The footwell, the deck, and the 5/16" mystery

 We've had a couple of mild weekends and I finally got the itch to work on Skidbladnir, so I pulled him out into the sunlight and blocked him up to dust off the plans and assess where we were at when we last left off. I think I spent half the day running back and forth to the garage asking T if he remembered if we had done this or that.

Harriet likes the boat, but would rather eat bugs than help epoxy.

It turns out we had left off right at the cusp of being able to put the deck on. The cleats had been glued to the footwell and they had been epoxied and sanded. The deck had been epoxied, sanded, and the bulkheads and supports had all been traced. 

One last view before it all gets buttoned up

 However, we had some issues with the last couple of feet of the hull, just forward of the transom looking a little flat. T had previously rigged a little C shaped piece of wood with some screws that we could use to draw the sides of the boat in or out. Ultimately we ended up not using it because that upper side is pretty free to move at this point and really wasn't affecting the shape lower down. 

Where we did have an issue is the width of the boat where it hits the front end of the cradle. The aft end sits snug against the cradle but the front had drawn away a little. We used a clamp on either side of the boat to force the hull a little wider.

We had to clamp both sides. It looks exaggerated at the top of the hull, but it pulls the lower parts out just enough to great a nice fair curve for the deck.

 

Some 12" wide pieces of OSB force the deck to center over the footwell

Previously we had taken the two pieces of the deck and made sure that they matched so that when they were glued in place we would be forcing the boat into a symmetrical shape. With a little bit of fussing and adjusting of the clamps on either side I was able to lay the pieces of the deck in and have a nice fit all the way down the side of the hull.........except for at the bottom.

For the last foot or so the hull seemed to flare away from the deck until at the very back of the boat there is a 5/16" gap on both sides. I checked everything I could think of, checking the square of the footwell, making sure the diagonals matched on the deck, double checking the deck was symmetrical. 

To add insult to injury there was a 5/16" gap between deck and the transom at the port and starboard corners, but it touched at the footwell. 

View of the port transom corner. Footwell at top of image.

 After a fair amount of sleuthing I think there are two causes for these gaps. 

1) The transom is bowed about 3/8" from outer edge of hull to the middle of the footwell. We must have unconsciously compensated for this in the footwell, because it fit easily and did not put excessive pressure on the centerboard bulkhead.

3/8" gap between by straight edge and the center of the transom

2) We did not shave enough of an angle onto the transom edge when we were assembling the boat. I'm also of the opinion that the transom my be a little wide overall, but all the other hull panels fit nicely so it doesn't quite bear up that hypothesis. However, 5/16" is just about the thickness of the hull panels. 

We did not opt to to fix either of these issues. Both of them are entombed in glass and fixed by large structural fillets on the interior of the boat. It would be very destructive to try and fix either. At the end of the day a convex transom probably won't affect how the boat sails. As to the other, if we end up with a flat spot or a flare at the back of the boat, we can always fair that out when we flip the boat over.

The actual epoxy work went quite smoothly. I made a mess, spilled vinegar in the boat, and initially made my putty too thick. I also forgot to pre-drill the cleats underneath the deck panels until I realized I had split a cleat (gahh!). About 2/3s were pre-drilled and I made sure that all of the cleats I could reach inside the cabin area were un-split or repaired in the two instances where I split a cleat, though I fear a little for what I'll find inside the watertight compartments when we cut them open for the bowmar hatches.

All screwed in place.

 

On a last note, I did not fillet the footwell yet. We will do this later when we actually glass the deck to create a better bond between the materials and to reduce the amount of sanding.

Return of Skidbladnir

I just looked at my last post and saw that it has been three years since we last worked on poor Skidbladnir. I'm sure there was a point at which the poor boat despaired of ever feeling the water under its keel.

But here we are, three years later, ready to pick up where we left off. And a tumultuous three years its been. We bought a house, got married, started and finished grad school, and are finally settled back down to living like normal people. So you'll have to forgive us for the long hiatus, but we had some things to do.

The light at the end of the tunnel.

Now on to Skidny....

The boat has a new home here at our house. Before, we had it crammed into our dilapidated little 2 car garage. Now Skidny has a whole RV carport (almost) to itself. It's not as wide, and nor is it weather-tight, but we closed off the sides and that keeps the driving rain out. T is much happier, because now he doesn't have to share his shop with the boat. It's a much better setup for building because all the messy glass work stays outside and all the itchy fiberglass dust we generate won't linger in the shop for weeks.

The carport itself was probably the best piece of sheer dumb luck. We were doing our first walk-around of the property through the hip high grass and my mom tripped right over it. Apparently, someone had bought, and then forgotten a whole, 40 ft long 12' tall carport out there!!

And that has been Skidny's home for the last two years. When we finally pulled the boat out, it appeared that the feral cats had been marking the inside, so we had a lot of cleaning to do and there may be a couple areas in the front storage compartment we need to repaint, because the cat pee stained the paint (sigh), but I suppose that's what we get for waiting so long.

Before cleaning and unpacking. You can see the bracing and stabilization we had in place for moving. Also at the bottom of the picture, you can see the foam we cut out for the rear flotation compartment. This foam is not mentioned in the book, but is shown in the drawings.

A little bit of soapy water and some sunshine and it looks just like we left it, better actually, because we never saw the cabin sole out in the sun before, and it looks pretty stunning.

When we moved we put the Pocketship cradle on castors so that we could roll it onto the trailer we rented to transport. The first set of castors were pretty crummy and collapsed, so T has been slowly adding and tinkering with the setup. We finally having something that allows us to roll the boat around easily and then shim it up for when we need it stationary for working. It's not perfect, but it is a lot better and the cradle still seems to be dimensionally stable.

We stabilized the cradle with extra plywood/OSB plates and created an offset castor setup using 2x6s that extend longitudinally down the port and starboard sides. This allowed us to use some pretty heavy duty castors without significantly changing the working height of the cradle.

T adding extra bracing to the castor system.

This weekend I unpacked the last two boxes we had left from moving, when I unpacked all our wood flour and fillers and brushes and squeegees and gloves. They now have a home right next to Skidbladnir. I don't have the camera set up yet, but that's coming soon, we just have to figure out how to place it somewhere reasonably accessible and then we'll be back to capturing the time lapse build.

And now its time to build.

Cabin Sole: Part I

Out of all the things we have done so far on this boat, the cabin sole has been the most finicky.
It has been tricky and dusty and mildly frustrating, but mostly just finicky.
We spent well of the 'day of work' estimated by the Pocketship manual and have thus far spent two weekends and another trip to the wood store just getting the basic layout done.
However, having given it the attention it deserves has yielded a beautiful sole with an even symmetrical curvature.

Looking good! Now time for a mile of roundovers and some Polyurethane.

The floor is pretty hard on the knees. The pillows are definitely worth it.

However, there were quite a few stumbling blocks in our way.

NOT ENOUGH WOOD! (We needed approximately another 32 board feet to finish the floor)

Beginning with stumbling block #1. We went to check if all the bulkhead cleats were level, using a straightedge, and found that indeed they were not. The cleat on bulkhead 2 was higher than all the others by approximately 7/16". You can see it in this picture below. The horizontal pencil line marks the height of the rest of the bulkheads.

Here is the cleat on bulkhead #2. A little bit higher than it should be.

We checked our dimension again (having pulled them from the plans in order to attach the cleat) and found that they were correct.
We are not entirely sure what happened, all of the bulkheads were snug with bottom panels of the boat and we followed the dimension in the drawings.
My guess is that somehow our cleat ended up in the wrong spot since all the rest ended up at the same height as each other.
If I had to do it again I'd put that cleat on after placing the center bulkheads.

There were two possible solutions....We could either make the front cleat shorter by grinding/using a router/whatever methods we could figure out OR we could raise the rest of the cleats using a little piece of wood.
As you can see we chose to raise the rest of the cleats by 7/16". It ended up being a very tidy solution. We glued them down using some neat epoxy with the fast hardener, then covered the boat with some plastic and put a heater in there to force a faster cure.
1 hour later and we were on our way.

Nice and neat... You can see the extra bit of cleat glue on top of the old.

Another view of the extra cleats. It actually looks intentional!

Stumbling block #2 was the wood itself.
We went for a very vivid looking cabin sole and decided to use Tennessee Red Cedar, sometimes also called Eastern Red Cedar.

Some of the beautiful purple patterning in the wood we bought. We are hoping that a UV protective coating will help preserve the beautiful color.

Unfortunately it only comes in 8 ft lengths. Alas, the Pocketship is 9 ft long in the sole.
For the two boards flanking the centerboard trunk we ended up just butting two pieces and creating a splice plate underneath. The result isn't our favorite, but it does blend in with the floor finished.

This is where our splice plate will go underneath. Note the slight warping of the boards.

Our other solution was to scarf a shorter piece onto the 8 ft lengths to create a board that would span the whole way. We kept the scarf towards the rear end of the boat so that it would be hidden under the footwell and deck. This works a bit better because the board is still able to span the entire way without needing some little splice plate.

A pair of unsanded scarf joints with a shim above. Notice that our boards are two different widths. We used an alternating 3 1/2" to 2 1/2" plank layout because of the widths our raw lumber came in.

Stumbling block #2A (perhaps)
Tennessee red cedar is not the most stable of woods and as we started ripping it down we began to realize that there were some definite warping issues. In the middle it was easy, we just used shims and forced the pieces to the 1/8" gap required, but at the ends of the curved pieces where the boards float we will need to do something to stabilize the gaps.

A smidge of warping can be seen here, but also note the sharp edges. We are still trying to figure out how to treat these so they don't snag on us and our gear.

Putty and Guide Coat

Where did I leave off?
It's amazing how fast things change on a little boat like this, and yet, when you look at her nothing seems to have changed at all.

I'm in the middle of processing several thousand photos into video from the past two weekends. I fear that when I finish all these videos that the full build will take upwards of an hour to watch....not really a youtube friendly video haha.

I left off with the application of putty to the interior of the boat....

We let that fluffy fairing putty dry and then I brought home some guide coat from work. Guide coat is great stuff. It's typically an automotive product (I think) and comes in several colors. It's basically a very thin spray paint.
What makes it so fantastic is that you spray it on, and then, when you sand it remains in all the low spots and gets sanded off all the high spots so that you know where to add more putty and what need to be sanded down.
You can also draw lines with a pencil or even go with a light misting of real spray paint if you can't get your hands on guide coat.

Also, we only put putty in the cabin where you will be able to see it. We didn't bother sanding under the floor boards (yet) and we aren't too concerned about the area behind bulkhead 2.

For all this putty work we haven't been using the MAS epoxy. T brought home some leftovers of this nasty industrial epoxy that we used on a really big project at work and we used that for all the putty. The stuff smells horrendous and has more safety warnings on it than a toxic waste dump, but it did work pretty well. Its a bit thinner than the MAS and takes much longer to cure completely but thankfully it did the job.
P.S. This epoxy is why our putty turned out so white... The MAS cures a little yellow, but this epoxy cures almost clear/greenish. (in case you were wondering)

You can see the guide coat as dark spots at the top of the putty

Back to Work

Spring is here and its time to get back out and work on old Skidbladnir.

We spent the winter dreading the next step in the process.....sanding the interior of the boat. It just seemed like such a monumental and miserable task. Like they say in the book, there really do seem to be acres of interior.

We finally talked over our strategy and settled again on a 'strategic'/efficient method. We had some lumps and bumps and in some places our epoxy coats were a little thin and the weave was still visible. I think this is because we did most of our laminating at 90 degrees and the stuff ran quite a bit. With this in mind we decided to do a very very mild sanding job. Rather than have to patch a bunch of stuff and possibly mess with the structural integrity we decided just to knock the lumps off the top of the epoxy and build up using putty to fair the inside of the boat.

We were so dreading sanding and it took us all of maybe a half hour. We also strategically decided that anything hidden was not worth sanding a whole bunch so we focused specifically on the exposed areas and those above the floor level. Everything else will just get a nice scuff with some scotch-brite just before we paint.

We sanded with 80 and then went back and scuffed all the glossy spots with scotch-brite to give it some bite. From there we went on the fairing putty.
I brought home some Q-Cel and Cab-o-Sil from work so we could make a nice lightweight sand-able putty. T mixed it to the consistency of a very light frosting and we spread it on with drywall trowels. T estimated the ratio of Q-Cel to Cab-o-Sil at somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1 leaning towards a little more Q-Cel and and little less Cab-o-Sil

We did not do a beautiful job, but we did one coat, waited 24 hrs (in a cold garage this meant that the epoxy was just a tad tacky the next day) and reapplied. At this point we wanted as smooth as possible an application, but if its not perfect we can always sand and add more. The next step will be the tedious application of sanding and guide coat until we have a beautiful smooth surface on the interior of the boat. When we put the roof on and flip the boat we will have to go through the whole process again (sigh).

As a last note.... being housebound and waiting for the cold and the rain to stop T decided to build a mini Pocketship. I scaled the plywood layout from the study plans and printed them on 11x17s at work and then he cut them out from airplane balsa. It was almost comical how fast the little balsa hull went together compared to the full sized hull.

12" ish long pocketship

Here's some of the lamination video from the fall that I never got around to processing combined with the segments from the last couple days showing putty.

An End to Winter (and Rain)

It has been a long wet winter out here in California. It feels like weeks since I've seen the sun, but lately the weather has been lightening up a little and drying out a bit. We finally feel like we can get back out to the garage and work on the boat without either freezing or getting soggy.

We rent an old house with a detached garage and the landlord isn't too invested in the garage (both good and bad for us). It has given us a lot of latitude to make the garage into a proper workshop which is excellent. The downside is that the roof is probably 25 years overdue to be replaced. The landlord has no intention of replacing it so we've had to deal with all the mess from the rainy winter. The shingles constantly shed little rocks everywhere and if you turn off the lights there's a constellation of tiny holes in the roof. The previous shingles(old wooden ones underneath the asphalt shingles) weep water in and drip it in odd locations around the garage.

Add a record rainy season and you have a recipe for a very very frustrating winter. We were catching water in buckets all over the garage but it just became too much. It was leaking into all the woodworking tools and getting everywhere.

T was mad because the rain was leaking all over his expensive tools, pretty much leaking everywhere except over the boat. It was rather ironic that the rain fell over everything except the one thing meant to come in contact with water.

T finally decided that the only solution was to cover the roof in heavy duty plastic and staple it down. The roof is half rotten in more that a few places, so to get up there and staple down all this plastic was a tricky endeavor. It looks tacky, but it works! The only problem was that it caused the water to weep down the wall on one side of the garage, but there was no more leaking on the tools.

Tacky!!!!

I think the rain was actually leaking up from the slab at some points and it puddled in the area where we were keeping the cel-o-fil and wood flour, getting the boxes all wet. Thankfully all that stuff is in plastic bags so no harm done. It did however get our footwell piece wet and caused some staining and mold which is crappy.

Footwell water stains

Water leaking up from the slab and getting our precious wood pieces wet.

Time Lapse Build

It's pretty amazing how many Pocketship blogs there are out there and how much fantastic information there is on each one about building the Pocketship.

However, there's one thing I really love about long projects that the Pocketship hasn't yet experienced and that is a TIMELAPSE of the build! As you'll see here (minus a few little lapses), we've managed to do a pretty good job of documenting our progress so far. The goal is to complete a video documenting the entire build from start to finish.

The setup is pretty simple. As you can see, I've built a little box for the camera to sit in and that gets pinned in place in the rafters. There's molded padding inside the box so even if you have to take the camera out to change the batteries or pull the photos off you can still put it back in the same place. Seems pretty good so far.

The camera gets hooked up to a cheap little timer that I ordered off Amazon and this forces the camera to take a picture every minute (or as often as you would like). With a few tweaks to the camera settings there's no need to focus or change the shutter, just set it and ignore (or forget entirely overnight...oops).

I don't yet have the latest batch processed and up but this is our progress so far. There's no sound and barely any processing, but if you can excuse the roughness it is kind of fun to see the boat come together. I'll keep updating this as we go.