S/V Ripple

I started assembling the case today, realizing it is going to take several stages (days) of glue-up to put it all together.  Taking a cue from the book (duh), i decided to glue just one of the cheeks to the case uprights.  It will be best to paint the insides before assembling the case, and I may even include a few inches of anti-fouling paint on the lower few inches. Tomorrow I'll glue the other cheek to the assembly, and fit it into the slot in the keel to make sure it will go together and mate with the floors at stations 2 and 3.   The third stage will be to add the end cap, logs, upper rails, and topcap.  There will be some additional cosmetic trim pieces that will hide the aft edges of the case cheeks and improve the visual balance of the case.  All but the top-cap will be painted.  The top cap will be finished bright, as it will be perpendicular and contiguous with the midships thwart.  The other thwarts, quarter knees, knee braces...

Today I sorted out the daggerboard case.  It is the focus of quite a lot of stress during sailing, not a component to be underbuilt.  It wasn't clear to me how best to integrate it with the midships thwart and the floors at stations 2 and 3.  My MO is to work through it a a component at a time, and see if they all work together.  I just don't have the experience to lay it all out on paper and do it. At a late moment, I decided to make the dagger board only 9 inches fore-and-aft (the plans specify 12), and the slot in the bottom is 12 1/4 inches long.  My reasoning was that I've seen lots of daggerboards for small boats closer to 9 than 12, and on Ripple, storage is an issue, and a 9 inch board would be easier to stow.  Oh, and I had a suitable piece of sitka spruce 9 inches by 4 quarters.  And straight and true. This meant re-engineering the case verticals to fill in the 3+ extra inches.  Doing so has the additional benefit of st...

Floors are really just partial ribs, giving some additional structure to the bottom of the boat, as well as providing bearing surfaces for the removable floorboards.  They straddle the keelson, spanning the garboard and second strake, and are glued in with epoxy.  I elected to pattern each with scraps of planking material... easier to shape than the 4/4 yellow cedar.  Still, spiling the shapes to the bottom at each of 4 stations turned out to be fussy work, especially for the first couple.  Running out of propane for the heater in the middle of the work made for a long session. When each pattern was close, I traced the profile onto cedar blanks and bandsawed them to shape, and adjusted the profile as necessary with a block plane.  I improved sufficiently over the sequence to motivate me to redo the first of them. I left the floors at stations 4 and 5 un-shaped on the top. as I have not yet decided how to tie them into the daggerboard case. About 6 ho...

This week's temperatures have made it difficult to spend much time in the shop.  Well, that and the Seahawks parade, for which I took the day off.  Yesterday I glued in the thwart ledgers, which took two hours or so of fiddling, measuring, remeasuring, gluing, clamping, and double-checking.  The glue-ups worked out well enough... one had slid slightly out of alignment, but I had left them square, to plane subsequently, reasoning that this would afford good opportunity to make any fine adjustments that might be necessary.  It did. I resolved to cut, fit, and sand the thwarts so as to be able to bring them home to varnish while I continue to work on the interior.  Le Tonkinois, the varnish I use and love, has such low solvent content that you can varnish in the house without much in the way of noxious odors.  This I will do with a number of parts.  The workship is no fit place to varnishing. I got the thwarts done, including rounding over t...

I fit the breast hook this morning, beveling the lands and trimming the ears that will serve as lands for the inwale.  Seemed to go pretty well.  Thinking about the near term order of battle, i realized I can't even think about painting until the interior seams are filleted, so I mixed up some epoxy peanut butter and got about it. I ended up using 6 pumps of epoxy, thickened with three heaping putty-knife loads of fairing beads per pump.   A messy job, and I have a headache from being that close to live epoxy for the better part of three hours.  Nice to get that done.

I worked on a lot of little bits today, as well as re-checking the inwale layout.  I also realized that I had to get the thwart ledgers (risers?) installed before putting on the inwales, else I'd have some difficult clamping challenges. I glued up the breast hook yesterday, epoxy with two reinforcement lag bolts as splines (threaded into one half, heads cut off and seated into holes on the other half.  I set up a clamping jig to help assure a tight joint.  The result looks good and seems to fit the bow profile nicely, at least before the fitting and beveling necessary before glue-up. Last night I finally figured out the dimensioning of the daggerboard case and the center thwart.  The case is dimensioned to the distance between the underside of the center thwart and the keelson.  The distance is established by setting a reference stick between the points where the the thwart ledgers will be set and measure the distance.  It was fooling around with ...

I layed out the inwale spacing today, epoxied the two halves of the breast hook blank together, created blanks for the quarter knees (Alaskan yellow cedar) and made the spacer blocks. I'll sand and pre-finish these parts bright before installing them.  I made a jig that allowed drilling a hole dead-center, then cutting it to lenght (1.5 inches) with the dozuki thin-kerf razor saw. The jig took an hour or so, and turning out the parts took a half minute or so each.  I ripped off three dozen (I'll need 22 good ones). The quarter knees are made from the cedar also, cut on the diagonal into a knee-like-shape.  I'll soften the edges on a piloted round-over bit, and fit them to the profile of the intersection of the topsides and the transom. The breast hook is mitered on the centerline, and fit to the inside of the planks.  It has ears projecting along the inner rail that are the thickness of the spacer blocks, and on which the inner rails lan...