Boatbuilding Blog

I’m installing all the stuff in the Lazarettes now because I know it will be impossible to do well after the tops go on. The Starboard side has all the hoses, gas lines and fuel filter, and the Propane tank.  I need everything to be accessible yet out of the weather. The Propane assembly has a pressure gauge, a regulator, and an electric shutoff solenoid. This whole thing was assembled for me by a cool guy at Fisheries Supply for a minimal cost.  The fuel-water separator has a clear container with a petcock to drain the water without having to remove the filter.  I think I’ll mount a little light next to it.
 

The Port side has the starter battery and the 6-gallon spare gas tank.  A plastic battery box drops in the frame to protect the battery from the elements.

I’ve cut the stem piece and have started fairing the chain locker top. Once I have the lazarettes done I can add their tops, and then glass and fair the gunnels. At that point I can start finishing the inside of the hull in preparation for assembling the cabin. I’m planning on priming everything except where the cabin parts attach to the boat before building the cabin. It’ll be a lot easier to spray primer while I can still walk around inside.

I’ve got the parts fitted for the chain locker in the bow. Next weekend should see it installed and glassed. I like the kick space below, like a kitchen counter. It lets you stand right up to the locker. There are two large scuppers so I can throw a bucket of water in the locker to wash it out.  The wide panel on the side of the cutout will hold the shore power socket. I assume I’ll moor bow-in most of the time so this will be the least annoying place to run shore power from. I’ve seen too many boats where the power cord is in the way all the time.

I tried various layouts of cleats and bollard locations. I like this layout best so far.  Note the plywood cap on the gunnels - it really makes the boat look more finished.  I need to do some more longboarding before glassing the caps.  I’ve got a bit of a dilemma with the bollard - I found a very pretty bronze one that would look great there. I have to decide if I want to return this one. Hamilton Marine sells bronze cleats too.

I’m trying to decide where to cut the stem. It’s going to be time to finish the whole bow area soon.

Non-boating note: I spend a lot of time on the West Marine site. It’s a good store, but the web site itself is a mess. It’s one of the least-optimized web sites I’ve run across. They break at least ten of the of the 14 rules.  For all of last week they had a missing CSS file too. It’s annoyingly slow to browse around on.  I bet they could speed up their pages by 50% with just a few weeks of work.

I’m working on the rubrail/gunnels of the boat. This involves designing the stern deck and the breasthook, and their attached parts.

Here’s a mockup of the structures in the bow, with the breasthook (which will be 1/2 inch ply with filler below) over the bollard mount, which in turn is the lid of the chain locker:

I really like this design because it allows you to stand in the very bow of the boat, to drop the anchor over or to grab the dock with the boat hook, or just to watch the water go by.

The whole gunnel will be capped by 1/2 inch plywood, radiused and glassed. Here’s the stern rubrail, laminated of thin strips to be the same cross-section as the side rubrail. The stern decks will go on top, creating an open-sided lazarette on either side of the motor well. The lazarettes will hold the starting battery and the propane tank, along with the sundry stuff that needs to be stored.

Along with the thickened epoxy, there are a couple dozen stainless screws and hundreds of Monel staples embedded. These strips really didn’t want to be tortured into this shape!

Here’s the motor well so far. The motor mount is three layers of 3/4 inch ply above the sole, and four layers below. The sides are doubled 3/4 inch ply.

The 25-gallon gas tank goes under the sole just forward of the motor, with the fill and vents below the starboard deck, which will be made as a hatch.  All the steering cables, electrical wires, and the propane tube will be through there also.  The space will be vented below the lazarette covers, well above waterline in case the stern gets flooded.

The plan is to finish the hull and decks and everything else I can do before starting the cabin. As soon as the walls start going in I’ll lose my work space inside the boat. By then it will be summer and I can cut parts outside. By the time the rains come in the Fall I’ll be doing finish work in the cabin.

I’m pretty excited - I just ordered my first real boat hardware! Everything up to now has been lumber, glass, and epoxy to build the hull and structures. Now I’ve ordered a gas tank and a bollard. I need the tank early because it gets built in below the cockpit sole. I want the bollard now because I’ve been mocking up a place to mount it in the bow and need to know how high it should be to make the line-handling work well.  I spent the weekend building the motor well, cutting, gluing, and screwing layers of 3/4 inch marine plywood. Now I need to fillet and glass the parts in and make the cockpit sole

Tank - 25 gallons:

Update Jan 7 - the parts arrived.  The bollard looks great!  The tank actually fits in the space below the sole as designed. I found installation instructions on the Moeller site (PDF). I didn’t realize the tank could expand quite a bit when it’s filled with fuel - more than an inch in length!

Bollard:

I went down to the Devlin boatbuilding shop, ostensibly to meet Joel and pick up a roll of glass, but really just to see the place. It was a great trip. Sam was in Mexico, but I met Joel Mill and two others in the crew (both of whose names I forgot - sorry guys!), all of whom were helpful and friendly. On the way out I stopped in Olympia and took a lot of detail pictures of some other Devlin boats in the water. I’ll make a page for them one of these days.

Here’s the shop in Maps.Live.com. The large red-roofed building is the main shop.

The office - very nautical.

I talked to this guy a while. He showed me around the shop and we discussed boats. He was really into boatbuilding and seemed like a real pro.

Inside the shop. They use the upper decks to get into larger boats.

They’ve got the original 16 foot Godzilli for sale. Here are some other pictures of this boat. There was some discussion of the shaggy fenders on the WoodenBoat forums. Here’s a picture of the back side of one showing the airplane tire used as a form for the baggywrinkle.

These are out of chronological order - I misplaced the pictures.

The deck framing is three layers of hemlock 1 x 4’s laminated. The diagonal parts were lapped onto the first layer of the fore-and-aft stringer and glued together so the whole frame is bonded together. It made for lots of small pieces to fit together but it feels very strong. This will be the foundation of the house sides, so I wanted a strong, rigid framework. The pilothouse deck that the stool is on is temporary, but at the correct height.

I cut away most of this bulkhead - you can see the cutout in the picture above. The foot of the pilot bed goes through here to the bow.

  This is just a cool picture of the laser level through the bulkhead WL holes as I leveled the boat.

Glassing the bulkheads. Four layers on each joint - three layers of biax and a layer of tooling cloth for protection.

Cloth-cutting station.

I went to a junkyard auto recycler on Aurora Avenue (Pick-a-Part) and got some nice seats out of an old Honda. Grabbed the steering wheel too so I can make make a steering-station mockup. Cost an hour of my time and $50.00. I like the idea of reclining seats in the boat. They also adjust 6 inches fore and aft. I’ll see if that’s enough.

I’m having a very hard time designing the seating, steering, and instrument placement. I’m going to have to build it all full-size to see what works.

Here are some shots of an outboard motor mockup I made to test the fit of the real motor. It’s a full-scale copy of the 45 HP Honda on my runabout. First, I took pictures of the real motor with a square for scale, then traced them full-sized on paper using a projector in a conference room at work.

I transferred the drawing to some old foundation insulation by poking holes through the drawing with a nail, then cut out the foam with a keyhole saw. I did this a number of times to build up the thickness, and glued it all together with construction adhesive.

I hammered in some steel rod scrap for strength. Then I formed it to shape with a Surform and covered it in epoxy. I made a motor mount with about the same dimensions as the real one and welded the parts together to make a mount that lifts and swivels about the same as the real one. I’m looking forward to seeing it mounted in the boat! Should be somewhat easier to play with than a 300 pound real motor.

I now know that a 20-inch motor means that the transom height is 20 inches, measured from the top of the mount vertically down to the bottom of the boat. The motor  will be in the water deeper or shallower depending on the distance of the waterline to the bottom of the boat. The idea is the anti-cavitation plate should line up with the bottom of the boat to ensure smooth water flow from the hull to the propeller. This is easy to lay out on my boat because the motor well mount is vertical.

My motor plans for now are to buy a new Yamaha High Thrust 50 HP motor. The High Thrust motors are designed to move displacement boats at non-planing speeds. They have oversized gearboxes made to run slower than most motors. The propellers are somewhat larger too, helping with slow-speed acceleration and reverse.  They’re supposed to be quiet and low-vibration too, which I think is very important. This boat only really needs about 20 HP to push it at hull speed, but I want extra power to drive it safely out of the most adverse conditions. I imagine going through Deception Pass against the tide and a strong wind pushing up the waves.  I’m still looking at the equivalent Mercury too - called a BigFoot. They’re both 4-stroke EFI engines with auto-tilt and trim. They cost about $6000 new - we’re going to sell the van and runabout to offset some of the cost. Anyone in the market for a nice van with a queen-size bed or a 16 foot runabout with a Honda? Runs good!

I finally got the bow and side decks installed last week. It took about 200 stainless deck screws, and lots of putty and resin. Here are the boards dry-fit in place.

I traced the supports while the panels were upside-down to act as a glue and screw guide. This picture is before sanding off all of the drips from gluing on the stringers when the hull was upside-down. All surfaces exposed to weather will be covered in at least one coat of 6-oz glass cloth.

I coated the underside of the boards with white-tinted epoxy, and coated the area below the panels also. I’ll paint the areas later, but this makes it bright enough to work under there in the meantime.

Then I pre-drilled lots of  screw holes, coated both surfaces with regular epoxy, and slathered on a layer of thickened epoxy as a bedding compound. After screwing down each panel I climbed below and cleaned up the joints with a gloved finger. This helped me tell if I’d used enough bedding on each area. 

At the bow,I glassed the fillets and covered them with peel-ply so I can cover the hull sides and the deck at the same time later, without a lot of scrubbing and sanding. This is my first attempt at peel-ply, and it seems to work well.  I seem to spend as much time washing epoxy as applying it!

Here’s the raised deck over the foot of the bed.  I made it 6 inches wider than the mattress to make it easier to make the bed. It makes a nice work surface for now. There will need to be a scupper on the lower side deck here, as this will trap water. I think it will be the only visible scupper - all other water will flow to the stern and run out of the motor well scuppers.

My next major job is to finish the sheer. I need to sand the tops and insides square, add inside and outside boards, and a 1/2 inch plywood top. Then sand and glass it all. The total width of the rails will be 5 inches, wide enough to step on to get in or to sit on for a while. They also strengthen the whole boat.

Now that I can see what the spaces look like I’m starting to think about the interior layout. I have a lot of glassing to do before I start adding anything though.  The boards that the chairs are sitting on are about 9 inches above the actual pilothouse sole. You’ll step down when entering the pilothouse. It looks like the cabin will be about 4 1/2 feet wide inside.

I added an 18 inch deep bay window behind the stern so I can work behind the boat more easily this winter. Clear plastic for the window lets in more light.

I dragged a big 20′ by 30′ tarp over the whole tent because the top started leaking along the ridge. This ‘Wedding Canopy’ tent was designed to be up for a week during a June wedding, so I can’t complain too much that it’s having problems after 8 months in the weather. I tried to order a replacement top via EBay, with no luck. I tied lines to every grommet around the tarp and ran the lines down to screw-eyes into the foundation. That’s about 40 lines! Last winter I was so nervous about the whole thing blowing away that I ran anchor lines over the top just in case.  I’ll be able to relax more this winter, I hope.

The real boat looks a lot like the model I made last winter. I’m kind of surprised for some reason