Building a skiff

[Maple Syrup Actual]

Okay, quick update, not a ton of time to write as I have been taking a lot of time off work to enjoy the summer, and am now way behind on everything, of course.

Bilge painted in preparation for gluing down the sole:



Mystery block all laminated up:





And glued into place:



Naturally, like an idiot, I got fixated on the painting process and forgot to leave a spot open for the mystery block. You can't glue to paint for reasons that I assume are obvious to everyone - or, you can, I guess, if you're happy with a bond no stronger than whatever the paint has. That's not very useful so of course I had to sand back to glass in this spot to glue down the mystery block.

Here's the sole gluing down:



Getting taped into place:



Man, wetting out glass in the summer is dead easy! That 12oz tape just soaks it up and turns invisible on the spot.



Quick buzz of the deck to take down a couple of minor highs and give the epoxy something to grab, with a rolled up sheet of 6oz about 12x5' at the ready:



And all wetted out:



I figure if you can get this intersection nice and flat you've done adequate prep on the stringers and frames:



Inset for the mystery block:



Looks like a decent fit:



And now I'm working on sorting out the framing for the seat hatch. I really like covers that lift right out so that's what I'm working on here. They still need drain troughs routed in, none of this is glued up or anything. It's all just me dry-fitting things together.




Oh, I should give a quick update on the other fun stuff too...family life and cabin time:

My wife continutes to find ways to make being the mom of a toddler look glamourous, by somehow matching her outfit to her surroundings all the time.



Of course she does have to bring spare shoes for the playground. The kid is spectacularly adventurous:






Being totally fed up with the view from our city place, we traded this in:



Via the old boat:



For the cabin, which ended up being really crowded. These two yahoos were constantly leering in the window at us:



And then a bunch of these guys just all over everything:



We checked in at the town hall/trading post/fire department/medical transfer station to see if anything could be done but apparently not.



All we could do to calm down was go swim in the ocean:



But eventually we'd just had it with the terrible conditions and went home. Now if you zoom in really far you'll notice this obnoxious family that was trying to harass us on the commute home:





Single mom with two kids. Sad, the state of society these days. Where is the father? Nowhere to be seen. But that's the world we brought this kid into. He turned 18 months old:



And we celebrated our 21st anniversary at a local restaurant where somehow my wife managed to find something to match with her outfit. So I guess SOME families stay together. Take a hint, whales.

[Maple Syrup Actual]

I see that one video didn't come through, here's the permalink:

https://imgur.com/RlMvvNu

[JAD]

I see that one video didn't come through, here's the permalink:

https://imgur.com/RlMvvNu

In the spirit of the forum, she flinched like that hummingbird was a .357 SIG.

[Maple Syrup Actual]

Yeah I laughed at it at the time - I had had one land on me the day before and encouraged her to try. She's always spooked by that kind of stuff and jumped a mile when it took off.

I think I've said this before but the island is so sparsely populated and lacking in cats that it's sort of an unintentional migratory bird sanctuary. We get thousands of birds stopping there, different species every couple of weeks all spring and part of the summer, then again at the end of summer and the fall. It's neat.

[Maple Syrup Actual]

Some prop thoughts...

I had a really good prop guy where I used to live but so far, here, I don't have anyone if I need something semi-custom (although I'm sure there are several shops that could handle it). I was thinking about it last night while heading to bed, though, and it shouldn't actually be too difficult to dial this one in. I haven't really gone through and checked these numbers but they should be close:

I can probably rev it to 5800, which I can verify with a cheap tach I have that's accurate enough for this kind of thing...gear case on these I think was a 2.15, so whatever that is, about 2700 turns at the shaft. 11/12 of 2700, minutes to hours over 5280 and something like 20% slip...that'd be around 22mph, just ballparking it. That's probably about what this thing is good for. So maybe an 11" wheel would be about right, anyway.

There's a dealership in Nanaimo that does OMC stuff; I'll have her out this weekend and see what I can do with the new bits on, then chat them up and see if I can try a couple of props. But I won't be surprised if an 11 is actually what I want, in the end. If the slip is too severe maybe I'll back it down - I never planned to run more than about 20 knots full tilt, if that. Probably more like upper teens.

In fact speaking of the new bits, the last of which arrived yesterday so of course after dinner I was out swapping them all in...

New intake is about double the volume of the old:



Here you can see I've cut the gasket back to the size of the new intake, and then laid it on the old one so you can see just how much bigger it is all the way around:



But here's the real money shot. The 20s didn't just come with a smaller intake and carb, they also had a restrictor plate to downtune them even further.



I'm about to go from an 18mm throttle body diameter, to a 38mm diameter. What's that in area? ~250mm vs around 1100mm? The motor has enough compression you can hurt yourself trying to start it - in fact my neighbour did just that when we were goofing around with the original carb a couple of weeks back. But it's been breathing through a straw.

I'd say things are about to get real in Oyster Harbour.

[AKDoug]

Some prop thoughts...

I had a really good prop guy where I used to live but so far, here, I don't have anyone if I need something semi-custom (although I'm sure there are several shops that could handle it). I was thinking about it last night while heading to bed, though, and it shouldn't actually be too difficult to dial this one in. I haven't really gone through and checked these numbers but they should be close:

I can probably rev it to 5800, which I can verify with a cheap tach I have that's accurate enough for this kind of thing...gear case on these I think was a 2.15, so whatever that is, about 2700 turns at the shaft. 11/12 of 2700, minutes to hours over 5280 and something like 20% slip...that'd be around 22mph, just ballparking it. That's probably about what this thing is good for. So maybe an 11" wheel would be about right, anyway.

There's a dealership in Nanaimo that does OMC stuff; I'll have her out this weekend and see what I can do with the new bits on, then chat them up and see if I can try a couple of props. But I won't be surprised if an 11 is actually what I want, in the end. If the slip is too severe maybe I'll back it down - I never planned to run more than about 20 knots full tilt, if that. Probably more like upper teens.

In fact speaking of the new bits, the last of which arrived yesterday so of course after dinner I was out swapping them all in...

New intake is about double the volume of the old:


Here you can see I've cut the gasket back to the size of the new intake, and then laid it on the old one so you can see just how much bigger it is all the way around:


But here's the real money shot. The 20s didn't just come with a smaller intake and carb, they also had a restrictor plate to downtune them even further.


I'm about to go from an 18mm throttle body diameter, to a 38mm diameter. What's that in area? ~250mm vs around 1100mm? The motor has enough compression you can hurt yourself trying to start it - in fact my neighbour did just that when we were goofing around with the original carb a couple of weeks back. But it's been breathing through a straw.

I'd say things are about to get real in Oyster Harbour.

I assume that like other two-strokes, jetting is going to come into play in a serious way. Right?

[Caballoflaco]

I seent a hole or two in my life and I still think what you got yourself there is a syrup hole. And I ain’t one to tell a man what he should or shouldn’t put in his holes, but it seems to me you might be about to miss out on a great opportunity here.

[Maple Syrup Actual]

I assume that like other two-strokes, jetting is going to come into play in a serious way. Right?

Yeah, the new carb is rebuilt and jetted for 35. Should move!

I seent a hole or two in my life and I still think what you got yourself there is a syrup hole. And I ain’t one to tell a man what he should or shouldn’t put in his holes, but it seems to me you might be about to miss out on a great opportunity here.

I can neither confirm nor deny my involvement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_...le_Syrup_Heist

[Maple Syrup Actual]

A minor update since I'm kind of goofing off with the build right now...

Got the framing and gutters under the forward hatch sorted and just tabbed them in place by clamping them to the seat and putting a thick mix in at the hull, then went back afterwards and popped the seat off so I could do nice fillets around the surfaces I otherwise wouldn't have been able to see. This worked pretty well.



Finally the purpose of the deck fill: it supports my grab rail, which is all the console I think this little skiff needs.



I don't know why I did this this way, this was so dumb. I had previously cut out those hatches, and I thought I'd glass that whole bulkhead so I gently put the cutouts back in with a bit of masking tape as a spacer, then glassed both sides, and cut them back out. It worked, it was just a pointlessly hard approach to save about half a yard of fabric.



Then I glued down the seat:



And glassed it in, kicker still fits in and out nicely...



And then I was like ah, screw building, let's just go get back on the water.

I think this is the only shot of the sheerline of the completed hull.





The clipboard is for prop math (which of course being me I still just ballpark rather than take seriously, even when I bring a pencil and paper specifically to do the math.



Every time I do this, I don't know why. You can see my liberal use of ~ which I use to mean "about." I'm pretty good at mental arithmetic but not very interested in actually doing math, so what I always end up doing is doing the math for a given step about 3/4 of the way until I think I have it within some reasonable margin, writing down the approximate value, and moving on. Partly I do this because I work with a bunch of engineers that are really persnickety and it drives them INSANE, although the thing is, I always calculate the values to within a useful degree of accuracy. They just hate that I casually dismiss the need to finish the equation. But I just keep an eye on my rounding and end up with values that are close enough and I find it really funny to treat math so roughly.

Oh, and I need to take a closer look at that tach. I hope I wasn't actually running at 6500! But it was sure howling at WOT.



Anyway I didn't go back and look carefully so it's possible this napkin math done while running the boat isn't perfectly accurate. But clearly the prop that's on the boat is slipping like crazy. That's fine, I'll fix that. Actually I'll fab up a jack plate to tune the prop height, it's a tiny bit high with the amount of setback I have and between the height and the old behind-the-prop water pickup on this motor, at speed it starts to lose water. I didn't notice it at first because it's not obvious until you're really moving, but then I ran it for about five minutes at about 16 knots to get well ahead of a tug with a load of salvage logs and I realized it was getting way too hot! I shut it down for a bit, popped the kicker on just to be sure I could easily do so, and chugged around on my little 3hp Evinrude a bit before firing the Johnson back up and cruising slowly around.









I brought some fishing gear along but once I realized I couldn't run at speed without drying out the motor, I just cruised around to look at some spots I'd been past, but never explored before. Once I get the bracket fabbed up it'll be more useable. Also, the beat up old prop probably isn't helping matters, it's churning the hell out of the water back there. I'll drop on a new one with less pitch and get the motor set back a little, dropped a tiny bit, and we should be in business.

[Maple Syrup Actual]

Chipping away on fiddly little bits when not doing family stuff. Have to admit that much of the time when I'm out in the garage building, I'd rather be taking the family to the beach, so I'm striking a balance. It's slowing down the progress, but I don't really care.

Roughing in the side deck supports:



They're only dry fit, none of this is gluing up yet:



I want to be able to take 8 rods under the gunwale. The shortest rods I ever use are about 7 feet long, although maybe sometime I'll spring for a Trevala and I think they're 6'6. The longest rods are 10'6 mooching rods. I wanted to make sure I could store at least two of each maximum and minimum length, and not have reels banging into rods, or rod tips whacking the hull, so I mocked up some stuff to be sure that would all work about how I want.




Then I went to work on a bracket. Man, not much left of that cutoff wheel! I can't remember if I said this here or not; over Canada Day long weekend I got a piece of wood rammed into my eyeball (outside the field of vision, nothing disastrous) and had to take the boat back over to the big island and head up to the urgent care to get it dug out. Luckily it didn't seem to punch through into the middle so they just pulled it out and put drops in it and gave me a tetanus booster and off I went back to the cabin to live as Odin, having traded one eye for wisdom. In this case, that wisdom paid off and I was wearing safety glasses when that cutoff wheel started to disintegrate on me, so that was good.



Something along these lines should work fine:



Nobody panic about the scuffs on the transom, it has lots of sanding and varnish left to go.



Up next: I thought I would take this nice little slab of maple and turn it into a pad for that outboard to hang on. The old Johnson doesn't have a convenient option for handling a 1/4" plate transom, so it needs a bit of a spacer.



Having gotten the bracket and side deck supports in hand, I took my kid to the other local park that's really amazing, where he continues to focus on climbing everything:



And settled into the hot tub for a nice view of the moon over the bay before facing the grim reality of impending Monday.



I was going to try to take the boat to the cabin next weekend but I'd be rushing and cutting corners to do it, I think, so I won't. I don't want to leave the exposed epoxy in much UV so I really want the interior painted with a couple of coats of primer, at least, before it sits on the hook for a week. That means glassing in the side deck supports and getting paint on the deck in the next three days, plus going around and injecting a few little spots under the sole glass at the edges where there are air bubbles...I don't know. It's probably possible, but the paint would be pushing it and I'd rather just take it as it comes.