At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

[pee wee]

Your skiff is coming along nicely, and I fully understand about not wanting to look back and regret a shortcut.

That's one of the great things about ww* hand tools, just pick them up and go to work- no plugs, and excellent control. I bought a "cordless saw" at a thrift shop for $2, dates to the early 1900's made by EC Atkins and used it recently to cut the angles on the legs of some saw horses I was building. Easy, fast and accurate.










* wood-working

[cracked_ribs]

Thank you - definitely agree on the traditional woodworking tools; power tools are of course fast and...well...power-ful. But in most cases I don't find them viscerally satisfying to use. On my last build I was up at my cabin and needed a mast and a sprit for my little sailing dinghy I'd just finished and so I just picked a young Douglas Fir and trimmed it down with an ax and finished it with a plane and it was one of the most fun parts of the build.



Up next: last night's update, which I didn't post because imgur was acting up but it seems to be working now so hang on one moment...

[cracked_ribs]

Hauling and hacking. I wanted to cut the bottom panels to their final size today so I pulled them off the jig, took them back up to the bedroom, cut them out and dropped them back down. I also trimmed the side panels, already up there, to their final size. In retrospect I guess I could pretty much have followed the CAD but what can I say...I’m always paranoid about that stuff.

I know I've gone off about loving hand tools but did I mention I also love that Hitachi worm drive? It just tracks so straight and easy. Here’s a cut I made to take a quarter inch off one panel:



I one-handed that, no problem. The saw is so settled, it just doesn’t buck or twist at all. I love that thing.



Off-cut is what, at most an eighth of an inch wide. No problem. It’s a smooth saw.

Here’s another hauling pic which I took to show that A) I also drilled the holes on the bottom panels for tying the thing together, and B) this is another example of why I like scarfs. I have 8+ feet of plywood hanging off the deck and the railing is the only spot holding it up, and I deliberately placed the scarf right on top of the fulcrum just so you can see how strong that joint is. It’s about two feet wide and half a panel of plywood is just hanging in the air, supported by that scarf.



What next? Get the panels back on the jig and start assembling, I guess.

Not too much weirdness putting it all together. Leaving the bottom panels on half-tightened for a few days sure made them easy to pull together at the bow. I forgot to get a good picture of that; I’ll get one tomorrow. I forgot to tape the stations before stitching stuff up but there’s quite a bit of space underneath, I’ll just crawl under and slide some tape in under the seams tomorrow to keep them from adhering to the panels when I start gluing it all up.

Ties are still loose but everything lays together pretty smoothly as this picture shows.



I thought I’d include this picture because it’s basically the same pic as the one the other day, only the plywood goes all the way to the transom now:



That’s about it for my Saturday afternoon…I was tied up with family tasks until around 2 pm - I like to send my wife off for the occasional massage and pedicure and today she had an appointment at ten so I took the little guy for a long walk and then I had to go get us Christmas lights and groceries which took a couple of hours, but still, nice to have three straight hours to work with no interruptions and I had from two until five with no other responsibilities at all so I got a fair bit done.

At the very end of the day I goofed around with the zip ties for a bit, just aligning the panels, but no hurry there...I want to go slow in this phase and be sure everything is lining up well. Here’s the current state of it before I shut down for pre-dinner toddler wrestling:

[cracked_ribs]

Today I just spent my time stitching panels together and tuning the fit of the panels against each other. I had her pretty close then decided to back off the bow a bit and adjust a few things…



It’s very close now, though, very close.



This is nice, you can get a bit of a sense of the sheer line.



And here you can see the bow, it’s not actually under that much pressure to get it this snug. There’s a little bit of a gap at the chine which I suspect I’ll need to work out by pulling the chines closer to the center line in the forward 18-24 inches, but it’s not severe. Epoxy would fill it without much difficulty.



If you look REALLY closely in a couple of pics you might see some wood fibres poking out right at the zip ties. Those are little bits of those 1/16” or 1/8“ cutoff strips from yesterday, I think. Was it the day before? At any rate I’m using them as spacers to keep the panels a bit separate for gluing. My tendency is probably to build tighter than I should; a bigger gap might be better. That’s the kind of thing I tend to struggle with in stitch and glue.

On a positive note, since the hull is stitched, and the process is called stitch and glue, all that’s left must be the gluing. I’m half done! I guess I’ll be finished in three weeks!

Or, you know, maybe not.

[Jeff]

Nice progress!!! Jeff

[cracked_ribs]

Thank you!

Very little time yesterday or today; I missed doing an update yesterday but there's not much to show, really. I continue to make tiny adjustments in the stitching. I'm very close to how I want it now.

Here's a pic that I don't know if anyone will be interested in or not: I took it just to give some sense of the shape of the forefoot. You can see here how far forward I've pulled the foot to get the stem fairly vertical and to lengthen the waterline.




And here you can see how I'm messing around with different straps to pull the chine inwards a bit close to the bow. It's working pretty well. As soon as I'm convinced I can't get the shape any better, I'll start gluing it up.



And then here you can see how I've been going along and making sure there's a bit of a gap between the panels all the way along. I have had to do a bit of trimming in a couple of spots to make sure there's a gap, although I don't think it will matter that much: the real strength will of course be in the glass, not the joints. As long as I have epoxy in the joint and not wood on wood, I think I'm happy with that.



One thing you can't see is that I went along and put packing tape behind every seam, just to reduce the amount of epoxy wastage as it gets pushed through the seams. Sometimes I see boats that get flipped and every seam looks like it was dripping twice as much epoxy as it was retaining, so I started taping the back sides of seams when I glue them up. One thing I didn't do on this one, although I thought about it and if I had more time when it was at that stage I might have given it a shot, was put 1/2" pvc pipe for the length of the chines and keel. If I'd stuck entire 10' lengths against the seams, A) I probably would have spent less time monkeying around with the strap tension, and B) had pre-formed fillets. I had been meaning to do that on this build but at the correct moment I didn't really have a convenient chance to go get the pipe, so I just kept on building. In general I don't like to over complicate things; just keep moving forward and you get the boat built, that's my experience.

But I've never seen anyone else build with joints temporarily backed by pipe to give it shape, an epoxy stop, and an automatic radius, so I really should have done it just to show it as a concept. Next time.

[cracked_ribs]

A simple update today: I finished adjusting the panels, and glued between stitches over about 90% of the boat. There's a couple of spots I discovered while working that I think will be easier to fine tune once the surrounding stuff is glued up, so I just worked around them.

I built a big fire in the stove for this to get everything good and warm, and boy, it sure worked. Although it was so much hotter than every other fire I've had, the stovepipe really cooked in, and smoked the hell out of the garage for about half an hour.

Anyway I think it will remain warm enough that the epoxy will harden right up overnight. I'll check it after dinner and maybe build a small fire again if I think it's necessary but it was kicking pretty well by the time I shut down around twenty minutes ago.

[cracked_ribs]

Super busy the last few days and haven't written much but I do continue to make progress on the boat.

I have been dialing in a few spots as I go so glued everything up over the course of a couple of days, letting the epoxy set up on the initial gluing and then bending the panels as necessary in the few remaining areas to get the alignment the way I wanted it. Some of the tweaks were really minor, like this first picture I wanted to move the bottom panel out a miximum of about 1/8" relative to the top panel in this one area.



Other areas required creative clamping to move the sides inward at the join.



Once the second round of glue had set up I pulled the straps - the epoxy doesn't really adhere to them well so a good yank and even the ones that got in a bit of contact with the glue pop right out - and started smoothing and rounding the edges and corners.



The hull has taken the shape nicely; that transition towards the bow looks pretty good. A slight compound curve in that area; I achieved it the same way I have achieved everything else in life: p̶e̶r̶s̶i̶s̶t̶a̶n̶c̶e̶ brute force.



Bike's getting dusty but all the seams are smooth and round. Up next:



About time to get glassing.

[Fuzz]

The hull is looking good! And you are making fast work of it.

[cracked_ribs]

Thanks, we'll see how my perseverance holds up once I'm just fairing the same surface 400 times in a row, but this slam it together phase I do pretty well at. If you need quick and dirty heavy lifts, I'm your guy, but a need for sustained effort on repetitive tasks I typically resolve via arson, so hard to say if I'll slow to a crawl when things get boring. Past boats I have built were either small, or had a workboat finish for a reason.

On the other hand...building boats seems to exploit a task fixation loop in my brain and I am hard to distract when I have one on the go so I'll hammer away as long as I can.