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.