At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

To help other builders, please list the boat you are building in the Thread Subject -- and to conserve space, please limit your posting to one thread per boat.

Please feel free to use the gallery to display multiple images of your progress.
TomTom
* Bateau Builder *
* Bateau Builder *
Posts: 736
Joined: Thu Nov 22, 2012 10:29 am
Location: East Africa

Re: At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

Post by TomTom »

Well - I think many people’s lives have been disrupted - so we are not alone! It’s mainly the 10 days of hotel quarantine coming into UK that is keeping us from going anywhere.

We are very lucky to be able to stay in touch so well with what’s app - my brother is in Curacao, my wife, daughter and I are in the UK, our parents are in Africa - but the ability to stay in touch the way we can nowadays really helps.

cracked_ribs
Very Active Poster
Very Active Poster
Posts: 511
Joined: Sat Apr 11, 2015 11:58 pm
Location: Western Canada
Location: Ladysmith, BC

Re: At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

Post by cracked_ribs »

TomTom wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 10:34 am

We are close - it’s just I am stuck in the UK and my boat is in Kenya - and due to all the covid travel restrictions we are basing our selves here for now.

But basically she just needs the top coat on the inside and some anti skid and then the woodwork needs clear coating.

Have sent the engine injectors off for a clean - our fuel is terrible and they have sat unused a long time.

Out of interest what are you finishing your wood work with?

I imported the Gurit SP 115 UV epoxy for the wood; and then will clear coat with one a 2 pac clear coat car paints.

I have also found that Fiebens alcohol leather dye seemed to work ok at touching up epoxy blemishes - I have used it on wooden bows in the past and it’s worked nicely there. (I have a few places where the epoxy joint lines look very white because of the microfibres) ...

That’s my plan - sort of - curious how you were dealing with it?
[/quote]

All the brightwork is just getting the treatment my caveman brain came up with: 3 coats of regular old BBC MarinEpoxy, followed by as many coats of Epifanes varnish as I can stand. Apparently the Epifanes does pretty well over epoxy but I have no personal experience to back that up. That's what I hear, though.

I will say that on my last all-bright dinghy, I used System 3 WR-LPU clear over MarinEpoxy, and that boat's been in the sun for three years now, and held up pretty well. Really well, considering it sat on the mooring for three straight summers, actually. Pretty brutal treatment for an art project. But it really didn't yellow.

Strangely this epoxy, which is exactly the same, seems to be prone to yellowing much more quickly. I have had the boat out a few times and can see it. My last boat spent a month on the deck in the middle of summer, and didn't really yellow perceptibly at all. No idea what the difference there is. But I can tell on the interior of the boat, for sure, it yellowed a little bit. On the other hand, I had it out in 40C in direct sun, so I'm calling it "post-cured" a la Fallguy. Well, again, my neanderthal rendition of post-curing.

Now I'm curious about the Fiebens - that's really interesting. I have a few spots I think I might try that on.
I designed my own boat. This is the build thread:

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=65349

TomTom
* Bateau Builder *
* Bateau Builder *
Posts: 736
Joined: Thu Nov 22, 2012 10:29 am
Location: East Africa

Re: At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

Post by TomTom »

It has to be Fiebens - and alcohol based - but it’s the only dye that I have found that penetrates the waxy cuticle on bamboo and it has done pretty well at hiding epoxy blemishes - so worth a shot for sure.

cracked_ribs
Very Active Poster
Very Active Poster
Posts: 511
Joined: Sat Apr 11, 2015 11:58 pm
Location: Western Canada
Location: Ladysmith, BC

Re: At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

Post by cracked_ribs »

Well, I'll have to track that down, thank you!
I designed my own boat. This is the build thread:

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=65349

TomTom
* Bateau Builder *
* Bateau Builder *
Posts: 736
Joined: Thu Nov 22, 2012 10:29 am
Location: East Africa

Re: At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

Post by TomTom »

Image

This is a thin bamboo strip glued over a wood called Ipe using epoxy. There is a tapered wedge between the bamboo and the Ipe around the handle section. The handle is then glued on afterwards. So at the handle there are 3 glue lines. The Ipe is a very dark wood. The bamboo is light. I feel like the Fiebins dye did a pretty good job of blending everything...

cracked_ribs
Very Active Poster
Very Active Poster
Posts: 511
Joined: Sat Apr 11, 2015 11:58 pm
Location: Western Canada
Location: Ladysmith, BC

Re: At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

Post by cracked_ribs »

Wow, that looks terrific. I've seen ipe used for wear properties - I was actually hunting for some locally at one time for some project, I forget what, but I wanted to try it because I heard it's really tough.

But I didn't know it was springy. Is it used in traditional bows in the part of Africa your family is in? Like is that a fairly faithful reproduction of a local traditional bow, just with modern adhesives etc?

Here, to my knowledge at least, the only indigenous bows were made of cedar and while it's a bit springy, it's nothing to write home about, so archery didn't take off as a technology on a huge level.

Anyway the colour blending does look quite good.
I designed my own boat. This is the build thread:

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=65349

TomTom
* Bateau Builder *
* Bateau Builder *
Posts: 736
Joined: Thu Nov 22, 2012 10:29 am
Location: East Africa

Re: At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

Post by TomTom »

This is a whole different rabbit hole you are sending me down!

I would say that bamboo backed bows are very much a “modern concept” - you can pull shape into the bow in the same way you would with gluing up fiberglass bows. Also, something strange happens from an engineering point of view when you use a bamboo back and you pull a belly into reflex. For some reason a bow stores energy much more efficiently. An American called Dan Perry who holds several flight bow records popularised the technique of “Perry reflexing”... I’ve tried to understand the physics but don’t but suffice to say it works!

Ipe is amazing stuff - sinks in water. Very oily and hard to glue.

One side of a bow must be good in tension and the other in compression. Ipe is very good in compression and bamboo is great in tension - so you can essentially create the perfect “bow wood”... and you can “Perry reflex” and you can glue a bow up in multiple shapes with this combination - so it’s very common and popular technique. It also lets you use imperfect “bow wood” from a lumber yard. A traditional “self bow” must have its back (the part in tension facing away from the archer) as one single unviolated growth ring running tip to tip - because if you violate a ring it will break there. So you basically have to start with a whole log and split it and follow it’s natural contours to achieve this. Bamboo backing lets you cut some corners....

It’s like sticking fiberglass and epoxy over wood and calling it a wooded boat! The purists scoff at you in both cases!!

From your part of the world I would say Pacific yew and Osage are the out and out winners premium bow woods; though hickory will make a bullet proof bow but it’s very susceptible to moisture fluctuations so must be sealed well.

Other decent North American bow woods include maple, red oak, black locust and ash.

One of the cedars is much better than the other - cant remember which. But they were/ are often backed with sinew as they are tension weak woods...

Many North American traditional bow designs were shaped by the areas that people lived and the woods available to them. I think sinew backed bows really came into their own as a way to make much shorter bows from brittle/ tension weak woods that could be used on horses... so I think bow design basically changed drastically after the arrival of the Spanish and horses ...

It’s a whole addiction in its own right...

African bows come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes depending on where one is talking about. From our part of the world, Kamba or Waliangulu people are probably the best known for their bows.

cracked_ribs
Very Active Poster
Very Active Poster
Posts: 511
Joined: Sat Apr 11, 2015 11:58 pm
Location: Western Canada
Location: Ladysmith, BC

Re: At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

Post by cracked_ribs »

That's really interesting - sorry, away at my cabin for a bit there and although I get intermittent reception it's hard to give serious thought to anything I read on a phone, somehow.

It makes sense to use a tension wood and a compression wood; I don't know anything about archery but obviously you look at what a bow does and...yeah, that's a beam that will only ever go one way (well, I once saw a guy pull back and release an empty one and it flipped inside out or whatever you'd call it but I got the sense that that was very, very bad and everyone who knew anything looked like they instantly got an ice cream headache that would take a Texas gas station gallon-sized slurpee drink to generate).

I need another hobby like I need another hole in my head but my wife is always half-seriously talking about taking up archery. We have the space and it would be a lot more polite than shooting unsupressed rifles at the cabin, that's for sure.

And actually over the weekend someone gave me a beater sit-on-top kayak. That's only important because this fall I was going to take a break from the main boat, and build a strictly one-man kayak-ish dinghy out of foam so I could easily hoist it one handed into the boat, and stop using my sailing dinghy as a tender. With this boat I'll be able to offload people and cargo straight onto the shore, which is a huge pain with the two-ton glass tank, so I really just need to get myself to shore afterwards, and a little rotomolded SOT seems perfect for popping 100 feet to shore.

ANYWAY, as a result I suddenly don't need to build that. But I will have some spare epoxy lying around. And there's a specialty wood store right up the road. So anyway, there's a rabbit hole I'm fairly prepared to get sucked down.

Although I recently realized, as I sat in my hot tub, triggering heat shock proteins and cellular autophagy after my fourth set of neutral grip pull-ups, listening to Lex Fridman discuss psychedelics with Rick Doblin, while wondering if I should go back to BJJ, that I've essentially become a total caricature of a podcast bro.

So taking up bowhunting might just make me a freaking cartoon. There are risks to be managed here.


Perry reflexing, you say...
I designed my own boat. This is the build thread:

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=65349

cracked_ribs
Very Active Poster
Very Active Poster
Posts: 511
Joined: Sat Apr 11, 2015 11:58 pm
Location: Western Canada
Location: Ladysmith, BC

Re: At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

Post by cracked_ribs »

Well, I have a pretty small update.

I took a week off to go to my cabin, and then another week off because, to my enormous surprise, I got sick. Don't get your hopes up: it was nothing serious. I had been speculating that with things starting to open up and my kid going to these mommy-hook-ups/sort-of-semi-daycare-hangouts that we might actually have an avenue by which we could get sick and that turned out to be shockingly prophetic. I work from home, my wife doesn't work, and covid is really rare where I am so until very recently I felt like the odds of catching anything at all were exceptionally remote...and the only real change to that was the local mom meet-up, so I had processed this kind of theoretical change to our family's risk of infection, which in a normal year wouldn't be a thing I'd think about but you know, covid etc, so this was just a thing I was thinking about.

Anyway then my kid got his first cold, which I also got. I was so surprised that there was anything circulating at all that initially I just assumed it must be covid, but I got tested, and apparently not. But I was super beat for about a week, and also had lingering concerns about a false negative so I didn't want to go grind fiberglass, even in a dust mask, and just give my lungs some whole other problem to deal with on the off chance it was indeed covid. Which, as far as I know, it wasn't, and it's been a week and I feel pretty much fine, so I got back to work on the boat on Saturday for the first time in a while.


In rough chronological order here...I started by bailing out to the cabin, so I'll cover that first.

That Costco Lifetime cooler I bought for the boat, I used for the first time because there was yet another heatwave on, so I wanted all the coolers I could get for a week at the cabin. When I bought that thing I had slight misgivings, because at whatever, I think around $160 CAD, I thought there's some obvious downsides: you're supporting junk chinese manufacturing etc. But I'm pretty tapped out at the moment, and bought it, anyway.

So then I open the thing before we head to the cabin and check this out:

Image

It's made in the freaking USA. If I knew this, I definitely forgot. I was totally stoked. I'm not American, so I'm not patriotic for made-in-the-USA stuff per se, but would I rather support manufacturing in an ally country instead of a country I won't comment on further because not everyone wants to drink my personal brand of political kool-aid? Hell yes, I would rather my money go to America and American workers. Very happy about this.

The cooler appropriately packed, we headed off to the cabin where this familiar beach continued to enthrall my kid:

Image

Image

I thought this might be kind of interesting, too. This is the sound of a beach here at low tide. If you turn it up you'll hear all the tiny little animals making their weird little squeaks and creaks and clicks as they open and close shells and filter mud and crawl around. It struck me that a sand beach is really nice to walk on, but often a bit of a desert, but our beaches are the opposite: murder on the feet, but teeming with life. And our little island is so quiet, you can hear it all happening. Anyway I just thought it was kind of cool.

https://youtu.be/afMqEtV5Fq8

There are other beaches there, though. We got the kid a little floaty thing, like an inner tube but with a center floor with leg holes, so he could float around in the ocean. He's really into beaches and the ocean in general. I have to say I think he's pretty lucky to get this constant exposure to these marine environments. I'm really happy about the general experience of life he's getting so far. He has just suddenly grasped the significance of berry bushes and we have been gorging him on wild salal, blueberries, and blackberries. He's crazy about it all. It's pretty neat.

Okay, last non-boat pic:

Five days, >30c (~90f) all day every day, still 5 lbs of ice in there. That's yeti performance for coleman money.


Okay, back to work:


Just throwing a bit of light cloth on the side supports here to prevent checking etc; that's marine fir so it needs a bit of extra help in that department:

Image

Cleaning up a little slab of maple for the outboard pad on the bracket:

Image

Filleting in side supports:

Image

Test fitting the...I don't even know what to call these. Full-length coaming cleats. If this was german, maybe inwalesheerclampcoamingcleat. I honestly don't know. They're going to give me a gluing surface to connect the side decks to what I would call coaming but could be considered an inwale? I have them for the top and bottom of the coaming surface, the top to give gluing surface and the bottom just to stiffen the bottom of the coaming edge.

Then I ripped a 2x3 into quarters. This will go under the side decks, in the middle, as a longitudinal stiffener. I only have 1/4" ply on hand and I think it'd be floppy between the side supports without a bit of help. I scarfed these together last night.

Image

And finally, I went around the side supports where they interface with the sole to make really fat fillets, and stuck cleats all over the relevant surfaces of the side supports where the decks and coaming need gluing surface.

I'm going to pull a really thin coat of fairing compound over the interior, I think. I spent about an hour Saturday afternoon running over it with a sander and it's decent, but I think a skim coat could make it look noticeably better under paint, so I guess I'll do that.

Really looking forward to getting paint on the interior: once the surfaces are protected from UV I can be less careful about keeping it indoors, so I can use it more easily when I want as I finish up.
I designed my own boat. This is the build thread:

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=65349

Fuzz
* Bateau Builder - Expert *
* Bateau Builder - Expert *
Posts: 8921
Joined: Tue Aug 02, 2011 4:23 am
Location: Kasilof, Alaska

Re: At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

Post by Fuzz »

Looks like you are getting close to laying a little paint on it. Nice work on those hull side stiffeners.

Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Bing [Bot] and 23 guests