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Thread: Building a skiff

  1. #161
    Site Supporter Maple Syrup Actual's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by mmc45414 View Post
    Poor Guzzi gonna need a bath...
    Attachment 66726
    man, that poor bike puts up with so much from me


    Quote Originally Posted by WDR View Post
    FWIW, my daughter is now 7 and she went deer hunting with me last fall for the first time (real walk around the mountains hunting, not sit in a stand hunting). I was never more than 25-50 yards away from her, and most of the time, much closer, but I still found a lanyard from an old streamlight, ran it through a bright orange plastic emergency whistle, and made her wear it, and practice blowing it loudly... just in case we were ever separated for some reason. Every time I was more than a few steps away from my daughter, I'd think about the risk of a cougar or bear suddenly showing up, and a whistle isn't going to help that. She might have been fine sitting on that rock for days by herself, but I made her walk with me to peek over the ridge or whatever, every time, even though the sage was nearly as tall as she was, making picking her way through it tough.

    Kids are resilient and tough... and some of the best lessons they learn are by failing and getting hurt. I'm not saying you shouldn't take precautions, but it is important to let go of the reigns sometimes, and let them explore and learn a bit. I'm sure you already know this, and he's very young. But you are right, its a huge thing to be committed to, raising a kid. That "Heart relocated outside the body" bit really resounds with me. Years ago, my father and I built a small duck hunting boat out of plywood and epoxy/fiberglass, and it was a fun project. My father is a much more dedicated craftsman and woodworker than I, but every once in a while I get an urge to build something like that again. He's constantly working on projects, and I think it's helped keep him young and active now that he's pushed into his 70's. He recently finished building plantation style shutters for every window in his house (a lot of them!)... custom fitting each frame to the window openings, which were absurdly un-square and un-plumb.

    I wont clutter up this boat thread farther, but I wanted to drop in and say it is an interesting thing, and I keep checking back to see how things are going.
    That's really interesting - it's such a tightrope to walk. You don't want to helicopter, but you also need to let them learn about risk and danger.

    I hope my kid one day thinks about building stuff with me as a fond memory; my dad was deep down just kind of mean so for me most of that stuff is kind of either missing, or run through with other memories of him just kind of going after me for sport, which is a shame, because he's an interesting guy and if he'd wanted to get along with me he really could have been a good dad.

    On the other hand it was an extremely formative experience and as a result I invested a ton of time into figuring out what I'd do differently.

    But, obviously, I'm long on theory and short on experience, so it's interesting to hear from people who've run that gauntlet already.
    This is a thread where I built a boat I designed and which I very occasionally update with accounts of using it, which is really fun as long as I'm not driving over logs and blowing up the outboard.
    https://pistol-forum.com/showthread....ilding-a-skiff

  2. #162
    Quote Originally Posted by Maple Syrup Actual View Post
    man, that poor bike puts up with so much from me




    That's really interesting - it's such a tightrope to walk. You don't want to helicopter, but you also need to let them learn about risk and danger.

    I hope my kid one day thinks about building stuff with me as a fond memory; my dad was deep down just kind of mean so for me most of that stuff is kind of either missing, or run through with other memories of him just kind of going after me for sport, which is a shame, because he's an interesting guy and if he'd wanted to get along with me he really could have been a good dad.

    On the other hand it was an extremely formative experience and as a result I invested a ton of time into figuring out what I'd do differently.

    But, obviously, I'm long on theory and short on experience, so it's interesting to hear from people who've run that gauntlet already.
    My dad was a good man, but he didn't know how to teach anything. I basically learned everything on my own. What he did teach me was the value of working hard and I am eternally grateful for that.

    I made a conscious effort to spend more recreational time with my kids and teaching them skills they were interested in. The result is that I have kids that are self sufficient and can fix/build stuff themselves. My oldest daughter picked up enough that she's fixed almost every electrical problem on her '08 Dodge mini-van, even pulling the TIPM out by watching YouTube and sending it in to be repaired. My youngest is a hobby artist that works with epoxy, paint, and wood. She also does her own auto repairs. My son is incredibly talented at mechanics and is a damn fine welder. All of this is simply because I took them out to the shop and allowed them to make mistakes (yes they still have all their fingers) and guided them along the way. I hope that 10 years from now there will be threads of you and your kids building stuff.

  3. #163
    Site Supporter Maple Syrup Actual's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by AKDoug View Post
    My dad was a good man, but he didn't know how to teach anything. I basically learned everything on my own. What he did teach me was the value of working hard and I am eternally grateful for that.

    I made a conscious effort to spend more recreational time with my kids and teaching them skills they were interested in. The result is that I have kids that are self sufficient and can fix/build stuff themselves. My oldest daughter picked up enough that she's fixed almost every electrical problem on her '08 Dodge mini-van, even pulling the TIPM out by watching YouTube and sending it in to be repaired. My youngest is a hobby artist that works with epoxy, paint, and wood. She also does her own auto repairs. My son is incredibly talented at mechanics and is a damn fine welder. All of this is simply because I took them out to the shop and allowed them to make mistakes (yes they still have all their fingers) and guided them along the way. I hope that 10 years from now there will be threads of you and your kids building stuff.
    Sounds like the results speak for themselves in your case...I am hoping for the same result, indeed.
    This is a thread where I built a boat I designed and which I very occasionally update with accounts of using it, which is really fun as long as I'm not driving over logs and blowing up the outboard.
    https://pistol-forum.com/showthread....ilding-a-skiff

  4. #164
    Site Supporter Maple Syrup Actual's Avatar
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    Mostly fairing pictures; I'm sorry, I know how boring these are. I'll try to offer commentary that at least explains why I even bother to photograph this stuff.

    But first: a good little score, in my opinion at least. A Force 10 kerosene heater, for which I paid basically nothing. It worked but was in rough cosmetic shape, and the guy who had it put a solid fuel heater in his boat and this was just surplus to his needs and came with his boat so he didn't value it at all. It needs a fuel tank - no big challenge there - so I mean I literally paid pocket change for it.



    But then it was back to the fairing.

    I'm laying on really thin coats of fairing mix because I want the minimum amount of putty necessary to have it as smooth as I want it. Honestly it's not requiring much; I'm basically on my third skim coat of the hull and each skim takes around 18 oz, so I think I've used 54 oz on making fairing mix. The fabric all laid down pretty smooth and that makes a huge difference.





    You can see the new sanding block I'm using, now that I'm past the mega monster stage. I had been using a 36" x 4" board. This is a Hutchins 5501, an autobody fairing sander that's roughly 3x18". I knew the Hutchins 5501 was the thing to have, because I'm an expert on this stuff.

    In reality it was just the first hit on Amazon when I searched for something about sanding longboards, I don't know anything about autobody stuff at all. But apparently it's a known item. I will definitely say that I like it a lot. I am using a 3x18 power sander belt, cut to be flat. Man, does that ever rip down the fairing compound. I scrape it occasionally with a cheap metal spreader, then wire brush it, and it's lasting forever. I'm half inclined to cancel my order of pro-grade 2 3/4 sandpaper roll...I have four more of those belts and I doubt I'm even halfway done the first one.

    The next couple of pics I took to try to illustrate how the chines are getting nice and clean and fair and have a good smooth sweep to them.





    It's not that easy to show but anyway, I'm happy about it.

    Then yesterday, after about six hours of detail sanding, I slapped on about 6 oz of hard, as I call it: wood flour, fumed silica, milled fibres and talc. Filling little hollows on the chines, and a bit of a skim right where the hull had its harshest transition in the bottom panels.

    Today, I cheese-gratered yesterday's hard stuff down as necessary, then spent a few hours carefully laying on a full skim coat.









    You can see how thin I put that stuff on, I think. The wood is still visible over 90% of the hull. I just prefer to minimize the putty use, for whatever reason. I really try to make the wood fair, then the glass, and just use putty to get the final 5% or whatever. That's just how I like to do things, I guess.

    Oh, and one other thing I did was spend a couple of hours refurbishing that old heater. It seems mechanically intact, so I just popped a buffing wheel on my Makita angle grinder, and cleaned it up a bit.

    Of course looking at this picture now, I can see there's still a bit of black buffing compound on it, so I guess I'll have to take a clean cloth to it to finish it off. But anyway you get the idea.

    This is a thread where I built a boat I designed and which I very occasionally update with accounts of using it, which is really fun as long as I'm not driving over logs and blowing up the outboard.
    https://pistol-forum.com/showthread....ilding-a-skiff

  5. #165
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    @Maple Syrup Actual -- it has been fun and interesting following this thread, but there is something I am curious about. You've been showing us the process, materials, challenges, etc... involved in building this craft by hand. How much would the process differ for a boat built by a commercial manufacturer? Would the materials and steps involved be similar but with less hand operations or would they be completely different? And how would the end product differ, other than the satisfaction of doing this yourself by hand?

  6. #166
    Site Supporter Maple Syrup Actual's Avatar
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    Oh super interesting question, thank you! Allow me to warm up my typing fingers...



    A production boat would be different in the extreme. There's basically nobody that does boats like this on a production level; it's very much a design that would only really work for one-offs or maybe a small boat yard or something.

    A typical production boat would start with a big female mold, and that mold would be sprayed with a gelcoat that does two jobs, it acts as the paint but it's also a mold release agent. Since it's basically the final surface of the boat's exterior, the mold has to be extremely smooth and finished inside.

    Then they fill fiberglass in on top of the gelcoat...a small manufacturer would use sheets of glass, like I do, but bigger manufacturers use "chopper guns" which just spray chopped up glass fibers and resin into the mold. The small guys use big rollers and saturate the fabric with resin a layer at a time. In general it's better strength-to-weight than chopper gun builds, but you can do a good job with a chopper gun if you know what you're doing, which I don't.

    The glass and resin would both be different...most manufacturers use pretty cheap glass and REALLY cheap polyester resin, which doesn't have anything like the strength of the fairly specialized fabric and epoxy resins I'm using.

    There would also have to be really different support structures internally. Fiberglass sheets, with no core, just glass, are really floppy. You can't have big unsupported areas; that's why if you look at a lot of production boats, there are creases and stuff molded into the hulls themselves. The builders often imply they're there for performance reasons...this is sometimes true. Often it's just a matter of needing a way to stiffen the hull.

    Building around a wood core the way I'm doing makes for an extremely light, stiff structure. It's more like an airplane wing than like a production boat, or like a surfboard. Really light, really stiff. I can do larger areas without framing; you'll see when it gets flipped and I start building the inside that I can make it really open, and there's not much framing necessary to support the hull.

    In order to get around the floppiness of glass, the framing, the creases, and the increased thickness has a huge weight penalty. Built with a chopper gun, I'd guess this bare hull would come out around 900 lbs? So then you need the motor to push a 900lb boat, which is maybe 300 lbs, plus the fuel to fuel it, so now the motor has to be able to push a 1400 lb boat, empty. All in, figure 2000 lbs. The framing has to be strengthened to withstand the stresses that big motor is putting on the hull, which is always effectively trying to rip itself off the back with a two foot lever between the clamp and the propeller, right? So you get in this spiral of more weight -> more power -> more weight to handle the power -> more power to push the weight...


    Contrast this with the surfboard boat: that hull, bare, will probably weigh around 350lbs. This weight, for guys used to production boats, is so shocking that I have been practically laughed off of a fishing website for mentioning it. But I know what materials are being used in its construction, and I carried them all by hand into my garage. I know what it weighs. Fully loaded, it'll be half of a production boat's loaded weight. So very little motor is necessary, so less fuel, so less framing...





    Perhaps interestingly I was just guessing at the weight numbers of a production boat, but just out of curiosity, I just went and had a look at the Mako 17 skiff, which is roughly comparable in terms of size.

    They list the hull weight as 950 lbs, the dry weight as 1200, and the average package weight as 2050 pounds. The max payload including engine they list as 1650.

    The engines they are supplying weigh about 350lbs. My engine weighs around a third of that, a little less. So there you go, my guesses were fairly close, and I think it illustrates the extreme difference between the end products. This little skiff will perform like a much bigger boat, for a lot less money in running costs.

    And although I think this is rarely said except in jest...next time you're at the beach, toss a broken piece of fiberglass in the water, next to a broken piece of wood.

    NOW which boat do you want to be in?

    But that's not actually a serious comment, just wood boat guy humour.

    Anyway thanks for giving me the opportunity to expound at length on why I made the design choices I did and to surreptitiously boast by proxy about my incredible success* in this arena, without appearing to be self-aggrandizing.




    *I should point out that none of the amazing characteristics of boats built in this manner have anything to do with me; there are a bunch of actual, famous designers that work in this way and I'm mostly just stealing their original ideas and applying them to a design off my own sketch pad. But the real work in developing the method was all done by others, I can't actually boast about any of it. But I am still happy to benefit from it.
    This is a thread where I built a boat I designed and which I very occasionally update with accounts of using it, which is really fun as long as I'm not driving over logs and blowing up the outboard.
    https://pistol-forum.com/showthread....ilding-a-skiff

  7. #167
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    Thanks for the detailed answer, the weight numbers are especially interesting and surprising.

    Are there any companies building comparable boats in wood, or is that left strictly to boutique builders and individual craftsmen like yourself? Would boutique builders working in wood follow a path that is similar to yours?

    I also suspect the boat you are building is quite different in many regards than the wooden boats of yesterday built from native timber.

  8. #168
    Site Supporter Maple Syrup Actual's Avatar
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    There are definitely some boutique builders that do something quite similar to what I'm doing...I'd say some of what Hylan Brown are doing is very similar (although on a larger scale) - they have a coastal commuter underway by a designer Reuel Parker which is much bigger, but it's the same approximate structural concept, lots of the same materials, and so on.

    It has a bunch of the same advantages, too: at 43 feet long, they're just putting a couple of 250hp outboards on the back, IIRC. There are thirty foot open skiffs that need more power than that.

    https://www.proboat.com/2020/03/cust...stal-commuter/

    It's not a super common building method, though, partly because you're right about the difference between traditional wood construction, and what I'm up to. There are pretty big outfits doing high end traditional wood construction and it's very labour intensive, with lots of fine joinery and complex framing. It's quite beautiful, but tons of extremely high-skilled labour involved. Relative to the chopper gun factory boats, it's basically the difference between an artist painting a portrait, and a commercial painter spraying walls in a new apartment block.

    What I'm doing here is a strange third route: I am using the wood really differently that a traditional wood builder. The wood in this build is hardly doing anything; it's almost a spacer, and a form, and not much else.

    If you picture an I-beam, and the tiny amount of material in the middle of the I-beam, that works because the top skin is resisting compression, the bottom skin is resisting tension, and the middle is basically just keeping the two skins from moving relative to each other. It's not much weaker than a solid steel beam, because the middle of the beam is not really doing any work, so you can hollow out the middle to the point that it's basically gone, as long as it keeps the skins locked together.

    The reason my boat is so light and stiff is that it's getting covered, inside and out, with structural skins of fiberglass that are themselves fairly unusual: rather than being like regular woven cloth, they're more like two sheets of parallel fibres, not woven but just stitched together with binding thread, at 90 degree angles to each other. It's 45/45 biaxial, that is, these parallel threads are all running at 45 degrees off of the lengthwise axis of the cloth. This stuff, once it's absorbed epoxy into the binding so the glass fibers are locked in place relative to each other and relative to the wood, is unbelievably strong. You put tape along the joins from the bottom to the sides, and across the keel, and then big sheets over the whole hull, inside and out, and that's where the strength comes from. The tape is almost like a skeleton; the sheets like a hard shell. The wood in between gives them shape and locks them together, and it mostly just has to resist compression cycles from the water slamming against the hull, but wood does that really well. Some woods will go a million cycles before they break down; structurally it's incredible stuff. But my design doesn't appeal to the true wood enthusiast; it's pretty space-age compared to that stuff (which personally I also love, but don't have the skill to build).

    As a result of all this, you're not really looking at a normal design here. This is very different from traditional wood, but also very different from fiberglass. It's sometimes called composite sandwich, or cored composite construction. One of the guys who really made this technique work is a naval architect named Jacques Mertens-Goosens...that's probably the person I spent the most time studying the work of. He used to design for Cigarrette, which were legendary high-speed extreme offshore racing boats with insane amounts of power. He really has a handle on what forces boats need to withstand and did lots of very straightforward, workmanlike designs in this style and he's one of the true experts of that method; I really look up to him and his work and I have learned tons by reading his writings and studying his designs for the last, I guess, twenty years or so now.



    You know, there is a limited-production outfit that suddenly springs to mind that does something kind of similar, not with wood but with honeycombed Nidacore panels: Judge Yachts.

    http://www.judgeyachts.com/

    They build really nice boats on the east cost, I think near Maryland but I could be way off with that - that's the location that pops into my head but maybe that's wrong. Anyway they do a cored composite that's similar from an engineering perspective, which gives you some idea, maybe, of how not-normal-wood this thing is: the closest production boat is an expensive, ultramodern design with no wood in it at all.
    This is a thread where I built a boat I designed and which I very occasionally update with accounts of using it, which is really fun as long as I'm not driving over logs and blowing up the outboard.
    https://pistol-forum.com/showthread....ilding-a-skiff

  9. #169
    Sounds a bit like the SCRIMP process that JBoats used to build their sailboats. Fiberglass inner and outer skins sandwiching a core of vertical grain balsa. Vacuum bagged with resin and cured. Very strong, very stiff, and reasonably lightweight.

    This is a great thread! Please keep going. I love to watch and hear about the progress
    Last edited by Trigger; 02-01-2021 at 05:12 PM.
    "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master"

  10. #170
    Site Supporter Maple Syrup Actual's Avatar
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    Ah, yes, the balsa cores were a similar concept - the materials were ultimately abandoned, for the most part, because balsa soaks up water like a sponge, and rots really quickly if wet.

    They used a cheaper laminate that wasn't as resistant to long-term water exposure, too, so they got a bad reputation after a while. But the theory was sound and they ride really well for their weight. I think Tiara used to build the same way.
    This is a thread where I built a boat I designed and which I very occasionally update with accounts of using it, which is really fun as long as I'm not driving over logs and blowing up the outboard.
    https://pistol-forum.com/showthread....ilding-a-skiff

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