S/V Ripple

I got off the starting line for rail installation today.  Some approach-avoidance going on here.  I glued the first of two laminations for the outside rails.  I didn't feel I could bend the size stock specified in the plans around the forward quarters of this bluff-bowed boat.  Laminations will improve strength as well. Having the first layer of rails will really increase the structural integrity of the hull.  I've been very nervous having the boat off the jig without them.  Scary with chisels, too.  I'll do both laminations and pop the boat back on its jig and finish the bottom. The rub rails have me thinking about the inwhales, and that requires decisions about the breasthook, the quarter knees, the style of the gunnels (I'm going to do open gunnels, for sure... wouldn't want to actually finish this boat too soon!) There are also decisions about the oarlocks that have to be thought through.  I bought bronze oarlocks and gudgeons (two set...

My first efforts with fiberglass go back about 50 years,  patching a rotten old wooden dinghy in 1963.  A little British Seagull 1.5 horse outboard pushed that pram all over the cypress swamps of Seashore State Park in Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Hog heaven for a 14 year old with his first boat all his own. As I recall,  my efforts at patching weren't all that effective.  The only remnant of that boat is her transom name plate, pictured above. Over the years, I have dabbled with polyester and epoxy resins on kayaks, and even built an okume plywood lapstrake canoe with my friend Thom Hickey (a mere two decades ago).  Still, I have been a bit cavalier about the admonitions concerning clean up along the way.  Sunday I paid the price --  some scary moments with chisel and scraper. It is one thing to face up to a few hours of unpleasant work to clean up a mess.  The trouble with this effort is that there is actual risk to the integrity of ...

The sistered-keel glue-up worked fine and it looks good.  I rough-cut the daggerboard slot with a sabre saw and then used a piloted strait bit on the router to finish.  Some sanding and final shaping of the skeg is all that remains before I prime the bottom. I couldn't resist popping the boat off the mold to see what the inside looks like.  There is a LOT of cleanup ahead before any serious work gets done on the interior.  I honestly don't know at this point whether it was worth while taping off the interior of the planks before I glued them up.  The tape is difficult to get off where the epoxy is thick.  Removing it is a tedious job with a scraper and chisel, but I think it would be even worse without the tape. Ideally, one would clean up the squeeze-out at the time of glue-up, but the space between frames is so small on this boat that getting at the seams is difficult and awkward. I may be singing a different song after a few hours of chiseling and...

The daggerboard slot emerges from the keel at approximately the width of the keel, so it is necessary to sister the keel on each side at this point.   I somewhat arbitrarily chose a two foot span... about 6 inches fore and aft of the slot, tapered back to the running width of the keel.  The keel and sisters join in a simple a planed joint, but the surface where the sisters meet the hull is a winding bevel.  I spiled the shape of the hull onto a pattern,  transferred it to two blanks of Alaskan yellow ceder and cut them out.  I then found the bevel on each end of the blanks with a block plane, and used a sweet little Japanese wood block plane with a convex sole to render the winding bevel between the ends.  The gap-filling properties of epoxy peanut butter reduce the demands on my craftiness (copious squeezeout is my friend). I free-handed a gentle S-curve taper, bandsawed the curve, smoothed it with the stationary belt sander,  mixed the pean...

The outbone of the boat is comprised of the keel, the skeg, and the outer stem (and then, the rails).  I elected to glue the outer stem and the keel before final fitting and fastening to the hull.  I think this was a mistake.  It would have been easier to fit had I attached the keel, then fit the stem.  Having them as a single piece made it fussier to handle and fit, but it worked out. I glued the pieces together in a lap joint about 5 inches long, did a preliminary fitting to mark the width of the stem where it meets the gains at the bow, and marked the outer edge so that i could plane it to just wider than a piece of half oval that I will fit to the finished stem.  I did the planing at the bench, with a couple of fittings in between. I pre-drilled three screw holes in the complete keel assembly to fasten the keel and cut some sky-clamps to wedge the aft section to the hull (springy 6-footers that exert a downward pressure on the keel when wedged against ...

Today is Christmas Eve -- not much boat building in recent days, but while finishing up a project for the holidays, I took time to fit the keel and work out how to fit it around the daggerboard trunk.  I confess to having miss-cut a version a few days back which made evident the need to do a carefully measured lay out.  I used a scrap of the Okume plywood (foreground), and took measurements every 3 inches to define the bottom curvature.  I cut out and smoothed this pattern until I was happy, then traced it onto the Alaskan yellow cedar blank.  I band-sawed the piece, and did some further shaping with a block plane and  sanding block.  I'll do some additional tweaking of the fit and taper and shape the skeg portion, and laminate sisters to the portion adjacent to the daggerboard, and taper them.

All the plank are hung and filleted.  The fairing compound totaled five pumps of epoxy, and enough filleting microballoons to result in a consistency of peanut butter.  A lot.  I used a putty knife to apply the epoxy, dragged putty along the joint with a gloved fingertip, scraped excess off with the putty knife, both sides of the fillet, smoothed a second time with a fingertip, scraped again on both sides, smoothed a third time, scraped again if necessary, smoothed, until I was happy with it, always ending with a smoothing operation.  When all 14 joints were done, i cleaned up the planking with a rag wetted with denatured alcohol, and dipped a gloved fingertip in alcohol for a final smoothing of all the fillets.  The next day, I created a small bullnose for 120 grit sandpaper, and sanded the fillets till all the gloss was gone, and no rough surfaces remained, to the point that one can run fingertips rapidly along all joints without risk of splinters or catc...