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:

1.  Daggerboard
2.  Rudder assembly (the whole steering thing in fact with Norwegian tiller)
3.  Floorboards
4.  Interior fairing and paint
5.  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.

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.

Flipped

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.