A mini-journey: Tiny (part I)

Long story short. I did not find time to work on the new boat last summer and neither this year. And next year might be under question aswell. So to keep myself busy and learn some finer details on boatbuilding, and maybe, if lucky, end up even doing some sailing, I started a side project of building Tiny, a 6ft dinghy/sailboat from a 1950 edition of the Popular Mechanics.

Having lived my life in a world of non-imperial system of lengths I soon discovered that the sizes really are very tiny. For example the width of transom, 27 inches does not make me even blink an eye, do a conversion to metric - ohhh, that’s a bit less than 70 cm… Which made think that I can actually take the original measurements and scale everything by 1.33 so I would end up with an 8ft boat instead. And 8ft (2.40 m) would be perfect as the local legislation requires everything bigger than LOA 2.50 m to be registered in the vehicle registry.

Tiny is going to be in the approximate size class of Optimist: “[..] a small single-handed sailing dinghy for use by young people up to the age of 15”. Although the Wikipedia page in estonian is more forgiving to older people stating that it is also suitable for beginners.

Lofting, strongback

Since the plans themselves are pretty much a typical backyard build, I figured it would make sense to loft the boat before build fullsize, so it would be easier to take arbitrary measurements and check angles. Also, to get the general feel of the curves. I did the lofting in original size but converted to metric with rounding to about a half-a-centimeter precision.

After doing the profile, half-breadth, and body-plan and included a few corrections, I dug out the dog shed material (dismanteled earlier in the summer) to build the only frame according to the rescaled sizes. I remember having troubles with marking up a centerline during my first boat-build (which absolutely coincidentally started almost exactly 10 years ago, mid-August 2013) which ended in the starboard side being a few cm wider than port side. So I decided to play it safe this time and mark it correctly and usably.

For the frame top and bottom pieces I measured their respective centers and drew a line circumnavigating the whole piece making sure both ends of the scribed line meet. Then took a scrap piece of lumber and drew a straight line long enough (frame height plus a litte more). After that it was just the matter of getting the frame top and bottom pieces to line up with the helper line.

The original plans call for two large pieces of 30 cm wide planks (which would be 40cm after rescaling) for planking the sides of the hull. It would have taken some time and effort to find these. And since I was not going to use plywood (although the thought did cross my mind, but this build is not about getting a boat, it’s about me learning working methods) I saw a chance to try out carvel planking where the side planks are laid out edge-to-edge. Especially as the big boat should be carvel planked aswell.

In turn this meant I would not be dealing with a few pieces to fit together anymore and in order to get the measurements straight I decided to construct a kind of a strongback on which to fix the transom, frame, and stem while I do the planking. As I found only two long enough pieces of 5*10cm lumber at home and some shorter ones decided to build it a triangle shape.

Stem and transom

For the stem I found a leftover piece of siberian larch from the frame build for the big boat from two years ago. Hand-planed it roughly to dimensions and fitted loosely on the strongback.

Since by this time I was still not sure how this build will end, I did not feel like making any extra expenditures on lumber so the transom was constructed by laminating together four pieces of 2.2*10 cm pine (or spruce?) planks (of the ex-dog-shed brand). After having sanded the contact surfaces (edges) and the fore sides I soon discovered that the stock material is not really of equal width. Since I had no access to a thickness planer I decided to do the lamination nevertheless but leave the aft side unprocessed for the time being. Since it’s on the outside it will be easily accessible afterwards aswell. As leveled space is hard to find and to help fix the planks to each other I bore four aligend holes to all contact edges and attached wooden dowels there during lamination helping to secure the planks to each other and not slip when clamping.

Made me feel so proud of myself having thought about that beforehand. It’s only the next morning that it occured to me that “well, you were supposed to fix cleats to the sides too”. The pieces that the hull side planking is going to be fixed… Only realizing a few minutes later that I was supposed to saw out the rough shape before I could do that. So taking the aft and fore measurements of transom from the lofting, drew the shape and rough cut to size. As some parts of the transom will be bigger on the fore side (e.g sides), and some on the aft side (e.g the top arc), makes sense to pay extra attention here.

Meanwhile I got the frame fixed loosely on the strongback. And it does look like a mock of something out of the imperial starfleet.

Using a thin polyester string attached to the strongback as a hypothetical centerline there was nothing else to do but to align the centers and attach
all the pieces at correct measurements to the strongback. As easy as it sounds, it took quite some time and I still wasn’t sure that everything is correct. But that’s what dry fitting is for. For checking for any errors, omissions, or things you might not like.

And this is exactly what happened. There was something wrong with the shape being too banana-like. So I went back to the lofting, and after puzzling myself for almost half a day, discovered I had taken some measurements wrongly so the transom was supposed to go further back and the frame lower down. I finally got to fix the transom and the frame to their possible correct positions in order to see the chine curves for the first time in real life.

But I had to put the build on a pause, as I had to do some repairs to the house terrace instead. But in turn this gave me time to think about how to do the planking, and more importantly out of what to do the planking.