At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

[cracked_ribs]

Transom is laminated...this is just two 1/2" layers of marine fir, probably tons for the 35 hp this skiff is scheduled to get. But I might end up throwing in a doubler between the motorwell walls just to bring the thickness up to standard clamping spec. The motorwell sides are also 1/2" marine fir, mostly because I had some lying around in scraps after making the transom. That whole assembly is going to be an anvil.



Then it was time to rearrange the bedroom. We got rid of our old bed frame when we moved from Vancouver and neither of us care about that kind of stuff so for the last year we've just had the mattress on the floor. I should probably build a frame just to give it air circulation underneath or something but I never remember to do that stuff. I don't know where towels are kept or where dishes are stored. I just don't want to know anything like that so my brain rejects it.



The scarfs got the same treatment as the transom: 1 coat epoxy, neat, let it soak in for a little bit, then slightly wet peanut butter on both sides, spread with a notched trowel. Like proper peanut butter, the kind that's just ground up peanuts at room temperature.



I lay down a bunch of waxed paper to separate the epoxy from the floor, and then between each layer. I had a few of these laminated sawn pine shelves around that were part of a headboard I built at our last place; they have nice straight sides so I lay one down on the floor and used it to align the plywood during scarfing. My wife said I would have to buy waxed paper; we didn't have any. I asked where it would be if we did and she said there was a drawer in the kitchen near the fridge...I found this stuff and she said she thought it was "untrustworthy" and therefore didn't count. She speaks English, basically as a first language, but her syntax is a little weird sometimes, I think from being raised by German speakers, speaking English. Her German is actually worse than mine, and mine is beyond terrible...except she understands more spoken German than I do by a factor of about 20. Anyway I don't know what about this waxed paper was untrustworthy. It seemed fine to me.



Running out of light by the end of it! I'm never in the bedroom unless I'm in bed so I guess the overhead light is burnt out? My wife's little lamp was working pretty hard by the end of the shift. The other thing that's funny is that it was the first time we've heated the bedroom...I like it cold and my wife just piles on blankets to sleep. It took about 48 hours to get up to temperature but it was necessary to cure the epoxy; usually this time of year that room would be around 30-40 degrees farenheit. I'm not sure how I'll sleep the next couple of nights. I might move into the library and just open the windows.



A couple of 1x12s to spread the weight out across the joins, and a couple of plates to clamp it. That untrustworthy waxed paper sure better hold or I'll have the world's largest, most expensive, custom wooden toe-stubber in the bedroom.

[cracked_ribs]

Untrustworthy waxed paper vindicated! Everything peeled apart as expected.



The scarfs themselves look pretty good:



Tiny bit of glue squeezed out the sides and bottom on each scarf but overall very clean. I aligned it all pretty carefully which makes a big difference. The waxed paper combined with pressure from a flat surface top and bottom allows for a very clean joint IMO. These two lines are something like 1/8" apart, maybe 3/16".



The transom also glued up nicely but I didn't think to take a picture of it.

Other than that I mostly just worked on getting the jig aligned. It's pretty close now. The transom assembly is a bit tricky to work with because it's heavy and needs to be adjusted and supported at the same time. But I'm very close now.

[Cowbro]

I cant get over the narration about gluing up those joints in your 30* bedroom. Lol. I like it though, when my wife complains about my boat building I can say that at least I am not gluing scarf joints on the floor in the bedroom.

Carry on!

[cracked_ribs]

Yeah, I take the whole "if you can't be a good example, at least be a horrible warning" thing pretty seriously.

[gstanfield]

I haven’t built in the bedroom yet, but two of my boats were built in our downstairs “family room”. Anything I build in there has to be small enough to go out a door and up stairs or out a window. It’s great for canoes and kayaks, just gotta be careful not to drop epoxy on the carpet!

[Jaysen]

No in home building yet. But the house is used to hold Lil Bit during hurricanes. Never know if we will need to float out the front door.

[gstanfield]

Days like today where the wind has been blowing a steady 35+ for four days with gusts as high as 80mph and temps in the 20's with snow really bum me out. I have to keep telling myself: At least we don't have hurricanes and summer humidity.


Still, by Christmas every year I'm so sick of winter that I start looking at maps for nice places to move and by April I'm so sick of winter that I start trying to sell things off, but when spring finally hits towards the end of May I know I'm in for three months of incredible weather and I forget all about moving back south.

[cracked_ribs]

My last build was indoors...and on the top floor of our apartment building, when we lived in Vancouver.



I was pretty happy when the weather got nice enought that I could move it out onto the deck. Fortunately we had a pretty big deck and all the finishing and everything happened outside. And I finished the whole thing bright so there wasn't a ton of fairing dust, although it did mean that I had to lay the epoxy down pretty flat to avoid sanding it much, so that part was kind of a pain.

Once I get the large panels cut up, that should be it for the bedroom build. Although as my wife pointed out last night, it's kind of fun to have the bed up in front of the glass door. We get some pretty spectacular sunrises etc here.

Weather-wise, we aren't subject to hurricanes or severe winters, but you do have to deal with wind and rain. On the other hand, four days ago they were predicting ten straight days of rain, and we got one. Yesterday was mostly dry, and today there's not a cloud in the sky and it's probably a few degrees above freezing out there, making it some of the only land in Canada actually intended for human habitation.

[cracked_ribs]

The jig is finally aligned to my satisfaction, which should last until the minute I roll it anywhere. Corner to corner, I'm seeing something like 1/4" of difference and I don't think that's enough to worry about seeing as the panels should float on the jig and self-align to some degree. The stringer cutouts are lined up and everything seems about right. It occurs to me that if I thought it out more carefully, I could have put the baseline on an angle, because the bow has a lot more freeboard than the stern...but it would have been a lot more math, so screw it. I can sand at 4' off the ground.





I don't know if you can see in the picture above but in case you can and people are raising eyebrows at it...the motorwell bulkhead is not full height; the sheerline doesn't dip three inches between the transom and the motorwell and then spring back up or anything. I just cut it out of marine keeper plywood at the height it will be, because there's enough other full height stations to wrap the sides around and I mostly just need it there to help support the transom.

Having aligned the jig, I'm on to lofting the large panels.



I know some people hate this process but I don't really mind it. I much prefer it to full-sized templates, anyway. I don't like it as much as nicely laid out plans with good measurements shown but it's not bad, to be honest. And I'm not just working from a table of offsets - in fact the way I'm doing it is pretty easy:



Here's a screen cap of the kind of plan I'm working from. As you can see it's pretty self-explanatory.



So I just put on some music or a podcast, draw the grid, and start plotting points. I have the sides laid out now and hope to cut them tomorrow. It'll be really nice to start hanging panels on the jig and have something a bit boat-shaped to look at.

[cracked_ribs]

Big action today.



This is a 2" strip of lexan that a local plastics shop gave me when I went in looking for a good batten to draw curves.  Pretty helpful!  The little muffins are lead; I use a beater muffin baking tin to make lead into readily melted or alloyed blocks so I have tons of little lead 1/2 lb blocks.  With a little block of wood and a clamp they make a nice batten-holder-in-placer.



With the sides and bottom pretty much drawn up - there's some screwing around left to go, the sides need another foot and a half on the stern end and the bottom another 6 inches or so, but that'll be easy to splice in with the big cuts out of the way - I cut them out, leaving the sides about a half inch taller than necessary and an inch longer, and the bottom a half inch wider and an inch longer.

Ordinarily I would cut exactly to size - usually I'll measure precisely and cut half the pencil line away.  And in most cases I would be saying look, do you think you know better than the designer?  Cut to the size they recommend, don't improvise.  The builder needs to respect the designer.

But in this case, obviously the designer can't be trusted at all.  Of course, the builder is also kind of a problem child, so it's hard to know whose side to take.  Probably the builder and designer should spend some time in the octagon, fighting it out.  But for the moment, let's proceed under the assumption that an extra half-inch on the dimensions may turn out to be warranted, and it's easier to take a bit of wood off than put it back on.  No boat has ever been built from these plans, so I'm erring on the side of caution.  Or at least: I'm erring.





Anyway, sides and bottom are cut out and they aren't needed in the bedroom anymore, so back to the garage with them:





This last picture makes me think two things:

1) I hate that god damn railing...I just bought this house a year ago and haven't had time to do much to it but that railing has got to go.  It looks like someone bolted a bunch of pallets to my deck.

2) This is why I like scarfs for joining plywood.  As you can likely imagine, there were points during the process of lowering the cut out panels during which the apex of the bend was the scarf.  But it held just fine, and the bends were nice and smooth with no obvious hard spot at the splice.

Speaking of scarfs, since I know you're all dying to know what a scarf looks like when sawn through:



That's a nice clean glue line if you ask me.  I'm quite happy with that.

Oh, one last thing: I figured out why my wife found the wax paper untrustworthy.



It's godless communist hippy wax paper made from SOY.  If you tolerate soy stuff, you're probably not the kind of person who would spend a couple of decades of your life with me.  Luckily it must have been smeared with testosterone grease or something or it probably wouldn't have worked.

Damn hippy paper.