6 month catch up

In starting this blog my intention was to give folks the encouragement to start their own project and perhaps avoid a mistake or three that I have made along the way.  Not keeping up the blog means that a good deal of the latter intention is lost for the ages.  I have quite a few pictures, but the reality is that a many learnings big and small I meant to capture and write about are no longer part of my detailed knowledge.  None-the-less I will take a stab at capturing the high and low points of the past 6 months effort.  A few things were painful enough to lodge in my long term memory.

This is a picture of Eel Pond in Woods Hole.  My Grady is on the dock way to the right in the back ground in front of the Marine Resources Center.  Woods Hole is a fantastical place to spend the Summer and we are lucky enough to not only have a boat, but a cottage as well.  So though not much time was spent on the build during the Summer, the time was well spent on boats and being on the water.

I ordered Dynel cloth from Jamestown.  I forgot how much, but it wasn't enough.  I had to go back over the Christmas break and buy a few more yards.  I chose Dynel because that is what Doug Hylan used.  The stuff is tough.  Sanding was a bear.  One think I was not keen on though was the hydrophobicity of the cloth.  It was very difficult to get all the bubble out from underneath the cloth after I layed it down on the hull.  I read and watched several videos and articles.  One completely submerged the cloth in a huge tray before applying.  I don't have that kind of space and am way too cheap to make enough excess epoxy to first submerge the cloth and then apply.  I also was always working alone and so the soaking method didn't really appeal.  We shall see if I was shortsighted in saving on materials and applying the cloth and then wetting through.  There are definitely teeny bubbles in spots, but I suspect this would be true no matter the method.  I'm not worried.  Laying the cloth took a lot more time than I expected.  I worked with small batches of epoxy - about 200 mls I suspect.  When it got cold, I put the metal cans on a hotplate I liberated from the lab many years ago.  The added fluidity of the warmed up epoxy definitely made for easier and quicker pumping and I'm sure improved my epoxy to hardener ratio accuracy.  And I only left the hot plate on by mistake one long afternoon.  I wasn't overly careful about the corners, as you can see from the pic above and aimed to beef up the corners with a few overlays of cloth and epoxy.

Here I have the bottom of the hull covered.  I decided to put the keel on *after* covering the bottom.  I like the notion that the keel can be repaired and the hull integrity essentially maintained.  If I ever need to do this I have really screwed up though, eh?  I also laid out the cloth so that I would get an overlap of cloth at the chine.  This was intentional as I think the chine is the place most likely to get dinged by a rock in the Hole.  The amount of overlap increases dramatically in the forward most third of the hull.  It's unsightly and I could have cut it back, but that would not be consistent with sloppy copy etiquette and a desire to trade a bit more weight for a stouter exterior.  My Fein vacuum got a workout throughout all this work.  I was faithful in wearing a mask and have not had any issues with dust in the lungs.  I have taken several hours throughout the project to thoroughly vacuum the floor and any other surface where the dust accumulates.

Sadly I must include one of my Dynel goofs.  Near the stem I ran out of time -- I think we had a swim meet or something came up -- while I was laying and wetting the cloth.  I figured I would be able to pick up where I left off.  Wrong.   Way wrong.  The edge was a wreck and when I did finally finish all the way to the stem I was left with a section that was not adhering to the boat.  So I had to sand/grind it off and do some repair work.  Not the worst task, but I wish I had pressed on and finished the job all the way to the stem.  Oh well.

One tricky task that I did not document or write about was getting the bottom of the hog flat before attaching the keel.  In several spots my plywood pieces and hog did not come together all that firmly.  I definitely could have done a better job, but I have neither the patience or frankly the skill to have all the pieces intersect consistently well. There are a lot of intersecting angles.  Oversanding the hog in a couple of spots didn't help.  I filled in the low spots with some thickened epoxy and took off the high spots with my belt sander.  I can't imagine doing this kind of work without the miracle properties of plastic.

At this point most of the hull has been covered in Dynel.  There were a couple of spots that I had to go back and cover with some shorter, custom-cut pieces of cloth.  Lots of sanding.  And then more sanding.  Did I mention I spent hours sanding?  I used several scrap pieces of bamboo flooring to fashion a long, 3' sanding block and added 60 grit paper with contact cement to get the inner stem plane sufficiently flat.  Worked well.

At this stage I needed to go find some wood for the keel.  I discovered Downes and Reader in nearby Stoughton Mass and bought a few pieces of 8 quarter mahogany.  What an amazing place.  I can't believe I have been working with hardwoods for 20+ years and never made my way there.  I can't wait to go back.  I had to glue up two pieces to get to an appropriate length for the keel.  I think they had longer pieces, but I wasn't comfortable transporting anything too long in the 8' bed of my pickup truck.  I think I cut this piece on the bandsaw, but don't really remember.  My table saw is inoperable during the build.  I could have used white oak here.  They had plenty of oak and all kinds of other species.  Went with mahogany in the end because all the other exterior pieces are mahogany.

I decided to use my joiner hand plane rather than the 8" Delta because I need the exercise and it just seemed like the way to go.  It didn't take too long and I liked the results.  Don't need no noisy Delta.

I countersunk a series of holes every 18 inches (I think) in the keel and attached the whole thing with 2" #14 (?) silico-bronze screws right into the hog.  I considered through bolting but decided that screws and epoxy were sufficient to keep the keel on.  It's at this stage of the build that the plans Doug supplies start to get thin and the photographs ever farther apart in the accomplishment stages.  I emailed Doug about attaching the keels and whether I needed through bolts and he suggested that screws and epoxy should be fine.  There are almost no pictures of the prep and layout of the interior of the boat in the files that Doug provides.  Thankfully there is at least one very thorough blog detailing high quality (at least much higher than mine) work on a Doug Hylan design.  A big shout out and thanks to the group in Brooklyn for sharing their excellent work and maintaining a wonderful blog.  I have learned a ton and approach the work on the insides of my build with much more confidence than I would otherwise.

I attached the stem with three through bolts.  I used stainless as silica bronze was going to get ridiculously expensive and wasteful if I got them at Jamestown, as they have minimum numbers of pieces for these long bolts and I only needed one each of 3 lengths.

Doh!

OK...now that I've got that out, I can tell you that the little piece of mahogany on the top (destined to be the bottom) of the outer stem in the picture below is because I glued the outer stem on 1 inch too low.  I had fashioned a small piece of oak I had lying around as a template for the base of the keel and it had a piece missing on the end.   I forgot about that cut off end when I lined up the outer stem and so ended up an inch too low.  So I decided to add the little piece on the end to make up the difference.  There are 3 screws and some epoxy to hold it in place.  Seems solid.

The lower picture shows how I had to apply a fillet to get the whole outer stem looking like it should.  A little epoxy and a lot of embarrassment.

I have the keel attached above and have just filled in all the holes with thick epoxy.  The lower picture of the shop floor was taken inadvertently, but I think it captures well what the shop looks like in the heat of the action, so I include it here.  

I added the outer rails one side at a time.  Thankfully I have a lot of clamps.

I put a layer of dynel over the keel and feathered it out about 6 inches on either side.  I put a second coat of epoxy over the whole exterior.  Lots of sanding. Filleting.  More sanding.  More filleting. etc.  I spend a good month doing this.

I added a spray rail that I fashioned out of some left over fir.  I followed the chine back a few feet.  The pictures that Doug provides have the boat without and with the spray rail.  On the 23' version this piece follows the entire chine.  The plans are sketchy, or at least that is my memory, on the spray rail for the PC18.  I love that I can modify this if need be in the future

Then I put on two coats of epoxy primer.  The primer showed where I had done a poor job filleting, but decided to live with the Sloppy Copy result.

Got this at Jamestown.  Went on very easily with a roller.  This amount got me two coats.  Easily.

The view from the yard looking into the shop.

Mid January -- ready to flip.  Took until early February.