At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

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TomW1
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Re: At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

Post by TomW1 »

Great job CR. Glad your young and not my age with my bionic metallic joints. :D Beautiful shot of the beach and family. Thank you for sharing. :D

Tom
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cracked_ribs
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Re: At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

Post by cracked_ribs »

OlivierP wrote: Mon Apr 26, 2021 1:15 pm Hi, beautiful work !

Strange that you had to use a heat gun though ? I built a new boat this winter in my garage while it was often freezing outside, it went well with the following measures:
- Warmed up the bottles of epoxy for 15' in hot tap water before use
- Diluted the mix with 10-15% solvent, it really helps
- Heated up the garage above 15°C (usually 17-18) for 2-3 hours while epoxy sets

Good luck for the next steps
I don't dilute epoxy but the other stuff works fairly well for small jobs.

You have to mix a couple of gallons in a day, it gets increasingly inconvenient to use hot water; you spread it on a large surface that's 8 degrees C, it immediately slows down anyway.

Heat gunning it lets me control the flow very precisely, even on large areas.
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cracked_ribs
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Re: At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

Post by cracked_ribs »

Not much of an update - after last weekend's insanity, I took a couple of days off, and then had to devote a lot of time to household stuff as my wife did last year's taxes for us. And then the weekend was really nice again, so back to family enjoyment time:

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That park is just amazing. There's so much stuff for kids to do, and the whole thing is set right on the ocean so you can go down and walk on the beach...really one of the best parks I've ever seen in my life.

About all I got done on the boat was a quick grind of the interior glass so it'll be ready for framing etc:

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And then it was laying out the stringers. I forgot that originally I'd had the idea of putting in a ballast tank so I drew the stringers further outboard than normal. But then I decided against the ballast so the stringers can be relocated to a more conventional spot which will make some other stuff easier...but now the curve I drew on the stringers I cut a few months back is wrong, so I'm just templating them straight off the hull. Oh, I also spent a ton of time making sure the hull was actually true. For some reason I got super paranoid about this - I think it was putting in the stringers and not being happy with the fit, and then I just went on a rampage of tuning the cradle and jacking it up here and there and blocking this and that and anyway, that took about five hours before I was satisfied.

Anyway now it's absolutely definitely true and fair and so I'm patterning the stringers straight off the hull.

Using, of course, a deck of cards, as pioneered by Jeff in Vermont.

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The dimensional lumber is just some spacing stuff to keep everything upright and in place while I get the stringers dialed in. I am hoping to get the egg crating pretty far along over the next seven days. Then I guess it'll be cleats, bulkheads and hatches for a solid month, probably two. Somewhere in there I'll template the sole and get it temporarily placed while I make some decisions about a strange piece of hardware I don't think anyone will be expecting to see.

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VT_Jeff
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Re: At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

Post by VT_Jeff »

cracked_ribs wrote: Sun May 02, 2021 11:48 pm Oh, I also spent a ton of time making sure the hull was actually true. For some reason I got super paranoid about this - I think it was putting in the stringers and not being happy with the fit, and then I just went on a rampage of tuning the cradle and jacking it up here and there and blocking this and that and anyway, that took about five hours before I was satisfied.

Anyway now it's absolutely definitely true and fair and so I'm patterning the stringers straight off the hull.
Yes, I know that tune, though I think I spent 5 hours in just staring alone!
cracked_ribs wrote: Sun May 02, 2021 11:48 pm
Using, of course, a deck of cards, as pioneered by Jeff in Vermont.
Awesome, finally some royalty checks coming in! Like Gregg Allman, I'll keep them all stacked up on the TV for the rest of the band to admire when they come to visit. If I were going to do it again, I would bevel the bottom of my stringers to match the slope of the hull. I know this is debated as hotly as Khloe's paternity but I feel like it would have made things simpler, used less goo and left me with a better connection.

Here's my submission on the "strange hardware" lottery:
Capture.PNG
There are only two seasons in Vermont: boating season, and boat-building season.

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Re: At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

Post by cracked_ribs »

You know...I am also of the "bevel the stringers" persuasion just because I have never perfectly nailed the curve on the cut. So I figure the easiest thing is make them a little oversized, and plane them to fit. And if you already have the plane out, it's two minutes to bevel the whole length, and then it's just that much easier to avoid hot spots because you have a uniform shape. You can lay down a millimetre-thick ribbon of epoxy and it'll still bond everything pretty evenly.

To be fair to anyone who finds it difficult, though, I'll say that much like scarfing, I have the advantage of having spent many, many, many hours hand-sharpening knives and I suspect as a result of this, I'm really good at holding a particular angle with my hands. I don't know that they're connected but I think they are. If I want to sharpen a knife to a particular profile by hand I can get super close by feel, and I keep a stone on my boat for touching up between fish and am not really affected by sea state while doing it, my hands have just done that exact thing a thousand times and they do the work and I just stand there trying to look picturesque and salty.

I think that this translates fairly smoothly into being able to feel angle on a plane well, and feel the cut as it happens and know what it's doing. So probably if I had not spent so much time sharpening knives, I would find planing a bevel into stringers a lot more challenging, and it would be worth it to me to just burn a few extra ounces of epoxy so I didn't have to screw around with it.
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cracked_ribs
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Re: At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

Post by cracked_ribs »

I've pretty much been doing one update a week but I'm sitting around for a bit here so why not a bit of news?

I laminated the stringers last night; always impressive how a couple of thin bits of 1/4" ply stiffen right up when stuck together. I dropped them into their approximate locations but haven't started gluing them down yet or anything.

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I also bought a seat...65 or thereabouts litre/quart rotomold from Costco. I have a couple of rotomolds from different companies already but the big fancy one lives at my island place and the other is a little portable one. I can really appreciate a good cooler and have built a couple but they've all been pretty unweildy. This is more portable. It'll be good for the boat. I sat on it and made vroom vroom noises for a bit, but then got back to work.

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Transom is starting to shine up a bit...

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And last but not least I got unexpected, unexplained mail today. That's pretty normal for me; I have a lot of friends in different places and I get a fair number of surprises. Plus at one time my previous address got accidentally circulated when I was working for a magazine and I got a lot of stuff sent to me for a while from companies that were trying to promote their stuff. So I'm not totally shocked when something shows up unheralded, and knowing some of my friends it's entirely likely they won't want to put a return address on the box. For example, one time I got a crate of Mk 262, just showed up one day, no explanation, nobody admitted to being the source. Who knows? Could have been one of the companies trying to promote something, hard to say. FN used to be pretty generous. But they also used to want the credit for their generosity. Anyway I get a letter mailer in the box today, bring it home, and shake it a bit because I'm paranoid and I saw that one episode of CSI Miami where a guy got mailed a sheet of C4 rigged to blow when he opened the mailer. But no, this really sounds like paper. I unzip the thing.

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It was this magazine, and a note saying "hope this was a better week - M." It was a friend in Montana, a (wildly more accomplished) guitarist and (somewhat less accomplished) fellow traveler in arcane worlds of armament and conflict.

Ironically I had just been joking around with a former business partner about setting up a business in the Seychelles doing sportfishing charters as a cover for anti-piracy work in the gulf of Aden but now I feel conflicted. Just based on what I gathered from the magazine today, pirates seem like a lot of fun. So maybe that business is off the table, at least until I get a couple more issues.
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cracked_ribs
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Re: At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

Post by cracked_ribs »

A bit of time has gone by since my last update - this was primarily on account of Mother's Day but secondarily on account of the weather, which has been beautiful again and generated a lot of beach trips.

But since the arrival of Pirates magazine, which is pretty surreal and I can't quite tell if it's supposed to be serious or not, I've managed to chip away at a few tasks, and at least my distractions have been very pleasant. Here's the family at one of our local beaches - my kid was extremely serious about this small piece of waterlogged bark. Way off in the back there you can see my wife in this new bikini she's currently obsessed with that looks like an oily marble, if you recall those. Kind of a metallic colour-shift fabric. Anyway life is good but boatbuilding is probably a little slower than usual.

Got the fillets in on the stringers...

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Glassed them down...as usual, probably overkill for the loads this low-speed machine is going to see but what the heck, I have plenty of tape. 2x 12oz, staggered. The stringers are 3" tall so I didn't go crazy on the stagger - more than half the tape is on the hull already. Anyway, they're not going anywhere.

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I don't think anyone here will find this funny but I do...this is what happens when you go from tac'd out gunfight bro to suburban boatbuilder dad. Your high-speed deadbird faceshooting gear gets repurposed for kneeling on rough fiberglass surfaces.

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Oh, then I took a couple of days off to play with this. You know how I was saying I just never know what will show up in the mail? Well, here's another totally unexpected arrival:

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Dynaco PAT-5 preamp and Stereo 410 power amp. I had never heard of this, but by some weird coincidence I had a couple of 200w, 8 ohm speakers lying around doing nothing. The 410 requires exactly this, so I wired it all up. Holy cow, what smooth sound! I put a bluetooth receiver on it so my wife could connect her phone and just put on music whenever. It's got crushing, huge sound...I made her take the kid into the back yard so I could test it out and it's lethal. Totally awesome. I know nothing about vintage amps at all but I do have a friend who collects that stuff so I sent him pics and asked a couple of questions. He couldn't believe somebody just gave it to me and was furious. I'm very fortunate in how my friend selection process has panned out, I'll certainly say that.

Here's more humour: this is what happens when you ask your somewhat barbie-doll-esque wife to grab cheap playing cards from the dollar store if she's in the area so you can do more templating.

"But look, bunnies and hearts!"

"Well, I guess there's no specific disadvantage to that."

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Here's something I should have thought of months ago: I'm always making improvised lists of the day's tasks on scraps of cardboard and stuff. Why didn't I do this earlier? I just staplegunned about 50 sheets of paper to the garage wall. Instant no-losing-it tear off pad. I can't believe I didn't do this ages ago.

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Here I'm just trying to sort out the forward bulkhead and splashwell. The splashwell I left tall to give it some crown.

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There's the splashwell bulkhead laid out. I wasn't thinking when I laid out the V - I measured to the wrong spot and now have to "infill" an inch or so at the bottom, but no big deal. Just late in the day measuring and cutting without a sanity check first. Anyway annoying but not much of an issue.

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Derp - that's too much V as should have been obvious.

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At any rate I'll see if I can get the transverse frames glassed down today, and then it'll be cutting up the splashwell and forward bulkhead. I'm going away this weekend for a bit, so could continue to be slow going, but that's all right: I'm enjoying life.

Finally I don't even know if this is a bridge too far so I'll just post the link instead of including the photo. This is my wife dropping off drinks so I can keep working, and finding ways to make me want to take a break. I can't believe we've been together for over 20 years now. She's still a lot of fun to have around.

https://imgur.com/7Fcfk0S
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Dan_Smullen
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Re: At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

Post by Dan_Smullen »

This proves it once again. Beautiful women are attracted to both Pirates, and members of rock bands. Build on, sir. Build on.

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VT_Jeff
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Re: At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

Post by VT_Jeff »

And Cr continues to be unchallenged for most entertaining build thread. Hope you're planning another boat.

The beach photo got lost in the ether. Please resubmit for completeness.

Glass one of those hearts/bunnies cards inside the boat somewhere.

Keep up the great work and the great updates!

Vj
There are only two seasons in Vermont: boating season, and boat-building season.

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Re: At last a build thread: CR16 skiff

Post by Fuzz »

I seem to recall from another forum your wife has a thing for rabbits :D I also think one of those cards should be part of the build. It sure must be nice to have a wife who supports your habits :wink:

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