Seats and floorboards

I'm taking a break from spar making to put together the seats and floorboards.  The seats will be varnished, like the spars, so I figure I'll get those done.  Then I'll be able to get all (or at least most) of the varnish done while completing the rest of the boat.  With luck, the multiple coats of varnish won't hold me up in the end.

The slatted seats are attached to Douglas fir cleats spaced about every 18".  Here I've got them cut a bit overlong (they'll be cut down later) and back-screwed to the 1/4" ply top of the underseat watertight lockers.  I've also milled out the slats for the top, and I've placed one along the edge of the cleats just to take a look.  Note that the seats overhang the lockers by about 3".  I'm going with Cypress, 9/16" thick, for the slats, except the edge will be 5/8" Western Red Cedar.  This is a very soft wood, and I might regret this later...but it'll match the W.R.C. transom, which I really like the look of.  (Incidentally the cypress is renewable "ranched" cypress, NOT old growth.)  If it gets banged up, it can easily be replaced later with a tougher wood like, say, Douglas fir (that's one advantage of slatted seats).  I thought about oiling the seats, but the cypress looks so nice varnished I said "what the heck" and decided to varnish them.

Here's the completed seat on the port side, you can see how the W.R.C. edge piece contrasts with the paler cypress.  All that's left now is putting in some bungs, rounding the inside edge, and sanding/varnishing.   The cleats have been cut back to about 1/2" from the edge, which hides them nicely while still supporting the edge.  Along the hull there's a small shelf which hould be good for small items like docking lines, etc.  I used scrap pieces of 1/4" ply as spacers between the slats.

Meanwhile, the starboard seat is coming together and I've started on the floorboards.  These too are slatted, this time of Port Orford cedar.  This is a West Coast cedar, it seems to be a bit heavier then the East Coast varieties but it seems to be a bit tougher too.  A few knots, but that's fine--heck, they're floorboards, they will get beat on.   I've never worked with this type of cedar, but I know they use it for decking out West.  It will be left completely unfinished, so the sun should bleach it to that nice grey color you see on old houses with cedar shingles.  I used scrap pieces of 3/8" ply between the floorboards to set the spacing.

This photo shows the slatted floorboards in place.  Next, I'll remove the whole thing all as a unit and make various cuts to make the lift-out hatches.  There will be hatches either side of the centerboard trunk and a centerline hatch aft.  That grey "fish" in the middle is a lead weight that proved handy as a "third hand" to bend the boards down to the underlying floors.  I used blue tape to make various notes to myself:  Cut Here!  Don't Cut Here!  Plane to line!

In the last photo, you can see that there are fewer cleats for the seats than in the first photo.  That's because three cleats are permantlly attached to the seat slats:  one at each end and one down the middle.  This is so the whole seat can be removed as a unit for varnishing or what-have-you.  I'll try to get a photo of that next time.  About 10 screws then hold the seat to the cleats that are permanently attached to the 1/4" ply.  Hope that's clear.

That's it for now.  I'll be taking Thanksgiving week off from work, hurrah, but I do hope to have a few more photos in about 10 days or so.  Happy Turkey Day!

Making the birdsmouth mast and more

One of the fun things about boatbuilding is next:  spars!  For this boat, I'm making a solid-wood boom and gaff plus a hollow mast (to save on weight aloft).  I decided to go with the "bird's mouth" technique for the hollow mast.  All the spars are made with nice clear Douglas fir.  Why not Sitka Spruce, you ask?  Well, have you seen the price of Sitka Spruce lately?  Also, Doug fir looks very nice varnished--nicer than many types of spruce, in my opinion--and the weight difference won't be significant for this boat I don't think.  Gaffers like BELLE have relatively short masts, so that helps too.  If you want to know more about wood spars, here's a few links:

• There's a good discussion of how to dimension small-boat spars in William Garden's The Making of Tom Cat.  He uses the small catboat Tom Cat as an example, giving numbers for both Doug fir and spruce and hollow vs. solid spars.
• I used the Birds' Mouth Spar Size Calculator to figure out the dimensions of the staves...many thanks to Clint Chase for posting this!
• Skene's Elements of Yacht Design also has good information about wood spars.

First I ripped out eight identical strakes on the table saw with the trademark "birdsmouth" on one side.  Since the spar tapers at the top, and a bit towards the butt too, each piece needs to taper as well.   I marked one piece with a batten, rough cut it on a band saw, and planed down to the line.  I then used this master to mark a second piece and cut and planed that one down too.  I then used these two identical "master pieces" (so to speak!) to plane down the remaining six pieces to size.  In this photo, the master pieces are on the outside, separated by spacer blocks from three strakes that I'm planing down to size. As you can see, the plane (a #5) rides on the "masters" and cuts down the inner three strakes.  A couple of passes with a power plane got things started. ( There are various ways of cutting out these strakes...using routers etc...for a small spar like this I'd say this worked quite well.)

I'm going to use pipe clamps to glue up the spar, here's a test run.  I'll double the amount of clamps shown in this photo for the actual glue up.

Voila...the glued-up spar.  This is actually Phase One.  A strip of packing tape along two strakes allows me to split the spar open to add blocking...see next photo. To the left of the mast are the "blanks" for the boom--glued from two pieces--and gaff.  I'll eight-side, then 16-side, these the old-fashioned way.  The hollow mast starts out eight-sided, so it only needs to be 16-sided on it's way to becoming round in section.  Then a bit more planing and a bunch of sanding to produce the final tapered, round spars.

With the spar opened up, I'll now shape blocking at the butt, deckline, and top to add stiffness to these areas.  In theory you could do it all in one step...but it seemed easier to do it in two discrete steps.  Once the spar is glued back together, I'll then shape it to 16 sides with planes and then sand it round. 

Meanwhile, I made up this centerboard pin from 3/8" bronze rod.  The plywood discs have pieces of 3/8"-inside-diameter bronze tubing to act as guides.  These will be screwed/glued to the side of the centerboard case.  There are removable brass plates (not shown)  on the outside to hold the pin in place...and keep water from getting in the boat.  There will also be a piece of bonze tubing embedded in the centerboard for the pin to run through.

Here's the discs shown in the last photo being glued to the side of the centerboard case.. I also screwed/glued cleats on each side of the case, towards the top.  These cleats line up with the tops of the seats and will allow me -- if all goes well -- to have lift up floorboards.  To make a (relatively) large "sleeping platforn",  the forward floorboards will fill in the space between the side bench seats and the centerboard case, resting on these cleats.  Not clear?  Well I'll be working on that in a bit, more photos to come...

Finally, after much hand-wringing, I finally cut down the transom!   This changes the whole look of the aft end of theboat...and I have to say I'm happy I did it.  Yes, that's a 35-yr-old British Seagull Forty Plus hanging there...my father bought it new years ago...and it actually runs!  There's a temporary piece of plywood clamped to the transom to protect it from scratches.  I have a nice block of yellow pine that I'll use as the final outboard clamping block.  To be honest, I may buy a more, umm, modern outboard at some point.  But the ol' Seagull will be the Official Power on launch day, that's for sure.

Next time:  more work on the spars plus maybe get started on the floorboards and seats.  Until then, good night and have a pleasant tomorrow.

Dynel on deck

As promised, here are a couple of photos of the decks covered in Dynel (glued on with epoxy):

I'm gluing on the Dynel in four pieces, here I'm cutting out the port-side deck piece.  

All the pieces on the boat...but not trimmed as yet.

Corner before trimming...

Corner after trimming, hey that looks better.  The Dynel cloth--which is soft and bends easily--wraps around the the edge of the 1/4" ply deck.

The completed job.

Forward view.  Note that the rubrails will cover the screw holes along the top of the sheerstrake.  With the toerail to go on soon, I'll finally be able to trim down that stem, which I've left rough-cut for months.  That'll be a good day...

With the deck completed, hurrah, it's on to rubrails.  More on that later.  Plus I'm thinking of adding a little trim piece to the bottom of the sheerstrake.  No structural function, just for looks.  Plus there will be a small toerail on the foredeck.  Once that's done, the exterior hull will be complete, with interior work like seats, floorboards, etc. to go.  Plus gobs of finish work--and spars--of course!  So, until next time, it's goodnight from him.