This was my first attempt at creating saw dust from my lovely stock of Sapele.  I bought a new (secondhand) 17" bandsaw for this project so I was eager to put it through its paces, cutting laminates.  I was chuffed at how well the laminates came out, and before long I had 15 lengths prepared for my stem.

I glued up the laminates without incident, although I did not use any fillers in the epoxy mix, but so far the stem seems to have held together fine.

Flushed with early sucess, I then laminated up the outer stem on the inner stem.  It wasn't until I re-read the specifications  that I realised the import of the sequence of John's instructions - i.e. shape the inner stem after it is cured and THEN laminate the outer stem to the inner stem.  My outer stem is a little off as a consequence, but I am confident that it will bend back to mate with the outer stem, when the planking is complete, or failing this I will have to get out my lamination blocks and plans and re-do the outer stem.  Not the end of the world...

One small word to the wise....dont cut off the excess timber from the top of the inner stem - you will need this to attach the stem to the jig, only when the boat s off the jig should you cut it to its finished lenght.  I thought I knew better, I trimmed it back to about 2" longer than the finished length - had to re-glue the cut-off back on so that I could attach the stem to the jig.  Epoxy glues and wood flour make for a very strong joint!

Read More..

All the information is there - yes really - you just need to explore and find it, (and learn a new language).  By all accounts John Brooks' plans are extremely details and come equipped with cut lists, materials lists and building specifications.  In conjunction with John's book Glued Lapstrake Wooden Boats, one can find answers to every question.  But you do need to look hard, especially for a first timer.  Having sent a few emails to my fellow workshop class mates, and receiving patient replies I began to realize that indeed all the information is on the plans...

Half breadths...yes that is an interesting concept, once you have made a stem exactly half as narrow as it should be (I didn't, but very nearly did!).  Most of the plans show measurements as half widths from the centreline.  The logic I presume is to ensure complete symmetry.  John is quite encouraging to his students about mistakes - as long as they are the same on both sides of the boat, no one may ever know...

Also I began to understand that when John writes his instructions they are exact and precise.  So when he says to build the inner stem and then shape to the Full Size Plan (FSP to you boat builders) and THEN laminate the outer stem over the inner stem, if you decide to simply laminate the outer stem over the inner stem before refining the shape of the inner stem, you end up with an outer stem which is out of shape...oh well, I am optimistic that I can get the outer stem to bend into shape, if not I can build a jig again for the outer stem in due course.

Plans can be unwieldy and so for the early stages of my build I had them rolled up in the corner of my workshop pulling one out when I needed it - and could reach it.  So the big learning for me was to cut a large 3'x4' hardboard and use paper clamps to hold the plans on the board for easy access.

Read More..

JohnB 's instructions suggest laminating the floors on the molds before planking so that hey mirror the inside of the planking when installed later.

So using stiff battens screwed to the molds, the laminates are clamped to the battens and glued up in a plastic wrap to save on the epoxy mess....

Batens for laminating floors

It was an interesting stage for me as it was the first time I had several battens attached to the molds which gave me a picture into the shape of the hull, and onlookers could at last be assured it was a boat I was building!

Laminates cut from Douglas Fir in preparation for glue up

Cutting laminates became an easy task with helping hand from Ivor and my shop made feather board which ensure constant thickness in the laminates.  This is an enjoyable process which runs much faster than I had envisaged.

Here the floors are glued up, wrapped in polythene to reduce mess - it does have a down side as the next photo shows:-

Removing hardened epoxy from the boards was  a painfull, dirty messy job!

.  Were I to do this again, and I very well might have to, I would use more clamps.  I only used one clamp on each baten and two on the keelson, making 8 in total for each floor.  This left some voids between some of the laminates and you could see where more pressure was placed on the glue up where it was clamped.  Another issue showed up as by ensuring the floor was clamped tight to the bottom of the keelson, the floors then swept back at an angle to meet the batens.  Had I had my thinking cap on, I would have realised that most of the floors (at the centreboard) will be cut in half and in fact following the lines of the keelson was immaterial and in fact unhelpful.   Time will tell, whether I will have the re do these floors.

The finished floors

Read More..

While awaiting delivery of my hardwoods and plywood, I took delivery of some spruce, larch and pine so I was able to begin building my jig - or strongback as I think it is also known by.

First my garage floor was very uneven and heavily sloped with a fall of around 5" over the 16' span.  Apparently, builders start by building the garage so that they can mix more concrete inside the garage for the build of the main house - that seems a reasonable explanation to me when I tried to comprehend the large lumps of concrete stuck to my garage floor.  So, I took the advice from GLWB and bought two large sleepers to lay on the floor, which I bolted to the floor and took out some of the fall in the fall.  Then I built out the legs for the side beams.  In the interest of having the three beams accurately aligned, I screwed them together and ran them over my planer together in an attempt to have them lined up.

I spent quite a while with my water level.  I'd read in John's GLWB where they had used food dye to colour the water to make it more visible, so I decided to add some ink, which had been idling in my office for some years.  Yes it makes for a nice visible colour in the tube, but hey does it create quite a mess when you forget to hold both ends level and black ink comes squirting at you, all and sundry!  So I abandoned the water level and took out a 6ft spirit level which seemed to work fine.  I later checked it with a lazer level and my measurements seemed good.  However, it's not a trivial job, certainly for me single-handed nad first timer, I spent quite a few days before I was satisfied that my jig was square and level.

While I had reasonable success in keeping the jig square and level, I did find the side beams warped and so I had to use a combination of clamps and windlasses, with 4' spacers in between to finish with parallel side beams.  Also, even though I had taken quite some time to carefully cut the angled timbers which support the centre beam on my mitre saw, I still had some jiggling to do to get a properly aligned centre beam.  

Read More..

As I write this, time has passed so thankfully I can't recount the entire fiasco that was building my transom!  You see I had some nice 2 1/2" by 9" timbers which I thought I could resaw and get two board out of one.

That seemed to work fine, although I wasn't convinced that the thickness of the two boards was uniform. No matter that was what planers are for...except my planer was only an 8" model.  So armed with my new #6 foreplane, I went about flattening the boards.  I had read in John's book that this was good practice/exercise, so fired up with these encouraging thoughts, I set about creating heaps of wood shavings.  Man I was having a ball - yes I was a real boat builder at last - none of that modern noisy machinery, I could see myself swelling with pride as I recounted how I had hand planed that lovely highly polished transom to the admiring onlookers...

Well, after I had one side nicely flattened, I noticed that the board was beginning to warp, and before long I had the distinct impression that I was carving a wooden propeller rather than a flat transom!  Moreover, I had neglected to keep tabs with the width and so I ended up with boards too thin for the finished transom.  So out with the bandsaw again, and this time I laminated a new piece onto the original board and invested in a new 12" planer, and voila - a (reasonably) perfectly straight transom of the correct thickness. phew...

I elected to use biscuits joints as I had a biscuit jointer and had reasonable confidence in my ability to accurately joint the boards.  I had visions of routing out splines etc., but wasn't convinced I would get the accuracy I needed.

I did however elect to use the technique which John describes in his book to get two boards perfectly edge matched using one baton and a flush trim router.  It worked a treat and so hopefully the glue lines will not be too noticeable when the transom is finally varnished.

My next step was to mark out the shape of the transom onto the jointed boards.  This was trickier than I had imagined.  John has supplied a fully developed transom in full size scale in the plans - for one half.  So one half of my transom will be correct at least!  Flipping the plans as John describes in GLWB and pricking the the other half of the transom boards using the existing holes proved more difficult, so I erred on the side of caution and cut to the outside of the line.  Later I made up a large "compass" and used it to ensure than my marks were symmetrical on both sides. With hindsight, I would take this approach again, as I was able to take accurate measurements from the FSP and transfer to both sides of my transom.

Carving the bevel on the transom was quite tricky.  Not having any prior experience of reading the plans, it was not entirely clear to me how the bevel should finish.  I had read elsewhere on Dave's SS 12.5 blog that he had difficult cutting the notches on the transom, so he recommended waiting until it is affixed onto the jig and you can fair out the bevels using batons.  I had elected to take the option of a curved transom rather than notching the transom.  This means using Dory gains at the transom.  I did take the initial bevels off using the bandsaw, as John describes, which I thought was quite brave of me! But as luck would have it I didn't screw up and so then I finished off the bevel with my block plane, spokeshave and finally Stanley Surform.  I'd love to relate how I expertly carved the wood with my spokeshave, but to be honest, it only made a horrible scratching noise as I dragged and pushed it over the the timber, so my Surform won the day!

Subsequently, I spent some time researching how to use (and tune up) a spokeshave, and now can manage to get it to shave really nicely - certainly a tool worth persevering with until you get the knack.

Read More..

First I needed to find some wood.  John Brooks gave me lots of sound advice so I settled upon Sapele as my timber of choice.  I searched among the building supplies in Ireland, but my timing was poor - Ireland was going through a horrific economic downturn, where its construction industry had come to a complete standstill - so traditional wood suppliers were going out of business or closing down.

However, I did manage to source some nice larch and spruce for my jig and molds from a local sawmill.  He also sourced some Douglas Fir for me but only in 10' lengths.  

So at last I could get started by building my molds.

This proved to be a far more complicated process than I had envisaged.  Not having seen boat plans before nor indeed molds, I was hard pushed to understand how to fabricate the molds.  I didn't realise that the only important lines where those on the outside down as far as the sheer - anything below this could be any shape you desire and the inside shape of the molds was entirely immaterial as long as they are strong enough.  However as a first time mold builder, these now obvious questions were slowing down progress:-

To get started on the boat proper I had to bite the bullet and send in my order for the Sapele and plywoods which totaled an eye watering sum..

Nothing for it but to import my timbers from the UK - and Robbins Timber proved to be the best supplier I could find - they had everything and were used to dealing with amateur builders.

Unfortunately John's plans are in imperial measurements and here in UK/Ireland our timber suppliers have gone metric.  So I spent quite a time spread-sheeting the materials list and translating into metric equivalents.  I also bought a small software program called CutListPlus which I used to estimate what lengths of timber and quantities I needed.  The system gets you to input the parts' dimensions and type of material and then allows you configure this to optimize your layouts.  John Brooks GLWB book shows how to do this manually, but I got bored after about one night of fiddling with pieces of paper and thought there had to be an easier way.  In addition, the software translated the imperial sizes into metric. Scrap the spreadsheets.......

I spent countless hours amusing myself with this ingenious program...however after much to a fro-ing with the timber suppliers I stupidly ordered the timber rough sawn and ended up with a tonne of huge timber planks occupying my garage.  

For about a week, I crawled around this pile of wood trying to match the wood with the delivery docket.  Not having seen Douglas For before, I was still trying to figure out which was Pine/Fir - at least I could identify the plywood and Sapele.  I'm still wondering how I am going to manage the 12' lengths of 3" by 14" planks.  Yikes...there's no going back now!

Quickly I realised my thicknesser (or "thinnesser" as my wife calls it) wouldn't be up to the task, so the small saving I made from ordering the timber rough sawn was eradicated by the consequential purchase of a heavier 12" planer thicknesser.  I read all the various reviews and most of the highly recommended machines were 3 phase, which I don't have in my workshop.  A 12" thicknesser seemed to be about the largest size one can get in single phase.  Constant bidding on eBay UK and searching Ireland's version of CraigsList - Donedeal.ie failed to throw up a suitable second hand machine which everyone tells you one can pick up for pittance...

Read More..

My mold material was Spruce - but it seemed very green when delivered to my shop from the sawmill, with moisture content around 18%.  So armed with my plans and my GLWB book, I set about assembling the molds.  I decided to use biscuit joints to join the boards.  John Brooks describes a method of using yard sticks joined together to work out the best angle to optimise the wood lengths.   This was confusing initially, because I didn't appreciate the end product, so I stressed over this unnecessarily. I was introduced to the science and trigonometry of using a bevel gauge, transferring it to a Bevel Boss .  I railed in my engineering minded friend Bendan to figure out how to transfer the measurements off my BevelBoss to my MitreSaw...

John shows how to create your own Bevel Boss in his book, but this tool has proven to be a very accurate companion for me and I am doubtful if I could have recreated this with the same level of accuracy.


The biscuit joints proved to be insufficient and unnecessary so I ended up adding the blocks to place over the joints.  My reason at the time for using biscuit joints was so I could lay the molds accurately down onto the top of the plans.

I became obsessed with accuracy and bought aluminium channel to allow me screw a straight edge over the FSP so that I could align the bottom of the mold on the line which represented the jig side beam. 

Accuracy - John had warned me at the workshop about the cone of accuracy - a half millimeter out at one end of the boat could wind up to by 8 millimeters at the other end... perhaps an extreme example, but I got the point and heeded the warning!

Cutting the molds in pairs on my new jig saw proved quite satisfying, but I struggled to understand which marks I needed to transfer to the molds, so I ended up copying the entire plans on to the molds.  

When I was finished with the molds, I re-read the introduction on the plans which stated that the boat is built over 7 molds, 3 of which are permanent frames and 4 and just for the jig....I had built 5 out of spruce, so I had missed that in fact #6 was a permanent frame to be built out of marine ply and reinforced with DF cheeks.  

It was about 3 months later when one of the molds fell down from the loft in my workshop that the folly of relying on biscuit joints alone was evidenced.  So I reinforced each component with an additional brace.  Also the full import of the 18% MC of the spruce revealed itself when I saw how nicely warped some of the molds had become when they dried out!  That didn't prove to be a problem as I was able to straighten them out when placing them on the strongback / jig.

One mold does deserve special mention - #14.  When you come to positioning the transom and the transom knee, you need to cut a section out of the top of the mold to allow the knee sit in its correct place.  As I write I don't have the plans in front of me, but I am 90% certain that this is not explicit on the plans.  A seasoned boat builder wouldn't think twice, but for a first timer, it took me a while and some advice from Bob to go ahead and cut out the recess.

This is the mold in action showing how the transom knee sits into the top of the mold.

Read More..