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Taping and tabbing

After a long hiatus due to the day job (too much travel!) I finally had some time to make progress on Sarah’s boat. First, I got the boat flipped upside down (easier said than done for one person… it’s light, but BIG!), so I could apply duct tape to the outside seams in the hull. The tape is in preparation for the next steps, where we’ll be applying thickened epoxy to the seams. The tape will keep the epoxy from drooping out of the seams, helping save on epoxy, and even more importantly, cut down on the sanding required to the seams once the epoxy cures.

Next, it was time to start tabbing. In this step, you essentially create “spot welds” or tabs along the seams in the hull, using epoxy thickened with wood flour. You put the tabs alkong the seams between panels, in the gaps between zip ties. After the tabs solidify, you can go back and cut out all the zip ties, leaving the tabs to hold the hull together. This way, when you complete the epoxy fillets along the seams, and then cover those with fiberglass tape, there won’t be any zip ties along the seams to get in the way.

Finally, here’s a shot of the hull where you can see the epoxy tabs completed (the darker brown spots along the seam between the bottom and side panels.) The string you see in the picture is helping pull a little bit of twist out of the hull before I tabbed it all together, so I don’t end up gluing the twist permanently into the boat.

New Toy

Laser 2 and trailer

Originally uploaded by apexchaser.

Well, I’ve added a new toy to what is now a FLEET of boats (Condor the Capri 22, Sarah’s dinghy under construction, and now this one). This boat is a Laser 2 which I picked up yesterday in Seabrook (near Houston). It’s a 1993 boat, in very good condition, ready to race.

The boat is rigged with main, jib, and spinnaker, and is meant to be sailed by two crew. The skipper in the cockpit, and the crew flying on a trapeeze, for maximum sail carrying capacity.

It can also be sailed solo (which is what I will probably do most often), with the added challenge of learning to control the boat and trim the sails while flying on the trapeeze wire. I hear having more than two hands is helpful.

More updates to follow as I get the boat into the water.

Zipping the boat together

With all the panels cut, it’s time to start stitching the boat together (yes, I said “stitching”). Here you see the hull sides, bow and stern transoms stitched together using nylon zip ties threaded through holes drilled along the edges of the panels (and the proud skipper-to-be inspecting the work so far. She was concerned about the lack of a bottom!). After the hull, bottom, and internal frames have all been stitched into place with zip ties, it’ll be time to move on to epoxy and fiberglass, which is what really holds all the pieces to gether. That’s right… I’m NOT sending my daughter into the water in a boat held together with zip ties alone.

After a bit of wrestling with the plywood to get it to bend in the right directions, I got the bottom stitched to the hull, and all the internal frames installed (the frames add stiffness and support the seats, mast step, and centerboard case. More on those later on in the building process). It’s really starting to look like a boat now! Sarah was relieved to see a bottom on the boat, and also informed me that I was making very good progress. It’s good to get kudos from senior management every once in a while!

Here’s a close-up shot of the bow, with the boat flipped upside down. You can see the zip ties that hold the whole thing together at this stage of the process. coming next: Adventures with Epoxy.

Makin’ sawdust

Now that the panels are all drawn onto the plywood, it’s time to turn a few big pieces of wood into lots of little pieces of wood (ar ar ar… power tools! woo hoo!) Enter the trusty circular saw. A circular saw with the blade set to barely cut through the plywood makes an excellent cutting tool for both straight and curved panels. It turns out to be surprisingly easy to use the circular saw freehand to follow curved cut lines, with one hand on the saw’s handle and another on the rear corner of the saw’s sole plate, to help make fine adjustments of the saw’s path. Since the blade is set so shallow, there are no issues of kickback or binding whatsoever, although I have to admit I was very nervous at first, and remained paranoid throughout the process.

A few things that helped make this part of the process a lot easier:

• A left-hand blade circular saw - If you’re right handed, this allows you to hold the saw with your right hand and have a clear view to the blade and cut-line. A more typical right-hand bladed saw would force you to look OVER the saw to see the blade and cut line, making this part of the process a lot more awkward.
• Dust control - Connect your saw to a shop-vac or dust collector, to help control the amount of sawdust thrown into the air and onto the work piece. This is not only good for your lungs, but also makes it easier to see the cut line as you work.
• Hearing, breathing, and eye protection - I’ll admit I haven’t always been very good about this. But , [rant on] if you care about your eyes, lungs, and ears, invest in protection! [rant off] Not only will you live longer, but your work will be higher quality. If you’re not suffering from the noise and dust in the air, you’ll be able to take your time and deliver a higher quality finished product. (Was that preachy enough for everyone?)

Hauling the mail

On a slightly different scale than Sarah’s boat, check out this video. It’s got to be one of the most spectacular (and intimidating) pieces of sailing footage I’ve ever seen. Watch the video first, and then read below.

For those of you not familiar with the boat, what you see in the video is the Black Pearl, a Disney sponsored entry into the Volvo Ocean Race, a round-the-world fully crewed race going on right now. Skippered by Paul Cayard, The boat is 70 feet long, is built retty much 100% of carbon fiber, and has a canting keel that that can push the keel bulb, all 4.5 TONS of it, to the windward side of the boat to provide increased leverage and allow the boat to carry an insane amount of sail area. If you look carefully in some of the overhead shots in the video, you can actually see the keel bulb (bright orange) under the water, sticking way out to the side of the boat. Amazing. Even more astonishing is the fact that this 70-foot monster is crewed by only 10 people, half of which are theoretically resting at any one time, so only FIVE lunatics have to keep this beast under control.

The video was taken a few days ago, with the Black Pearl on its way from Melbourne, AUS to Wellington, NZ. They’re probably doing about 30 knots of boatspeed (yikes!) carrying three sails in conditions that would have most sane sailors reefing down to a scrap of sail area or heaving to.

I want to experience sailing like that someday before I die… and hopefully not die doing i! Enjoy!

Sarah’s Boat - The Adventure Begins

The plans arrived in the mail last week. The wood was purchased a few days later. So, it’s time to get to work! Construction began today on what will be (with a bit of luck) a beautiful little sailboat for Sarah (and ok, I’ll admit it, and for me too). The vessel we will be building (I say we because Sarah has stated emphatically that she will help, particularly with sanding and painting… she wants to paint the boat “all the colors that are real”) is a Jaques Martens “D5″ sailing pram, very similar to the popular Optimist sailing dinghy. The boat will be built using the stitch & glue construction method, which allows you to very quickly build extremely strong, light, and durable boats. I won’t go into a lot of detail regarding the construction method here, since you’ll be seeing how the mothod works as you follow a long on the construction of Sarah’s boat.

Step one was clearing out a work space in the disaster area that is our garage (my fault.. I can’t throw ANYTHING away, it seems) and then beginning the process of transferring the parts of the boat (”lofting”, in boat builder speak) from the plans to the Meranti (a variety of African mahogany) marine plywood that will be used to build the boat.

In the photo above you can see one of the sheets from the plans, assorted marking and measuring tools (if you’re going to build a stitch and glue boat, buy a large drywall T-square. It makes transfering measurements from the plans to plywood a LOT easier!).

After marking all the key measurements, corners, and line intersections on the plywood, it was time to “connect the dots”, which is easy when the lines are straight, but a bit more challenging when one needs to draw curves.

Based on advice from www.bateau.com, I bought a 10-foot length of Schedule 40 PVC pipe, which makes an excellent flexible batten to help draw fair (smooth) curves for curved panels, like the boat’s bottom and hull sides. Here you see the plastic batten laid out to mark the curve along one of the boat’s two bottom panels. Spring clamps helped secure the ends of the pipe along the edges of the plywood, and small finish nails at each of the points transfered from the plans ensured that the batten followed the appropriate curve. Next step: cutting.