A skiff

All day testing day!

Pics whenever I get on a laptop again.

I don't have final numbers on speed yet - but that will probably be close to what I saw today. I think I can get another knot or two over the current max - I'm still using the original prop which is 40 years old and looks it. And I think I can raise the engine one hole, although that may not help. But at present, it's good for 22.8 knots, or 26.2 mph. I bet I can hit 25 knots before I'm done, though.

More useful: at 4500 RPM, it has a nice relaxed 18 knot cruise, only 3/4 of the way to redline.

My personal guess on weight which I didn't post because I didn't want to influence anyone was 300kg for the boat and motor. I don't usually think in kilos but that's what the local scale reads in and for whatever reason it just made me think, whatever I see with the empty trailer, I'll probably see 300 more with the boat on.

Today I weighed my 4runner, me, my empty trailer and whatever junk in addition to me is in the 4runner at 2245 kilos,

Then I went home, loaded the boat, and motor, and at the last minute tossed in a 6gal/25l gas tank in and went back. I hadn't planned to include fuel but then thought... someone's going to complain it doesn't run without a gas tank so it's not complete. The tank was a little over half full so it's a pretty traditional crib weight component anyway. Anyway say 3/5 a 6 gallon tank so figure I've got around 30lb of fuel, tank, fuel line, straps holding the boat down, and so on. Probably within a couple of pounds, I'd guess 30 is reasonable for fuel and ancillaries.

Reading on the scale: 2560.

315kg difference or 695 lb wet.

I'd guessed 300kg/661lb dry and think I was pretty dead on but I built it so that's cheating.

Those motors weigh about 105lb so hull alone, 556.

No complaints here!





ETA: somehow "gas tank in" got autocorrected to "fast tank up" so that is the reason for the edit.
 
Last edited:
PXL_20211002_222415166.jpgIMG_20211002_172416_056.jpgPXL_20211003_024124040.jpgPXL_20211003_025334882.jpg

No rest for the wicked... not in the harbour of waterlogged hemlock logs at least. Didn't see it until I was on it, couldn't find it again after. Don't think it even touched the boat but I'll look more closely tomorrow.

Smashed pilot shaft, 2 bushings, one anti-vibe mount, one throttle rod housing thing.

On the hunt for a parts motor; have an offer from a friend but he's a bit of a wheeler-dealer type and thinks I gouged him on our last trade (which he proposed) so I'm a bit hesitant there. Will try local sources first.
 
I think I owe everyone a pretty good update here so let me start by giving this post a title:



“And Then This Happened”



I booked a week and a day off of my job – September 30 which was Thursday was the first annual memorial day of a new type in Canada, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation between indigenous people and, I guess, everyone else. Yesterday was Thanksgiving here, so I took Friday and the intervening week off and resolved not to touch a laptop until they paid me to do so again so the only updates anyone has gotten would be if they follow me on some platform that’s really easy to update by mobile. That’s the reason for the lengthy silence, anyway.



And now…on with our story.



First some build detail stuff:

How did I guess the hull weight as accurately as I did? Simple: cheating. Here I am weighing it by hand a couple of weeks ago:

bs18NuP.jpg


So I had a pretty idea what half of it weighed, anyway. I knew it was light.



Here was a good “I’m not a rocket scientist” move: I’ve never had a motor with hand cranks before, to snug it down. So I didn’t think about that when I made the little bracket.



How did I think they were going to turn and flop and turn? There’s not enough room! Duhhhokay, well, we mount the motor to the plate, then mount the assembly to the boat, I guess. Unless there’s another solution, which I immediately discovered:

hsHAnNk.jpg




Just tighten it down really hard, and you can shear the handles right off and punch your hand into the aluminum bracket and now a 3/8” wrench lets you turn them with ease. Another problem solved with brute force.



Here’s a quick bit of detail for you on my weird personal take on open spaces under decks…I wanted the ability to prevent water from getting in and weighing me down in the improbable event of taking a ton of water on board. I bought a pack of kayak bungs for about $20 and employed two on the actual kayak where I needed them, and 5 on this boat.

h20Sgdg.jpg




Here’s three stopping water from leaving the bilge and moving forward. Easily removed, no chance of excess air pressure like sealed bilges, but almost impossible for water to gain entry except by catastrophic hull failure. Very simple. That picture is a few weeks old, the bilge is a bit cleaner since then. But that’s the only pic I have that shows the bungs.

I also use them like this:

AoohCKV.jpg


A3gOfDU.jpg


If the hatch lid isn’t jammed at all, they make good handles. If it is, they just pop out and you can get a finger in there and give it a yank. But it keeps most of the rain and spray out.

IEqP04t.jpg




I can’t remember if I mentioned this but the boat fits in the garage with the motor on, which is great!

Well, it mostly fits.

3IH7bRF.jpg


Close enough!



Then it was just some little detail stuff like the motorwell (which now has a drain and is fully glassed but didn’t/isn’t in this pic)

cdFD4Un.jpg




Get the grab rail all fancy

DI3fjIM.jpg




Kid all excited…

L7pYl6V.jpg




And onto the water!

October 1: burning fuel, having fun, hunting lingcod in the reefs around my place.

A9dSSfS.jpg


2jSULpx.jpg


HrANJe5.jpg




October 2, same basic plan…

EKkJRw8.jpg




“And Then This Happened”

BKIcgme.jpg


Heck.



Submerged log, maybe 6” down below the surface. Hit it around 15 knots, I think. Was just moving between reefs fishing them and had left the lock on, which is flimsy…looking. But apparently very sturdy. I highly recommend the old OMC locking system, it’s apparently very, very strong.



I also recommend the motors, though, because apparently they’re unkillable.

I roped it back onto the transom by running the fender lines through those rod holder holes, got the engine running, and drove it home six miles like this.

HupxZ8c.jpg




I had dinner and possibly some kind of beverage to improve my state of mind, and got to work in the alley behind my house.

MV2LANh.jpg




Probably need a new one of these:

fvpPUxn.jpg




And some other bits

CAVUz8W.jpg




Hmm…what to do. The same guy who got me the intake and carb offered to send anything I needed but he took months to send that stuff. He told me to send him a list of parts, so I did, but then he said he’d been sick and hadn’t been into the shop in a few days and I could immediately see that turning into weeks of chasing him around so I hit up a couple of local contacts as well as FB marketplace.

Well, that turned up paydirt pretty quick…I blew a whopping 150 ice pesos and some gas money and launched my latest charity: the Cracked Ribs Home for Wayward Outboards.

OjiHIrp.jpg


Note the inverted Evinrude 25 just visible through the doorway. It was probably the best of the three but came with a driveshaft which was seized in the cam, so cost very little. I picked up the ’76-ish Evinrude 20 Tuesday morning and began stripping it down, and the ’84 Tuesday evening. I yanked the lower off the ’84, tipped up upside down started soaking the driveshaft in penetrant that night.

Wednesday morning it was still plenty stuck. I was a little worried and began thinking about whether I could assemble an entire waterpump etc back on from underneath. I also noticed when I slid the driveshaft out of the lower that there was a little needle bearing that had popped loose down in the gearcase. Okay, that’s coming apart. Heck and double heck. I continued disassembling motors until about noon. I didn’t even stop long enough to turn on a podcast or something, I just went at max speed, heating nuts, pouring penetrant, whacking stuff with hammers, drilling out frozen studs, dremeling broken-off screw extractors (2) and also engaged in periodic fits of swearing but not as much as you’d guess. I just felt like I had zero time to waste because I wanted a running motor and each frustrating thing that happened, like shearing off a stud, was more time, and getting angry was just going to slow me down more.



I really wanted that driveshaft out on the Evinrude but HATE the idea of putting vice grips on and hammering them. I just hate it. But I couldn’t come up with a better solution, so I just kept working on the other two motors to see if I could make headway there instead.

I wasn’t sure which was going to be the fastest route, repairing the Johnson, or starting the ’84 Evinrude. There were a lot of frozen bolts and screws (seriously OMC WHY SCREWS ON A MACHINE THAT WILL SIT IN SALT WATER – you have to see the problems coming, it’s two different metals and anyway, screws, f’ing screws, god damn it) on everything and every inch was a battle. I worked on the midsection of the old Evinrude to try to get all the parts I could, and at the same time, thought about the stuck driveshaft on the ’84.
 
Around noon I remembered this really old flaring tool I had that I got at a garage sale for a couple of bucks at least 20 years ago. It’s very sturdily built because it’s decades old, big blocks of steel that bolt together and has all different sizes of holes with chamfers that I thought might interface well with the driveshaft bosses. That was the moment I thought I would start to win the battle.

2UKxqNS.jpg


I put the flaring tool over the driveshaft and it did indeed fit nicely against the step on the shaft. Dimensional lumber spacers, old bunk hardware bridges, and C-clamps against the flaring tool. I’d work on the Johnson and the old Evinrude for half an hour, come out, give the C-clamps a couple of whacks with a ball pein hammer, crank the clamps a quarter turn, then go back to drilling out bolts, tapping new threads, hitting stuff with a torch, soaking things in penetrant…it was a hard day. I started around 8 am and promised my wife I wouldn’t overdo it. I came in bruised, burned, and dirty around 10pm. The driveshaft was still seized. The other two motors were mostly apart but I hadn’t quite gotten far enough to start building anything. Wednesday was a hard day. It rained all day and was miserable in the garage and out. I wasn’t sure if I could get a working motor without ordering parts from somewhere. If the driveshaft didn’t come loose, I figured it’d be another two weeks before I could realistically get anywhere. The old motors just needed too much persuasion.

Thursday I woke up and went back to it. It was a sunny day again, which always improves the experience. The first thing I did was give the driveshaft a few whacks, and a couple of good hard cranks on the clamps.





BY THE POWER OF SHADETREE…

I HAVE THE POWER!!!!

gtwwq4y.jpg




Now I kicked into high gear. I already had enough of the other two apart to get the upgraded intake side of the Johnson, and the lower which was surprisingly intact after the log strike. Tthe hull was totally untouched. I had actually forgotten to remove the protective film from the PVC wear strip on the keel which is dumb because it could have blocked the water intake but anyway, even that was clearly untouched and that was the lowest point on the boat so I can’t have hit the log at all. And the tiller was already off, so I used that. The carb linkage took a bit of messing around and of course I had to put in a new water pump because it was wrecked when the lower was pulled off the seized shaft, but things rapidly started to improve.

ChnTmx1.png




Note water shooting out of the running engine! Victory!

Getting the engine built took until late Thursday, and tuning the thing to run well enough to trust and then mounted back on the boat took a big part of Friday, plus by that point I had barely left the garage in two days so I spent some time with my kid, and didn’t really get things wrapped up until Friday night.



Saturday morning it was a bit stormy, not much above freezing with a light rain and blowing a cold steady 15 knots after a windy night, and still gusting up to around 25 from our least-protected southeast tack.



So rough water testing it is!



Looked decent at the ramp

Tormi6z.png




Pushed me out through a bit of chop in the harbour

9T9gACb.png




And off I went!

5v4uWiM.png




It was really only about a 1-2 bay chop with some big wakes off the timber tugs around here but the boat feels great in the chop; much better than I felt I had any right to expect. I could run 15-16 knots straight into the waves in complete comfort – that deep bow really softens the impact if you keep the nose down a bit, and there’s so much freeboard up there you really lose nothing by staying pretty flat on the water. Downwind 20 knots on the chop was no problem at all. Felt great, to be honest. I was really surprised by how smooth it rode because I’m used to a big heavy deep V and honestly…I thought this would be a huge step down in comfort but it’s really not. I think it’s the ability to keep the hull in the water; it never really has the space to come down and slam. There’s no transition to plane really at all; maybe around 6 knots you get a bit of it but it’s so minor, it’s barely noticeable so then you can cruise at 12 if it’s quite rough (by small open boat standards) and it just skims along. The big Double Eagle has, like any deep V, two speeds: slug and fly. But I find that it’s often rough enough on plane that unless I’m alone, I don’t really like going full tilt. Everyone is tossed everywhere and you’re constantly airborne.

In this boat, I have the full range of speeds on tap from zero to max, and it works fine the whole way. So in waters like that dark choppy mess Saturday morning, I could actually make better time than I often would in the big boat, because I could do 14-15 knots in comfort, whereas in the Double Eagle, I’d do 20 knots if alone…but with the wife and kid, no way. I’d be chugging along at 8-10.

Sunday I had agreed to drive down to Victoria for Thanksgiving lunch…so I had to get up early. Much nicer weather.

rcoTK0x.png


zvnPQM4.png




And it was great…except I was launching her off some big wakes from a big tug…and spun the prop.



But that’s okay because the prop was due for replacement already and was 40 years old and it was bound to happen. I’ll order a new one today to a local dealer and be back on the water very soon.



So there you go – sorry if the update is at times confusing or repetitive, it’s so long I can’t remember what information was already known and to whom so I just hammered the whole thing out.



Oh also those motors seem to like running lower than I would have guessed. New engine is a long leg mounted higher on the jack plate but still lower than what I would have thought. Current top speed: 23.8 knots, or 27.4mph. Pretty good IMO!
 
I admire your stubbornness to get it done. I believe stubbornness can be a gift when focused in the right direction.
 
I was too lazy to read how you came to declare victory but soaking seized shafts (haha) in diesel for like a week works.

Looks like a wicked sea trial, Mr Ribs, keep up the good work!!
 
Great thread from a skilled craftsman and writer. I moor at LMS Marina and play in the same waters so I hope to see your boat out on the water one day.
 
Well, I'm really happy people have enjoyed being along for the ride as this thing has gone together. It's been a ton of fun to build, although of course everything has frustrating moments. But cruising around in it just feels great. I have to say the performance is a lot better than I expected - I worried that it would be slippery in tight corners, which is why I put that skeg in the full length of the hull, for example. But no, it really corners. I've very happy with it.

And thankfully there's almost no danger of me getting the nice white decks all stained with fish blood. At least...not at the rate I've been going recently - my last few trips have been pretty sad and I haven't been out much this year.

But then that was the whole point: this boat should make it easy to pop out for an afternoon run whenever I want, so I'll get the local spots dialed in now and by the time my kid is old enough to judge my performance, it won't be so embarrassing.


Anyway I'm really glad it's been a fun thread to read. It's sure been a journey in that dark little garage!
 
Feels like I've been waiting a long time to be able to post an update like this.

My design, my build, my boy, my first fish on the boat, and the first fish he's ever seen. He's just turned two and isn't speaking in full sentences yet but he does shout the word "boat" excitedly a lot.

But now it's "boat dad boat fish dad dad dad!" which, it turns out, is probably the most gratifying sentence in the English language.

PXL_20220205_192708319.jpg
 
Kind of funny to see this in the local paper last yesterday - will be hanging on to a couple of hard copies to prove to my kid when he is a teenager that I didn't have him just because I like grounding people and telling them to clean their rooms.

 
Back
Top