54.) My First Boat Project

Here is a photo of the first boat I ever, um, assembled. It was supposed to be a battleship and I think I thought at the time that it was going to turn out a bit larger. It was never going to make it out of my grandparent's yard, so I didn't worry too much about making it watertight.  <smile>

53.) My Shipwright Hero

The Internet has given rise to some useful how-to videos (it's a whole new genre; you can learn how to do almost anything)--and some really bad ones.  I won't go into detail about the terrible ones other than to say cave inspectoris: there are a lot of numbskulls out there who may think they are being helpful but who do NOT know what they are talking about.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is a video series featuring Master Shipwright Louis Sauzedde sponsored by Jamestown Distributors.  These short clips show effective, and often highly imaginative, techniques.  Louis is eloquent in explaining his approach, though he does get a little technical at times. The only defect in them I've come across: Louis sometimes has to plug Jamestown's Total Boat line of products. At least it's a very good line of products; no one will be harmed as a result.  And if that's what it took to make this possible, I suppose it was worth it.  It's not as though the relationship between the videos and the product placement isn't fairly obvious.

52.) Repair Finished

Looks pretty good.  Note how the mahogany sanded out to a fairly uniform color compared to the photo in post #46.

Wish I could say I can now move on to the next phase, but I have found some other planks with air underneath them. I won't waste anyone's time by documenting each of these. But I have at least three more days of sanding off and installing new planks. I wish I had been much more careful about how I put them in in the first place.

51.) An Unvarnished Look at Life in the Day of a Woodworker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfJ7LQn8kp8

50.) Restoration Under Repair

The repair to my planking puck up is progressing. I am happy with the way this latest vacuum bag worked. The epoxy bleed out between the strips shows I am getting nice pressure and that the planks are making contact all of the way down the hull. The pressure needle on the pump is another good indication of a strong vacuum. So is the sound the pump makes: the pitch rises noticeably once the pump starts straining to remove air.

Four planks today. Four more tomorrow. The bag should stay on until the epoxy cures, so the pump will run all night. Final note: After my initial experience with a vacuum bag, I now use a stethoscope to check all of the way around for leaks. One of my shop mates asked me if I could give him a flu shot.

49.) Getting to the Point

In a recent post, I talked about the fun of learning. Sometimes it applies to things I thought I already knew...such as how to draw a pencil line.

Are you laughing?   Perhaps you're thinking: "He's been on this Earth how long? And he just learned how to draw a pencil line?"

Well, ah, yeah...true.  And I am going to tell you about it.

The first step is fairly obvious: make sure you have a nice sharp point.  I have a cool little doodad that helps me with this.  It's called, appropriately, a "Perfect Pencil" and it's made by Faber-Castell, a German company that has been making pencils since 1761.  Apparently, it took a long time to figure out how to produce a perfect one.

The best part of the Perfect Pencil is a cap that both protects the tip of the pencil as well as an enclosed sharpener.  So long as you keep it attached to your pencil, you have no excuse not to use it. (Sometimes, when you are in the middle of something, it's hard to drop what you are doing and go across the shop to sharpen a dull tip. You talk yourself into the idea that the dull point is good enough, or maybe you pick at it with a finger nail or rub it a few times on whatever's handy--like your jeans.)

The Perfect Pencil allows you to get around this sort of lazy thinking.  Here are some photos of mine:

Once you have a sharp pencil, the key to drawing a good line is to move the pencil in one direction only. Don't go back and forth or retrace the line--even if you've seen a carpenter or handyman do it this way.  Just one smooth stroke. That's it.

If the line is longer than six inches or so, you need to be a little more acrobatic. Gradually twist the pencil in your hand as you draw the line. This will allow the pencil to self sharpen and maintain a nice thin line.  (Another option for the rotationally challenged: auto pencil.)

Finally, if you are not happy with your line for some reason, remove it completely with the eraser or with sandpaper.  Don't draw a second or third line thinking you'll remember which one is correct.

This technique really helped me when I was making the planks.  Another little thing I picked up is that when you are planing to a line, it really helps to hold the piece or get into a position where you can see the bottom of the plane.  The straight sole of the plane provides a better reference than just looking at the pencil line alone, allowing you see exactly how much further you need to go. Maybe this photo will help show what I am talking about:

Finally, I acknowledge to all the woodworkers out there that a pencil line itself is far from perfect. For really fine work, you need to use a marking knife to draw your lines.  But that's another blog post.

48.) Shop Fun

It's not all serious business in our shop.

A fallen tree in the parking lot becomes fuel for our fireplace.

Above: Satan's head visits our paint spray room.  Below: Testing a mirror frame for strength.

47.) More than 2,000 Page Views?

That's what the blog dashboard says. Holy crap. Someone out there must actually be reading this.

46.) By The Time I Get Really Good At Planking....

....It will be time to move on to something I don't know how to do very well.

That's one of the frustrations...and, frankly, joys of a project like this. At least for someone with an attention deficit order like me. (Who says it's a disorder?) The single greatest pleasure I get from this restoration effort is the chance to learn new things. In fact, if nothing else came of it (the boat plummets to the depths upon launch), it still will have been worth the trouble just because learning new stuff is so stimulating.

And one stuff I have learned is how to make and install planks. Will I ever make and install planks again? Who knows! Who cares! It was fun teaching myself how to do it...and watching myself get better and better at it as I went along--momentary setbacks notwithstanding.

Speaking of setbacks, the Big Redo is coming along nicely. Here's a photo of where things stand now:

I'm pleased.  I haven't epoxied any of the strakes in place yet, but the fit between them is getting tighter and tighter. The pieces should blend together nicely once they are all sanded.

In fact, the photo above is a good illustration of the impact of oxygen on wood. The mahogany planks were all cut from the same few boards. The difference between them has everything to do with how recently each one has been sanded or milled. The darkest one is from the top of a board and hasn't been sanded at all. The lighter ones have been sanded more recently. Some also may have had more oxygen exposure than others depending on where they sat in the pile.

This is a reason why it can be super important to apply finish coats to wood shortly after sanding. Even 24 hours of oxygen exposure can make a noticeable difference in the appearance of the wood.  A finish will also adhere better to freshly sanded wood.  See...the stuff you can learn is limitless!

45.) If It's Possible to Gain Wisdom from Stupidity, Then I'm Going to be One Wise Fellow

One principle behind this blog is transparency. I have to say, though, that I wasn't all that eager to make this particular disclosure: I messed up.  Big Time.  And it's going to take me at least a couple of weeks to undo the mistake.

If you've followed my blog to this point, you might remember the issues I had attempting to vacuum-bag new planks to the hull. The first time I tried it, there were leaks in the bag I couldn't plug. I tried to compensate for the lack of a strong vacuum by placing sandbags into the boat to hold the planks down.  I think I may have even patted myself on the back for a good recovery.

Wrong.*

While finish sanding the planks last week, I decided to test the quality of the bond throughout the hull by repeatedly pressing the handle of a wooden screw driver down hard every six inches or so. When I got to the spot where the vacuum bag failed, I heard a sound.  A snap, a crackle and a pop.  It was barely perceptible, but it was deafening nonetheless. It signified an air pocket between the top plank and the hull--and therefore, no bond.  "I'll have to fix this spot," I thought.

But then I heard the same snap, crackle and pop on the next plank....and the next one, and the next one and the next one.

DRAT! (I might have uttered a different word in real time.)

The discovery meant I would have to remove a large area of planking--mostly by sanding the planks off, but also by chiseling a lot of very precise lines so another set of planks could be added. I was bummed--partly just because I had already started looking forward to the next phase of the project.  I also felt lousy because I realized that the sandbag remedy was a mistake. What I should have done the moment I realize the vacuum was going to suck (or not suck, depending on how you look at it), was immediately removed the planking before the epoxy dried and thrown the whole mess away.  That would have cost me a lost day at most, not a lost few weeks.

But there's no other option now.  If I don't stop to fix the planks, I will cause myself even bigger problems down the road. There's no easier way to screw up something like this than piling one mistake on top another.

Oh well, at least I'll learn how to do plank repair and will further polish my chisel technique. There's going to be a lot of chiseling. The photo below shows what the disaster area looks like now that I have removed most of the the planking that wasn't adhering as well as it could.

*This word is a paragraph unto itself because I want to emphasize it. 

44.) Making Predictions

.....is a questionable business, especially when they are about the future.  Which is why I should not have boasted in a recent post that I was going to be able to sand all the planks without burning through in any spots.  Wrong!

As it turned out, I burned through (or almost all of the way) in three different places.

So the past few days have been dedicated to repairs: removing a section of the plank with chisels, re-sanding and patching the surface, and then cutting out and epoxying a patch in place.  I've completed one, the largest of the three, with two still in progress.

I also am not fully finished sanding all of the interior planking. But I am not going to further jinx myself by saying there won't be any more instances of burn through.

43.) The Nick of Time

In my last post, I referred briefly to Wooden Boat magazine's "Launchings and Relaunchings" section. This usually runs three or four pages and is full of snapshots of completed projects, with the grinning boat owner often included. Each photo is usually accompanied by a little bit of text explaining the project.

I save back issues of the magazine because I never know when I might want to refer to an article.  But to illustrate a point, I'd like to quote a few things from "Launchings and Relaunchings" in an issue I picked at random (March/April 2014).  Here goes:

"Though he began the project in 1999 and didn't launch until last year, Jay estimates he only spent about three-and-a-half years building his boat...."

"More than a dozen years ago, David Smith started building Gratitude...."

"Working mostly alone over more years than he cares to admit, John Di Dio built Ghost...."

"Jeffrey spent five years building the boat from native white oak, white ash....."

42.) Planking ComPLETE. Morale Gets Boost

One of the guys in our professional woodworking shop asked me a rather insulting question the other day: "Does your client ever complain about how long the boat project is taking?"

My response: "Yes, HE does--every night while I am lying in bed in the dark. That's because HE is me."

Undertaking a project like this can be super frustrating even without any heckling from the peanut gallery. There already have been many times when I wondered whether I was in my right mind to attempt this at all.

A lot of people who get excited about boat restoration give up midstream, when they realize after a year or two that they still have a year or two left. Hearing about these surrenders used to surprise me. Now I am surprised every time I open Wooden Boat magazine and see how many people actually hung on until the end.

For me, the only way to get through this type of marathon (while retaining what I define as sanity), is to set short-term achievable goals and to take them one at a time. For the past several weeks, my focus has been on planking the interior of the boat. And now that I have finished that part of the job, I'll take a moment to pat myself on the back of my Jackson Hole t-shirt for this small victory.  

Pause.

Whoopie! Hooray!

Pause.

This approach, along with my new Beats headphones, helps me keep up my morale.  

Now for the photographic proof:

Ok, I still have some sanding to do. And I need to fill a few small gaps between the planks with epoxy. But I am pretty pleased that I can begin to move on to a new phase of the restoration.

I'm also super glad I made the planks extra thick because they needed even more sanding than I expected. I didn't actually burn through in any spots but I came dangerously close in two small places.

When I showed my wife the middle picture above on my iPhone, she said: "Oh, what a nice wooden spoon!"  I didn't know what to think of that at first, but I choose to believe she was complimenting the beautiful mahogany, the symmetrical shape of the IC, and my fine craftsmanship. Does sort of look like a spoon, though.

Next milestones:  

1.) Completing the repair of the keelson and then strengthening it.

2.) Sheathing the interior of the boat with a transparent layer of fiberglass and epoxy.

3.) Building and installing the rails and decks

4.) Making and installing the major interior components: bulkhead, centerboard trunk, partners, and rear seat.

That order may change, but I'll be proceeding one step at a time.

41.) Planking Putters Ahead

The photo below shows the status of the planking project—about 75% of the way done (though, as you can see, there is a lot of finish sanding yet to do).

This has been a fairly laborious process and one that has increased my respect for the original builders. They had to make and attach five layers of mahogany planks compared to the measly one layer I'm installing.

In my defense, I think it's a bit harder to plank from the inside out than the other way around. The job also would go much faster with two or more sets of hands, but I've stubbornly determined to do every bit of the work on this little crate myself.

The process I've been following is to start in the center of the hull and work my way out to each side. The first plank can go in without any shaping, but each one after that has to be trimmed on at least one side to fit snuggly against its neighbor.

So, to start, I put one plank in position and temporarily clamp/staple it in place. Then I place a second plank alongside the first and scribe a line showing the shape it needs to take for a close fit. Like this:

Below is what the scribed line looks like. It may help to click on the picture to expand it because the edge of my workbench is hard to distinguish from the edge of the plank.

The next step is to bandsaw the plank close to the line. Why not all of the way? Two reasons. The first is that the saw leaves a rough finish that needs to be smoothed. The second is that the scribed line, at least the way I do it (and no matter how many variations I've tried), never ends up a perfect match but always needs fine tuning.

The only way I've discovered to get the right match is to plane the plank close to the scribe line and then hold it in place to see where there are still gaps.  I note where the planks touch and plane down those areas a bit more.  I repeat this process over and over again until all the gaps disappear.  (In some cases, when the curve to be cut on the plank isn't very extensive, I've found it fairly easy to skip the scribing step and just plane the plank by eye).

The photo above show the Lee Nielsen violin maker's plane I have been using for this process. I have it set to shave about 1/200ths inch off with each pass. It takes a lot of passes, but the fit ends up very tight which, for this project, is more a matter of cosmetics than a concern about making the boat watertight. (The reason for this will become obvious later.)

I've settled on installing only five planks at a time because there's almost no way to keep each one from shifting slightly when "gluing" it in. The more planks I install, the more each shift gets magnified from one plank to the next. 

The adhesive is epoxy, applied first to the boat and then to the underside of each plank.  Here's a picture of a section of the hull coated with epoxy and almost ready for the planks, which are laid out near the bow.  I put the epoxy on with a cheap brush with the bristles trimmed more than halfway off. This prevents the sticky epoxy from pulling out too many bristles, which all need to be removed from the surface before the planks are laid in.  I use a very slow drying epoxy to give myself plenty of time to get the job done and I change disposable gloves often to keep from smearing epoxy all over the planks and my tools, though I always seem to end up making a mess anyway. I also try not to let drips of my sweat fall into the epoxy.

The last step before fastening the planks is to mix a second batch of epoxy and stir in glass microfibers. This formula thickens the epoxy to a catsup consistency and helps create a stronger, gap-filling bond.  It must be evened out with a notched trowel like this (the same technique you'd use when laying ceramic tile).

Once all the "glue" is spread out, I lay the planks in and fasten them in place with staples fired through tongue depressors to hold them down firmly and evenly. I've covered the rest of the procedure in my earlier posts on vacuum bagging.

40.) It's Not Art, It's an Ark (A Small One, Anyway)

The photo in my last post was a closeup of the hull ready for more planking.  The way I can tell that I'm finally finished with fairing is when the scratches left by 80 grit paper look even and uniform across the surface, with no shiny spots remaining (which would signify a low spot where the sandpaper hasn't touched the surface.) It took four layers of epoxy mixed with fairing filter and a lot of hand sanding to get to this point. The area up near the port bow still needs more work.

Here's a view from farther away.

This only works if you use a sanding block so that you don't accidentally press the sandpaper into the low spots.  Next is a photo of my new favorite way of hand sanding--using a roll of 3M sticky back sandpaper on each side of a strip of wood.  I peeled back the paper for the photo so it's easier to see what I am talking about.

The picture below shows dry-fitting planks to the port side. (No glue/epoxy yet.) Each plank has to be tapered to fit its neighbor.  I'll show how I do that in the next blog post.  Now, that I've had some practice, I am getting pretty good at it. The seems between the planks are going to be much tighter on the port side than I was able to get them when I started on the starboard side.

39.) Is this Art?

If so, I may need to do this instead of restore boats.  I'll tell you what it is tomorrow.

38.) Fall Back, Regroup and Reorg, Prepare for Battle

Before any of my legions of readers (slight exaggeration intended) send any more sympathy cards to my wife mourning/celebrating my passing, I should probably explain the lack of any recent updates on this blog.

One of the things about boat restoration, at least the way I am doing it, is that it requires a lot of equipment. You need an array of tools for woodworking, for mixing and applying composite materials, and for painting and finishing. You also need supplies of the raw materials for all these activities. And then there's the boat itself, hogging up the prime real estate in the center of the shop.

It's very important to keep all this stuff organized, put away, clean, and fully functional. I am a big believer of the idea of a place for everything and everything in its place.

But around the time of my last post, you would have never guessed that if you happened to stumble upon my shop, which I had unwittingly turned into a stirring monument to either A) Entropy or B) Sheer Sloven Laziness.  I prefer option A but I am sure my mom would have picked B had she seen the place.

So I got to work becoming Mr. Clean (without the earring).  Among other things, I made a nice white oak cabinet for my hand planes and some mahogany dividers for my tool chest.  See photos below.

I also cleaned and sharpened all of my tools so they would be ready to go. I even went so far as to reorganize my sandpaper! It's surprising how much of the stuff you can accumulate working on boats. I have the usual sandpaper box with individual full-size sheets in both regular and wet/dry, in all the standard grits ranging from 40-2,000. I also possess an arsenal of different papers for each of nine different electric or air powered sanders plus a bunch of hand sanders, including one three feet long.  In addition to different grits, these come with different backings like Velcro or adhesive and different hole patterns for different methods of dust extraction.  The grit can also be made of different materials for specific jobs; you don't use the same one to sand wood that you use to sand epoxy and the epoxy type is different still from the one you use on paint. I have a wall chart that helps keep me from losing my mind over this.

One of the reasons I have so many sanders is that I really don't enjoy sanding very much and am always looking for ways to make it easier. To speed things up, I change paper often and try to move fairly quickly from one grit to the next highest one.  If I get really impatient, I can quickly find myself surrounded in a pile of sandpaper boxes, discarded used sandpaper discs, plus two or three or four different sanders, their power cords, and the vacuums I hook them up to.

It was in the middle of one of these Pig-Pen (yes, there's a hyphen in Pig-Pen) episodes that I finally decided that enough was enough and that I needed to stop working on the boat and clean things up before I either injured myself, broke a favorite tool by sitting on it, or accidentally burned the whole shop down.  And just as I made this resolution I stood up and stepped on something and snapped it in half. It was a part for the boat that I had spent days making. Ay Carumba.

So that's what I have been doing. That, and well, um, uh, I also got kind of distracted by the idea of making a "Krenov style" hand plane. It's not finished yet, but here's a picture of mine sitting in front of one made by a guy named Scott Meek, who is probably the best wooden hand plane maker in the U.S.  Yes, I am copying his work for the most part and, yes, mine isn't nearly as good. But, hey, it's my first one! Ya' gotta start somewhere, and if I am going to imitate someone it might as well be Scott who, as he'll be the first to admit, got his start by copying Krenov's planes.  I am guessing my first crack at imitating Shakespeare would fare similarly.

These side journeys are now just about over. I like, totally, promise that my next blog will be about something I did on the IC. It will not be another blog post about why I am not writing more blog posts.

Oh, one last thing, Cosette is now doing very well.  It's been too hot to bring her into the shop as my assistant, but she'll be returning soon in the fall when I expect to back working full throttle on the boat.

37.) Cosette on Shop IR

My small dog who thinks she is a big dog got in a fight with another dog who thinks she is a big dog because she is, in fact, a big dog.  Cosette was the uncontest loser of the scrap and actually lucky to be spared her neck.  Cosette was bruised, both physically and emotionally.  She's been spending extra time at home in recovery time.  I am sure the absence of Cosette's steadying influence on me is what sabotaged the first vacuum bag.  She is a vital member of the team.

36.) Everything is Different, the Second Time Around

Now that's what a proper vacuum bag is supposed to look like. Hooray!

I bravely (or stupidly) attached six planks again this time. But to help slow things down and allow me to be more careful I used West System's extra slow epoxy hardener instead of just the normal slow hardener. The extra slow stuff is made for boatyards in tropical climates, but lately that's just the sort of weather we've been having in New York. It provides a substantially longer "pot life" (when the epoxy is thick in the mixing cup) and takes 24 hours to cure at a constant 72 degrees.

The most important thing I did better this time, basic as it is, was to keep my plank marking system simple so I didn't accidentally apply any epoxy on the wrong side of the planks like last time.  

I also was much more careful with all the materials and about establishing a good seal around the area to be vacuum-bagged. The photos below show the tape and the way it goes on (the fourth side is hidden on the outside of the boat). I still had a few tiny leaks (which is all it takes to mess up a vacuum), but they were fairly easy to plug.

The super slow epoxy also gave ample time to line up the planks properly and staple them down. I still found it impossible to get them absolutely perfect, with no gap at all, but I came pretty close. I am guessing I will have figured out how to do it just right by the time I install the last plank (which of course will tempt me to pull them all out and start all over again—an urge I hope to vigorously resist). Stapling was all that was used to hold the planks together for gluing when the boat was first built.

I am not going to show all of the steps involved with shaping and vacuum bagging in this post because I have to repeat the process four to six more times (depending on how brave I get) to finish the hull. That will give me more opportunity to explain this process in greater detail. I also wanted to focus on avoiding a repeat vacuum bag disaster, so I also left the iPhone on the sidelines for this go around.

The vacuum pump is still running in the shop as I write this. It will need to stay on for at least 24 hours to maintain the seal that is clamping the new planks to the hull. That's much longer than it would usually take using a faster hardener. The risk is that if a leak develops during that time, the vacuum could lose some or all of its pressure and ruin the job.

One thing I am going to do differently in the future is to get a proper suction valve to attach the vacuum hose to the bag. The way I am doing it (with multiple holes cut in the end of the hose that's inside the bag) works okay, but it's hard to get a perfect seal around the place where the hose enters the bag.

35.) How Not to Vacuum Bag

This is not the way a vacuum bagging project is supposed to look. The sandbags are the giveaway; they are a resource to turn to when trying to stave off disaster.

I began this phase of the project excited to finally have begun the process of rebuilding the boat. My shop mates quickly noticed I was up to something unusual, so I also had a curious audience.

Making a vacuum bag is the best method for installing planks on the inside of the boat. Done right, the bag provides a clamping force that distributes pressure evenly. I thought I was being conservative by confining this step to six planks. A professional would try to do the whole hull, or at least half of it, in one shot. As it turned out, though, I should have been even more cautious.

I outlined where each plank would go and I numbered and marked each one. Then I mixed a batch of epoxy and used a two-inch paint roller to spread it first on the hull and then on the underside of the planks. I mixed a second batch of epoxy thickened with a filler and spread that on the hull with a finely notched plastic trowel. (The unthickened first coat seeps into the wood; the thickened mixture provides a paste between the boards and the hull, helping to fill out any hollows and to avoid voids in the laminate.)

Mixing epoxy is a bit like firing a starting pistol. The moment you blend the resin and the hardener, a chemical reaction begins that eventually turns the liquid into a hard-as-steel solid. Heat accelerates the chemical reaction. My shop thermometer showed it was 87 degrees, so I used West System's slow hardener to give myself more time. I figured I had at least an hour, maybe 90 minutes, if I got the mixture out of the pot quickly and spread out on the wood (the curing reaction slows when the epoxy molecules are distributed at greater distances from each other).

I like to think of myself as cool under fire, but for some reason, epoxy always stresses me out more than it should. Feeling under the gun, I sometimes work too frantically. And that's how I made my first mistake.

Midway through applying epoxy to the planks, I misread the markings I had written on the boards and coated the wrong side of three planks. That meant that I had to go back, turn them over, and coat the other side, too. Now I had three super slippery planks that would be difficult to wrestle in place and staple down.

Once that was done (after going through three pairs of disposable gloves), I placed a layer of release fabric (a material that doesn't stick to epoxy) over the planks. Next came a layer of a breather cloth that would enable air to flow within the bag. Last was a thick plastic sheet that would serve as the vacuum bag. I had cut all of these materials to size beforehand. I also had already surrounded three sides of the planking area with a clay-like adhesive. The adhesive is what holds the plastic bag on top of the breather cloth, release fabric, and planks. It creates a seal when air is removed from the bag. In the best of worlds, the resulting vacuum gives you the equivalent of one atmosphere of pressure (more than 2,000 pounds per square foot) spread evenly over the bag,

I initially put down only three sides of the adhesive because the fourth side had to run on top of the planks themselves after they were in place. As soon as I started putting the fourth strip down, I recognized the makings of disaster. The clay refused to stick properly to the three planks with epoxy on the wrong side. I quickly wiped as much off as I could and did my best to try to get the adhesive to adhere.

The last step in vacuum bagging is to run a perforated hose under the plastic bag, attach it to a pump, and start removing air from inside the bag. The bag needs to be leak-free to remove all of the air. When I flipped the switch on the pump, I could hear hissing. A lot of hisssssssssssssssssing, in fact. I had a typhoon of leaks. Most were in the area where the fresh epoxy was keeping the adhesive clay from sticking properly. It's not unusual to have a few leaks at first, but this was way worse than usual.

I spent the next 20 or so minutes frantically trying to plug the holes, using more clay, tape, and plastic. But it was a losing battle. When I only had about 10 minutes left before the epoxy started to "go off" or harden, I got desperate and started running around the shop looking for a solution. At the last minute, I found four 50-pound sandbags and set them down in the area where I was getting the most leaks.  At the very least, I surmised, the sandbags would apply uniform pressure on the wood the same way the vacuum bag was supposed to, though at about a tenth of the force.

But .... I also got lucky: the sandbags greatly reduced the amount of leaking. A decent, but not great, vacuum developed inside the bag. As an added measure, I fastened wood clamps on the top of each plank.

Then I collapsed on my shop stool, exhausted, drenched in sweat, and disappointed. And that's when the ribbing started.

"What do you got going on there, Mr. Boatbuilder?", one of my fellow woodworkers asked as he passed by.

"Preparing for a flood?" remarked another.

"Oh, so that's what a vacuum bag isn't supposed to look like", said a third.

Ha. Ha. Joke's on me.

In coming posts I hope to be able to show that I regained my composure, learned from my mistakes, and executed a much better vacuum-bagging operation.

Below is a photo I took the next morning after I removed the bags and adhesive, sanded the epoxy off the top of the three planks, and did a little filling between the seams. They still need a fairly aggressive hand sanding.  But, in the end, the sandbags did their job. It wasn't a complete disaster.

Note: the red Bessey clamps are holding the hull in the mold. The new planks should help the boat regain some of its designed shape.

34.) A Free Lunch!

Do you love sanding?

No?  Are you sure?  Want to think it over at little more carefully before you reply?

Okay. Alright. I don't love it either. But it is and probably always will be a critical part of boat work. So that's why this humble boat restorer decided to invest four hours of his day today attending a free seminar focused exclusively on the topic of sanding. It was sponsored by Stiles, a Michigan-based machinery company, hosted by a cabinet shop in Greenpoint, and attended by a representative from 3M.

Overall, the session was kind of disappointing. I learned much more about sanding technique several years ago by spending half an hour with Carl at McMichael's Yacht Yard in Mamaroneck. Carl is a real treasure. He transforms sanding into something approaching an art form. He doesn't use machines or sanding blocks, but instead folds a piece of sandpaper carefully in his palm and goes to work, letting his trained hands feel the highs and lows he needs to even out with the paper. He also feels the resistance of the paper as it scratches the surface, information that tells him how close he is to being able to move to a higher grade. He focuses on one small area at a time and doesn't move on to the next until he has the object of his current focus finished. He does amazing work that I can't duplicate in either speed or quality no matter how hard I try. His level of patience and discipline are superhero qualities to me. I'm patient, too, but if sanding were a sport I'd be on the junior farm team and Carl would be on the starting lineup on a pro team. 

I did learn something at the event that I had never heard before that I think is worth passing on. It's this: As soon as it is freshly sanded, wood that's newly exposed to air begins to oxidize. Within 24 to 48 hours, it's composition is affected and starts to change. This matters because it affects the ability of a finish to penetrate the wood fibers, impacting the appearance of a finish (especially a stain, varnish, sealer—or anything transparent) as well as the adhesion of the coating.

The bottom line: don't let 24 hours elapse between the time you finish sanding something (whether it's a mahogany tiller or a hardwood floor) and the first coat of finish. The 3M guy said that cabinet makers who complain about the results they get in the finishing room often end up revealing that they typically complete construction on Friday and begin the finishing process on Monday. Big mistake.

If in doubt, MMM suggest you try the drip test. Put droplets of water on your sanded wood and see if the droplets disperse and penetrate the wood or if they tend to sit intact on the surface. If the latter happens, the oxidation has become a problem and will lead to things like stain blotches on a beautiful piece of hard maple.

A piece of sandpaper rated 36 is not exactly interchangeable with one rated P36.

Another thing I suspected but didn't know for sure is that a regular 220 grit sandpaper is different from P220 paper. The ratings with the P follow the European numbering system, which has been gaining in popularity. They are not radically different, but they are different. (I don't know if that's because Europeans measure the grain count metrically rather than Imperially. I do know that the ratings for U.S.-made sandpaper relates to the number of tiny pieces of crushed rock glued to the paper per square inch. A 220 paper has 380 fewer pieces of rock on it per square inch than a 600 paper.)  There's also some new measurement system I didn't pay much attention to in which the finest paper is rated 1 and everything courser has a correspondingly higher number.   If you want to see how this confusion plays out, click on this link: http://www.mibnet.se/home-improvement/sandpaper-grit-size-comparison-between-european-and-us-standards.html  It might help you get your ps straight, if not your qs.

The final thing I learned is that 3M has developed a new sandpaper that is somewhat revolutionary (in the sanding world at least). It contains a new abrasive made of a ceramic mineral that has two advantages: first, unlike the particles on regular sandpaper, the abrasive is identically sized and shaped; second, the tiny bits of stuff that scratch gradually break down in a controlled manner forming sharp new peaks that keeps the sandpaper working.

From 3M literature: "The secret lies in the revolutionary precision-shaped ceramic grain technology pioneered by 3M. As the triangular shaped grain 

wears, it continuously fractures to form sharp points and edges that 

slice through metal, wear evenly and provide super-long life and 

consistency at any grinding pressure."

The new sandpaper is made of a ceramic mineral and the new brand is something 3M is calling "Cubritron II."  (I have no idea what happened to the first Cubitron).

"This is already a game changer in the metalworking world," the 3M guy declared—and I think that's probably at least mostly true, mind-blowing as it may be. At the moment, the new paper is available only in very rough grits for wood: 36, 60 and 80. But I plan to try to get my hands on some, try it out, and report on the results. There were no free samples at the sanding seminar (I am still shaking my head that I voluntarily went to such an event). But I did get a free roast beef sandwich.

One reason I didn't learn more at the session was that it covered a lot of stuff I already know.  If you have questions about sandpaper, drop me a line and I'll be happy to help.

33.) Multi-tasking

I've got a lot of things going on at once at the moment and this photo shows most of them. On the port side of the boat (right side of the photo), I'm still applying and sanding epoxy fairing compound to prepare for planking. You can tell it hasn't been sanded yet because it turns from dark red-brown to white with sanding. (The color change has the added advantage of helping you to see low spots that aren't scraped by the sandpaper.*) On the starboard side, the fairing is finished and I'm starting to shape mahogany planks to fit into the hull.

The planks don't go in straight, but curve along their sides. That means each has to be individually shaped by hand on one side to fit snugly against its neighbor.

The planks go in at an angle to the layer of planks below. This makes the boat stronger by aligning the grain of the wood in a crisscross pattern.** It also means the planks don't need to bend as much to fit the shape of the hull. That's not a huge deal except for near the bow, where the planks need to bend in multiple directions.

The first plank can have straight edges on two sides. I made the other two using different techniques as an experiment. For one, I used a compass to scribe a line along the edge of the plank and then cut and sanded it to fit. For the other, I used a small brass violin maker's plane (barely visible in the photo) and did most of the work by eye, taking shavings here and there until I got a good fit.

Both methods took about the same amount of time, but I had more fun using the plane. It's good to know both ways of doing it work well because some of the shapes may be more difficult when I get closer to the bow.  I have one more method I may try out on the next plank.

You probably noticed all the popsicle sticks stuck to the planks. I could say that it was a really hot day and I ate a lot of popsicles to stay cool.  But actually they're tongue depressors and I am using them with a pin gun (an air-driven tool that shoots super-skinny headless nails) to temporarily hold the planks down as I shape each one. I'll need to take the planks off again before I can epoxy them in place. My as yet untested theory is that I will be able to break off the tongue depressors and easily remove the pins with a pair of pliers. (This is another technique I made up on my own, but doubt I am the first to think of it.)

Bostitch Pin Nailer

I can't finish the job of patching the big hole in the mast step area until I install the planks. That's because the patch needs to go in on top of the new layer of planking.

The patch is almost complete. Below are a couple of photos of what it looks like. The first shows it from above with it temporarily in position. The second shows the underside of one end of the patch. Note how it is both layered and stepped. The dark lines are epoxy between each layer.  I watched those lines carefully as I sanded the bottom of the patch into a triangular shape, trying to keep them relatively straight fore and aft. The final sanding to fit should remove those lines almost completely.

The patch is also curved fore and aft to match the shape of the hull. To get that arc, I cut out a piece of plywood in the shape of the boat's bottom (working off the original plans) and then laminated the patch together with epoxy and clamped it to the plywood mold. Here's a photo of what that looked like (and also happens to be a good illustration of why woodworkers often say that there is no such thing as having too many clamps):

Finally, when I cut out the piece of plywood for the laminating mold, the matching curve in the leftover piece was perfect for making center supports for the frame that the boat sits in. If you look again at the picture at the top of this post, you can see them peeking through the big hole. They are covered in plastic so they won't stick to the hull when I epoxy everything together.

*Even though you can see one of my Festool sanders in the photo, I did 95% of the fairing on the inside of the boat by hand with 60 grit sandpaper backed with a piece of wood. It's too easy (for me at least) to add new highs and lows into a fairing job with a power sander.

**This crisscross pattern was especially important in the past when the planks were glued together and varnished. The orientation helped keep the wood from expanding and contracting as it gained and lost moisture. Because wood doesn't move much along the direction of the grain, each plank would help hold the boards above and below it in place. This is less of an issue now with epoxy, which prevents moisture from getting into the wood at all. This is a topic I'll be coming back to in more detail and will discuss why epoxy can, under certain circumstances, make the problem worse.

32.) Weekend Among the Mystics

Marisa, Cosette, and I attended our first ever Wooden Boat Show at Mystic Seaport this past weekend. No, we didn't go to Mystic Pizza, but we still had a great time and even learned a few things. If you are interested in boats made out of something other than plastic, I'd recommend you do it at least once. There are a lot of great vessels—from dinghies to ships—to look at and, if you are inclined, interesting workshops to attend. Virtually all the advertisers in Wooden Boat magazine, which co-sponsors the event, set up a booth on the Seaport grounds, so there are a lot of experts around if you have questions. West Systems was in the house: so was Lee Valley, Jamestown Distributors (promoting their Total Boat line), Mas Epoxy, Chesapeake Light Craft, and many more. A marine lumber supplier was there with some very luminescent slabs of mahogany and spruce. The restored shipyard also functions as a mill and was selling some of their surplus, as well. There was even a guy selling a portable sawmill you could take home.

Four of the workshops interested me in particular (not so much Marisa or Cosette, who spent most of the time on a park bench fielding compliments. I am pretty sure the two got more than any of the boats.)  The workshops that I had scribbled on the program as MAs, or MUST ATTENDs focused on sharpening, lofting, steam bending, and vacuum bagging. I don't want to sound conceited, but the main thing I digested at these workshops is that I am much more informed about these subjects than 96.2% of the other folks present.  Another thing I learned: the apparent target demographic of this group is a 63-year-old, white, very nerdy male wearing sandals. All apparently were sussing out retirement options. Boy, did I ever feel out of place! I'm only 59.

A few tidbits from the classes:

—The biggest difference between furniture makers and boat builders is that furniture makers like a straight edge on their planes and chisels, whereas boat builders like theirs curved.  Makes sense when you consider that there are very few 90 degree corners on a boat.

—When you are using a batten to draw a curve on a layout board, there's a cool device you can use to pin the batten down at various spots along the curve that doesn't distort the shape and allows you to position the batten precisely.  It's called a spline weight. It's made of lead and kind of looks like a little whale with the top of a coat hanger for a head. (The are also sometimes referred to as spline ducks.) You can see some in the foreground of the photo below. This tidbit comes from the lofting class. The term "lofting" comes from the place where boatyards did most of this work because it was the only place around that was even remotely clean.  The attic or—ta da—loft.

—You need freshly sawmilled green wood for steam bending, especially in the case of white oak. Steam for about an hour per inch of thickness up to about 3 inches thick. The wood needs to be free of knots and the grain needs to run straight the length of the board. If the grain curves and runs out of the wood, it will probably break when you bend it.

—Vacuum bagging is pretty easy and can be done with inexpensive materials like Mortite (a clay-like substance that's mostly used for insulation), cheap plastic drop cloths, mosquito screen, and an air pump taken out of an old discarded refrigerator.

I'll be doing some steam bending and vacuum bagging as part of the project to restore #48, so you'll get to see whether I do it right or foul it up. I might even see if I can get or make some of those spline whales and try out that technique, too.

I bought a book at the show that I'd never seen before (Preliminary Design of Boats and Ships), but my biggest splurge was for two old wooden blocks that I got for $40 each from an antique tool vendor. I probably could have negotiated a lower price, because it turned out the vendor has been drowning in the things for years. When I asked how he got them, he described an anxious phone call he received a few years back from a family whose patriarch had died. Their panic related to what they had uncovered in the dead man's basement. Are there antique tools?, the vendor asked hopefully. Not really, the family replied. When the antique guy arrived at the house and went down the basement stairs, here's what he saw: a huge pile of more than 1,000 old wooden blocks saved from old ships. It had apparently had been the primary life mission of the deceased man to rescue these old blocks.

Now, I have two of these rescue blocks in my shop, right along with my rescue dog, rescue boat, and the rescue project that is yours truly. The blocks are really nice, still work, and it's easy to tell that every bit of them was crafted by hand. You can still see the marks the blacksmith made when he pounded out the iron parts. I wish the next picture was a little better (There's too much red in it for one thing: the block is just a dark wood. Damn iPhone.), but I think you'll get the idea.

Several people have asked me if I am doing a "museum quality" restoration of #48. After looking at many of the many boats at Mystic, I can now answer that question with a resounding conviction: NO. My restoration is going to be vastly superior to the work done at Mystic in attention to detail, in finish quality, and in on the water performance. I'm not saying the Seaport workers don't do a good job, but I think they have to work quickly on a budget and simply don't have time for a lot of truly fine work. They want the boats to look presentable and to retain the materials and methods used in its original construction.  So they don't use a spray gun, for instance, for painting. Everything is done with a brush, just like the old days.

My goal on the other hand, it to try to produce a truly beautiful boat. The only boat I saw at the Wooden Boat Show that met the standards I hold for myself was a homemade DN Iceboat. It had been expertly crafted by a very nice young guy from New Jersey. I took a bunch of pictures of it and will show two. One is a close-up of the boat's head support for the reclining driver. The other shows the strut that supports the rear runners.

Nice, huh? I was really impressed with the DN, a boat I've always wanted to try and may yet make myself. They've been North America's most popular ice boat class ever since 1953, when the Detroit News sponsored the design contest that launched the boat. I also like the fact that the DN is named after a newspaper, blending two areas of personal interest. They race over on Lake Hopatcong in Jersey (when there is enough ice and not too much snow.) They go 60 mph in 20 knots of breeze. Talk about frostbiting!

31.) Working on the Patch

Here's the beginnings of the patch for the big hole.  (The photograph makes it look so much like an art object that I am almost tempted to hang it.)

It was made from a single piece of mahogany, re-sawed into strips (the same as the planks*), and shaped with a bandsaw. I used the Sparkman & Stephens plans as a guide, rather than the boat itself. I'd rather adjust the boat to the patch than the other way around.

I haven't staggered the ends yet to fit into the ladder (which is almost finished and will appear in an upcoming post), nor have I planed or sanded the sides.  I also haven't glued them together in the curve they will need to follow. This photo just shows the flat pieces stacked up on top of each other in the reverse order that they will go in the boat. Below is a photo showing how the pieces were sketched out one by one. They had to be designed to taper quicker toward the bow and more gradually toward the center of the boat, to match the shape of the hull. The S&S plans don't specify how to do this. They just show the thickness of the keelson, it's width at the top, and the angle of the hull at various stations from bow to stern. I presume that sorting out the remaining details was left to the builder. I am still trying to figure some of them out even as I write this, and I can foresee all sorts of ways that I could seriously and completely foul this up.

*I used a different, much cheaper bandsaw blade on these pieces. It was a Wood Slicer, available from Highland Woodworking.  It costs a third of the Lennox carbide-tipped blade I used, but it produces fewer deep saw marks than the Lennox Tri-Master.  Highland sells both the Wood Slicer and the Lennox. I got the Lennox because it was billed to last a long time.  One of my shop mates ripped a third of the teeth off the blade within a few weeks.

30.) Stairway to ?

Below is a close-up view of the steps I am carving into the keelson as it rises up toward the bow. I thought it was worth showing. This project at times is sort of like the woodworking version of an archaeological dig. The original boatbuilder assembled the keelson by gluing together thin strips of mahogany (like plywood) to make a single piece 9/16ths of an inch thick that curves around the bottom of the boat from stem to stern. My plan is to rejoin these strips one at a time, making a laddered scarf joint.  (It will require a corresponding flight of steps, or ladder, on the other side of the hole.)

It's not especially easy to make this particular ladder.  I'm carving it out with a paring chisel and small rasp while sitting awkwardly in the boat instead of at a workbench where you can see what you are doing and get the right leverage. See the brownish blob on the right side of the photo? That's epoxy fairing compound. See the blob on the left? That's a pool of my sweat.  (I suppose I also could have done this excavation work with a small power tool like a Dremel, but that just seemed too, well, unmanly.)

The other reason it's not easy is that the stairs can't be straight but instead need to follow the downward curve of the keelson.  The only good solution I could come up with to make this happen was to gradually carve and file away tiny bits of material until I hit the thin glue line between each set of mahogany plies. Once the glue line was exposed, I could then just gently remove it to expose wood only.

The photo shows this work in progress.  See how one of the steps in the middle looks black?  That's because I've cut it down so that just the old glue is showing. The stairs above it have all the glue carefully removed.  The ones below it are unfinished.  (I still have some final trimming and sanding to do to square up and complete all of the stairs.)

The unfinished stairs show just bits of the glue line.  That means they are cutting through multiple plies and not yet in line with the slope of the keelson.  No black stripes means the step is confined to one of the original mahogany plies.

I hope the above explanation is clear.  If it's still a little fuzzy, it should become more understandable as I forge ahead.

29.) Cosette Ponders the Keelson Conundrum