A skiff

Taking you at your word you don’t mind a de-rail...

Dorman Point was built by a friend of mine, who is an old-school English boatbuilder. He was trained at a yard named Dixon’s of Exmouth, on the Exmouth estuary. He apprenticed building traditional wood fish boats. Dixon’s apparently started keeping records in the late 1600s.

Anyway, he has always built and repaired wooden boats and Dorman Point was his only fiberglass boat. She was to be a prototype. He was going to build them here and sell them in England (at the time, he had a means of getting them there cheaply). Small, heavy, full displacement boats like her are commonly fished commercially in the UK.

Long story short, she was the only one to come out of the molds. Pretty heart-breaking to watch, really. After he realized there wouldn’t be another, he tried to sell the molds. Then he tried to give them away, and still had no takers. There just is no market on this side of the pond for a slow day boat. He ended up cutting up the molds and throwing them in a skip. A real shame.

So, Dorman Point is the only one of her kind. Despite her 6knot speed, I’ve covered a lot of water in her Over the last 12 years or so. I fish all over Howe Sound and the Vancouver side of lower Georgia Strait. I have run her over to Gabriola a few times, but that really requires a multi-day trip as it’s basically a 3 hour trip for me. A few years back I jerry-rigged a trailer (not a very trailerable hull) and took her to Ucluelet where we fished out of a camp site on Gilbert Island for three days.

She’s a tough little boat. Fully beachable with a purpleheart full-length keel shoe and oak beaching keels. The lapstrake design makes the hull extremely strong and stiff, as at each “lap” the hull is over 1/2” thick. Down by the keel, where the garboards would be, she’s about 3/4” thick. In keeping with her commercial-fishing pedigree, my friend built the hydraulic pot-hauler she’s fitted with. Made the patterns and had the parts cast in aluminum, fabricated the aluminum boom. Runs off a little PTO. The hauler is rated to pull about 1 1/2 tons. If I hang up I never have to worry about getting the gear back.
Very cool - sorry to hear that she's the only one of her kind but what a cool boat. Anybody that would have a problem with that derail hasn't got a soul.
 
Back to work on the little outboard.


The carbs on these things are almost absurdly simple. There’s a low speed circuit on the top, which is controlled with a needle valve that screws in through the air cleaner. It’s a single passage with a couple of holes in the top of the throttle body that drip fuel down under vacuum. There’s no adjustable brass jet, you just screw the needle in or out. Factory setting was something like 1.25 turns out, maybe 1.5. There’s a high speed jet that’s a single passage off the carb bowl. Single brass jet. Dead simple. A rebuild kit was around $25 and took me an hour or so to install, and was probably completely unnecessary: after I took the float bowl off, I discovered that the passage to the filler tower in the float bowl was totally blocked, so the main fuel nozzle was probably bone dry. I let some acetone sit in the bowl for a bit, then poked a super tiny drill bit through the passage and gently cleaned it all out. Off to the races!


When I put the carb back on, which is a two minute job, I was feeling pretty confident. I pumped up the primer bulb on the fuel line and gave it a rip. The starter pawl skipped and the motor did nothing. I fed the rope back in and gave it a gentle pull. No, the pawl was jumping over the teeth on the flywheel. Annoyed, I went inside to find out where I could get a new starter pawl. I found lots, in the US, for around $5 a pop. Shipping was $30 for the cheapest option. Very aggravating. I kept searching and ultimately found a two-pack for $12, with $14 shipping. Okay, good enough.


Back to the motor: rather than continue to use the old metal tank, I popped an OMC fitting into one of my 25l Sceptre tanks. I have two because while I occasionally use one for the kicker, mostly I just wanted the ability to get 50l of fuel at a time from the gas station without pulling my boat out of the water all summer last year. But now I don’t really need that ability since I’m not commuting by water every day, so one of the tanks was demercurized and enjohnsonated. Now I really felt confident it would run.


Like most small outboards I’ve known, the old Johnson has an emergency backup rope start ability, you just have to wind the rope on with every pull. I have a ton of rope lying around, so I wrapped a couple of turns on and gave it a good hard pull, and it coughed a bit and died. Very close. So I primed up the bulb again and wound on the rope and pulled, and nothing. I did it again, and nothing. I stood there for a solid half hour just winding on rope and pulling it and trying to figure out why it wasn’t even trying now. I pulled the plugs to see if they were really fouled from all the starting attempts but they were sparking fine. I sprayed more Seafoam into the carb and tried it again and it ran, but quickly started to die as it used up the burnable fuel in the cleaner. I cracked the throttle open on the carb and it roared, but stalled as soon as I backed off. At least that gave me the idea that the high speed was getting fuel, but the low speed might not be, so I quickly pulled the carb again and hit the low speed circuit with compressed air from every direction. The carb went back on, I wound the backup rope around the flywheel and hauled off. Instant start! It was a bit sensitive to choke but the air cleaner wasn’t on; that might calm it down some as it smooths out the airflow into the carb. Lots of two-strokes are a bit sensitive about the shape and volume of the air box.. I put elastics on the butterfly valve linkages to hold the choke closed and let it run for a bit. There’s nothing like old two-stroke ring-ding sound...except WOT two-stroke powerband sound!



Up next: Prepping the workspace
 
wow great read, I think my ride on lawnmower needs some of the same carb work.
 
A bit busy today and not a ton of headway. I moved a couple of bikes out of the garage and tarped them up outside, and moved the stove into its approximate intended location. The drill won't handle driving big screws anymore; I found a NOS hitachi hammer drill that takes the same batteries on ebay and ordered it but it won't be here for probably another week, and I'm avoiding doing a ton of dicking around with the strongbacks until I have a good drill again. I did screw the 2x3 cleats for the crossmembers into place but it's such a pain doing it with the ratchet that I don't really want to invest a lot of time in it. Years of shooting pistols in massive quantity, interspersed with hand-cutting checkering on 1911 frames, left my right elbow a bit banged up and I have to watch the repetitive motion...so that's going to be fantastic when I have to spend six months sanding the hull. Anyway, whatever.

2020-10-29 17.57.29.jpg

The workspace is almost ready - just need to get a chimney together for that stove and I'll be rolling.

I tracked down a company in Canada with a bunch of 12oz biax e-glass left on a roll that nobody wanted; I bought it cheap which is amazing, that's exactly what I needed. I also stumbled into an insane deal on 7725 Rutan 8.8oz twill; I grabbed ten yards of it because why not. The sellers weren't sure of its provenance so they wouldn't certify it for aircraft usage but that won't affect me. It'll do great for anything not strength-critical. Which, honestly, is this entire boat aside from the seams. Anyway I paid almost nothing for it so now I have it.

The next research project is going to be finding out if I can get 35 horses out of that 20. I bet I can. But we'll see.

Oh, also I dropped a beer in my kitchen yesterday and it landed like this and I think maybe now I'll develop superpowers or something.

2020-10-28 16.51.29.jpg
 
Another little bit of prep work...none of this is very interesting I'm sure but I am going to try to put something in here every day just to force me to keep chipping away at the million tasks that make up one complete boat.


One factor that's been weighing on my mind: can I find the parts necessary to get 35 hp out of the old Johnson? I think so. I talked to a friend of mine in Ontario who works as an outboard mechanic; he found me a carb and intake. I told him that if he did a rebuild on the carb and sent it out with the intake all freshened up, I’d give him a scope I had kicking around that I don’t think I was ever going to use. It took a bit of prodding to get him to sort through his parts inventory, but today he sent pics of the carb. The linkage looks identical; I bet everything will bolt up fine. Worst case scenario is that it doesn’t and I can’t use it, but I still have a 20hp to play with. But my strong suspicion is that this will all bolt together fine.

35 carb.jpg

I’ll ship the scope in the next few days, but I want to wait until I hear he’s actually rebuilt the carb, because it took him two weeks from when I asked about...

Okay, let's get something out of the way. There are going to be about four million "johnson" jokes that I'll have to either intentionally make, or just wait for somebody else to. In order to prevent this from taking over half the posts as I write them, I'm going to toss out a bunch right now so the temptation to reuse them later in the thread is reduced.

"I asked about his Johnson."
"I would rather have had a longer shaft Johnson but this'll do."
"For a small Johnson it sure does the job."
"I just don't understand why my Johnson won't work anymore."
"Two strokes is all my Johnson needs."
"I'm a little concerned that my Johnson is insufficiently lubed."
"I asked my neighbour to help me manhandle my Johnson into place."
"I spent most of the day in the back yard, playing with my Johnson. Eventually my neighbours called the police to report a disturbance."


Okay, that ought to prevent too many guys from thinking up lewd stuff about my Johnson.


Anyway yeah, not shipping that scope until I hear something from the outboard mechanic. But hopefully that's not too long a wait. If my Johnson doesn't get a bit of love soon, I'm not sure what I'll do.


I guess since we're in the gutter I'll tell you about ordering epoxy. I'm using MarinEpoxy from the somewhat unfortunately-acronymed Boat Builder Central. Man, the internet changed a lot of things. There was a time you could go to the ATM and get out money for BBC and nobody would think anything of it, but anyway, their epoxy is good stuff. I've used a lot of it. When I used to live in Vancouver I always ordered from them but I could have it sent to Point Roberts and just go pick it up. That's out of the question these days. I'd have ordered everything from them but shipping to a dock in Nanaimo would have been around $800 plus customs brokerage. I'll still have to sort that part out but Air Express International seems willing to ship epoxy to the island, so that's where BBC is sending the epoxy. I like dealing with the guys at Boat Builder Central; the service is excellent and they have a forum I've learned a lot at over the years. I started reading it around twenty years ago, before I built my first ever boat, and now I'm a bit loyal to them. Still, if I can save $500 by breaking up shipments, you bet I will.

By detailing out everything and grabbing stuff in Canada when possible I think I got my total shipping costs down to around half the original $800+brokerage, so that's pretty decent and even though I didn't physically build anything today, each step counts toward the finish line.
 
I didn’t get the chance to do much that physically got me any closer to a boat today but I did get a lot of little issues polished out on the 3d model. I transposed all the control points of the hull panels into an old version of the same software, Freeship, and compared the unfolded panels to make sure everything was rolling out predictably. I also went through all the various renditions and made sure nothing was left that had been changed in an early file but only in the bulkhead copy, say. I like to split the files up so I can delete everything but the hull panels in one version, or everything but the bulkheads and stringers. 3d design software always seems prone to glitching out when you get points that are attached to multiple planes so I like to take the final version and break it into three or four separate drawings so I know nothing is in them that’ll render weirdly in 2d when it gets flattened. That’s slow, fiddly work to check over so I was avoiding it but anyway, now it’s done.


Construction Bulkheads snip.JPG Construction Bulkheads layout snip.JPG Hull Panels Layout snip.JPG

I really roughly laid the panels out on a 4x8 grid just so I could mentally work with the plywood sheets. When I go to print stuff out I'll probably print it on 3"x3" grid for maximum measuring accuracy. The construction bulkheads I'll just hack out of cheap plywood; I don't need to waste marine plywood on frames that'll get cut down to a fraction of that size in the actual boat.

I also picked up (I think) all the components necessary to build a chimney to code. Man, those bits are expensive. I spent around $600 at Home Hardware getting rigged up. Tomorrow I’ll try to install everything. I’ll have to build a bit of framing in the garage to support it but I don’t think that’ll be too complicated. Anyway grinding ahead, one step at a time.
 
Insulated flue pipe is punishing, $10 per lineal foot for zero moving parts.
 
Insulated flue pipe is punishing, $10 per lineal foot for zero moving parts.
Yeah, a little aggravating, but I guess it's a worthwhile venture. The house is on natural gas heat and it occurs to me that in a lengthy power outage we'd be without heat, so having emergency heating options in the garage couldn't hurt. Although I guess if I thought we'd be out for a bit, we'd just head over to the cabin.

But I'm trying to find ways to justify this, so...emergency backup.
 
The wood stove is connected. I’ll still probably get a fireboard and when the shipment of more stainless chimney stuff arrives at the local Home Hardware next week, I think I’ll extend the chimney two feet further up. It seems to draft fine now but it’s not quite as tall as it probably should be. Anyway the wood stove is working and the shop is now ready for action. It was a perfect day to do all the chimney work: sunny and warm, maybe 10 celsius? Not bad for November.

2020-11-01 13.38.13.jpg


2020-11-01 13.38.13.jpg 2020-11-01 13.32.20.jpg

2020-11-01 13.31.59.jpg



I also got the air cleaner and everything back on the outboard and fired it up for a bit...I didn’t think to film it but it’s running pretty smoothly now so I think I can pretty much shelve it for the moment and focus on the hull.


The next step will be to get some beater plywood in and cut construction bulkheads and start framing everything up. The epoxy (and lots of other stuff) will start arriving next week so I better get ready to start cutting and stitching!


2020-11-01 15.31.05.jpg

2020-11-01 15.31.21.jpg
 
The wood stove is connected. I’ll still probably get a fireboard and when the shipment of more stainless chimney stuff arrives at the local Home Hardware next week, I think I’ll extend the chimney two feet further up. It seems to draft fine now but it’s not quite as tall as it probably should be. Anyway the wood stove is working and the shop is now ready for action. It was a perfect day to do all the chimney work: sunny and warm, maybe 10 celsius? Not bad for November.

View attachment 58229


View attachment 58229 View attachment 58230

View attachment 58231



I also got the air cleaner and everything back on the outboard and fired it up for a bit...I didn’t think to film it but it’s running pretty smoothly now so I think I can pretty much shelve it for the moment and focus on the hull.


The next step will be to get some beater plywood in and cut construction bulkheads and start framing everything up. The epoxy (and lots of other stuff) will start arriving next week so I better get ready to start cutting and stitching!


View attachment 58232

View attachment 58233
Do you worry about an open flame with all that resin work going on?
 
Honestly...not really, even it could conceivably be a risk. Epoxy is pretty forgiving, chemically. There's probably some theoretical chance it could flash off but I think it's way more likely that the fuel in that bike's gas tank is going to explode.

And even more likely that I'll crash the bike and die before finishing the boat.


Other resins yes, I'd worry but I know enough guys working on boats in wood-heated shops in Alaska that I guess I'm just willing to gamble on it. But no way I'd work with MEKP around open flame, for instance.
 
Pretty awesome stress reliever man cave
Yeah the double bungee fender, I wrap the bottom bungee around a bag of concrete and it's a really unpredictable speed bag with a ton of movement; the larger fender is full of 70lb of water and makes a nice medium bag. The big Scotchman float is there to be filled about 3/4 full of water for a serious heavy bag. Water filled bags are just amazing for soaking up the impact that I just can't really take on my right arm anymore.

And then the power rack has around 450 lbs of weight associated with it and lets me do bench work, squats and deadlifts as heavy as I'll go these days. Plus of course pull-ups. All told it's a pretty good, simple setup that cost very little to put together, and lets me stay reasonably fit, adequately strong, and able to at least retain some fraction of fighting form. About once a year I'll do a three-day course with a lot of really challenging hand to hand in it and if I don't stay at least halfway in the game I just get the tar beat out of me. Some of the guys I used to knock around with stayed in the game a lot longer than I did and are way better than I am now, so I really have to work to keep up and not get my head kicked in when we do stuff like "surprise carjacking scenario in this old wrecked volvo, and there's a sim Glock in the other guy's hand and maybe a rubber knife somewhere, so solve it fast or you'll get stabbed twenty times or shot to bits."

It's a quirky hobby but it keeps my head in the game.
 
A dull update today: I bought some plywood. It’s kind of exciting for me because now things will really begin to roll ahead, but “today I drove to Nanaimo after work to buy plywood” doesn’t make for especially compelling reading.


I guess conceivably interesting is my choice in wood, which is a bit controversial: I bought a couple of pieces of cheap plywood just to build temporary bulkheads out of to wrap hull panels onto, but for the transom and some stuff that’s staying in place, I actually bought marine fir. There’s a lot of people who don’t like marine fir. It checks to hell if you don’t glass it and it’s hard to bend, but for the transom and forward bulkhead I don’t think it’s a bad choice. The transom will get glassed right up so I’m not worried about the checking there, and I can always put a light fabric on the collision bulkhead. The big question is “why not just use tropical mahogany hardwoods?”


I just don’t trust them. I know that’ll sound crazy to some builders, because the world standard is BS1088 Okume plywood. But I have seen that stuff go seriously wrong and I don’t trust it unless it’s from someone like Joubert. Same with Meranti. Meranti I trust more; it seems inherently rot-resistant. But you get a pinhole in okume and it turns into paper mache. Ordinarily the local plywood people carry Joubert plywood but I went in today and they were out, to my immense irritation. I called last week and they said they had tons. In fact they had some BS1088 “something tropical marine.” I think it was alternating plies of a dark meranti with a different tropical hardwood, maybe keruing. I think I used that stuff once. It was fine at first. But somewhere in the decking it got water in, somewhere I couldn’t see, and it disintegrated. Marine fir may be a little heavier than standard, and prone to checking, but it’s built here. I trust it. So at least for the stuff that doesn’t have to bend, that’s what I’ll use. It may be a little harder to work with but it's strong as hell. I think it'll work fine.
 
Well, today it started for real. I started laying out bulkheads on the plywood panels and making sawdust.


It took a while to lay out the transom pieces because I’m going to laminate a couple of layers together and I had to cram two pieces onto a sheet that could barely fit them, and it took a couple of tries to figure out the best setup. Anyway, half inch marine fir doubled up should be pretty solid.

2020-11-03 17.16.28.jpg

2020-11-03 17.26.55.jpg

The only other thing I got to was hacking up a chunk of scrap from the transom cuts. Why is that important? Two reasons: I wanted to make sure there really weren’t voids lurking inside - there weren’t; Vancouver Island plywood mills seem rock solid - and I wanted to make some wood soup.

2020-11-03 17.28.39.jpg

2020-11-03 18.22.04.jpg

In order to test the waterproofness of the wood, I’m boiling it and freezing it. I’m never going through another “supposed to be waterproof and isn’t” episode again, so I have six chunks of plywood boiling and I’ll take them out one at a time over the course of 24 hours and chuck them in the freezer and see if anything delaminates.


But I think it’ll be fine.
 
I thought I learned on this forum that Marine plywood was just good plywood with no voids and not chemically different than other plywood, so not "waterproof".
 
Yes and no...it's nothing really exotic; the glues are just the same stuff used in exterior ply (well, exterior ply made here) and the marine grade relates to the voids, exactly as you say. But before you invest several thousand bucks in stuff that may be at risk of water intrusion you want to test it to make sure nothing is wrong with it. I've had marine ply that was indestructible and marine ply that fell apart when wet. Now I go through the boil test to make sure they didn't mix up a batch or certify the wrong stack or whatever. But this is also part of the reason I am using local marine fir when possible: I trust OUR mills to actually do that stuff correctly. I am boiling it to confirm what I believe.

You use the stuff from Asia...you could get any result at all, in my experience.
 
You're wrapping wood in a waterproof membrane. If water still gets in somehow, there is no light, air circulation or drainage path to allow is to exit. Any wood will grow mould and rot in those conditions.
 
Obviously...but there is a huge difference between various woods and glues in terms of the amount of time you have to fix a problem that develops. End grain balsa cores... very little time. Okume...not much time. Meranti, more time, and so on.

The other concern is delamination, which comes from either the type of glue or the amount. Or the wood types.

There's a reason this kind of testing is standardized in the marine industry.
 
Back
Top