A mini-journey: Tiny (part IV)

Taking advantage of the early-September nice weather there were a couple of tasks I wanted to accomplish before the weather goes all bad - prepare the keelson which is the long plank in the bottom of the boat running from aft (the transom) to fore (the stem), and prepare the decking plywood strips. Since I have no fancy equipment, but I am armed with a circular saw and a simplistic planer / thickness machine, my rig for sawing things to size is a… yard bench, clamp screws, and a long batten for saw guide.

The keelson material itself is a salvaged piece of weatherboard (spruce?) from a dog shed I demolished a few years ago (that I had built some years before that). I have another one of correct length waiting and that will become the partnering keel on the bottom outside.

Now the hull was already inside, I cleaned it from the redundant fiberglass (boxknife) and turned it over. After shaping the keelson aft to fit snuggly to the transom, and fore to chines-meets-stem, and dryfitting also the sheer clamps (those battens at the top of the sides where hull side becomes deck), I felt it was really needed to also get the kingplank roughly sorted out. That, again, is from a salvaged piece of the dog-shed floor.

The original plans themselves describe installing inwales, and decking only in the very fore of the boat. Since I’m adding decking to all, I felt the need to reinforce the structures somehow, that’s why I’m using sheer clamps.

It kind of really resembles something boatlike already. A bit bare bones, but does look like a floating device…

But anyway… must concentrate on tasks at hand because there’s still so much work left to do. Some time ago I had purchased two sheets of 4mm thick plywood (I cannot remember why, maybe it was for templating something for the big boat? I’ll find that out hopefully soon). Got the 2.5m length sheets laid out on top of each other and then spent the next two afterwork evenings ripping 2.5cm wide strips from it using a jigsaw.

… and of course collected them where they would give a general feeling if this was a good idea at all.

And though I liked the outcome, I understood that more support from the sides is need. Fixing the strips only on the kinglpank, deck arc beam, and transom will not be enough most probably.

The solution? Add deck knees which would be fixed to the frame pieces and through that support the deck. Since these are not in the original plans they would have to be trial and error for the shape and size. In the real world they should be lofted too so the patterns could be picked up and pieces shaped accordingly. But I simply cut 6 straight-edged square pieces to length of my strip-deck width at the sides. And two small square blocks to the transom inside.

And started to shape and measure these to place.

This brought along the need to start shaping the rest of the deck support elements too. For example planing the kinglpank to the correct shape, and fixing the deck arc beam, and also transom.

Using two battens (that will later become moulds on the hull top sides) to simulate the deck line there was quite a bit of back-and-forth measuring and then adjusting locations knee by knee, planing the kingplank and deck arc beam, measuring, adjusting locations and so on again and again and again…

Somehow it finally started to come together. For the final checks I dry-fitted the sheer clamps to their correct positions and carried out final measurements for height from bottom centerline and opposite side chine at every frame. When finally satisfied, marked all locations on the frames, and added masking tape so that epoxy cleaning afterwards would be easier and entail less sanding.

With the deck knees and sheer clamps installed I could finally saw the frame pieces to correct length too at the top of the hull sides.

And all good ideas come a bit too late - the hull insides, waking up the next morning I decided I wanted to fiberglass those too. This would give more rigidity to the whole structure, and maybe make maintenance a bit easier. The only problem being that they’re all N shaped and I did not want to waste too much fibercloth, because I still wanted to apply it to the hull inside bottom too. The solution was to template every panel piece by piece. Since starboard and port sides should be the same then only 5 patterns would be needed… but… just in case check that. Fortunately, all was correct.

With the templates done, I cut two pieces for every template, clearly marking the respective sidepanel number and side of the hull.

Since I used clearcoat epoxy which flows very well then it seemed like a good idea to tilt the hull to one side for the job. So it would not flow very fast. It would have been still easier if I had done it before the final fix of deck knees and sheer clamps, but more or less still managed to complete both sides with a single batch of epoxy in one evening.

And with this we arrive in the end of September. The last thing I managed to do was cut the excess fibercloth away and clean some of epoxy residues that were boxknife-treatable. I don’t want to do major sanding indoors otherwise the cleanup will be an absolute hell. The weather is not that nice anymore for working outside - meaning it’s hard to plan outside activities because of constant rain, rather coldish weather and short daylight duration.

So it’s hibernation time…