Fern Hollow: Campion Apple

Campion Apple

2017-01-19 - A New Boat

So after a seemingly endless period of searching and general hand wringing about the best possible design for a new build I have settled on the Campion Apple 16. Originally, I kind of fell in love with the Caledonia Yawl and had planned to build that, and even went so far as to seek out a ride in one in Maine with Jeff Kerr (who builds them for a living). I'm still in love with the design, but decided to pass on it for now because of a number of factors. The first being cost; a bigger boat means more lumber and larger everything. Part of that cost was figuring in that I would do a kit which has a fairly steep upfront cost. Another reason was that I wanted to build something that wouldn't necessarily take as long if I was committed. Finally, while I enjoyed sailing the Caledonia Yawl, it is first and foremost a displacement boat, and I am still nimble enough to want to have a boat that can get up on a plane and go when the wind is right.

The Campion Apple satisfied all of those requirements and I think it's a lovely design. The plumb bow and yawl rig make it very distinctive and it exudes its Northern European heritage. I will be building the stitch and glue form but it can be built clinker style. I think it should be a fun build.

I've spoken with the designer Tom Dunderdale on several occasions now and he has been immensely helpful. I purchased the plans last week and had several sets enlarged. There will be some additional work that a kit boat would have eliminated; namely laying out and cutting each of the 5 strakes per side and an additional keel strake, but since I will be building it stitch and glue, no strongback is required and the hull should go together relatively quickly. I hope to be staring in the next few weeks, but I still have some finishing details in the shop and some jigs to build to help the process along. More details and photos of the design can be found at: Campion Sail and Design

Stay tuned....

2017-01-26 - Squaring Away

I have a lot of crap. I am not good at throwing away crap. There, I've said it, but fortunately I have an opportunity for redemption with the new shop. My old shop (in my basement) was less than half the size of the new space, but it was filled up with 10 years worth of scrap wood, various nuts and bolts and other assorted debris that I was reluctant to throw away because "it might just come in handy someday".

As it turns out, I really don't need that dishwasher motor, or the bag of 17/32 bi-metal washers, or really any of the odd collection of junk for that matter. I guess that goes back to the days when I didn't have 2 cents to rub together and spending $3 on some washer was really extravagant. So a lot of it is getting purged as I move everything over to the new space so I can start collecting a fresh pile o' crap.

As everything gets moved, I have been sorting into piles and either throwing them away or re-organizing to be stored in the new shop. I've made a lot of progress, but there is still a lot to do. The biggest win so far was sorting and organizing all the hand tools I hav
e. There were a bunch of duplicates that are being put in a soft sid
ed tool bag that will stay over at the house for day to day "operations".

I put up some pegboard along the back wall to store all the frequently used hand tools like saws, mallets, and screwdrivers and have found cubby homes for all the power tools at the miter saw station. I also set aside a full drawer for drill bits, hole saws, and and bit mounted wire wheels, but I haven't come up with a good arrangement for the myriad of good fasteners I have, but will probably settle for a plastic case with sufficient storage.

I still need to move the compressor and the band saw over, but given the snow and ice we have right now outside the old shop door, it would be pretty treacherous to try and move them and will have to wait until it's not so slippery.

With any luck, I'll be able to start on boaty stuff in the next week or so; The first task I'm going to do on the Campion Apple build is to build the birdsmouth mast, and I hope to get the wood (either Sitka Spruce or Douglas Fir depending on price and quality) over the weekend.

2017-01-28

I've been itchin to get started on the Apple Campion build ever since I purchased the plans but in addition to getting the shop in order, I have been without a truck since my son decided to ram it into an embankment (fortunately only his pride was hurt). So getting lumber has been a bit of a challenge and I will need to get something soon if I am to transport the plywood and avoid delivery costs.

With that said, I found two really nice 16' Douglas fir boards for the main mast at the local specialty lumberyard (Goosebay Lumber) yesterday and immediately hatched a plan to get them home. I won't go into details, but it involved my wife's Mazda, a 14' aluminum ladder, and a lot of rope. I should have taken a picture because it was pretty comical looking and marginally legal, but I got the boards home without issue (other than being $135 poorer).

Birdsmouth reprinted
from Duckworks Magazine.

The plans call for either a solid or hollow spar; I am opting for a hollow spar using the 'birdsmouth' method. I've never built one before, but I'm pretty sure it's in my wheelhouse and there is a lot of literature out on the interwebs detailing the procedure. One of the better ones is on the Duckworks Magazine site here. In a nutshell, making the birdsmouth spar involves cutting a bunch of staves, and then cutting a notch out of the end each one, making the profile look like a birds mouth (hence the name). You can use anywhere from five to sixteen or more staves to make the hollow spar, but I opted for eight because it is the easiest to cut the notch (it uses a 45 degree notch).

To get started I used the birdsmouth calculators on the Duckworks Magazine site to figure out my stave size. The plans call for a 90mm section tapering to 50mm at the top so I just plugged in the number of staves (8) the outer diameter (90) and an inner diameter. I chose 60mm based on at least 20% wall thickness. I know that 20% of 90 is 72mm, but it came down to me being lazy. To get the 72mm would mean that I would have to plane the boards down from 18mm to about 12mm and since my planer blades are really dull, I decided to say I am overbuilding the spar, and may trim the final outer diameter a little less than 90 (solid spar calls for 84mm).

Anyway once I figured out my H(18mm) and L(35mm) for the staves I ripped the two boards up into eight staves. Once they were cut, I set the table saw to 45 degrees and ran a few test pieces through to dial in the depth of cut and the fence alignment. I should say that there are a number of ways to cut staves to get the birdsmouth cut, but I am using the table saw method (it seems faster and less messy than a router).

Once I was satisfied, I had my son come over to the shop and help hold the unwieldy staves as they came off the saw. Basically, you run the stave through the saw for the first 45 degree cut and then turn the stave around and pass it through again leaving a satisfying little 16' triangular piece of wood leftover waste. It took about 20 minutes to run each of the eight 16' staves through the saw twice and once completed I plunked all of them into a series of 90mm semicircle forms clamped to the bench and stepped back to see the magic. Woohoo! Tomorrow I will work on the taper to reduce the final diameter from 90mm to 50mm over the top 1.5 meters and then wait for my 3 gallon epoxy order to show up in the mail.

2017-01-28 - Chirp Chirp, It's a Birdsmouth

Reprinted from Duckworks Magazine

Late last week I was marking out the taper on the staves for the top of the mast where it reduces from 90mm to 50mm and I happened to check my email and found that another Campion Apple builder had seen my last post where I had assembled the roughed out staves and was about to cut the tapers. He suggested that I don't start the taper so low on the mast 1450mm from top; instead, I should just taper the area above where the yard connects at about 200mm from the top.

Sneaking up on the 50mm taper line

He said that I should go with a stiffer spar, so I adjusted the taper to go from 90mm diamter at 1450mm from the top to about 70mm about 200mm from the top and do the last 20mm taper (to 50mm) in the final 200mm from the top. I probably didn't explain that very well, but to make a long story short, I did a more gradual taper until the last 200mm and then got it down to 50mm much faster. To actually get it done, I ganged up all staves, laid them out on the floor and clamped them together. Then I took my 22" bench plane and set to work on the gradual section before finishing off the steeper taper with a jack plane.

Bottom end of plug

Once I was satisfied, I cut out a second, smaller set of staves ~1 meter long that I will use for the bottom plug (the designer calls for a solid mast for the bottom 1 meter with no hard transitions. To do that, I had to to cut the top ends of the staves so that their thickness tapered from very thin to regular thickness along the top 200 mm. I managed to get it close to correct on the first try, but I will have to thin the top a bit more with a rasp before I install it.

In the comfort of my warm basement at the house, I glued up the plug and had to wait out a particularly cold spell that I knew would prevent me from getting my shop above 50 degrees F (minimum glue up temp). I just don't have the room in the basement to glue up a 15 foot mast.

This weekend I scrounged up a third space heater and tested it out with the other two and was able to keep the temp in the shop up around 60 F even though temps were roughly 12 F. I decided it was time to get it done and glue it all up; sort of.

My plan was to glue everything up except for staves 1 and 5 (I put packing tape on the square sides) so I could split the mast apart once it was mostly glued up. I enlisted the help of my wife and son to hold various sticky pieces while we wet them out and got them into position. To make a long story short, it all went well and we got all the staves into place and then I hosed clamped them tight to cure for the night after using 24 ounces of epoxy.

This morning I got up early and was happy to find the shop warm and the epoxy nice and hard. I split the halves apart and pulled the packing tape off each side so I wouldn't forget later and then spent some time with a heat gun cleaning up some of the inside drips at the top and bottom of the mast where the plugs would go. Since I already did a lot of prep work on the bottom plug, I was able to adjust and fit it snug in short order and then rasped out the tapered end to ease the transition from hollow to more solid.

For the bottom plug I found a nice piece of Honduras Mahogany that was a cockpit deck beam on my Alberg 35 in a former life. When I rebuilt the cockpit in that boat, I couldn't bring myself to throw away those perfectly good and really lovely wood even though the rest of the cockpit was a soggy mess. I'm glad I didn't, because it was just a dream to shape down into a 200mm cone for the top plug. The perfect grain allowed my block plane to shave off delightful and very satisfying curls of wood.

Once the top plug was fitted, it was time to epoxy it all back together again. This time I didn't have any help, but didn't think it would be a big deal to do it myself. It ended up getting a bit hairy because I miscalculated how much epoxy I would need to get the plugs set and ended up doing 3 - 9 ounce batches. By the time I got finished spreading out the last batch, the first batch was pretty close to kicking, so I got it all clamped up as fast as possible. It was just in the nick of time because when I was cleaning up the squeeze out a few minutes later, I could feel the excess staring to get that weird coagulated state consistency that epoxy gets when the reaction gets going. I went over to the shop and checked on it a few times tonight and on my last visit I was pleased to find very little tackiness left so I'll be able to pull the clamps off tomorrow and starting cleaning it up.

2017-02-05 - Birdsmouth Part 2 - Gluing it Up

Reprinted from Duckworks Magazine

Sneaking up on the 50mm taper line

Bottom end of plug

2017-02-16 - Birdsmouth Part 3 - Whittling

After the final glue up, I let the spar sit for a few days to make sure it was fully cured and then we got a bunch of snow, and then some more snow. It was fluffy and soft, and it called me to go play in it. So I did. I managed to get lots of first tracks with my trusty skins and then followed up with lots of skiing at Ragged Mountain. So if the snow holds out, I'll be doing as much skiing as possible until the end of March.

Even though I didn't spend much time in the shop over the past two weeks, I did manage to get the mast whittled down to a round cylinder like object.

To make the mast round, I started by knocking off the edges of the 8 sides and cutting it down with a hand held power planer until I had 16, then did it again to 32 sides. At that point I switched to 60 grit sandpaper because I was terrified of what might happen if the power planer slipped and took a huge chunk of wood out of the spar after all the work I had done. In retrospect I probably should have sucked it up and done a little more work with the power planer, or switched to a hand plane, because the sanding took a long, long time.

Still, it was pretty satisfying watching and feeling it go from angular to round even if it was slow going. I found a heavy cardboard shipping tube in the basement that was really close to the diameter of the spar. I cut it in ha
lf about 8" long and I spray glued a piece of 80 grit paper to the inside. After it dried, I put the paper grit of choice over that. The spray on piece is just there to provide friction to the inside of the half tube.

Then it was time to make some dust. I kept going with 60 grit until I was happy that all the flat spots were gone, I switched from 60 grit to 80 and did 2 passes over the whole spar. Then I moved on to 100, 120, and finally 150 grit for the final passes. Along the way, I shaped the top end into an nice rounded nub.

Overall I'm happy with the result and my final diameter is 91mm at the bottom and tapering to 52mm at the top. I probably could have kept sanding to get the diameter down to the 90mm and 50mm specified in the plans, but enough is enough. Although it is a bit heavier than I'd like at just under 25 pounds, I don't know I could have done anything to prevent that other than using Sitka which is a lighter wood, but much more expensive. I still need to cut the beehole at the top and figure out the shape of the bottom butt arrangement. I will probably round that as well.

2017-03-01 - Spars Spars and More Spars

So I haven't been totally idle for the past two weeks, but there hasn't been much to report on that I haven't already said. I just finished up the mizzen mast and the main boom in birdsmouth fashion and while it has been pretty satisfying building these things, there is a lot of sanding and planing that gets a bit tedious after a bit and I think I'm ready to move on to the hull.

Notably missing from the completed spars so far are the main and mizzen yards, the mizzen boom, and the boomkin. I am certain that I will do the boomkin up with the birdsmouth method so I can run the mizzen sheet through the spar instead of mounting a block (There are several nice examples here: woodenboat forum). I'm not entirely certain I will do the yards and mizzen boom in birdsmouth because they are so small in diameter as it is, I don't know how much I will gain by going birdsmouth with these. I suspect there is some equation of diminishing returns that can be calculated based on diameter of spar and a few other factors; I'll let you know if I come up with it.

Asymmetrical? No, not really.

Anyway, the mizzen looks like a tiny main mast, but only 2305mm compared to the 4545mm for the mast. The boom is a bit more interesting in that it is tapered on either end, but slightly differently. On one end, the taper goes from 65mm to 45mm over 750mm, while the other end does the same taper in 400mm. It added up to a little more care with planing (both electric and hand plane), but overall, the process is identical. The plan's line drawing actually show the boom tapered asymmetrically, but I contacted Tom Dunderdale and he said that the taper is symmetrical and to treat it as such.

The boom I plugged either end with octagonaly planed pieces of 120mm mahogany (< 5 inches) and the mizzen got the top end plugged with mahogany and the bottom got a similar birdsmouth plug treatment as the main mast. I finished up tonight by getting everything sanded down to 150 grit paper and ready for Deks Olje oil finish.

I will probably get a coat or two on before I move on to the next task, but I hope to actually purchase the plywood next week sometime and start the scarfing process to get the long panels I'll need for the hull.

2017-03-20 - Scarph It Down

It's been a few weeks since I last posted; the call of the ski slopes kept luring me away from getting busy, but I will use the "it's too cold for epoxy" excuse for practical purposes. Fortunately, I finally managed to get over to Goosebay lumber and purchase six sheets of 6mm Okume marine plywood and had enough time this weekend to get to work on scarphing them together. Once these 6 sheets are glued together and diced up into appropriate shapes, they will provide enough wood for the basic hull to be built.

I have been pondering the scarphing part of the build since I purchased the plans earlier this year and spent what seemed like a huge amount of time researching the ideal method for accurately scarphing plywood panels. I say ideal because I mean 'best for me', not what may be the absolute best if time and money were no object. There are a ton of methods that range from simply using a block plane, to complicated router sled jigs and everything in between. After weighing all the options I chose to go with a circular saw jig that combines simplicity in design with speed of cut once setup properly.

The design I chose is nothing more that a large bracket that clamps to my manning bench with an 82 degree face angle that allows a circular saw to ride along and cut the scarph at an 8:1 ratio. I constructed it out of 2x4s and some 3/4" Melamine shelving so the circular saw will slide along smoothly. The hardest part of building it was figuring out the blade offset from the fence so I could attach a metal rail for the fence to ride along. All of this is explained much better with pictures so hopefully they will give you the idea.

Once completed I tried it out with a few pieces of 6mm test plywood to make sure everything was working as expected before I jumped in and started slicing up $75 per sheet plywood. All went well and was able to cut all six sheets in about 30 minutes.

Next I stacked three at a time and hit them with my random orbit sander to clean up the cut so everything was nice and smooth and made sure they fit together nicely. To glue them up I had to clear out a space on the floor and then lay them out with a piece of plastic sheeting under the section I would be gluing up. I test fit the joint and then mixed up a small batch of epoxy slightly thickened with 404 filler and smeared it on both surfaces with a disposable brush and then 'clamped' them together by placing another sheet of plastic over the joint followed by a flat 2x6 and a 30 pound toolbox. After that it was just a matter of waiting for the glue to dry and then sanding the surface down before repeating two more times for each subsequent plywood pairs.

Next up I'll sand down the glued joint to smooth everything out and then start marking out the strakes on the panels. I've never done strakes this big before, so I'll be taking my time to make sure I get all the measurements correct and then go back and double check before I cut a thing.

2017-03-21 - Laying It All Out

I have been pretty excited about getting started on the strake/plank layout and I finished up the cleanup of the last scarph joint last night so I got started at lunch today. I spent a fair amount of time making sure I understood all the strake layout plans and how to transfer them to the plywood panels. Fortunately, Tom Dunderdale (the designer) did a great job of providing clear, concise strake plans in a number of forms.

Illustrated strake layout

There is both an x-y coordinate sheet and a nicely illustrated version that marks the strake dimensions visually along the shape of the plank. I ended up using a combination of both, mainly because reading off the x-y coordinates is faster, but I double checked visually on the illustrated version.

To get started, I had to setup a reference line to measure everything off. The illustrated plan showed an 8mm reference line along the bottom of the scarphed panel and all the first strake measurements are built from this line. Once I had that drawn the entire 16 foot panel, it was simply a matter of marking off the x-y coordinates for the top and bottom of the strake.

To make sure I could go back and double check measurements, I did all the x coordinate lines first and labeled each one before going back and doing the y coordinates. Pretty painstaking and monotonous work, especially considering there are x-y coordinates for both top and bottom lines of each strake. After completing all the coordinates for the first strake, I tacked finish nails into each coordinate and laid a wood batten on them and drew the curve. Very satisfying when you step back and see the strake's shape emerge from the plywood rectangle. Especially when it actually looks like what's on the plan.

Between the monotony of marking out the strakes and being on my knees for 3 hours (yes it took about 3 hours), I only finished two strakes tonight. I think the rest will go a bit faster now that I have figured out a bit of a method, but it doesn't take long before the numbers start repeating in your head and mistakes are made. Towards the end I had to correct a few small dumb errors, so I figured I should quit while I was ahead. Marking the coordinates down on each point will make it easier to double check before I actually make the cuts when I get there.

2017-03-22 - Got Planks

Nested strakes make for lots of lines, hope they're right.

I had four solid hours of time to myself today to work on the soon to be boat and made good use of my time. After working out a decent system for laying out the planks/strakes last night I got straight to work marking out the last two planks on the first scarphed panel. I was able to layout the remaining two planks in roughly an hour and forty five minutes which, compared to last nights three hour session, seemed like light speed. I spot checked a number of marks to make sure they were right and I'm fairly comfortable that I got all the measurements correct (cross fingers).

As I was finishing up I was thinking about how long it's going to take to get all of these planks cut when it occurred to me that after I cut these planks out I could use them as a pattern for the next scarphed panel. I suppose this revelation should have been obvious, but it wasn't to me. Then I thought, why not just cut both panels at once, then I get two of each plank matched exactly.

That brought me to the next question which was "how am I going to cut these planks?" I hadn't really thought too much about it before because I was focusing on getting the layout correct, and I didn't really think that I would be at that point today, but here I was. I had unconsciously assumed that I would use my jigsaw, but I have never been happy with the speed or the lumpy cuts I always seem to get because even a millisecond's inattention is enough to change the direction of the saw. I always cut proud of the line, but cleanup is always a chore.

That got me thinking about using my Bosch 7-1/4" circular saw to do the cuts. When I built the shop last summer, I spent a huge amount of time with that saw and I got really comfortable with it. The cut line gauge is really accurate and it doesn't wander like a jigsaw and as long as the radius isn't too deep, it can follow a curve nicely. Oh, and it is Way faster than a jigsaw.

The blade was pretty dull from the shop build, so I ran up to Home Depot and got a Diablo 60 tooth thin kerf blade, mounted it, and got busy.

I lined up two of the scarphed panels so the edges matched up, screwed them together with a few wood screws and started cutting. It took just under an hour to cut all the planks out with a few breaks in between to let the dust settle and I'm really happy with how they turned out. No oops, crap, or whatever; it just worked and worked well. Every edge is smooth and about 1/16" proud of the line.

Nice smooth cut, just proud of line.

So, to make a long story short, I went from being overwhelmed with how much drudgery work I had to do, to having eight of the eleven planks cut out and nicely matched. I still have to mark out and do the same operation on plank number five and cut out a single keel strake, but I feel like I over the hump and may actually start making the wood look like a boat next week.

Can't even see that there are 8 planks; the benefits of stacked cuts.

2017-03-27 - Awkward

So I knocked out the rest of the strakes in between various obligations this weekend. To get myself worked up for boat stuff, I drove up to the Maine Boatbuilder's Show on Friday to see what was happening. There were a lot of incredible boats there but not much in the way of sail and oar type stuff, except for Clinton Chase of Chase Small Craft. I had a nice conversation with him and really love his 16 foot Calendar Islands Yawl. I almost wish I had come across the design before the Apple 16, because it pretty much ticks off all the items on my list. Oh well, maybe next build (he mentioned he has an 18 footer in the works).

Anyway, I had really worked up cutting the strakes out to be a bigger chore than it turned out to be, but by doubling up the strakes for cutting I essentially halved the time it took to get everything rough cut. It went way faster than I thought and cleaning up all of the rough cut strakes only took about two or three hours with the low angle block plane. The only other thing I needed to do before beginning to stitch everything up was to epoxy a piece of 6 oz cloth along the forward end of the keel strake to keep the stitching from coming out because it is so narrow (as recommended by the designer). I forgot to take a specific picture of this but it's really straight forward.

So this afternoon after work I found that the epoxy had dried along the strake and I had some time and no good excuse for putting it off any longer. The stitching is where the rubber meets the road so to speak, and any errors I may have made with the marking and cutting would quickly become apparent.

I marked and drilled out holes at 200mm increments along the keel strake and the port and starboard strake 1 planks and along the plumb bow and started stitching. It was a mistake to stitch the bow together first (even though that is what the designer suggested), because it made joining the keel strake to strake 1. I eventually cut the bow zip ties and did that last... that worked much better.

It was all very floppy and I found it difficult to keep it in shape so I decided to cut out the outside form for station 5 specified in the plans and attach it to two 2x6 to stand it upright and placed the stitched section in it and clamp it down at station 5. At this point things got much easier and I ended up screwing the port and starboard strake 1 onto the form to help hold the shape. One nice thing about the design is it calls for the keel strake to be cut long and trimmed after everything is together. This makes the forward section meet up nicely.

With all of that in place, stitching the second strake on was super easy and was just a matter of drilling out holes for the zip ties every 200mm and zipping them up going from stern to stem. Once I pulled everything tight the whole thing lined up really nicely with no gaps in any of the strakes and it all looks straight. So far, so good. Depending on how much time I have tomorrow I should be able to get a few more strakes stitched on.

2017-03-29 - Stitched

So my fingertips are really sore from drilling and pulling almost 300 zip ties to get the hull, transom, and bulkheads stitched, but it's now done. Finally... It really wasn't too bad, and the sound of the zip tie 'zipping' up and pulling the strakes tight was pretty satisfying.

I'm happy with the results so far, all the seams are tight and the hull is nice and straight. I kept center lines and the top uncut (straight) on the bulkheads and transom so I could line everything up by sight. I emailed the designer and he suggested cutting out most of the internal bulkhead shape and just leaving tabs in place to cut once everything is glassed in. I followed his advice on frame 5 but didn't do anything with frame 10 because I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it yet. I may cut big circles out along either side of the mast, but I may do a top entry on the recessed foredeck, but I'm just not sure yet.

The next step is to start tacking the hull together with epoxy to start strengthening up the shell, but I'm waiting on a tub of wood flour and several hundred yards of glass tape from Jamestown Distributors. Hopefully it should be here tomorrow and I'll get started.

2017-04-01 - The April Fool

The 50 and 75 mm glass tape and wood flour showed up Thursday afternoon so I spent two marathon nights in the shop getting sticky. After more hours than my back was really happy to be on duty, I finally finished up last night. It's not that the work is difficult, but leaning over the gunwale of the boat, reaching down to spread out the seemingly endless supply of 180 mm fiberglass tape pieces just go old.

I started out by measuring and cutting 100 pieces of 180 mm fiberglass tape from the 50 mm wide roll. I came to the the 180 mm number simply because the zip ties are spaced at 200 mm and 180 would give me a little leeway on either side (first pass lays the tape between the zip ties). Once cut, I vacuumed out the boat to get any debris out that would prevent the tape from laying flat.

I layed out all the pieces of tape next to the spots they would soon occupy permanently and then it was just a matter of mixing up a batch of unthickened epoxy and painting in between the zip ties. I would generally paint out a row, going from the stern forward to frame 5 and then place and smooth out the pieces of tape in an orderly fashion. Then I would move onto the next row, do the same, and then circle back to the first row (which by that time had a bit of soak time), and brush a thin layer of epoxy over them to make sure they were fully wetted out. Repeat... again and again over the course of two days.

Once those were all done, I mixed up a batch of epoxy and thickened it to peanut butter consistency and spread it into the frames and transom; first with a putty knife, and then followed with my finger which is the perfect filet radius. After taking care of that, I cut a small piece of mahogany and planed it down so that it fit nicely in the inner stem to tie the strakes together. This isn't called for in the plans, but I can't see how it would hurt (other than add about 6oz of weight) and most boats do have this 'feature'. I fileted that in place and called it a day.

This morning I woke up to a fine April Fool's joke complete with 10 inches of snow and the power out. Fortunately, the shop is well insulated and it only got down to the 40 degree F range. The power came back on this afternoon and I started working on the scuppered inwale that needs to go in place before flipping the boat over. This is also a deviation from the standard plan, but I know others have done this and I have found in the course of messing around in boats that scuppered inwales make nice places to tie something off anywhere along the rail of the boat. Very handy and I think it looks nice too.

I have a couple of nice black cherry boards that I had bought for the gunwale/inwale job so I sliced off a few 3/8" (~10 mm) pieces and cut them to 2" (50 mm) lengths to use as spacer blocks. I marked out the placement and found that if I have the 50 mm spacer block spaced every 100 mm they will be nicely staggered the entire length of the boat. A note on the metric measurements: the plans are all metric and while I still have a little trouble visualizing how long say 125 mm is (whereas if I think about 5 inches, I can visualize how big that is), it is WAY better going metric. The math is dead simple and I wish all my tools were calibrated in metric. I did buy a full on metric tape measure and I have a metric straight edge that I've been using as well. I wish we could convert everything over.

Anyway, I mixed up a batch of thickened epoxy and spread it onto each spacer block and positioned them with spring clamps. Unfortunately, the saying 'you can never have enough clamps' is very true in the case of doing scuppered inwales; I have about 20 or so, but probably need a good 30 to do one whole side (let alone the whole boat), so I did one 20ish clamp section and will wait till those kick before getting the rest of the side done before going to bed tonight.

2017-04-05 - Sticky Bits and Stupid Mistakes

Morning in the shop

So now I have reached the inevitable stage in a build where the big pieces are together and things start to seemingly slow down because the parts get smaller and require careful setting and epoxying. It's not that I've stopped doing work, it just feels that way sometimes because you don't see as many big changes.

With that said, I did reach a milestone earlier this evening and finished gluing up both sides of the outside gunwale (outwale). The reason it's a milestone is that I've finished the first stage of the build and now it's time to turn the boat over and start glassing up the bottom. I should thank Tom, who commented on my last post. I was lamenting the fact that I didn't have enough spring clamps to glue on all the spacer blocks for the scuppered inwale and Tom pointed out that I could just slice up a length of PVC pipe and cut them lengthwise to make a super cheap spring clamp. I had enough PVC pipe on hand to make 20 and that allowed me to move forward much faster.

Mini miter box

Scarph goodness

While the spacer blocks were curing in place, I cut out the 20 x 20 mm outwale pieces and cut 8:1 scarphs to get the lengths I needed. To do so, I built a mini miter box to do the cut and it also served as a jig to glue them up. Once the epoxy had cured and I sanded them down the glue lines looked really good.

Next, I milled a 6 x 8 mm rabbet in both of the scarfed outwales. It's a little hard to see in pictures but I epoxied the spacer blocks about 8 mm proud of the top plank. I did this so when the outwale was set, the rabbet would cover up the plywood edges. I never liked the looked of exposed plywood edges and figured that sealing those edges with epoxy and then covering them with the outwales would help keep out moisture.

Last night I lured my wife over to the shop to help butter and bend on the first rabbeted outwale. I mixed up two small batches of wood flour thickened epoxy and had my wife start 'painting' the outwale with the mayo consistency epoxy while I did the same on the outboard side of each spacer block. Once done, we simply mashed it into place and worked our way forward, clamping it onto the curve of the hull as we went. I needed to use a few c-clamps along the way because just using spring clamps wasn't enough. It went great and once it was on, we spent 20 minutes or so cleaning up all the squeeze out before quitting for the night.

The last few days wasn't without it's trials though; I managed to get an extremely large cherry sliver in the palm of my hand when planing down one of the outwales. My wife managed to get it out with some serious digging, but it ended my work for the night. I also knocked over four ounces of unmixed resin on the shop floor and didn't notice it until it spread out all over and I had walked in it. My wife managed to drag her hair in thickened epoxy when we were moving the boat a few feet. She was not happy.

I also managed to screw up the length on the starboard outwale we finished tonight and didn't notice it until we bent it on after we buttered the whole thing up with wood flour thickened epoxy. Earlier in the day I cut the forward end at an angle so it would match up with the one we did the night before and didn't realize that I cut too much off and as we pushed it into place, it was about 5 inches short of the stern. WTF...

There wasn't anything to do at that point but get it clamped down because getting all the epoxy off the hull that we just spread just wasn't an option and I don't want to go through all the work of scarphing and milling more cherry stock. I found the piece I cut off and glassed that in place at the aft end where it was short. Not ideal, but it's the last 5 inches on the stern, not on curve and it fit into place nicely. Obviously there will be a seam that is not as elegant as my nice scarphs, but strictly cosmetic. Oh well,

2017-04-06 - Knees

So even with my screw up yesterday when I somehow cut the starboard outwale too short, I'm pretty pleased with the way it turned out. The 5 inch piece I fitted on after I got the rest of the piece on is blended pretty well even though it's just butted, not scarphed. Once it's sanded down it won't be too noticeable (except to me). The best part of last night's work is that the boat has really stiffened up a lot now that both outwales are on and the curve of the top strake now seems totally fair.

I wanted to pull the boat and flip it today, but it was raining so hard I didn't dare. I'm sure it would be fine since it is BS1088 marine plywood that should have waterproof glue, but I didn't see the point. Instead I decided I would fit the quarter knees and the outboard stern rail (the trim on the back of the boat, not sure what it is called). I thought it would be quick, but it ended up taking a ridiculously long time to get everything nice and tight. It was fairly satisfying though, I love shaping wood and a low angle block plane and my shinto rasp are some of my favorite tools for hacking up wood.

I started with the stern rail and the low angle block plane to sneak up on the cambered line and when I was close, I went to the rasp to get the last bit. Once I was satisfied with the general shape, and that it matched the slight camber of the inner one I moved onto the quarter knees which should also help stiffen up the boat even more once they are glued and screwed into place.

For the knees I found a nice piece of wide Honduras mahogany board and transferred the general angle of the transom to strake intersection onto the soon to be knee. I oriented the board so that the grain was diagonal across the knee for the best strength and then used a compass and ruler to make the curves that will be exposed inside the boat.

It took a few test fittings to get the initial angle (there are 2 dimensions; fore - aft, and up - down), but eventually it sat perfect in the crook between the strake and the transom. I cut out the rough inside shape with my band saw, but could cut the tight curves with the blade I have on it right now, so I settled for close, and made multiple passes at different angles to get most of the waste wood cut away. Then it was back to the shinto rasp for final shaping and some 80 grit paper to cleanup and radius the edges before epoxying it all in. I didn't have any screws long enough to go through the rail and solidly into the knees so I will have to do that after it all dries up and I can get to the hardware store from some 2.5 inch SS screws.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to do any work on the boat this weekend so the boat flip will have to wait until next week when the weather gets a little better. The shop is long overdue for a serious cleanup and I want to be able to move the boat out for a few hours so I can clean and sweep before moving it back in and starting on the bottom.

2017-04-11 - Flipped

We had a family trip to NYC over the weekend to see the play Wicked so boatwork was not an option this past weekend, but before we left I spent a little time rough cleaning the stern lamination and knees I had glued up the night before to see how it turned out. Everything looked pretty good and there were no huge messes to take care of; it was just a simple matter of hitting everything with the sander to get rid of the squeeze out. I left for the weekend in good spirits.

Fast forward to last night; I enlisted the whole family to come over to the shop to flip the boat. In retrospect I should have brought some beer and celebrated a bit, but logistics have never been my strong suit, so we just got on with it. With the knees, outwales, and three frames in place the boat has gotten surprisingly rigid, but it's still very light. I'm not sure exactly, but I'd say it's still under 100 pounds, so the flip was uneventful and I had no opportunity to teach my kids salty phrases.

We set it up on blocks and I made sure the hull remained true during the flipping process and then went to town clipping off the 300 zip ties. The novelty quickly wore off because many of them were partially glued in place when I tabbed the inside, so there were very few that came out easily. Most I had to clip off flush on the hull and then from the inside (on my back), I would yank them out or break them off with a pair of pliers. It took far too long and I was really glad when it was done.

I did find an annoying mistake while removing the zip ties. The cradle I used to keep the boat upright had caused a slight depression on the bottom of the hull. It was only about 3-4 mm over a 2 foot section on the keel strake, but it was definitely noticeable from the right angle. Unfortunately, the tabbed in frames made it difficult to remove entirely. I reduced it as much as I could by propping up the center underneath frame 5, but there is still about a 2mm deflection along the keel strake. I decided that I would correct it with the miracle of epoxy and came to terms with it pretty quickly. The epoxy won't add much weight, and will make the hull fair. It is not noticeable inside the boat.

After work today, I got right to work with the low angle block plane to get rid of any anomalies between any joints in the strakes. Other that the low spot on the keel strake everything looked great. I was able to take care of everything in about 30 minutes. Then I sanded all the joints with 80 grit and mixed up the first of many small batches of thickened epoxy. Since this portion of the build is not structural (that comes later when glass tape and sheathing is applied to the outside), I used a 50-50 mixture of wood flour and glass spheres to make the fairing a bit easier.

I started by spreading out a reasonably thick course over the deflected area and then moved on to filling all the seams and holes left from the zip ties. I also spent some time filling in the partially lapped strakes at the bow. All told it took about 2 hours. Tomorrow I'll sand it down and find what I missed and do it all over again (but hopefully not as much).

Zip ties clipped, everything faired and ready to epoxy

Note the filled deflection

It's finally warm again and I can open things up a bit.

2017-04-16 - Taped

After the first round of seam and hole filling last week, I sanded everything down and did a much smaller fill session to take care of the areas I missed or didn't quite get right the first time. Of course, I had to wait another day to wait for everything to dry and sand this down, so it can be frustrating at times.

At this point in the build, things have started to slow down a bit (compared to the big gains of early on), and I have to multi-task to make sure I keep moving. With that said, while waiting for the second filler coat to dry, I started building the daggerboard trunk. I didn't get too far past cutting the 6 mm plywood to the proper dimensions (I had marked out the location and scribed the curve of the hull onto a piece of scrap before I flipped the boat), before I had to break out the epoxy again and put the first of 2 coats on what will be the inside of the trunk. The second coat will be a layer of 6 oz cloth with a graphite coating. Then I can start to cut out the bed logs, struts, and end pieces. I have a few nice pieces of mahogany that will be perfect for the job.

Back to the hull once the filler was cured, I sanded it all down again and was pretty satisfied that I was ready for the next step: tape. I started with a single seam, mixed up a 3 oz batch of epoxy and 'painted' it on the the length of the hull with a chip brush. Then I took my roll of 7 mm 6 oz cloth tape and rolled it along the seam from the stern forward to the bow, pressing the tape to the wetted out area as I went. Then I went back with a plastic squeegee and made sure the tape was saturated.

As luck would have it, 3 oz batches of epoxy was the perfect amount for each seam (there are 10 total). By the last seam, I had the technique down and it only took about 10 minutes. I cleaned up and called it a day.

This morning I shaped and mounted a piece of mahogany to the bow for the stem with screws and epoxy. Along with the stem, I also mounted the 25 x 15 mm 'keel' as far aft as the forward part of the daggerboard location. The weather has been warm and I have been using cold weather hardener, so by late today, everything had cured nicely and I was able to start shaping the stem and keel.

Next up I will be skim coating the hull with fairing compound to keep the tape reasonably hidden once I sheath the hull. I know I will have to do more fairing after the sheathing, but this will be a good step in making the hull fair.

2017-04-23 - Sheathed

The process of sheathing, or any large lamination with cloth is not a difficult one, but you have to plan ahead or you'll find yourself making a huge mess of things. Having done some pretty large layups in the past, I've learned a few things the hard way and I was determined to not repeat those mistakes again.

The first lesson that I've learned is something that I found out while laying up the decks on the Alberg 35 and has nothing to do with process or technique; it's the climate. When I re-cored the decks of the Alberg, I pulled out the old decks and rebuilt them up with a balsa core, followed by three layers of 1708 biaxial cloth. Each layer is much thicker than the single 6 oz woven cloth that goes on the Apple, but the same principal applies: When you lay up a section, make sure you have steady or falling temps or you run the risk of getting bubbles trapped underneath the cloth.

Back in 2011, when I did the first section on the Alberg, I started early in the morning and I was pretty proud of myself when I finished. I cleaned up and left it for the day. I checked in on it that night and was horrified to find a bunch of small bubbles underneath the cloth, and by the time I found them, it was too late. Luckily the area was fairly small and I was able to grind out and fill all the bubbles before continuing, but I called the epoxy distributor (System 3 at the time) and the first thing he asked me was if I did it in the morning before temps warmed up. I had.

I don't know what the chemical process is that causes this, but from then on I made sure to do laminations later in the afternoon when the temps were falling. In the new shop, I have a few heaters where I repeat this. I make sure it is nice and warm when I start and then turn off all heating once I start. This ensures falling temps and no bubbles.

The other lessons learned are simply a matter of getting everything ready before you add the hardener. Make sure the cloth is in place and smoothed out, dispense each batch of resin up front before adding in the hardener. I measured out 3 eight oz batches of resin (it turned out to be a good guess). Then I double checked that my spreaders and brushes were ready and there was nothing in my way.

Then I mixed in the 4 oz of hardener into the first batch, mixed it up well and then went to work. The 6 oz cloth is nice in that it lays down better and conforms to curves better than heavier weight cloths, but if you just randomly apply epoxy, it will deform and crumple up (making a disaster). Since I was doing one side at a time (with the center line overlapped about six inches), I started from the highest point, which is the center line and worked down carefully.

I'd pour roughly a 1.5 inch blob along a two foot section and then use the 6" plastic spreader to work it down over the keel strake and to the first two strakes. I started at the stern and worked forward and then went back to the stern and repeated for strakes three, four, and five. It all went well, but the last strake (five) was a bit tedious because it is almost vertical and you have to be careful not to use too much or the epoxy just runs down onto the outwale. All told, it took about 2.5 hours per side and the better part of the last hour was spent working on making sure the glass on strake five was laying down properly. After I finished the first side, I cleaned up and waited until the next day for it to harden so I could do the next side.

I also spent a few minutes after everything was wetted out to make sure I didn't have a bunch of pooled resin anywhere. I didn't totally succeed, but all in all it turned out well. I now have a nice hard shell that I gave a quick sanding to in preparation for the next step where I will fill the weave with a slightly thickened mixture with glass fairing compound.

2017-04-26 - Odds and Ends

I'm marching toward getting the hull prepped for a primer coat and there are a ton of little details that have to be taken care of before I get there. The big thing is spot filling and fairing any anomalies that will look bad once painted if I don't deal with them. Ideally, when the hull is finished I hope to have a pretty clean looking hull with no cloth print through and no tape 'bulges' along the seams.

All of this makes for plenty of idle time because each batch of epoxy I make up takes a good day to be ready for sanding. It takes 15 minutes to apply and then you wait. I've gone through several rounds now and I think I'm pretty close to being able to do the fill coat, which should take care of the cloth weave that is currently on the hull. After that, there will be more spots that I missed and I'm considering applying a 'scratch' coat to the hull before actually priming.

Bonded, filleted, and taped, but pre-fairing compound.

A scratch coat is basically a throw away coat of paint that you apply to the hull to make a uniform color and will help highlight any imperfections. I'm not sure if this is a real term, but I'm making it one now and whatever it's called, I know that I'm not the only one who uses it. The problem with spotting imperfections now is that the hull color is so mottled it is hard to actually see the surface texture. I'll get a can of grey spray paint once the fill coat is done and throw it on to see what I've missed.

I have been trying to make the most of my idle time though and took care of a few things that needed to be done. The first was to fit and mount the skeg. I had some nice 5/4 Honduras mahogany stock that I cut down to size by scribing the hull curve on and trimming to the transom angle. This was a four step process where I initially epoxied it in place, then waited till that kicked (not full cure), then filleted a ~10 mm radius along either side. I left that until it was still a bit green but no longer sticky and applied a layer of 50 mm tape on the filleted sides. Finally, I waited until that was cured enough to sand and knocked off the woven edges of the tape before applying a layer of fairing compound. I still have to radius the edges at some point, but that will be just before paint.

The second item I knocked off the list was to clean up the bottom of the outwales. These had a combination of drips, glops, and edges of the sheathing cloth from previous work on the hull. They always seem to catch all the gunk that drops and then I forget to clean them up when they are still wet, making more work for me. This took way longer that I thought and used a combination of a heat gun and sandpaper to get all the crap off. Tedious is the word for this job. I finished up by running a small fillet along the hull intersection and filling any imperfections between the edge of the cloth and the outwale.

2017-05-10 - Going Rogue

I deviated from the original plan since the last post and decided against doing a primer coat before I do the interior. I did get a good chunk of the weave filled with 2 coats of unthickened epoxy and glassed the transom. I think it's looking pretty good now, but time to move on.

Instead of priming, I decided that it would be best to get the interior fitted before I tried making the hull look any prettier, so I marked and cut out the daggerboard slot and this is where I am basically throwing away the plans. I plan on a number of modifications to the interior, including the daggerboard.

The plan calls for a 25 mm wide daggerboard with a long slot (basically about the same size as a centerboard trunk. I talked to the designer about this and I decided that in order to optimize space, I would shorten the trunk because I only plan on building the standard rig, and not the light air rig which requires setting the daggerboard further back. Additionally, I'm planning on building a NACA0012 foil for the daggerboard and if I keep the chord of the daggerboard at 280 mm, that means that the maximum width of the daggerboard is 33 mm, not the 25 mm as designed.

I won't go into much detail now, but in a nutshell, but NACA stands for National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and the 0012 designation means that the maximum width of the foil is at 12 percent of the chord. In other words, it will look a bit like a wing. In theory this should allow the boat to point a bit higher before stalling. I think it will be fun to build. More on that when I get to it.

My son and I moved the boat outside and we flipped it over so I could sand the 50 mm tape in the interior to prep for applying the 75 mm tape over that. Using 80 grit sanding disks on my 5" random orbit sander I was able to get everything acceptably smooth in about 2 hours. I vacuumed it out and we moved it back in.

I measured and cut enough 75 mm tape to cover all the 50 mm tape in the bow and mid sections of the boat. I'll do the aft section a little later, but for now I want to focus on the centerboard trunk and the mast step and forward assemblies. Using 6 oz. batches of epoxy, I painted out all the 50 mm tape seams and then lay the 75 mm tape in it before moving on to the next. After a few of these 4 - 5 foot sections, I'd circle back and make sure the previously laid sections were fully wetted out. I always miss a few spots on the first pass so it's good to go back over them with a brush and squeegee. Once I finished up I moved onto the daggerboard trunk and let the new tape cure.

The daggerboard trunk isn't complicated, it's just a hollow, rectangular box with the bottom cut to the shape of the hull so it seats properly, but it takes a bunch of steps to get it all together and ready to fit to the boat. I should say that I really didn't follow the plans or construction key here at all, but I've done daggerboard and centerboard trunks before, and I know what works for me. There are really only four things you have to keep in mind:

Make sure your daggerboard will fit.
Install it in the correct location (Center of Effort +/- lead).
Make sure it is built stout enough to take a beating (because it will).
The trunk has to spead the loads imposed on it to the boat without introducing major stress risers.

So to start, I had previously determined with the help of the designer a shorter length daggerboard trunk and located it on the boat (fore and aft). From there, I scribed the bottom curve onto a piece of scrap and transferred it to the 6 mm marine plywood I planned on using for the sides of the case. I cut each side of the case out to the proper dimensions and then epoxied what would become the inside of the trunk with 6 oz cloth.

Once that had kicked, I followed up with a coat of unthickened epoxy with 10% graphite powder mixed in. I let it kick again and repeated with another graphite coating. The thought behind the graphite is that it is a good 'lubricant' and provides a slicker surface for sliding the daggerboard. I think there is plenty of debate on whether it works or not, but hey, it looks cool.

I let everything cure up for a day or so and then sanded the sides where the mahogany spacers would be screwed and epoxied into place to maintain the 35 mm desired width (for the 33 mm wide board). I clamped it all together and called it a day.

The next day I epoxied on some bed logs (scribed to the curve of the hull), which didn't seem to be part of the original plan, but I think they are crucial for stiffening up the trunk. I also added top pieces that will be covered by a trim board once completed. At this point I was about done, so I cleaned things up a bit with a heat gun to get rid of the inevitable gobs that I missed when the epoxy was still wet and sanded and rounded the inside corners.

I fitted the board the next day and to my amazement, it all fit without a single hiccup. I epoxied it to the hull with some thickened epoxy, and made a nice filet along the port and starboard edges before laying down a 75 mm wide strip of cloth to really tie it in. Of course there will be frames fore and aft and a vertical stiffener about midway that will further tie it into the boat, but this was a good milestone.

2017-05-23 - Forward

I'm definitely moving forward, both literally and figuratively. Figuratively in the sense that I feel like I'm getting a good amount of work done with minimal screw ups, and literally, because I am literally working on the forward section of the boat.

I think I said in the last post that I am going rogue on the interior build from here on out. I'm still referring to the plans here and there, but not in any measurable way. I'm winging it and starting with how things are arranged and built forward of the daggerboard trunk. I still have to abide by physics though, and need to distribute loads from the trunk and mast step, so I started with the idea that I would build a seat/storage compartment between the daggerboard trunk and the mast step to help tie things together.

Since the forward end of the daggerboard trunk didn't land on a specified frame, I broke out the hot glue gun and made a template of the new frame shape with little sticks glued to a 2x4. Once completed I transferred the template to a sheet of plywood and cut it out on the bandsaw. The first fitting was tolerable and a few hits with the shinto rasp made the new frame sit just about perfect.

Moving on, I cut and fitted frame 11 which will sit about 200 mm forward of the frame 10 and will be part of the sandwich that makes up the mast step and partners. For the mast step, I glued up a big blank consisting of sapelle and douglas fir.

Once it cured, I shaped the bottom to fit the curve/angle of the boat and screwed and glued more douglas fir and a 12 mm piece of plywood rabbetted to the fir for the actual step. This will allow a channel for drainage underneath where the mast fits. A bit hard to verbalize, so see the picture to make sense of what I said.

At this point I drilled the hole for the mast butt to seat and additional drainage holes and glassed the whole assembly in place. I called it a day and let it all cure up overnight. Next up was to fit douglas fir pieces that will serve as backing strips for the plywood that will enclose the mast step fore and aft between frames 10 and 11. All of this amounts to what will likely be the most complicated assembly for the entire project so I spent a lot of time in
'contemplation mode' to make sure I could visualize everything needed to be done.

Once I was satisfied with all of my dry fits, I filleted in frame 11 along with the all the douglas fir backing pieces and after an initial cure, I hot coated everything with unthickened epoxy. The next day I glued in the fore and aft side pieces to complete the mast step sandwich. In the meantime, I cut out some plywood that will be mounted about halfway up the mast step on either side. These will be glassed in and will serve 2 purposes: 1. they will be a shelf accessible through the bulkhead from the aft end, and 2. the area underneath them will serve as one of the watertight buoyancy chambers.

There is a bunch of glass taping to do in the next few days to tie everything together, but here's what it looks like to date:

2017-05-27 - Beefing it Up

Since last week, I fileted and taped up all the new mast step components to the hull and feel that it really stiffened up the front part of the hull. For the next step, I wanted to really beef things up so all the loads imposed by the unstayed mast will be properly transferred to the hull and nothing will break (cross fingers).

To do so, I needed to beef up the framing members at the mast partners so the loads will distribute laterally from the partners to the hull via these new members. Additionally, I decided to add a false bottom forward of the mast step that will tie the bow and sides into the mast step that should reduce or eliminate any twist caused by the loads.

I started by measuring out a longitudinal frame running from the mast step to the bow about 100 mm above the keel. I glassed that in place with thickened epoxy and after it had kicked, I coated it with unthickened epoxy to encapsulate the wood and added some douglas fir stringers along the top edge to receive the false bottom.

I left the aft section clear because I was planning on putting an inspection port in that spans both sides of the frame. I let it all cure for a day and then created a template with the hot glue gun and some random sticks to pattern the false bottom. I transferred the pattern to 6 mm marine plywood and cut it out for a first fitting. A little work with the rasp and it all seated quite nicely so I went ahead and cut out a hole for the inspection port prior to gluing it up.

I coated what was to be the bottom side of the false bottom with unthickened epoxy to seal it all up and after letting it kick, I mixed up a batch of thickened epoxy and ran a bead along the longitudinal frame and smooshed the bottom in place. I fileted the bottom to the sides and mast step bulkhead before letting it all kick. I stopped back at the shop later that evening after the epoxy had cured to the touch and mixed up a small batch of unthickened epoxy and taped the bottom to the hull and mast step bulkhead.

The next day I started beefing up the top of the mast partners by epoxying in 25 x 35 mm mahogany pieces that run from the mast step along frames 10 and 11 to the sides of the hull to distribute the load from the partners to the hull. I morticed a notch on each side of the aft piece for the beginnings of the deck framing as well. I feel like I'm using all the wrong terms here and I'm guessing all of these pieces have specific names, but the pictures below should give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

2017-06-08 - Decked

I have not been good about keeping up with the blog over the past few weeks, but I haven't been idle. In fact, I've done a lot of small bits of work that all add up to serious progress, but it's tough to know where to start.

I guess the best place is where I left off last time with the forward section; I had begun to put in the deck beams at that point and had finished up the structural pieces for the mast step and partners. I continued on with more deck beams and settled on a hatch configuration (rectangular 250 x 380 mm). Epoxying them in place proved to be a bit of a challenge because there wasn't a lot to clamp to so it took a bit of creativity to get it all done.

As I progress further into the build, I'm amazed at how the little stuff really slows you down (especially when there is epoxy involved that has a cure time). It seems like the net change of the boat is much smaller than at the start, but that's what everyone tells you; I just didn't want to listen.

Anyway, once I had all the deck beams in place I put three coats of white rustoleum paint in the forward area that would be soon be covered by a deck and only accessible by a hatch. I also did three coats in the cubby areas adjacent to the mast step that would also only have access via deck plates. The paint took a considerable amount of time to dry because the temps were cool, so it ended up taking many more days than I had hoped. Once the third coat was mostly dry, I started fitting out the deck.

I used the same 6mm plywood for the deck and once I had it fitted nicely (I used 2 pieces to span the area), I buttered everything up with epoxy and screwed it in place with #8 3/4" SS screws. Once that set up, I ran a thick filet down each side of the hull and covered with 75 mm tape to really tie it into the hull. I will eventually sheath the whole deck in 6oz cloth just to provide a little more strength and abrasion resistance, but I'm calling it good for now.

2017-06-16 - Moving Aft

With the forward deck area roughed in, it was time to move aft and fill in some structural details that should really stiffen the boat up. As I've said in previous posts, I have gone rogue for the interior and other than a few vague reference points, I am not working off the plans anymore. It's not that they aren't good, I just wanted something a bit different.

So with that said, I spent a fair amount of time staring at the empty hull trying to envision where everything would go and how it would fit. After many beers and many days, I finally arrived at an executable plan. Part of the consternation I had came from deciding the elevation of the floor which dictates the elevation off the hull of the frames. I ended up running a taught string fore and aft and found an elevation that would allow for flat floors for the entire length of the cockpit and a transition area to seat with watertight tanks on each side. To add to the mix, I'm planning on a removable thwart to allow for a sleeping area when not underway.

Once I established elevations with the string, I made hot glue templates at the frame locations and cut out the 4 frames needed with the bandsaw. After a few adjustments with the rasp to get everything fit well, I mixed up a batch of thickened epoxy and fileted them in place.

After letting them cure I made templates for the side panels of the cockpit seats. Since these will be watertight, they are extending down below the frames and will be filleted and taped to the hull. I notched out the location of each frame for both sides and got them fitting in place nicely like an interlocking puzzle. I cut white pine stringers (I think that's the wrong word) to add some rigidity where they mount to the frames and epoxied everything in place. I know that eastern white pine is not particularly rot resistant, but it is light and all of it will be encapsulated in epoxy and not continuosly exposed to water, so I think I'm good. Plus around here it is really cheap.

After waiting for another cure cycle I cut more stringers to help strengthen up the top and to act as a surface to mate the top of the seats to and did some more epoxying... The endless small bits glued into place that have to wait to cure is getting old at this point, but what can I do.

Finally, I made templates for the top of the seats, but left the forward section open for now. I plan on mounting a bulkhead bilge pump (Whale Compact 50) on one side so I want to have an access panel from the top for servicing, but I haven't decided which side to mount it on yet. The side that I don't mount it on will end up being epoxied in place. The other, more practical reason for not cutting the seat tops to full length is that I am trying to save wood and only have a 4'x4' sheet left.

Next up I will be taping the frames over the filets with 75mm tape as well as the bottom of the seat sides. I'll probably hold off gluing the seat tops in place until I get some of the aft deck framing completed.

2017-06-26 - A New Trailer

I've always been plagued by crappy boat trailers with lights that never work and very questionable safety margins. Currently I have 3 trailers in the yard, one of which I bought new in the 1990's and for my O'Day Daysailer and the lights have not been fully functional on it for many years. It seems that the wiring harness on these trailers are just awful and break very easily. Another one of the trailers for my Force 5 actually has working lights, but the trailer itself is kind of a disaster. I had it welded last year to hold it together, but I really don't think it's very safe. The third is just a hot mess and it just needs to be cut up and thrown away. It's that bad.

So the new boat is going to need a trailer and I've been looking on Craigslist for several months now and haven't found anything suitable. Either they are too long or too crappy or are too stiff for such a light boat that I expect the Apple to be. So this weekend I finally decided that I am sick of looking for another disaster so I went out and bought a new one.

It's a galvanized Karavan KBE 1250 and it has sealed/submersible LED lights that actually work and are bright. Woohoo. I'm sure I will break the harness somehow in short order, but at least it will not shake the boat apart. It has the new style torsion suspension that I'm told has a less bouncy ride.

I have to spend some time setting the boat up on it though because the rocker of the hull does not allow it to sit flat on the bunks and there is currently only one roller up front. I think I will add another roller aft to support the hull weight, but I'm not really sure the best way to handle it (suggestions are appreciated).

2017-07-13 - Little Bits

It's been a while since I last posted but I've been on vacation up in Bar Harbor Maine for the 4th of July week. Obviously no boat work was done that week, but we did get a bunch of sailing time with the craigslist Force 5 I found last summer and was the inaugural post for this blog (Click Here). I did manage to sneak in a bit of work though before we left and this week as well, so all was not lost. I'm still making good progress, but each step is taking a bit longer now because there are a bunch of small pieces that need to be glued to the boat in a very specific order and it just takes time.

My son enjoying the Force 5 in Somesville

When I last checked in I had just purchased a new trailer and was working my way aft building out the seat tanks and aft compartment. I won't go into too much detail because honestly, it just took a ton of time to figure out all the cuts, angles and general layout when not working from a plan.

The side seat tanks run aft of the daggerboard trunk to the sterb and will be watertight in case of capsize I will have several deck plates installed in them, but so far I have only installed the 4" aft plates that will be accessible from the aft compartment just forward of the mizzen.

I also spent some time designing the mizzen mount and glassed in the 25 x 50 mm stringers that will run from the stern to the 1st bulkhead. These will provide a channel to drain water from the mizzen mast to the bilge. I've selected a piece of 3" pvc pipe to be the tube for the mizzen mast step that should keep water out of the aft compartment.

For the aft compartment I built a channel around the perimeter and glassed sides onto the compartment lid that will fit into the channel to keep the water out (hopefully). This took quite a while and lots of sitting and thinking to make sure I got it right.

Finally, I purchased a Whale Gusher Compact 50 for the bilge pump and cut out the mounting hole in the forward part of the port seat tank. I think this will be a decent location because it will allow me to pump the bilge while seated with the tiller in hand. I'm not fully committed yet, but right now I'm leaning toward mounting the discharge in the stern adjacent to the rudder (obviously above the waterline).

By the end of this upcoming weekend, I hope to finalize the mizzen step and get the tube installed at the 6 degree angle specified in the plans with the corresponding partners. We'll see, but I don't think it should be too hard, I'm pretty sure I figured out the plan tonight while sitting and staring at the boat. Aside from that I have to glass in 'stringers' to the plywood frames to provide some material for the floorboards to screw into.

2017-07-18 - Stepped

For once, I finished a project in the time I allotted myself. The mizzen mast step assembly is done and mostly glued in. Now that there aren't single big jobs to focus on I have been trying to get better at organizing and doing many small jobs at once. I can easily see where build projects like these can go from months to years. Hopefully it won't come to that and I still have hope that I will get the boat finished and launched by the end of August. We'll see.

I mentioned in the previous post that I was going to use a piece of 3" pvc pipe to contain the mizzen mast and keep water out of the aft compartment. I spent a fair amount of time getting and marking the 94 degree angle needed to have a 6 degree rake on the pvc pipe before cutting it. I had bought enough extra in case I screwed up, but I think it worked out fine.

Next I found a nice old piece of mahogany that used to be a deck support in my Alberg 35 and shaped it so it would fit in the channel I installed earlier when I was building the supports for the aft deck. I like using salvaged wood where I can because in many cases, the quality of the older wood is way better than what you can buy today. This piece was in the Alberg for at least 40 years and I like the thought of carrying a piece of my old boat with me for new adventures.

Next, I bored out a 25 mm hole on center to accommodate the butt of the mizzen mast and drilled out limber holes in the top and bottom to make sure water drained. Next I found another piece of mahogany (from a different project) and bored out a ~90 mm (3.5 inch) hole to accept the butt of the pvc pipe. I did a little shaping to get a good fit in between the deck support pieces and then epoxied both pieces into the boat (one on top of another).

The step assembly will be the only piece I actually epoxy to the boat; pvc pipe will just have sealant holding it in place and the top piece on deck (collar?) will be screwed to the surrounding deck supports with #12 x 2" screws and waterproofed with a bead of sealant. This way I will be able to disassemble the step for periodic inspections and make sure everything is ok.

For the top piece I used a piece of 25 x 190 mm wide white pine. I know, it's shocking that I am not using some high end wood for some of this boat, but it's light, cheap and I can replace it if needed. I am coating every piece of wood in this boat with epoxy, so hopefully I can keep rot in check.

Anyhow, I bored another 90 mm inch hole in it to accept the top of the pvc pipe and made a plywood trim piece to cover the pvc and screwed and glued it together. Once it cured, I did some shaping and radiused the corners to make it all pretty like and put it all together. I haven't glued the plywood deck down yet because it will be easier to paint the compartment first, but aside from that, I'm calling the step done.

2017-07-26 - A Step Forward and a Step Backward

So I have made a lot of progress in the past week, but like everything these days, it just doesn't seem like as much as the early days. I started off by getting the aft compartment painted with 2 coats of primer on all surfaces to before epoxying the rear deck in place. I know final paint will wait, but doing the priming now should make things easier down the line.

After I got the smell out of the shop when the second coat was finally dry, I glued down the rear deck and seat tank tops and held them in place with screws while the epoxy kicked. Fast forward a day and I took the router with a roundover bit and trimmed off the edges of the seat tanks and did the same around the hatch coaming channel.

Next up, I sanded down the entire interior below the seat tanks and rolled on a coat of unthickened epoxy. Overall I spent about 3 hours sanding and because there were so many tight corners, the vast majority of it was done with little pieces by hand. In fact, I sanded so much with my fingertips that my fingerprint reader on my phone and computer stopped working for several days. I literally sanded off my fingerprints.

Once the coat of epoxy was mostly dry (the next day), I fitted floor stringers (probably the wrong word here) to the frames that will be used to accept fasteners from the floorboards and help stiffen the plywood frames. I epoxied them in place with thickened epoxy and then painted on a coat of unthickened epoxy to seal them up.

I spent some time cleaning up and sanding the seat tops and rear deck and that's when I found the screw up. I have been planning on doing pine planks on top of the seat tanks, rear decks, and seat compartment but as I visualized how I would do it so it would look good, I realized I had made the rear compartment hatch and opening too wide to accommodate the pine planks running fore and aft without cutting out part of them.

So after several days of thinking about whether to just get on with it or fix it so it doesn't bug me, I came up with a plan to fix it that wouldn't take too long and would allow me to decrease the width of the compartment. In a nutshell, I cut out a notch in the front and rear of each side of the compartment coaming and glued in another channel. At the same time, I decreased the width of the compartment hatch by cutting off the ends and glued in 2 new pieces for ends. I lost about a day's work, but in the end it will look better once the pine planks are in place and run fully fore and aft without any cutouts that disrupt the visual flow. A side benefit is that the channel will drain water better and keep it out of the compartment.

Finally, I found some nice clear pine planks that will make good seat tops and had just enough time this afternoon to rough cut them out. They will have to be bent in place, but I was able to easily push them into place to accept the curve of the seats as they move aft. What I need to do first though is to epoxy plywood risers on top of the rear deck, seat tanks, and hatch. These will allow the planks to have a little space underneath them to drain water, but I'm not 100% sure that I will do that. I won't be able to work on the boat for the next few days so I'll have some time to mull it over.

2017-08-07 - Seat Tops Complete

When I left off last week I had cut out some of the seat top planks but I wasn't entirely sure how I was going to fix them in place. On the woodenboat forum (here) I had a number of good suggestions with various methods that would not require me screwing them to anything, which would be ideal, but after a number of tries with various temporary fasteners I pretty much gave up and went back to the original plan.

I did learn a new term along the way though, the strips that I intended to epoxy in place to hold the seat tops were called 'cleats'. So with my new terminology in hand, I got to work. First I tried cleats that were 18 mm tall, but once I put everything together, it just didn't look right. I called my wife over to the shop who seems to have a good eye for all things aesthetic and she thought that the cleats were too prominent. She suggested making them a little less tall.

So I cut them down to 10 mm and both of us felt it looked much better so I went ahead and glued them all down with a thickened batch of epoxy and called it a day. The next morning before work I coated the newly glued down cleats and all the seat tops with unthickened epoxy. By the time I got home it was dry enough to test fit the planks and I was happy with the look.

After that, I cut out all the middle planks that will cover the rear hatch and deck and rough fitted them. I cut the outboard ones a little bit longer than the middle two because my plan was to strike a slight curve on the aft deck planks to make it a little less boxy.

I screwed down the side planks and further refined the aft deck/hatch pieces before taking it all apart again and rounding over all the planks top and bottom with the router. Once again, I screwed everything back in place for a few final fitting adjustments and then drew an arc on each of the hatch corner pieces to cut out. I tried a bunch of different curves, but finally decided that part of the curve on the bottom of the 5 gallon bucket laying in the corner was just about right, so I drew it on and took the pieces over to the band saw followed up by a roundover with the router.

So now I have to pull everything apart again (this is getting old) and sand and finish the planks. My plan right now is to use Deks Olje 1 for a matte finish, but I may change my mind on that. Also, I think it's time for a serious date with some sandpaper and get the interior sanded down for primer. I still have the removable thwart to do, and a bunch of work forward, but I'm getting close. I may sand and then flip the boat for final finish work there, but we'll see.

2017-08-10 - Rudder Time

Despite life being way too busy to fit everything in, I am still hoping to get this boat done before the end of the season, but I'm beginning to think I'm dreaming about getting it done. All the little things are adding up and you can only do them so fast. Even so, I've spent a few long nights in the shop this week and knocked out the rudder assembly.

The plans call for a swing up rudder accomplished by 2 cheeks that capture the blade on a pivot bolt. It's all hung on the boat with standard pintles and gudgeons that I sourced through Duckworks Boat Building Supply.

For the cheeks, I epoxied together 3 - 6 mm sheets of marine plywood. I cut them quite a bit larger than the overall dimensions of the cheeks so I would have plenty of room for trimming later on. Once these cured, I cut them down to the rough dimensions of the assembly and then found a nice piece of cherry to serve as the filler block and cut that to size. After a few trial fits, I mixed up a batch of epoxy and glued and screwed the cheeks with the cherry filler block together and set them aside to cure.

For the blade, I dug out a 1x6 douglas fir board I had and cut it into 2 - 1120 mm pieces (1097 mm finished length) and then ripped them into 4 - 45 mm strips and 2 - 35 mm strips to get a total glued up width of greater than 244 mm (max design width). I turned them end for end and then mixed up another batch of epoxy and slathered them up and lightly clamped them together before calling it a night.

The next morning I came back to find everything hardened up nicely and I got right to work whittling the blade down to size.
While I probably should have waited for a full cure to avoid gumming up my thickness planer blades, I went ahead and planed it down from 25 mm to 18 mm. Fortunately, the planer didn't seem to care and all went well.

I located the final blade dimensions on the freshly planed rudder blank and then cut it out with a combination of the table saw and band saw along with a small helping of the Shinto rasp for the final details. Now I dug out the tool that all wood should fear.... The belt sander. I don't use it often because it is not a precise tool, but relies on brute force to make wood disappear. This is good until you go too far, but I needed to remove a lot of material from the trailing edge for shaping and this can be a good tool for that when used judiciously.

It made quick work of the douglas fir and within 10 minutes I was close to final shape on the trailing edge. I left a little for some finish work later on, but it's pretty close now. For the leading edge, I used the low angle block plane, the Shinto rasp and some sandpaper to achieve the bull nose I was looking for.

I finished up the day by tapping the pivot hole for the blade and test mounted it in the cheek assembly. It was a bit loose, but I will be glassing the blade and the extra width from the cloth should take up any space in the cheeks.

I still have to add about 5 pounds of lead to the blade before I glass it over and I'm currently waiting for some wheel weights I ordered on eBay to show up before do so. I also plan on mounting a replaceable delrin bushing at the pivot hole so the 5/16" bolt holding it to the cheeks doesn't dig into the blade.

Knowing that I was about to start on the rudder project late last week I found and ordered a set of Racelite RL490 pintles and gudgeons from Duckworks Boat Building Supply in Port Townsend Washington (Racelite RL490). I've ordered a fair amount of stuff from this place over the years and they have been very reliable and shipping is surprisingly fast even though it is literally on the other side of the country from New Hampshire.

The pintles and gudgeons showed up yesterday afternoon so I got right to work. I had previously epoxied up a gudgeon cleat blank (as specified in the plans) with one of the batches of epoxy from the rudder blade so I fitted the cleat along with another thinner one that didn't require a multi-piece glue up. The plans call for the top cleat to stand off 15 mm from transom and the bottom cleat called for 60 mm standoff. To fit them, I basically held up the rudder cheeks where the corresponding pintles will mount and guessed since the plans don't actually specify where on the transom they should be mounted. I screwed both cleats right on the vertical centerline with temporary screws, and screwed the gudgeons in place with more temporary screws.

At this point it was just a matter of lining up the pintles with the gudgeons and marking their location on the rudder cheeks. More temporary screws and I was ready to test mount. I could feel the bottom gudgeon binding a bit on the first fitting, so I took the bottom cleat off and ran the face through the table saw at a really shallow angle. That fixed the binding issue.

So by now, it all fit well, but the cleats were looking pretty ugly, so a few passes on the table saw at a 25 degree angle followed by a 45 degree cut on the ends knocked down the boxy look and then I took the low angle block plane, rasp and sandpaper to soften up all the edges. I fitted the hardware again to make sure I didn't screw anything up and then epoxied both cleats in place.

I still have lots to do before I can sign off on the rudder project. First, I have to do some shaping of the rudder cheeks to give a bit of curvyness to them. I also need to ballast the rudder and add the Norwegian tiller arm as well as permanently mount the pintles and gudgeons, but that will wait until after paint.

2017-08-24 - Hull Fairing and Paint

I took a break from finishing the rudder last week to get the boat flipped over and take care of the hull finish. I'm not a good judge of weight, but I'd guess the hull is now in the 175 - 225 pound range. The boat is still pretty light but if I keep adding chunks of wood and various pieces it is going to get much harder to turn over, so I decided to get it done now. My son and I had little difficulty turning it over and I setup some boards on the trailer so the boat could rest upside down on it, allowing me to still wheel it in and out of the shop for the upcoming sanding sessions.

I washed the hull to remove any amine blush on the surface although I've found that the Raka epoxy is fairly low blush. The hull had a layer of 6 oz cloth and 2 filler coats of epoxy to smooth out the weave, but there was still a bit of a rough weave texture, so once it dried out I sanded the whole thing down with 120 grit on my random orbit sander.

I did a few spot fills of noticeable low spots with TotalBoat TotalFair fairing compound. I've been using this for a few years on various projects and like working with it. It uses a 1:1 ratio and one part is colored bright yellow, the other bright blue. You know that it is all mix well when they turn a uniform green. I've had trouble in the past with not properly mixing other fairing compounds because both parts are the same color and it's easy to miss fully mixing when you can't see a color change. Other than that it spreads out nicely and works just like any other fairing compound and cures to sand in about 3 hours.

After sanding again, I rolled on a coat of high build one part primer (also TotalBoat) and let it harden up for a day or so. Now that I had a uniform color on the hull I could really see where filling was needed. The vast majority was on the hull panels in between the chine tape, although the bottom two panels starting from the keel were in pretty good shape.

After sanding most of the first primer coat off, I mixed up several batches of fairing compound and slathered it on to get rid of the tape lines and waited for it to cure. Then it was time to sand again, and if you detected a pattern, you'd be right. Sanding was officially getting old now, but I kept telling myself that the prep is what matters, not the actual painting. Once sanded, it was again hard to tell where the low spots were because of the mottled color, but I was pretty sure I had gotten most of it.

Another coat of primer, another round of very minor fairing, followed up by a final coat of primer and 220 grit sanding and I was ready for real paint. When I say ready, I mean good enough for me. I like a nice finish, but I can only go so far before I call it quits. Other's may be much more meticulous here, but I know that the boat is going to spend it's life getting rammed up on beaches and rock shelves and trailers and I want to use it, not show it.

For the real paint, I went full stack with TotalBoat products from Jamestown Distributors and chose TotalBoat WetEdge one part polyurethane paint in Kingston Gray. I've used 2 part paints in the past (Interlux stack), and they do produce a very nice finish, but they are expensive and a bit finicky to use. I hadn't used TotalBoat polyurethane before, but I've used Brightsides in the past with decent results and I suspect they are probably made in the same factory (TotalBoat is slightly cheaper too).

I mixed up a quart thinned to 10% with their 'special brushing thinner' and went to work with an enamel/urethane 6" foam hot dog roller and did the margins with a good brush where the roller couldn't reach. The first coat took about 2 days to harden up enough to sand (it has been really humid here in Central NH) and I did the second (and hopefully final) coat last night. The humidity levels dropped yesterday afternoon and when I closed up the shop for the night I put a heater underneath the boat to speed up dry time. When I checked on it this morning the shop was a nice warm 85 degrees and the paint was dry to the touch. From what I can tell so far, I think it looks pretty good. With the thinner added, it leveled nicely and I don't see any brush or roller marks. It's not perfect by any means though. I can vaguely see where the panels are scarfed if you follow the reflection across the bottom of the hull, but there isn't anything I can do about that now. I'm ready to move on.

2017-08-31 - Armor

Way back in February soon after I started the build I ordered 18 feet of 3/4" x 1/8" 316 stainless steel flat bar from online metals and it's been sitting around the shop until now. Raw stainless flat bar is reasonably cheap and it should do a good job of protecting the bottom.

The whole process only took a few hours. I started with measuring and cutting the four lengths I needed; 1 for the skeg, 2 for the side pieces surrounding the daggerboard slot and 1 for the keel strip forward. Next I measured and tapped equidistant #10 holes in each of the pieces. Finally, I countersunk all the holes so the screws would sit flush. This is where most of the time was spent. With the drill press at slow speed and periodically adding lubrication while cutting it took quite a bit longer than I expected.

I bedded the skeg and foward sections with LifeSeal and then screwed them home with epoxy dipped screws. Before I mounted the strips alongside the daggerboard opening, I cut and fitted some slot gasket material (mylar with dacron scrim backing) and fastened it with 2 strips of wood that I had previously cut, shaped, and painted.

Once that was complete, I bedded and screwed down the stainless pieces and called it a day. So with that complete, the bottom is officially done. Of course I still have to build the daggerboard and I guess that will be part of the bottom some times, but I'm not counting it now.

2017-09-15 - Flipped Again

I've been a bit slow on the updates lately, but I've been picking away at a lot of little things and not really finishing any one thing. After painting the boat, I gave the paint a few days to dry, my son and I flipped the boat back over onto the trailer bunks so I could get more work done on the interior. There aren't any big jobs left, but lots of little things that will just suck up time. On top of all of that, I had my hip replaced last Thursday and I had a bunch of non-boat related things to take care of before getting my hip chopped and taking a few weeks off work.

Anyway, once the boat was flipped over I started on the bow area to get that completed. It was in pretty decent shape, but I still had to frame in the hatch opening and fair a few spots on the deck. I glued in the plywood riser pieces and followed up with a round of fairing compound on the surrounding deck area. Another round of fairing and a bunch of sanding and I felt like the foredeck area was good for primer.

At the same time, I started working on the mast partner assembly. Knowing at the start that the mast step and foredeck design was of my own doing, there was no plan to follow, so it took me quite a bit of thought (ie. drinking beer while staring at boat) to come up with a design. The number one feature I wanted in the mast partners was that it should be able to be easily opened and closed so the mast could be stepped and unstepped in seconds.

What I came
up with is best described with photos, but a few words on how it works can't hurt. So the design is basically a thick piece of Sapele with a 4 in circle cut in the center and then that piece cut across the circle perpendicular to the centerline of the boat. On the aft piece, I mounted a 1/8" stainless steel plate in which 2 - 5/16" bolts come up from the surrounding deck area and capture the piece with wingnuts.

It took a bunch of trial and error to come up with the final design, but I think it should work pretty well and should certainly be strong enough. For some of the final test fittings, I pulled the boat out of the shop and did a trail step and it seemed to work as planned. I slide the butt of the mast into the step, raise it up to full height, and then slip the aft piece over the 5/16" bolts and then snug it all down with wingnuts.

After I was satisfied with the design, I leathered the new partner to protect the mast from chafing. I had never done it before but found a number of tutorials online and it didn't seem too hard. I found some suitable leather pieces and 1/2" copper tacks online and went to town. I cut out the pattern lathered up both the back of the leather and wood with contact cement and once dry I set the leather onto the wood and tacked it all in place with the copper tacks. I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out, we'll see how it holds up over time.

Finally, I put a few coats of varnish on the partner assembly (not on the leather) and put two coats of primer down on the foredeck that I had faired and prepped earlier.

2017-09-19 - Leather

I'm still a bit hobbled with my new hip this week and I'm trying to take it easy so I took on a few less physically demanding tasks this week. The leathering on the mast step I did the week before surgery was actually fairly fun so I was looking forward to working on the spar leathers to prevent chafing. The problem is that I have never done any stitching, let alone on thick leather. Lucky for me though, the interwebs are full of tutorials and videos detailing every step of the process.

I started with the mizzen yard because it was the smallest and hopefully not too visible knowing that I'm never all that great on the first go round. I figured that by the time I got to the main boom, my work would be acceptable.

After finding the mizzen yard attachment point (520 mm from front end), I took a piece of 9 inch wide leather and wrapped it around the yard to find the circumference. Once I had that, I used my wife's fancy cutting tools (a Fiskars roller shear and some sort of quilting cutting board) to cut the width needed to circle the yard with a small gap in between the seam (so
the stitches pull tight).

Next I marked a line 1/4" from the edge of each side and took a four hole leather punch and hammered out holes on both sides. I found the leather punch at Hobby Lobby and it works quite well as long as you put the leather your working with over a piece of softwood so when you hammer on the punch there is something for the punch to dig into once it pierces the leather.

I applied a coat of contact cement to the back of the leather and the area on the yard where the leather will be covering and then pressed it in place and held it there with a spring clamp. Using waxed sail twine, I unrolled about 7 feet or so and fitted a big sailcloth needle on either end. I won't go into detail of the herring stitch (aka baseball stitch) because there are literally hundreds of tutorials online that describe it better than I can, but it is pretty simple and easy to do as long as you pay reasonable attention.

My mind did wander a bit a few times and I skipped a stitch and was forced to redo a few rows, but overall it went pretty well and it took about 30 minutes to do the whole thing. It's not perfect, but it seems strong and should provide good chafing protection. Just three more to do and I expect each one will get better as I perfect the technique.

2017-09-26 - Friggin in the Riggin

As I near the end of the build and approach some semblance of a launch date I realize how many little things I still need to wrap up. So many in fact, that I feel a bit like a mental patient who hasn't taken his meds in a week or so. The shop looks like hurricane Irma hit it and I'm getting a bit crazy.

As of my last count, I have the following major projects in a partially completed state:

Daggerboard
Rudder assembly (the whole steering thing in fact with Norwegian tiller)
Floorboards
Interior fairing and paint
Sails and Rig

There are lots of other things that I know I won't get done before my first test launch this fall, but the projects above are 'must haves' if I want to get the boat in the water and test it out before winter inevitably hits Central New Hampshire. Being a backwards kind of guy, I decided to focus on #5 (sails and rig) this week. On paper, it seems like I had this all wrapped up a while ago, but if you do a little math, having a bunch of spars I built that are hanging on a wall does not make a completed rig.

In between other projects from the week before, we had a good stretch of weather that gave me the opportunity to protect the spars using Deks Olje D1. It's a combination of oils that need to be reapplied from time to time, but it is way easier than actually varnishing and gives the spars a nice warm satin finish. We'll see how it holds up, but it's easy to apply and looks nice so far.

In the previous post I also mentioned leathering up the chafe areas on the spars so I had that taken care of as well, but that was about it for rig. All the lines, blocks, sails, and everything else that makes a rig a rig needed to be done.

The sails had shown up several weeks before from Michael Storer's Really Simple Sails (He designed the Goat Island Skiff which is a similar boat to the Campion Apple). I had taken them out briefly only to verify that the measurements were correct, but waited for the spars to be Dek'd before doing anything with them.

I am a total newbie when it comes to lug rigs (or any traditional rig for the matter), so this is all a learning curve for me. A yard always meant something you grow grass on and make your kids mow; but now there are two on the boat. Very confusing, and there seems to be about 10 million ways to rig a balanced lug depending on your budget. I've spent almost every night for the last month researching the rigging procedure and asking questions on the woodenboat forum and other resources. Now the time had come to just jump in and find out what sucks.

I had decided to use a mast traveler based on a bunch of posts recommending it in the woodenboat forum. The traveler is basically a steel hoop with a hook to hold onto the yard and a halyard tied to the top end. They don't bind on the mast and make the whole rig very easy to disassemble.

My welding skills are pretty weak, but it looked like the kind of project I could do. I went through a number of iterations before settling on a design that I could live with and actually worked. I used stainless steel rod but the weld is just regular steel so I coated them with rustoleum to keep out some corrosion. I still have to leather the rings, but I think they will do fine.

Onto the sail, I started by lacing up the mizzen to the yard by tying each end off tight (the throat and peak) and then lacing the grommets in between with nylon cord that came with the sail. Pretty easy, but I'm sure it will need to be adjusted once I actually sail this thing. Next, I tied off the tack and clew to the fore and aft ends of the boom.

For the mast I through bolted a Harken Carbo 29 cheek block to the aft side and ran Dynema line through it and tied it off to the mast traveler I made. I tested it on our back deck by tying the mast to picnic table benches and hoisting the sail.
Amazingly, it didn't look terrible and despite me wondering how the yard would raise up above the mast, it did in fact do so. Once you see it done, it makes total sense. I added a cleat to the mizzen mast on the starboard side and moved onto the main mast.

The main was almost the same just bigger. The only difference was that I used another Harken Carbo 29 cheek block through bolted to the aft end of the boom and a clam cleat just forward of that to make an easily adjustable outhaul. Then I tied the tack to the forward end of the boom and ran a line from the clew through the outhaul block and made it fast in the clam cleat.

Finally, it was time to bring it all together. I pulled the boat out of the shop and stepped both masts and raised the sails for a dry sail. Again, I was amazed that it all worked and looked halfway decent. I showed some of the photos to Michael Storer (see above) who is an expert on balanced lug sails and he gave me a few pointers on what could be improved, but it wasn't a disaster.

I still have to rig the main sheet to the boom and setup the boomkin and sheet for the mizzen, but I've mounted the main sheet swivel base on the daggerboard trunk, so I'm pretty close to crossing this project off the list.

2017-10-02 - Paint

Not much to say on the topic other than I mostly finished up the interior painting this afternoon. I used grey bilge paint in the areas that will be covered by floorboards and and put two coats of white primer followed by two coats of Kirby's Marine Paint (#32 Sand, low lustre).

I hadn't planned on using Kirby's, but I have heard a lot of people saying good things about the paint so I checked out their site and found that their prices were right in line with Brightside Polyurethane and the color range was much wider, so I ordered a free color chart. Computer monitors tend to change the color a bit, so I try to always get something real and in person if possible to see it in natural light.

Two days later I received the color chart in the mail along with a hand written note from George Kirby Junior thanking me for my inquiry and that he hoped we could do business in the future. You don't get personal service like that very often anymore, so I thought I'd give it a try. It didn't hurt that their shop is in New Bedford, MA which is just a few hours away and shipping usually only takes a day.

I won't go into the details of painting because it's about as much fun as watching paint dry, but I will say that I really liked the flow and coverage characteristics of the Kirby paint much better than some other paints I have tried and it smelled very different, more like turpentine or something old time-y, rather than made in a giant factory somewhere. We'll see how it holds up, but so far so good.

2017-10-08 - Floors and Round Things

I'm so close to finishing this boat I can taste it, but no matter how hard I try, there is always another thing to do. This weekend I picked away at a bunch of little things but the big win was getting the floors cut and installed.

I'm not using anything exotic, just the same clear premium grade pine that I used for the seat tops. This task was pretty straight forward, but I did spend a fair amount of time marking out the curves along the forward portion of the deck area. Once I cut and dry fitted all the boards I ran the router over them with a roundover bit to eliminate any hard edges. Then I refitted the boards and tapped each one with a countersink bit and screwed them to the frames.

The only exception is the center floor that I will not be screwing down so I can access the strum box for the bilge pump and inspect the lowest point of the bilge. I will fasten this floor with some sort of button toggles on the underside to keep it in place, but I'm not 100% sure how I'm going to do it yet. Once I figure it out and implement it, I will pull all the floorsboards out and have a marathon oiling session with Deks Olje D1 as I did with the seat tops and spars.

I really like Deks because you can get everything oiled in an afternoon. The application process goes like this: wipe or brush on Deks onto the surface you want to oil, wait 15 minutes and do it again, and again, and again, etc... You keep applying it until the wood stops absorbing it and then you leave the last unabsorbed application on the wood for 30 minutes and then wipe off. The only other thing you have to worry about is that it shouldn't be put into service for 3 days. It gives a nice satin finish and gives the wood a nice glow.

In other news, I finally got around to installing the seven round deck plates throughout the boat. There is one in the forward compartment, two adjacent to the mast step, two big ones amidships in the watertight seat compartments, and two in the aft compartment along either side.

2017-10-20 - Bringing it all Together (Sort of)

So I have been slacking ever since I've sort of come to terms with the fact that I probably won't launch this year. I haven't totally ruled it, but even though this weekend is going to be great weather wise, I don't think there are many warm days left in the year and I'm just not quite ready.

With that said, I did a mini push over the past few days to get my shit together and get some more of the odds and ends closer to completion. It all started when I picked up a lathe (Rigid w1200) on craigslist for no good reason other than I happened to be looking in tools and this was really cheap. It's not a very good one, but it came with a set of tools and I've never done any lathe work before so I wouldn't really know the difference. I had been thinking about a lathe ever since I saw a nice implementation of a Norwegian tiller arm somewhere out on the interwebs.

Anyway, I glued up two pieces of sapelle I had laying around early last week and once it cured, I threw it on the lathe and started turning it down. Originally, I was going to do a round hole through the rudder for simplicity's sake (just cut through it with a hole saw), but as I started playing with the lathe I decided it would be fun to have a square cut threw the rudder and have it taper to round on either side. Really no reason other than I was having fun with the lathe. Now that I have a lathe, it's just the most fun toy ever, it's fascinating to watch

Next, I drilled out the rough margins for the square hole in the rudder and then chiseled it out. It took a while to get the fit right, but I finally got a good tight (but not too tight). For the backside of the opening, I drilled a 1.5" hole in a piece of cherry and screwed it on so the tiller arm would seat in the hole. Last up I rounded off the top edges of the rudder to get rid of the angular look it previously had and dry fitted the assembly on the boat. I still have to rout the edges for a little more smoothing, but I'm satisfied with the overall look. Ultimately, I will paint the rudder assembly, but will varnish the tiller arm.

The second thing I got done this week was to get the bilge pump installed in the port seat tank. On a boat this size having a mounted bilge pump isn't really necessary, a bucket will do, but I wanted something that could drain water under the deck without having to remove them. The pump is a Whale Compact 50 and was the biggest one I could find that would fit in the space I had. It has a removable pump handle and a cover that makes the whole arrangement look tidy.

It was still a tight fit, and getting the hose routed from the bilge, up into the seat tank was awkward. I had previously dry mounted the pump itself prior to painting, but not with hoses attached so it took a bit of work to get it all set. In the bilge itself I mounted the hose to a strum box with a 3 pound lead weight and butyl tape to hold it in place but be movable if necessary. I ran the discharge hose from the pump through the port seat tank to the stern where I installed a discharge pipe as high up as possible near the rudder. I finished it up by sealing up the access plate with caulking and screws to keep it watertight.

Finally, I reinstalled the seat tops that I had spent a few afternoons applying way too many coats of Deks Olje oil. The pine I'm using for seat tops soaks up Deks like crazy. Anyway, kind of a mish-mash of accomplishments for the week, but it all had to be done and there's lots more of the same to come as I get closer to launch.

2018-01-17 - Slacker

I will be the first to admit that I'm a slacker, but if one were to really drill into my psyche, then you'd quickly realize that this tendency is really driven by my 'ability' to procrastinate when a deadline is not imminent. If a deadline is far out on the horizon, I can find lots of reasons to avoid working toward that goal. So when I finally came to terms with the fact that I would not be launching in 2017, and would be delayed until sometime in the Spring of 2018, I decided to take a break.

Since my last post in October, I have done virtually nothing on the boat until this past weekend. The winter has a way of getting a hold of me and luring me off into the forests and mountains of Northern New England to pursue outdoor adventures. I am particularly fond of being outside in the forest on really cold days when my wife declares me to be a 'lunatic' as she huddles by the wood stove. I feel that it makes me appreciate the spring and summer more knowing how nasty it can really get outside.

So up until late last week I had been happily tromping about Central NH like a mountain man, enjoying the single digit temperatures, and ignoring the boat. Fortunately for the boat project however, a warm front came through and dumped a bunch of rain and melted much of the lovely fluffy snow that had covered the area, leaving a frozen hellscape of icy crust. After coming to terms with the now annoying conditions outside, I decided to warm up the shop and do another push toward completion.

Most of the jobs now are fiddly things that just require a bit of thought and a few screws to secure bits and pieces, but there are a few larger jobs that still need to be attended to. The 2 biggest are building the oars for propulsion and building the 3 hatches (1 for the foredeck and 2 for the 'cooler'). I decided to tackle the hatches because I don't have the lumber needed for the oars yet.

When I built the openings for all the hatches, I added a plywood 'lip' to all of them as a placeholder for making them watertight (or mostly watertight) once I built the hatches for them. I planned on using some rubber gasketing material (TBD), but knew that the tolerances would have to be pretty tight in order to keep things dry in the compartments.

I started on the 'cooler' hatches just forward of the daggerboard trunk. Their recessed nature made hatches a bit of a challenge because the close tolerances needed to be on both the inside and outside frames. Using 6 mm marine plywood, I cut out the rough shape and fitted it to the recess. I'll be using a rubber gasket material to fit into the recessed channel surrounding the opening.

Using the same pine I used for the floorboards, I cut out the side pieces adjacent to the hatch openings and fitted those before moving onto the covering boards for the hatches. Because the hatches have the 6 mm plywood cover, I planed ~6 mm off the boards that will sit on the plywood covers and then screwed them from the bottom of the plywood. I still have to epoxy coat the plywood and drill some drain holes to move accumulated water out of the recessed channels surrounding the hatches, but that shouldn't take more than a few minutes.

Moving onto the forehatch, which also has a plywood 'lip' but is not recessed, I cut out a plywood top that will cover the hatch and 'lip' and then milled some of the nice Honduras mahogany that I have be using for some of the trim throughout the boat. I hand cut single dovetails on each corner and was not entirely disgusted with my effort. They aren't perfect, but will be strong and don't look too awful. I glued up the whole thing with the plywood top and some plywood stringers to stiffen it up.

Finally, I ripped a few strips of Honduras mahogany to make trim pieces along the trailing edge of the foredeck. It seems to give the foredeck a more finished look and I may add more at some point, but haven't decided yet.

2018-01-26 - Breasthook

Way back in 2015, I rebuilt the forehatch on my 1962 Alberg 35 and did a compass rose inlay on the inside of the hatch here. The way I made the inlay allowed me to slice off pieces like a loaf of bread and I had a number of compass roses that were just sitting around on my desk doing nothing. So when I got around to making the breasthook this past week I decided to put one of them to good use.

I began by finding a nice piece of cherry to match the rail (also cherry). The key to getting the fit right is to lay it on top of the V section of the bow and trace where it meets. Then I cut out the rough V shape and slowly cut the rail angle down with a shinto rasp so that it would slide into place.

Most breasthooks have a concave curve facing forward, but I decided to go against the grain and reverse the curve and have it facing aft. I did this partially because I wasn't really thinking, but I will mostly say that it was because I plan on mounting a cleat (or small sampson post) on the trailing edge of the breasthook and if the curve is concave it wouldn't work.

Once I had the breasthook fitted closely to the inner rail, I started on the inlay. Having experimented with this sort of thing before I found that placing the inlay in the desired position and tracing the outline of it with an exacto knife works best for me. After I had etched the outline of the compass rose onto the breasthook, I took a really sharp chisel and hammered it along the lines to make sure the cherry was cut along outline. Then it was a matter of carefully chiseling out the interior of the cut lines and then repeating the outline chisel to go deeper. The compass rose was about 6mm deep total and ended up with the compass about 2 mm proud of the cherry.

When I had it fitting well, I mixed up a batch of epoxy with fine cherry sawdust and glued the compass in. I let it cure and then sanded it all down before fitting and gluing the whole thing into the boat. Once again, I let it cure and then sanded everything down flush with 80 grit paper.

I still need to radius the edges with a router to soften things up and of course lots of varnish, but I think it should work out well.

2018-02-13 - Boomkin

A few months back I built up the boomkin spar out of leftover douglas fir that I had from the other spars, but I didn't do a birdsmouth this time. Instead, I ripped four pieces to length about 25mm x 25mm and then cut off a corner of each and glued them up to make a 4 section hollow spar.

Once it had cured, I knocked off the corners to make 8 sides and then rounded the end of it down while leaving the section that will be inside the boat with 8 sides. I liked building with the birdsmouth method but I just didn't want to take the time for the boomkin since I'm not as worried about weight (although it is still hollow to shave a few grams).

Fast forward to last week and I decided it was time to cut the hole for the boomkin. Cutting holes in boats always makes me a little squeamish, so I had to come to terms with it on my own time. To find the location, I basically laid the finished boomkin on top of the stern and eyeballed where it would protrude to the centerline and cut out a 2 inch hole at an angle in the transom, just above the level of the deck.

Next, I cut the same hole in a few pieces of 6mm ply and then rounded the pieces to make a 35mm flange surrounding the hole. Then I screwed and glued the pieces to the transom and faired it out with some thickened epoxy. A bit of cleanup with a rasp and sandpaper made it all look good.

After a test fit, I tapped the inboard end of the boomkin and installed a 5/16" threaded insert and tapped a corresponding hole in one of the frames to anchor the boomkin. I found a 5/16" thumbwheel and screwed it in place.

I still have to leather the boomkin where it intersects the hull and soak in some Deks to protect it, but aside from installing the mizzen sheet hardware (a turning block, and clam cleat), I'm checking it off my to-do list.

2018-03-23 I Can Almost Taste It Now - Part 1

There have been a ton of little things happening in the shop over the past month. Individually, they were each pretty small and didn't warrant their own post, but together, I've wrapped up most of the odds and ends needed to get the boat in the water.

For starters, I devised a way to hold the center thwart securely in place but making it easily removable to open up the cockpit for sleeping. I installed 2 threaded inserts on each side of the boat on the base where the thwart sits. Then I turned some cherry knobs and drilled them out to accept 1/4" threaded stainless steel screws. I tapped each side of the thwart for the screws and mounted a block that would allow the thwart to 'grab' the daggerboard trunk and help transfer the load while under sail.

Next up, I finally came to terms with the fact that I really needed to install a bow eye for trailering at some point. I didn't want to mainly because I don't like the look and the installation would be difficult because the bow is so narrow. I found a nice stainless bow eye online (I don't remember where) that had 2 - 3" legs. I like the 2 legged bow eyes because the don't spin if the backing nut loosens up.

To install it I carefully measured and re-measured where to drill to make sure that I had the legs spaced properly and to ensure I could access them from the inside to get the nuts on.
Moving aft, I finished rigging the boomkin with a small harken carbo block and a clam cleat to handle the mizzen sheet. I also drilled a small hole just above where the boomkin goes through the transom so that the sheet can pass through from the block to the clam cleat. I took a few photos but there isn't really much to see.

I also finally finished up the rudder assembly and mounted two cl-257 auto release clam cleats to control the rudder's uphaul and downhaul. I used small padeyes screwed to the leading and trailing edges of the rudder to attach the uphaul and downhaul.

There are a bunch more updates, but I'll split it up into a second part later this weekend.

2018-03-26 I Can Almost Taste It Now - Part 2

You may recall that I installed a bulkhead mounted bilge pump back in October (here), but with the floorboards covering the intake strum box, I was a little worried that if it were to become clogged I wouldn't be able to access the strum box easily to clear it. While most of the floorboards are screwed to frames and have to be removed with a screwdriver, I wanted the center floorboard to be removable in a quick fashion.

I researched a lot of different designs/ideas and found that most of them that included specialty fasteners that were quite pricey and required a high degree of precision to be effective. Those that didn't, seemed to be flimsy at best and seemed generally unstable underfoot. Fortunately, searching the woodenboat forum led me to a design that was both inexpensive and seemed like a good fit for the boat (Woodenboat Forum Floorboard Post).

The design uses a wooden toggle to 'clamp' the floorboard in place making it secure and strong. I decided that the best approach would be to cut the floorboard so that the removable section would only span the area between two frames, directly above the location of the bilge pump strum box. Of course this could come back to bite me if the limber holes get clogged up over time and will require that I remove the section that is screwed down to clear those, but I think that could be limited to a yearly maintenance sort of thing.

I started by building an assembly that would screw to the frame and be held above the bottom of the bilge but would support the cut floorboard and serve as an alignment clamp for the toggle. I tapped a 1/4" hole in the center of the assembly to install a 3" bolt to serve as an axle for the toggle. For the toggle, I found a scrap of mahogany and shaped it down to a 'bean' shaped toggle about 1-7/8" long and 5/8" wide.

Next, I cut out a 2" hole in the small section of floorboard and screwed and glued two mahogany cleats to either side of the hole. The spacing of these cleats was just a hair bigger than the width of the assembly screwed to the frame. I coated both the cleats and assembly in unthickened epoxy and left it overnight to cure before installing the toggle and axle bolt.

Moving on, I cut out a second 2" hole with the holesaw and rounded over both holes to smooth out the appearance with my router. The second hole will serve as a 'handle' to pull the floorboard, but I made it 2" so that I can fit an auxiliary pump into the hole if the other pump fails. Of course, there will be a bailing bucket on hand for 'special occasions' if/when the boat is swamped.

Finally, I notched out the forward end of the floorboard where it butts up against the daggerboard trunk and installed another mahogany cleat to the trunk to align the floorboard once it is in place and keep it from sliding. On the underside of the floorboard, I installed a few pieces of mahogany to 'grab' the floor timber and keep the forward end from lifting. This whole contraption is much harder to describe than it is to post a picture, so here are a few pictures once it was installed:

2018-05-06 Launched!

It happened, it didn't sink, and I'm happy to report that there was no drama at all even though I was pretty nervous thinking about all that could have gone wrong. The launch actually took place over two days, mainly because it was really gusty on Saturday and I really didn't want the first sail to be in sketchy conditions, but I really wanted to get it in the water.

So we did a quick run over to a small pond close to us just to splash it and row around a bit and to see how the boat felt being towed on a trailer. My first impressions were that it rows way faster than the O'Day Daysailer that I have been rowing for years and that it was actually more stable that I expected. With all four us onboard, it never felt tippy.

After we came back from the row, I built spar crutches for the main an mizzen steps and mounted the main mast on it. Everything else tucked into the cockpit easily so there isn't a lot of rigging to do to get ready to travel. I re-rigged the entire boat to make sure I had everything in order and then stowed it all away again to be ready for the next day.

Today I woke to cloudy skies and rain showers with not much wind. I could have done without the rain, but temps were in the high 50's and I definitely wanted low wind conditions for the first day out. So with just my wife and I today (kids were working), we drove up and launched at Newfound Lake. Newfound is one of my favorite lakes in New Hampshire. It's big and deep with crystal clear water and a great launch.

Since it wasn't a very nice day and it's only been about 2 weeks since ice-out (read: very cold water), the only other boaters there were salmon fisherman and most were headed home by the time we got there. We launched with little fanfare and shoved off under oars.

Once we were out a hundred yards or so, I raised the mizzen followed by the main and headed out. The wind was super light, but we ghosted along and crossed the lake in short order. A little rain here and there, but nothing that got us too wet. All in all things turned out great, the biggest issue of the day was that I forgot my rigging knife, raincoat, and the battens for the main, but not too bad in general.

I still have a bunch of other posts to do to cover topics I never got to like oars and the daggerboard, but those will wait so I can bask in the launch.

2018-05-24 Tuning In

I've been out for five sails since launch and each time I learn something new. Two of the days were really light (< 5 kts), one was just about perfect for my first day out solo (5 - 8 kts), and 2 were downright windy. I always seem to learn more about what doesn't work on the windy days, but fortunately nothing completely failed although the conditions (gusts verified to 25 at lake weather station) highlighted a bunch of rig tweaking needed to optimize performance.

Most of the tuning is minor, but the mizzen will need to be raised about 2 inches higher in order to clear the swing arm of the Norwegian tiller because it is offset from horizontal to clear the stern. It only happens when on a reaching run on the starboard side, but it is a bit annoying. Right now I think I am going to solve it by adding a small block on the bottom of the step, but I haven't entirely decided yet.

Other things that I've been tweaking are the yard attachment point for both the main and mizzen. When I originally set them, the sails didn't quite hang right so with some with some online advice I move the point a little bit forward. I also had to restitch the location of the yard leather as a result.

Keeping the boom close to the mast even with my 6:1 downhaul has been a challenge and on the last windy day sail, I tied the boom around the mast with a sail tie. Looking online though I found that a lot of people are using dog collars with a big snap clasp so I went to the pet store yesterday and bought a couple and fitted them to the rig. It seems like this will be a good solution, but I haven't tried it on the water yet.

So now for the good news: this boat just flies. It happily gets up on a plane and even though I have been being pretty timid so far about pushing her, I have gone over 7 knots several times on the windy days with much of the time spent in the high 6's even with some lumpy conditions. The water on the lakes here is still dangerously cold however, so I don't want to push it too much and end up in the water. Capsize tests will hopefully be held once the water is more comfortable.

I'm really looking forward to getting the boat out on the ocean with a nice steady sea breeze to see how fast I can get her going, the gusty, squirrely conditions on the local lakes are really challenging and make me think twice about really hiking out because you never know when the wind will hit you from the other side of the sail and throw you in the water.

Anyway, looking forward to more sea trials and longer adventures this summer, stay tuned...

2018-09-18 Dailed In

Last week I had my 25th sail on the boat and I'm really feeling comfortable in almost every condition. I've had light days with more rowing than sailing as well as some really windy, gusty days where I don't have a free hand to even get a drink of water. At this point I have the launch procedure fully dialed and it only takes me about 10 minutes from getting to the launch to sailing or rowing away from the dock. The thing that slows me down the most is people asking questions about the boat and commenting on how pretty it is out on the water.

As far as performance goes, it just keeps getting better as I learn the lug rig. I regularly hit 8-9 knots on the GPS once the boat gets up on a plane and had one 10.3 kts registered on the GPS on a windy quarter reach. It is no slouch on any tack and while it won't quite point as high as a bermuda rig, it's close. On a broad or quarter reach I regularly sail past performance dinghies.

Over time, I've changed very few things regarding rigging, but have made a few improvements. Most of the items have been rigging performance related including adding dog collars to the main and mizzen booms to keep them close to the mast. The one big thing I still need to do is to replace the halyards with lower stretch Dynema core because over the course of a day out on the water, I have to keep vanging the main down to keep the sail shape taught because the current halyard stretches too much. The only reason I haven't done it yet is because with a son off to college this fall, I don't want to spend the money. I will swap out the halyard this winter.

The only boat modifications so far are building a removable grate in the 'cooler' just aft of the mast so bilge water doesn't get everything too wet and a storage solution for the 2 piece oars that until just last week have been rolling around in the bottom of the boat. This winter I have plans for building a tent over the boat for sleeping, but I have yet to do an overnight (that's on my list for this summer though).