A mini-journey: Tiny (part III)

Last year’s build finished abruptly in mid-October as the weather got too bad for outside build activities. The last things I managed to do was to epoxy fill the bottom screwholes and sand them down. After that the boat was lifted into the sauna house, which has been a makeshift build space for pretty much everything… except sanding.

The plan is to cover the outsides of both bottom and hull with glassfiber cloth - since a lot of time this boat would be spending out of the water rather than in. Maybe it will help keep the structure better intact. After a winter in the sauna the hull sides did start to develop some cracks. And it will make the overall construction a bit more sturdy aswell. I’m still thinkng whether to fiberglass the insides too or not. It would make the structure more rigorous but water and humidity will be getting inside anyway and I want it to easily dry away, not get trapped in the wood and cause rot.

2024 has been an eventful year with a lot of my energy and free time going into FOSS4G Europe 2024 conference and OSGeo-related activities. In early June a friend of mine from the uni held the meteorology field-trip-lab for geography students in my back yard, so the fieldtrippers needed a place to crash for four days to check the thermometers and clouds, and all that on a regular basis. Since my, ermmm… build space was to be at their disposal for overnight stays I needed to move the boat outside, and decided I would do the bottom fiberglassing as-soon-as because otherwise outside in the Sun it would maybe dry up too much. The hull sides had already started to develop cracks so my suspicions for the need for glassing the outside were correct.

I decided to use 110g/m2 twill because the base surface is not absolutely 100% smooth underneath and reckoned it will be easier to work the cloth tightly to the surface and around corners than biaxial or mat.

For the application I used only clearcoat epoxy and a 18cm wide paint roller - first layer of epoxy on the bottom then by abt 15-20 cm lengths rolled out the fiberglass, work it to the surface and straighten the weaves with the roller so no air bubbles are seen until I saw it getting soaked with epoxy from below. Working away from center of the boat towards fore and center to the aft. Finally added another layer of epoxy on top.

The boat went outside after that and because of other errands it was only two months later in August when I finally had time to start working on it again.

Having turned it over, the right side up, it became clear that without the support of beams inside the shape had started to deform - amidship in the widest place it had lost around 10cm in width, and concequently gained in length. Over the following days I tried to stretch the top sides apart to get back to almost original width (and length) by placing temporary support beams inside in the middle and fore parts and supporting the weight in better places so the weight of the boat itself would also do some work when turned upside down. Slowly growing the width (by enlarging the length of beams inside) as not to crack the wood. In the end of this the width was almost the intended (a few cm difference amidship) and length restored back to the original 2.40m.

The same time I used for sanding the inside hull sides and bottom, and to prepare the frame pieces. The frame pieces were fixed with two screws - one on the inside to the chine, and one on the outside to the sheer, and fine sanding-dust epoxy mix putty to fix them firmly to the hull. According to the plans (and best practices, and best looks too) the frame pieces should be beveled to the angle of the hull side, but somehow I realized this only too late when installing the last pair, and simultaneously started to work on the supporting cross member for station #1 (the arched piece in the fore visible in later photos).

The supporting cross member arc was calculated (well, fitted and marked more appropriately) so that the arc’s highest point would touch the centerline from the transom top to the top of the stem. And the sides would have to fit in nicely with the hull. Cut only to a rough shape and fitted with screws from the fore side (so no screwheads are visible) and triangular wedges/blocks between station #1 frame pieces (because the frame pieces were not bevelled to the hull shape :/) and the member itself. And generous amounts of epoxy-putty because this piece will be supporting the king plank which in turn will get a hole in a middle - for the mast.

With all these works completed + a little more final sanding I moved back indoors - removed the temporary supports amidship that were supporting the width and dry-install the midship seat support pieces that will for some time serve the same purpose, temporarily help keep the width. I have a few ideas about how to construct the seats as the “one-solid-plank-of-wood” that should/could be there seems a bit boring. But this will be some thinking and planning time over the winter.

The midship seat in fact will serve the same function also in the end - structural support. And as I was planning for fiberglassing the sides it became apparent that this reinforcement is needed as the plan I came up with was to tilt the hull to the side for the job, so the hull side to be fiberglassed would be more horizontal to the ground. This would ensure that it is easier to apply the (clearcoat) epoxy as it will be slower to run off the sides.

The next job in preparation for fiberglassing was to get a pretty exact lofting for the sides as the amount of fiberglass I had was pretty much exact. After a conversation on the subject with a trained-tailor friend during a swim together in Emajõgi, I ended coming up with a plan of fixing a sheet of building paper to one side of the hull, making sure it lays nice and tight, and then marking the sheer-stem-chine-transom outline with a pen and cutting the paper to size.

The same loft should fit nicely on both port and starboard sides of the hull. But check just in case

One important part here is that the rollout of the fiberglass cloth on the hull will have to be rather precise maybe to a few centimeters because the amount of it that I had allowed me to cut exactly two pieces for the sides of the hull. So in order to keep a rough direction for the hull bends during unrolling (from the center to towards the stem and to the transom, just like as with the bottom) I marked random fixed points on the hull and transferred those to the loft and on to the cloth too so approximate bearings could be kept. Otherwise the following procedure was rather “simple” - meaning it required concentration not to make any fatal wrong cuts but otherwise really straight forward: fit the loft pieces to the fiberglass cloth, cut the cloth in half (box knife + straight edge) and roll the pieces together from both ends up to the middle.

The application itself went much more smoothly than I expected, the fixed points greatly helped here. The whole procedure was the same as for the hull bottom and took about 2h total to complete.

Next up is preparatory work for building the deck. I was planning on building the deck out of plywood, and in a sudden rush of crazy ideas one morning I decided to do it not placing plywood flat on top but instead to strip thin slices of the bigger sheets and then laminate those in place sideways instead. It’s going to be so much more work but I think it will give the deck a much cooler striped look.

But all that in the next writeup …