A skiff

[cracked_ribs]

The wire I used was either stainless or galvanized so no stains. So how do you get the tie straps out? I just heated the wire with a soldering iron.

Mostly by not putting epoxy in the holes until they're out... I'll tab the hull together between the straps and then just cut them loose. If you have to leave a couple in for whatever reason, they don't react with the epoxy at all and you can glass over them without any issues.

But mostly you just take them out before you put the fillets in.

 

[Sir Reel]

Mostly by not putting epoxy in the holes until they're out... I'll tab the hull together between the straps and then just cut them loose. If you have to leave a couple in for whatever reason, they don't react with the epoxy at all and you can glass over them without any issues.

But mostly you just take them out before you put the fillets in.

Ahhh!

 

[cracked_ribs]

Very little time yesterday or today; I missed doing an update yesterday but there's not much to show, really. I continue to make tiny adjustments in the stitching. I'm very close to how I want it now.

Here's a pic that I don't know if anyone will be interested in or not: I took it just to give some sense of the shape of the forefoot. You can see here how far forward I've pulled the foot to get the stem fairly vertical and to lengthen the waterline.

And here you can see how I'm messing around with different straps to pull the chine inwards a bit close to the bow. It's working pretty well. As soon as I'm convinced I can't get the shape any better, I'll start gluing it up.

And then here you can see how I've been going along and making sure there's a bit of a gap between the panels all the way along. I have had to do a bit of trimming in a couple of spots to make sure there's a gap, although I don't think it will matter that much: the real strength will of course be in the glass, not the joints. As long as I have epoxy in the joint and not wood on wood, I think I'm happy with that.

One thing you can't see is that I went along and put packing tape behind every seam, just to reduce the amount of epoxy wastage as it gets pushed through the seams. Sometimes I see boats that get flipped and every seam looks like it was dripping twice as much epoxy as it was retaining, so I started taping the back sides of seams when I glue them up. One thing I didn't do on this one, although I thought about it and if I had more time when it was at that stage I might have given it a shot, was put 1/2" pvc pipe for the length of the chines and keel. If I'd stuck entire 10' lengths against the seams, A) I probably would have spent less time monkeying around with the strap tension, and B) had pre-formed fillets. I had been meaning to do that on this build but at the correct moment I didn't really have a convenient chance to go get the pipe, so I just kept on building. In general I don't like to over complicate things; just keep moving forward and you get the boat built, that's my experience.

But I've never seen anyone else build with joints temporarily backed by pipe to give it shape, an epoxy stop, and an automatic radius, so I really should have done it just to show it as a concept. Next time.

 

[cracked_ribs]

A simple update today: I finished adjusting the panels, and glued between stitches over about 90% of the boat. There's a couple of spots I discovered while working that I think will be easier to fine tune once the surrounding stuff is glued up, so I just worked around them.

I built a big fire in the stove for this to get everything good and warm, and boy, it sure worked. Although it was so much hotter than every other fire I've had, the stovepipe really cooked in, and smoked the hell out of the garage for about half an hour.

Anyway I think it will remain warm enough that the epoxy will harden right up overnight. I'll check it after dinner and maybe build a small fire again if I think it's necessary but it was kicking pretty well by the time I shut down around twenty minutes ago.

 

[cracked_ribs]

Super busy the last few days and haven't written much but I do continue to make progress on the boat.

I have been dialing in a few spots as I go so glued everything up over the course of a couple of days, letting the epoxy set up on the initial gluing and then bending the panels as necessary in the few remaining areas to get the alignment the way I wanted it. Some of the tweaks were really minor, like this first picture I wanted to move the bottom panel out a miximum of about 1/8" relative to the top panel in this one area.

Other areas required creative clamping to move the sides inward at the join.

Once the second round of glue had set up I pulled the straps - the epoxy doesn't really adhere to them well so a good yank and even the ones that got in a bit of contact with the glue pop right out - and started smoothing and rounding the edges and corners.

The hull has taken the shape nicely; that transition towards the bow looks pretty good. A slight compound curve in that area; I achieved it the same way I have achieved everything else in life: p̶e̶r̶s̶i̶s̶t̶a̶n̶c̶e̶ brute force.

Bike's getting dusty but all the seams are smooth and round. Up next:

About time to get glassing.

 

[Rain City]

"p̶e̶r̶s̶i̶s̶t̶a̶n̶c̶e̶ brute force"

Same way I found both my wives.

It's looking great!

 

[cracked_ribs]

Thanks man, it's either a labour of love, or I have a love of labour, I'm not sure which. But I'm liking the way it's shaping up.

 

[Bill 310]

Ok besides the build, I see you are teasing us with what looks like a forlorn and needy looking Moto-Guzzi sitting in the corner of your garage.

When you get a moment some more details on that bike would be most appreciated.

 

[cracked_ribs]

Ok besides the build, I see you are teasing us with what looks like a forlorn and needy looking Moto-Guzzi sitting in the corner of your garage.

When you get a moment some more details on that bike would be most appreciated.

Ah yes, that bike was the star of a big travelogue I wrote in 2011, I think. A Griso. My wife and I took a slightly belated honeymoon on it. There's a very long version of the story...you know, maybe this is what I need to do. I need to set up a single website which includes all the long-form writing I do, and I can link to the original stories and all their photos and everything...that's a big project, but anyway it's a good plan.

The short version is this: when my wife and I first met, which is quite a story in itself but pretty inappropriate for a family site like this, we hadn't really put down any roots anywhere and very shortly after, moved to Montreal on a motorcycle, riding it first to San Diego, then the Grand Canyon, then Texas, then New Orleans, then up the Blue Ridge Parkway towards Montreal, visiting some of my American friends along the way but mostly sleeping in rest stops and behind rural gas stations and in fields for the whole summer. It was great and we loved it. I just took a tarp that was around 10x14, I think, parked the bike on one short side, then flipped the tarp up over the bike, out around six feet, pegged it there, then folded it back underneath us so we had a triangular tent with a single wall that was the bike I had at the time. I think I was 23 years old, my wife 21.

We were married on the tenth anniversary of our first "date" although I don't know if you could call it a date exactly...long story, she was there with someone else who was ignoring her and I stole her. That's the SFW version, anyway.

So on the tenth anniversary of the great road trip, which was the summer after we got married, I took two weeks off, which was my first vacation in years. We rode down to San Diego, then to Palm Springs, then randomly decided to drop in on friends in Edmonton and rode up through the American desert and then Idaho and Montana, up to Edmonton, then home through Jasper etc. We mostly slept in rest stops and fields and it was great to be back on the road with her. I wrote the whole thing up in a long travelogue that was mostly intended for my usual audience which was kind of an unusual bunch of professional gun fighters with a bit of a philosophical outlook...if you saw the post way back in this thread where I mention fighting inside cars etc, these are the people who developed the training regimen for that and now mostly work training 3 letter agencies in the states how to survive extreme close quarters fighting, among other spook action they all do. So the whole story was kind of this extended joke about how every choice I made on the trip was fun but an absolutely terrible tactical decision...the story was called something like "5000 miles of tactical failures, motorcycles, and my wife."

Anyway we've drifted way off the Guzzi but that was the ride for that trip and it's my primary bike; I rode it a bit last year but nothing at all this year; too busy to do anything with it. The big sideways V-twin is a riot. At a stop, when you blip the throttle, you can feel it torque over a little like the V8 in a muscle car. It feels alive under you. With the Mistral high mount exhaust it sounds gnarly as hell. In compression braking it's the sexiest sound I've ever heard from a motorcycle. I love that bike.

This was somewhere east of Palm Springs, mid-honeymoon. That was a great time in my life.

 

[Dorman Point]

You sound like a guy who would be fun to sit down and have a couple cold bzzrs with...

 

[Rain City]

You sound like a guy who would be fun to sit down and have a couple cold bzzrs with...

But then the couple beers would turn into three bottles of tequila and some ketamine. Next thing you know you'd be waking up next to a bike under a blue tarp in the Tijuana desert in nothing but a string bikini.

 

[cracked_ribs]

You sound like a guy who would be fun to sit down and have a couple cold bzzrs with...

I'm highly susceptible to beers. On about beer three you get some pretty good stories. If you ever want to sit two meters apart and drink beers through straws with little holes cut in our masks or whatever the current requirement is, count me in.

 

[cracked_ribs]

But then the couple beers would turn into three bottles of tequila and some ketamine. Next thing you know you'd be waking up next to a bike under a blue tarp in the Tijuana desert in nothing but a string bikini.

I find this comment a bit upsetting.

The lab guys assured me it would be physically impossibly for you to retain any memories of that.

 

[Dorman Point]

But then the couple beers would turn into three bottles of tequila and some ketamine. Next thing you know you'd be waking up next to a bike under a blue tarp in the Tijuana desert in nothing but a string bikini.

And you sound like a guy to avoid at a stag party...

 

[cracked_ribs]

I didn't get as much done today as I hoped; it was a lot of fiddly little things and preparatory work for the next stage. But the next week or so should generate some real action.

I finished gluing up all the seams; every little spot left over from my various tweaks and twists has now been glurped up nicely. All the stitch holes have been filled as well. These two tasks seemed to take forever.

I also wanted to transfer some fabric from my 50lb roll of 12oz biax to a smaller, more manageable one, so I laid out the cloth on the boat to get that figured out a bit. A couple of 8 yard chunks should do the hull, and then to finish right up to the gunwales I'll use a bit of the 7725 Rutan 2x2 twill I have.

Pretty cool to start laying out the glass fabric; I've never actually used 12oz biax fabric before. It's heavy stuff when you have enough of it.

And this is the final glued-up hull panel situation...

Then I wanted to saturate the seams where the biaxial tape will go, so I marked those out to help keep the tape straight and the overlaps in the right spots and then rolled around 12 oz of epoxy on to soak into the wood before the tape goes down. I had fantasies of getting the tape down today but I spent too much time tuning and gluing and laying stuff out to do that. That's okay; these early stages are worth investing a bit of time in.

At the end of the afternoon, I had a little bit of epoxy left so I slapped on a single short piece of tape at the transom. I hadn't been heating the garage all day because it's partly to my advantage to have the epoxy curing slowly at this point but then of course if I want to wet out fiberglass I have to hit it with a heat gun and it was too much of a pain to bother with late on a Sunday afternoon so I put on the one piece just to get things rolling, and called it a day.

The vertical threads you're seeing in this pic are just the cotton binding threads; they stick up from the surface a bit so the light tends to catch them and makes stuff look like it isn't wetted out properly. In reality though it's pretty thoroughly wetted on both sides.


One thing I like about boat building...I get so focused I forget other stuff. I opened a Winter Dunkel from Whistler Brewing around 2pm and didn't take a sip until after 5. The amount I save on beer will probably pay for the boat at this rate.

 

[cracked_ribs]

And you sound like a guy to avoid at a stag party...

You never know unless you try! And then, of course, you probably don't know, because of, oh, who knows. Let's say... scopolamine?

 

[cracked_ribs]

It was sunny today so I got cocky and didn't light a fire. Definitely a mistake. I started at about 4pm and the sun was down maybe 20 minutes later and it got cold.

I glassed on the transom, 2x 12oz staggered on all sides, and one chine seam. But holy cow, what a lot of work. I was mixing 6oz at a time, pouring it on and then heating it with a heat gun for paint stripping to get it thin enough to saturate the glass well. I'd pour it, spread it out over about half the tape, then hit it with the heat gun and use a gloved hand to work it into the glass. Slow and awkward and not much stopping once you start with a given piece of glass, either.

I have about half the seams finished now, but it took 3 hours or more and wasn't fun work: burning fingers and freezing toes.

Tomorrow I'll light a fire and get things comfortably warm first, and the other chine, keel x2 and stem x2 should go on a lot easier.

 

[cracked_ribs]

Continued to glass seams today; I lit a fire in the stove and it was a huge improvement for sure. I hit the areas I was going to glass with a sander, just in case, but they had a tiny bit of tack left to them so I think it's reasonable to conclude that I'll still get a primary bond anyway.

I actually kept on with the heat gun technique, though. It's faster when the ambient temperatures are comfortable. But what I really like is that it's extremely controllable. I can get a layup that is 50% epoxy by weight and not a gram more; maybe less in some circumstances. The heat just thins the epoxy so well, and yet the ambient temperature is low enough that it cools off pretty quickly after you remove the heat. I think I'll stick with the method for the time being. The only downside I can think of is that potentially you can get a pretty good lungful of epoxy fumes if you're not watching what you're doing.

Anyway, I glassed the keel and didn't have time for much more today. But the glass laid so smoothly on the keel, I was really happy with it.

 

[macro]

I didn't get as much done today as I hoped; it was a lot of fiddly little things and preparatory work for the next stage. But the next week or so should generate some real action.

I finished gluing up all the seams; every little spot left over from my various tweaks and twists has now been glurped up nicely. All the stitch holes have been filled as well. These two tasks seemed to take forever.

I also wanted to transfer some fabric from my 50lb roll of 12oz biax to a smaller, more manageable one, so I laid out the cloth on the boat to get that figured out a bit. A couple of 8 yard chunks should do the hull, and then to finish right up to the gunwales I'll use a bit of the 7725 Rutan 2x2 twill I have.

Pretty cool to start laying out the glass fabric; I've never actually used 12oz biax fabric before. It's heavy stuff when you have enough of it.

And this is the final glued-up hull panel situation...

Then I wanted to saturate the seams where the biaxial tape will go, so I marked those out to help keep the tape straight and the overlaps in the right spots and then rolled around 12 oz of epoxy on to soak into the wood before the tape goes down. I had fantasies of getting the tape down today but I spent too much time tuning and gluing and laying stuff out to do that. That's okay; these early stages are worth investing a bit of time in.

At the end of the afternoon, I had a little bit of epoxy left so I slapped on a single short piece of tape at the transom. I hadn't been heating the garage all day because it's partly to my advantage to have the epoxy curing slowly at this point but then of course if I want to wet out fiberglass I have to hit it with a heat gun and it was too much of a pain to bother with late on a Sunday afternoon so I put on the one piece just to get things rolling, and called it a day.

The vertical threads you're seeing in this pic are just the cotton binding threads; they stick up from the surface a bit so the light tends to catch them and makes stuff look like it isn't wetted out properly. In reality though it's pretty thoroughly wetted on both sides.


One thing I like about boat building...I get so focused I forget other stuff. I opened a Winter Dunkel from Whistler Brewing around 2pm and didn't take a sip until after 5. The amount I save on beer will probably pay for the boat at this rate.

I forget to eat when working in my shop.. A while ago I was working on a project and started to get cold.. I stopped and realized it was 3am.. Probably time to call it a night. Some scientists should do a relativity study on time/space in the home shop. I swear clocks dont work right in them.

 

[cracked_ribs]

I forget to eat when working in my shop.. A while ago I was working on a project and started to get cold.. I stopped and realized it was 3am.. Probably time to call it a night. Some scientists should do a relativity study on time/space in the home shop. I swear clocks dont work right in them.