Building a skiff

[Maple Syrup Actual]

Big action today.



This is a 2" strip of lexan that a local plastics shop gave me when I went in looking for a good batten to draw curves. Pretty helpful! The little muffins are lead; I use a beater muffin baking tin to make lead into readily melted or alloyed blocks so I have tons of little lead 1/2 lb blocks. With a little block of wood and a clamp they make a nice batten-holder-in-placer.



With the sides and bottom pretty much drawn up - there's some screwing around left to go, the sides need another foot and a half on the stern end and the bottom another 6 inches or so, but that'll be easy to splice in with the big cuts out of the way - I cut them out, leaving the sides about a half inch taller than necessary and an inch longer, and the bottom a half inch wider and an inch longer.

Ordinarily I would cut exactly to size - usually I'll measure precisely and cut half the pencil line away. And in most cases I would be saying look, do you think you know better than the designer? Cut to the size they recommend, don't improvise. The builder needs to respect the designer.

But in this case, obviously the designer can't be trusted at all. Of course, the builder is also kind of a problem child, so it's hard to know whose side to take. Probably the builder and designer should spend some time in the octagon, fighting it out. But for the moment, let's proceed under the assumption that an extra half-inch on the dimensions may turn out to be warranted, and it's easier to take a bit of wood off than put it back on. No boat has ever been built from these plans, so I'm erring on the side of caution. Or at least: I'm erring.





Anyway, sides and bottom are cut out and they aren't needed in the bedroom anymore, so back to the garage with them:





This last picture makes me think two things:

1) I hate that god damn railing...I just bought this house a year ago and haven't had time to do much to it but that railing has got to go. It looks like someone bolted a bunch of pallets to my deck.

2) This is why I like scarfs for joining plywood. As you can likely imagine, there were points during the process of lowering the cut out panels during which the apex of the bend was the scarf. But it held just fine, and the bends were nice and smooth with no obvious hard spot at the splice.

Speaking of scarfs, since I know you're all dying to know what a scarf looks like when sawn through:



That's a nice clean glue line if you ask me. I'm quite happy with that.

Oh, one last thing: I figured out why Erin found the wax paper untrustworthy.



It's godless communist hippy wax paper made from SOY. If you tolerate soy stuff, you're probably not the kind of person who would spend a couple of decades of your life with me. Luckily it must have been smeared with testosterone grease or something or it probably wouldn't have worked.

Damn hippy paper.

[AKDoug]

I married a unicorn.. and there would be no way she'd let me do that in our bedroom.

[Maple Syrup Actual]

Well, there's two basic factors at play with Erin.

1) She's really inclined towards sexual dimorphism...i.e. she likes women to be really feminine and men to be really masculine. So part of the deal is that I'm sure she doesn't consider herself as being in a position to "let" me do anything. If she felt like she had the power to make that call I think she would be really unhappy. She expects me to run roughshod over things and considers it evidence of masculine virility.

2) Actually point two is just an extension of point one, now that I think about it. I think she likes the fact that if our bedroom was on the ground floor I'd probably park my bike in it. This kind of stuff just makes her feel like she's married to Lemmy from Motorhead which is the kind of thing she likes. She doesn't expect me to be easy to deal with. She wants a barbarian chieftain. I'm moderately close to that and this stuff actually helps.

But you know it's also fair to point out that the floor in there is easy to sweep up and stuff and I'm sure she figures this phase won't last that long. Plus it's not like I'm rebuilding the outboard in there and everything stinks like gas or something; it's just slightly aromatic wood. This isn't really a huge sacrifice in any objective sense, and she's extremely practical about stuff like that.

Although I did take a picture which struck me as personally a bit hilarious because it really encapsulates the relationship perfectly:



That's the kind of thing you really only see around my place.

[AKDoug]

Well, there's two basic factors at play with Erin.

1) She's really inclined towards sexual dimorphism...i.e. she likes women to be really feminine and men to be really masculine. So part of the deal is that I'm sure she doesn't consider herself as being in a position to "let" me do anything. If she felt like she had the power to make that call I think she would be really unhappy. She expects me to run roughshod over things and considers it evidence of masculine virility.

2) Actually point two is just an extension of point one, now that I think about it. I think she likes the fact that if our bedroom was on the ground floor I'd probably park my bike in it. This kind of stuff just makes her feel like she's married to Lemmy from Motorhead which is the kind of thing she likes. She doesn't expect me to be easy to deal with. She wants a barbarian chieftain. I'm moderately close to that and this stuff actually helps.

But you know it's also fair to point out that the floor in there is easy to sweep up and stuff and I'm sure she figures this phase won't last that long. Plus it's not like I'm rebuilding the outboard in there and everything stinks like gas or something; it's just slightly aromatic wood. This isn't really a huge sacrifice in any objective sense, and she's extremely practical about stuff like that.

Although I did take a picture which struck me as personally a bit hilarious because it really encapsulates the relationship perfectly:



That's the kind of thing you really only see around my place.

I get to run rough shod over pretty much the entire planet other than anywhere near the bed in our bedroom... Sawdust and her sleep would be a no-go.. other than that I have invaded every other single place in our house with some stupid project. More than one two-stroke engine has been rebuilt on the dining room table. I'm glad you've got a gal like that, mine is the same way. She pretty much hates what modern "feminism" has done.

[Maple Syrup Actual]

Yeah, considering what a couple of weirdos we are, it's a surprisingly traditional marriage around here.



Today was pretty busy at work so limited progress and even worse pics as I was rushing and forgot to take any of the in progress pics that are usually the most illustrative.

But I did a second round of scarfs, just little ones connecting a couple of scraps to the pointy end of the hull bottom. I think those panels are something like 16'5" long which in retrospect is a dumb design choice but whatever. Start to finish a couple of scarfs like that takes me an hour or less so not that big a deal.



There's the newly scarfed wood all weighted with random junk.

The rest of my limited boat time today was cleanup - I have a couple of big paper bags of sawdust now which is really useful to me. Every time I get take-out coffee in a paper cup, I keep the cup. I have been doing this for about a year (I don't really buy that much coffee) and now I have dozens. The other thing I have is around 10 gallons of used motor oil, which I occasionally use to temper steel if I'm forging something, but at this point I have more than I need and want to get rid of it. Enter the sawdust: I fill a paper cup maybe 2/3 full of sawdust and 1/3 full of old oil. The oil saturates the sawdust in a few minutes, soaking completely in. The whole cup goes into the wood stove where it burns like a road flare for what seems like an hour or so, and it burns so hot there's practically no smoke at all. I put a few in the stove any time I'm going to work out there in the cold and man do they heat the place.

The one other thing I've been up to is boil-testing the meranti ply I bought a week ago. I was pretty confident in it but still, verify. I put scraps from a couple of sheets in the boiler and went through the whole boil/freeze process again.



Removing the 24 hour piece.



It didn't delaminate at all, but it definitely doesn't have the extreme grain strength of the douglas fir. But I'm sure it's well within spec for what it is.



Nice and stab resistant, though. A bit of glass over that and I'll be pretty confident in this boat.

[Lex Luthier]

So maybe I missed it with all the momentum, but what sort of superstructure will this craft have? Fully open hull, half deck, cuddy, roofed cabin, or something completely unexpected, like say, a landing craft for motorcycles?
(grin)

[JAD]

Incidentally, in big craft, people relentlessly fail to design the superstructure and hull in consideration of each other. One of the craft we’re working on has had a bonus year added to our completion time because the supe was unexpectedly tall, which made her tippy. This is being solved... somehow. We’re hearing... maybe cut the boat in half amidships and add 20 meters.

[Maple Syrup Actual]

Well, it's mostly going to be an open boat. I do have an idea for a bit of weather protection...but that's a major plot twist that I will release at the appropriate moment.

But given that it's a slightly narrow waterline and basically no ballast weight at all, any shelter would have to be extremely minimal or it'll be subject to exactly the problem JAD describes: I would think any more than fifty pounds of superstructure would make it pretty tender and rolly.

Funny to think of professionals designing the hull and the cabin separately. That would make me incredibly nervous. In fact I'm often surprised how haphazard some boat design seems to be... particularly considering how so many yachts these days are a hull with a small apartment block on top.

I'm sure JAD has seen this video but I don't know how well known it is among the general public. Apparently there were a number of factors here, but when I see these extremely tall yachts without a ton of draft and ballast they just seem prone to this kind of thing to me.

[peterb]

Well, it's mostly going to be an open boat. I do have an idea for a bit of weather protection...but that's a major plot twist that I will release at the appropriate moment.

But given that it's a slightly narrow waterline and basically no ballast weight at all, any shelter would have to be extremely minimal or it'll be subject to exactly the problem JAD describes: I would think any more than fifty pounds of superstructure would make it pretty tender and rolly.

Funny to think of professionals designing the hull and the cabin separately. That would make me incredibly nervous. In fact I'm often surprised how haphazard some boat design seems to be... particularly considering how so many yachts these days are a hull with a small apartment block on top.

I'm sure JAD has seen this video but I don't know how well known it is among the general public. Apparently there were a number of factors here, but when I see these extremely tall yachts without a ton of draft and ballast they just seem prone to this kind of thing to me.

Oops. :-)

You think about how fanatical racing sailors are about saving weight in the mast and rigging, and then you look at a superstructure like that......

More better;-)

[OlongJohnson]

This one was built an island north from @Borderland. I always kinda wondered about that superstructure, but I guess it worked OK.