  At this point, I felt that it was prudent to flip the hull.  I squared the sawhorses (including diagonals) and made marks on the shop floor.  The hull flipped easily because it's so light and gently rested back on the sawhorses.  It's a major milestone in the build that the hull is structural enough to flip, which now means it's time to mix up some epoxy for the first time!

Flipped!

 After tweaking each stitch, I thought it prudent to nip each one off to reduce the wires sticking out and possibly (read probably) interfering with the upcoming steps, which involve epoxy, which one can't afford to eff up...

Stitches tightened and nipped off...

 After reading a ton of other blogs (thanks guys!), I determined to deviate from the instruction manual slightly and "tack" the laps between the stitches.  I think that this should be explicitly recommended in the instructions because if you get globs of thickened epoxy onto the stitches, then you've got a pretty serious issue to address once it's hardened.  It's not smooth or fair and the only way I was able to deal with the few boogers I created was with a Dremel tool and a small burr.  This was done by squirting the silica-thickened epoxy with a syringe with the idea in mind that I would come back with a larger radius fillet once the tacks had cured.  It worked amazingly well.  The hull was amazingly stiffer once the tacks cured.

The second pass of silica-thickened epoxy created the exact same fillet as shown in the manual.  It left the thin plywood rabbeted edge and tangentially intersected its adjacent panel.  This creates a lot of surface area contact, which creates a lot of structural hull integrity, which is kind of the point.  I was successfully able to use the denatured alcohol trick to smooth 75% of the laps.  Unfortunately, due to time constraints and the laws of thermodynamics (it didn't get as warm in the shop as I'd anticipated), I had to leave two laps un-smoothed.  The next morning after the epoxy had fully cured, there was a noticeable difference between the glassy smooth joints and the lumpy, non-skid joints.  A few minutes of hand sanding the offending laps got them within striking distance, aesthetically-speaking, of the smoothed ones.  Not perfect, but acceptable, considering I'm going for a working boat, not a museum piece...

Panels overlap transoms in anticipation of a flush-cut saw to establish a smooth, flat face.
Notice the nice, tight gaps...

First pass, laps tacked together between the stitches.
Second pass, long, smooth fillet after stitches are removed...

Now that the laps were structural, it was now time to start thinking about filleting the interior.  Since I'm using the tabbing technique, I wanted a smaller radius for the tabs.  Then I'll cover the tabs with a larger radius, continuous fillet.  This meant two different filleting tools.  System Three spreaders have a nice 3/4" radius on them from the factory, so I took one and laid out a 1" radius.  The tabs were filleted using the factory spreader and the long, continuous, smooth fillet was made with the modified one.  An added bonus to using a spreader is that once you're done making the fillet, you can use it to scrape up the excess that squeezes out.  One thing that first time epoxy users might not know about plastic spreaders and mixing cups is that once the epoxy cures, you can usually peel/pop the epoxy off the slick plastic surface and it's like new!

Original and modified filleting tools...

Tabs in place.  Transoms are rock solid.  Wires are easily removable...

I deviated from the directions again by fiberglassing the bottom of the boat first.  I agonized over this step for several reasons.  First, it's much easier to do the bottom.  It's one panel and it's convex shaped.  The interior is concave and three panels.  It's actually a huge difference in the wetting out process.  I'd recommend considering this option.  Of course the trade off is that if you glass the interior first, you can still make sure that the boat is square by using winding sticks or just a visual.  There's no way to tell if the boat's square if it's upside down with both ends drooping over the sawhorses.  Plus, I had no idea how stiff glassing the bottom would make the boat, so I didn't want to build a permanent twist into it.  What I did to address the issue was place the boat right side up on the sawhorses and shim it square.  Then I flipped the boat upside down and put the equivalent shims under it to compensate.  Theoretically, this should make the boat square.

Protective tape in place on first lap.  Rolling out 6oz clothe...

Luckily, my shimming trick worked!  I squeegeed all of the excess resin out of the cloth, leaving the glass weave showing.  You know when the cloth is properly saturated because it get's completely dark.  No white cloth showing, only nice dark wood grain.

Boat bottom shrouded in 6oz cloth and hand smoothed...

Bottom wetted out...

I made a pretty serious deviation from the directions here, which really ended up biting me on the butt when I did the interior.  Because I got some epoxy drips outside of the target zone, I was concerned that it would fuse the glass in the wrong spots, so I ran a razor knife along the silica thickened fillet on the first lap, severing all of the glass fibers.  This allowed me to remove the excess dry cloth without disturbing the bottom panel.  This actually worked too well, because it lulled me into a false sense of security when glassing the interior...

Excess cloth trimmed and tape removed...

Properly wetted cloth still shows the weave...

To Be Continued...

Captain Skully out...