Striving for Perfection.

Its now three months since i started the planking. December turned out to be one of the coldest in years and January wasn't much better. So its hardly surprising that very little progress was made. Even if I can stand the cold, the epoxy was taking an age to go off. A time to stay indoors and read a good book. We'd made a family decision to stay in the south over Christmas as Chloe wasn't allowed to fly, so we had the most relaxing time we've had in years and only felt slightly guilty.

January brought the worst (or Best) snow we've had in 20 years which caused chaos and was loads of fun! But again the temperatures were hovering around zero which isn't good epoxy weather. Gradually things warmed up a wee bit and i could start planking again.

I have to confess I struggled a bit at first. Having had such a long lay off since the last build I was clumsy at first, the tools didn't sit comfortably in my hands, and I was making silly mistakes.

I'm also having to wear specs this time round as old age doesn't come un-announced! The first couple of planks were tricky, they seemed to want to lie too far down the stem, i.e. nearer the keelson than they should and took some persuading to lie on their marks. Looking back i'm sure its down to various creeping inaccuracies on my part. I was pretty rough cutting the gains so a fair bit of epoxy was required to cover my indiscretions. My moral was at a low point at this time and I was wondering why I ever thought I was a boat builder.

Any notions of a bright finish went out the window, still I percevered and the weather got a we bit warmer which improved the epoxy cureing times and the moral. I juggled the planks into shape and gradually improved my hand to eye coordination.
A few more planks went on and things were beginning to look up, there's still a long way to go though. I'm now half way through the planking.

All of this activity in the garage was of course just a diversion to the more important activity which was going on elsewhere. Very gradually and with the inevitability which nature intended Brooke Lyra Joan Gover was getting ready to make her debut and on Friday 20th Feb she arrived, making her grandad very proud and letting just a bit of perfection into his life!

And a pair of Val's knickers.

Back in the mists of time, well last year to be precise I started playing around with some drawings of a little 11ft dinghy, The design developed into what I as least think could be quite a pretty wee thing, for various reasons the project was shelved but not forgotten, and not before I got round to making a wee model. I took some photos at the time but never got round to posting them so in time honoured fashion Here is one I made earlier........................

The design brief I gave myself said that the boat must be self jigging without the need for a building frame. it also must have more than sufficient buoyancy, as it was likely to be a wet sail, so to meet both these requirements I designed it to slot together egg box fashion incorpoating enclosed buoyancy chambers.


Here the buoyancy tank sides slot into the central frame

The forward bulkhead is then added......

Followed by the aft frame, this gives the curve to the side tanks.

The transom goes on next




The thwarts can now be added to help square everything up and add rigidity. I'm not at all sure that all the gubbins forward is really necessary, I was trying to give plenty of support for the mast and foredeck.




I also wanted plenty of dry storage space so that she could be used as a mini camper, the space between the forward bulkheads, under the thwart and sternsheets would be a dry locker with the other spaces and side tanks full of buoyancy foam.


Now she gets turned over and the bottom fitted





Its now easy to see where the planks will go
The plan was to stitch and tape the lowest chine and have a lap joint on the others.







Here's an aft view with the planks added. She has side decks just wide enough to sit out on and would have a curving combing to set off what i think is her jaunty sheer line.

The stem is plumb to keep the LWL as long as possible but I think the final design would have a curved forefoot to help her ride up a beach.

The rig would probably be a balanced lug for simplicity but she might look good with a cheeky bowsprit.
maybe one day.

Time Lines and Deadlines.

Chris Perkins' Oughtred designed MacGreagor Canoe drifting in the glassy waters of Beal Park lake having just lifted first prize in the Watercraft amateur boat building competition.

When I was building "Caitlin" my Oughtred Whilly Tern, people were always asking when she would be finished, when was I planning to launch her etc. I tried to explain that I had enough deadlines to meet at work and that putting myself under needless pressure over what was supposed to be a hobby was counterproductive. Instead of being a relaxing pastime to de stress it was likely to wind me up if i was a week behind an arbitrary mile stone on an imagined project plan. Now I can budget, resource manage, and monitor progress against milestones on a gant chart the size of a small country but I prefer to leave such things in the office. So why is it that since I started this build I've been putting myself under pressure to get it done?
I know its partly because I feel I'm "cheating" using one of Alec Jordan's Kits for the planks and therefore expect to get it done much quicker, and also because I'm keen to see it on the water. Last weeks frustration over the keelson only made matters worse so its time to start listening to my own advice. It'll be done when its done.

Today dawned wet cold and windy, excellent! A fine day to be in the garage The Keelson is now firmly glued in place and i've spent a happy time with my block plane in hand chasing bevels from Transom to Stem. Much happier!

John Strictly Speaking I'm Only Dancing

Its been a bit frustrating down at Port-na-Storm this week, with associated levels of bad language and despondency but thankfully we're over that particular stage and can look forward to the next one.

I spent a few days cutting out the moulds and setting them up on the strong back, which was fairly straight forward. Of course when I say days I really mean hours as I only manage about an hour and a half in the evenings if i get out there at all. Even at weekends I try to work around everything else so manage to grab the odd hour here and there. Thank God for Strictly Come Dancing at least then I know there are a couple of hours when I can sneak out and not be missed. Anyway its not been the same since John Sargeant hung up his pumps.

Anyway, next step was to make the Keelson, a fairly straightforward task getting the 1" stock down to 3/4" tapering the end and then routing out the centreboard slot. I was cooking on gas now getting excited that pretty soon I would be laying those planks and turning her over, oh yea?

Offering the keelson up to the moulds everything went smoothly, slotting into place where it should and importantly all ligning up nice and square. The problem came trying to bend the aft end of the keelson down into the transom. Could I get the thing to bend? Writing this now, with the usual 20:20 hindsight it seems so bloody obvious, but at the time of course being so close to the problem meant I couldn't see the obvious when it was sitting on my shoulder and laughing in my ear.

I checked and double checked all my measurements to ensure the moulds were all in the proper place. I sent an emergency e-mail to Alec asking for advice. He proffered suggestions like steaming and spliting the recalcitrant stick down the middle, however the problem was finally solved when, as suggested by Alec I fitted the keelson into the transom FIRST then bent the keelson forward over the moulds. Basic school boy principles of leverage, Doh!

So as I write this the keelson is in place and the epoxy is cureing very slowly in the cold garage. All is well in the world again and look at the time, soon be time for "strictly", where did I put my pumps?

This weeks listening pleasure, Gram Parsons, Grevious Angel

Groovin' On a Sunday afternoon.

There hasn't been much time for postings recently but this sequence of photos should pretty much explain where we are up to. Making a transom is a new experience for me after a canoe and a double ender, so the learning curve is vertical.

The transom is made up from three boards to get sufficient width, and in order to get a strong enough bond these have to be biscuit jointed. So I cut a 6mm groove in each face with the router and then used 6mm ply for the biscuits.

I cut the planks close to their final shape before gluing, and then laid them flat and wedged them together while the glue went off.

The thing I was dreading the most was routing out the name plate. Convinced that the router would
take on the persona of a whirling dervish and go skating off across the grain leaving a spiral of disaster behind it. I'm glad to report that after a few practice runs which didn't exactly boost my confidence, it all went fairly well in the end.

This week, setting up the moulds. More soon...........

Friday on my Mind

A long time ago in a far off land I made a decision not to work in an office but to work outside travelling around to interesting places with strange sounding names, I would be wind swept and interesting as Connolly once said and would leap from landrovers and helicopters with a single bound. So I joined the Ordnance Survey and became a surveyor and to be fair did my share of bounding with the best of them. But of course eventually the desire to settle down sets hold and the need to pay the mortgage encourages a bit of slippery pole climbing and here i find myself doing that fairly boring office job I said I wanted to avoid.
Such indeed is life, and as I sit waiting for Friday to come I dream of sailing here or paddling there when I should be project planning the build .
So I suddenly realised I've now finished the scarfing and have all the planks glued. What's next? Well i'm going to need a transom, keelson and stem before I can assemble the moulds and back bone.



Friday comes, I book a half days leave and suddenly I'm a boat builder again, so it must be time for a visit to Bamptons Timber. Dick Bampton is the President of our little Sailing and Rowing Club. Indeed it was from Dick's launch that the photo above was taken of Southampton Water looking all broody with an extreme cat equipped with those fancy kevlar sails being harried by its attendant Rib.
Dick's joinery and wood store is situated in an old boat yard right next to the River Itchen. They have a few pontoons out the back where a pretty eclectic bunch for people moor their equally eclectic bunch of boats. We are up the low rent end of the river here well away from the rich man's boat parks at Ocean Village and Hythe Marina.


In fact come to think of it Dick's address is R & A Bampton , Four Maries Yard, Vespasian Road, Bittern Manor, Southampton. So in terms of Interesting places with strange sounding names that'll have to do for now. P.S. Also some pictures of epoxy drying. zzzzzzzzzz

P.P.S. In a new and infrequent addition to this blog, music choice of the week,

A Piece of What You Need by Teddy Thompson. excellent!

Teddy is the son of Richard and Linda Thompson and if you don't know who they are, boy you need educating.

Never mind the width, get your scarf on

Its not been a particularly productive week and photo's of the inside of my garage can be a bit boring so here's one I took earlier of a fishing boats in St Ives harbour Cornwall. I've had a couple of chats with Alex Jordan this week. I couldn't understand why the paper pattern of the transom differed so much from the ply template I'd made from the table of offsets. Of course the reason is that Andrew Wolstenholme gives his dimensions to the extreme aft of the transom while Alex has compensated for the bevel by bringing the measurements forward by an inch, the thickness of the transom. The difference is half an inch which was surprising, anyway that's another thing I've learned.
I cut the planks from the pre cut ply in a couple of hours, I used my Japanese Pull Saw which avoided the nasty buzzing of the jig saw and gave a very accurate cut which needed very little sanding. I then started to cut the scarfs. I'm just using my old jobbing plane to rough out the scarf and then going in with my trust block plane to finish off. I know this part of the process puts a lot of people off but it really is fairly straight forward if you sharpen your blade and take your time.

The main thing to watch out for is to make sure you cut the scarf on alternate sides of the plank so that you get a join not a great V shaped void!
I'm going to use the building frame as a work surface for gluing the scarfs which should help keep things fair and even.
I wrote to Steve at North Sea Sails the other day to get a quote for a sail. He made the sail for Caitlin on Iain Oughtred's recommendation. He is a very frendly bloke and liable to chat about all sorts of things, I think he gets a bit lonely in his sail loft over in Tollesbury. He told me he makes lots of sails for Oughtred boats in Norway and Sweden and that he's currently making a set for a Macgregor Canoe being built in Eyemouth. Steve's quote was £399 to include two rows of reefing points a canvas sail bag VAT etc, which seems very reasonable and a good bit cheaper than the quote I got from Jeckells, so Steve gets the job. I think I'm getting ahead of myself again. Back to work. Oh and by the way, its to be a wee girl.