Whoopsie.

So today I pulled off the stifflegs from the back of the bulkhead, prepared a piece of glass to skin the front side...

And then I backed up to the main bulkhead and looked at it. Something went wonky...

So I screwed my two 3 inch wide plywood straight edges together and made a go - no go gauge to go between the main bulkhead and the cockpit bulkhead.... (Straight stick 120 some inches long...)

Turns out the back wall of the cabin is out 3/4s of an inch from one side to the other, and I used the back wall of the cabin and bridge deck to align the cockpit bulkhead across the boat.

So, I cut out my perfectly flat, perfectly plumb bulkhead that was straight to the deck but not the hull. Then I cut out the bridge deck and started getting everything lined back up as it should be.

The reason for removal: The galley and cockpit are built off the hulls line, not the decks... so if I can keep it all symmetrical and be able to use a square to define fore and aft things speed up quite drastically. Noel taught me that one long ago... If its not right, pull it out or forever hold your peace...

I went ahead and ground off the tabbing to the hull, since the epoxy hadn't post cured from yesterday... The first 24 hours its easy to work with, after 3 days it gets mighty hard...

I won't be able to goof around with it anymore till tuesday night, so back to the beginning all over again.

October 23 2010

Leveled the boat...

Met a new friend named Rob today...

Fit the new Coosa bulkhead in place and tabbed it in place with two layers of 8 inch wide 1708 on the aft side, as I glassed the entire aft side, and will do the forward side... but did not want to add another sanding cycle tomorrow.

I goofed when I cut out the bulkhead... and cut the outside the line I scribed from my pattern... so it took a bit of time to fit, in addition to being 3/4s thick rather than just

I then ground out the old minibulkhead tabbing behind the rudder, and the old back stay knee...

Then I vacuumed out the interior and filled up a 6 gallon shop vac with fiberglass dust. Still have more to go but I ran out of light.

Tomorrow: Cut out the bridge deck and square the top edge of the coosa to the world... and everything. Grin.
Then, I'll take a piece of divinycell that I've already glassed, and place it on the new bulkhead leaving just a bit of the old cockpit seat as a cleat to epoxy it to. The seating height will actually be an inch higher finished, but the center of the bridge deck will go down an inch and change.

I have a piece of 4 inch wide 3/4 inch plywood that is doubled up that I use to keep things straight that take a good pull. A few screws through hold things straight, that will warp a piece of 3/4 plywood on end.

I put two pieces of 3/4 plywood 3 inches wide on the back of the coosa board to hold it flat while the glass is setting up, otherwise with foam and things glassed on only one side, it will be locked in as a potato chip. This is important if you are trying to make something that will be finished for paint, or will be a single wall thick with a door...

I was to dusty to get a picture...

Zach

Update October 22 2010

So, I tried for three days to get away from Noel at a decent hour and do some work on Pylasteki without any luck.

Today, I got away around 2:00, and worked till 7.

I took out the old bulkhead under the companionway, with a 4.5 inch metal cut off wheel on a grinder by laying it flat against the hull and grinding until I saw wood dust on both sides. Then I slid a long wood cutting sawzall under the bulkhead bending it into a j shape so it didn't dig into the hull and ran it from the bilge to the deck, and the bulkhead fell out. I ground out the old tabbing with a hitachi 7 inch grinder, and a norton 24 grit grinding disc or two. It is about the fastest way I have found to remove old tabbing...

On a fiberglass boat, it is worthwhile to remove the old tabbing as it is a secondary bond to the polyester fiberglass on the boat. Fiberglassing the new tabbing that holds the bulkhead in with epoxy, on top of a polyester tab doesn't make a whole lot of sense... while it will grab the wood, foam or coosa board better than the polyester resin would... it can also grab the hull better than the old tabbing can. So... I made a lot of dust.

After that I screwed a piece of luan to the old lip of the cockpit I left to stiffen the bridge deck while working... and used a tick stick to transfer the shape of the hull to the luan.

A tick stick is a piece of thin stuff, 1/4 inch or so by 1 1/2 wood with a few shapes cut in it. A lot of people use a tick stick with a few notches, number 1 2 3 or a b c along the notches so that it can show a long mark with a 3 and a short one with a 1.

I take my tick stick and cut a few hills and valleys, squares and rounds in it so that it can only be marked one way, and anywhere on its length is unique enough to be idiot proof. With a few V notches and a 1, 2, 3... I turn into an idiot...

With that done, I laid the luan down on a piece of junk 1/2 inch plywood, and laid my tick stick on each of the lines, marking the sharp end point with a pencil. Once the marks were there, I took a thin steel rule and used it as a batten (Traditionally a thin piece of wood with a clear straight grain and no knots so it bends uniformly...) I connected the dots, and cut it out.

Then I fit it to the bulkhead plywood to the starboard side, plumb to the world, and perpendicular the centerline of the boat. With that done I laid the starboard bulkhead on the port side, and noted the changes that needed to be made, by laying a scrap square of 3/4 inch plywood about 1 inch by 1 inch and marking the spots where it sees air.

Then I took the two bulkheads, and set them side by side in the boat, and scribed the overlap. (I purposefully left one just short of centerline, and the other real long...) and cut the overlap off the long one. I then set them together, and screwed a backer block of another piece of 1/2 inch plywood over the seam.

With that done, I took the full width plywood template out of place and laid it on top of a piece of 3/4 coosa board. Coosa board is a fiberglass filled polyurethane foam board that serves as a rot proof plywood replacement. I cut out the coosa with a jig saw, and then laid it on a piece of plastic.... on top of a piece of 3/4 plywood... on top of my table saw. (The only surface I have at the moment that is flat...)

I then cut out a piece of 1708 fiberglass, and laid it over the coosa and marked it out with a sharpie and cut it, then fiberglassed it with west systems epoxy using 60 ounces...

Tomorrow I will fit the bulkhead, relevel the boat (as it is on a sand lot and shifts with a lot of rain...) and glass it in place.

Update Oct 5 2010

Still not dead!

Friday I went over to Pylasteki and cleaned her out, and toted all the scrap bits and pieces that had piled up around her away. Took an hour or so to get reaquainted...

Saturday, I spent some time making a set of bomb proof saw horses. (2x4 I beam on top, with the legs set to no bevel... gives just about the perfect saw horse when built with 36 inch legs.)

Cruised up to see the babe for the rest of the weekend...

Tuesday night, I spent two hours digging my sheets of divinycell out from under a big pile of stuff for Noel, and went ahead and cut out my blanks for the cockpit sides. Then I sanded off the other 4x8 sheet. Since I didn't vacuum bag them, where ever there was excess resin it had to be ground off to yield a smooth surface.

I also priced out some 316L for building a new rudder. Around 250 for a half of a 4x8 sheet of 1/4 inch. The rudder shafting runs $18 bucks a foot... I now just need to test out my little TIG box and see if it up to the task.

All for now,

Zach

I'm not dead! (Yet.)

Sad to say, the last few months have had me working on Noel. I'm getting ready to build a work shop beside Noel, so that will slow down the short term progress... but speed up everything once built. Right now I am without a work bench once again.

I'm plotting an evil plan to take a week off for another great grinder war of 2010. (One a year, isn't quite enough... twice still isn't enough...)

I've piddled a bit on Pylasteki. Pulled some putty on her top sides, and cleaned up a few things... but by and large she hasn't had the attention she needs. For the first time since May, I felt a cool breeze yesterday... so the time is coming!

I have my divinycell blanks laid up... but do need to order a sheet of 3/8ths (or more accurately, run a sheet of 1/2 inch through a planer...) and recore the top of the cabin and lower dog house.

I have some grinding work to do inside her bilge, to get rid of some of the cracked resin that was poured in to smooth out the area.

My evil plan for a fast cockpit design didn't thresh out... the tiller and rudder shaft height dictate the need for the widening cockpit that tritons have. If the tiller came across the stern, one could put a cockpit like you see on boats with stern hung rudders, it doesn't. Moments that make me say, duh.

I also snagged some stainless shaft and plate to play with (scraps) to see if my tig has the guts to build a rudder.

So, Pylasteki will have a foam cored cockpit that looks quite original, it just will have straight sides and not flex and squeak under foot.

Somewhere along the way I got engaged, so times they are, a changing.

Zach

March 24 2010

Yesterday after work I cut some out the rest of the cockpit templates I had been drawing up.

Just 1/2 inch birch plywood, good enough stuff to hold a straight line without much help.

I spent some time re-leveling Pylasteki, as I noticed a little air under one of the once tight jack stands. Hazards of working in a boatyard with a sand lot... Just used a water level and marked the scribed waterline.

I'm calling the cabin top/hatch sliders level, which is pretty close to the scribed waterline. Most of the time I measure top and bottom of stuff that runs athwartship (from one side to the other) off of a known true plane... Or something that isn't going to get changed. So, while I could hang a plumb bob to see if the vertical faces on each end of the cockpit are inline with gravity, what matters more to your eye is that they are inline with the rest of the vertical lines on the boat... So if the companionway bulkhead mirrors the main bulkheads, thats what I'll build to. Otherwise with the hatch boards out bulkheads will run at a different angle than the cockpit.

Not to say that is something even worth thinking about... but if you have a boat set up in one spot and steady you can pick a bulkhead to work off of and build a whole boat that looks right, or try to trust a plumb bob and level and build something that doesn't match. The trick is to take a level, and cut a wedge off one of the bulkheads so everything is evenly out, to the center of the earth, for the entirety of the bilge.

I'd probably change my tune if I mostly built boats on land, but the big one floats... so my brain wraps around thinking the boat is in its own little world.

In other news, my 24 inch wide cockpit won't work. I had a boat in the past with straight, narrow cockpit seats... but it had a transom hung rudder. Pylasteki's tiller sprouts up from the cockpit sole (floor) and needs a greater swinging clearance for knees and other things. Because of this you have to be far enough away from the tiller to make a tight turn, but also close enough to push it over the other way past center and gybe... The close enough in side of things, means I'd need to shove the coamings in about a mile to make it comfortable to push a the tiller past center.

The reason for the Triton's tapering cockpit is so when seated, your forward knee has somewhere to be. It tapers wider at the front than the back from 26 inches to a hair over 37.... at the forward end... at least at the top.

If I were not building a blue water boat, it'd be easy to square everything off and do away with the bridge deck, gaining the clearance to make things work. But, I'm not... So, no matter how much I like the aft end of a Herreshoff Alerion 26, things will go back more stock than not.

I also fired up the pad sander and started on the starboard side gelcoat removal and stopped as the sun was setting. It's not real smart to plow around with 40 grit after dark, at least in my book... as the fairer and flatter you can keep something while chewing off the old finish, the easier it is to arrive at an end product that is smooth and fair...

In other news, I found a 6 inch pad for the 7335 Porter Cable, and a counter weight that lets it work together. Locally I can't walk in and grab 5 inch paper with a stick back, while not a big deal to order and bring in... I try to keep everything standardized so whatever works. The 5 inch pad at full tilt boogie never wanted to stay flat for me, and always had the feeling it was about to do something unexpected. Expecting the unexpected is something I try to do, but not a desirable trait in my sander.

Grinding and paint removal... done. March 21 2010

Today I went from 2:30 till 7...

Settees removed, head bulkheads removed. Chainplates pulled, galley bulkheads removed... Salon shelves removed...

Then all the tabs ground down. I ground down to the first layer of mat against the hull with my 8 inch makita grinder, and made a lot of dust. Pretty much everything was tabbed in with 5 layers. 1 layer of mat against the hull, 1 layer of roving, another layer of mat and another of roving, then a last layer of mat. I swept up close to 30 lbs of dust by the old calibrated elbow... lifting the cardboard box over the side.

I removed the paint using a 4.5 inch grinder with a twisted wire wheel. (not a cup style)

I held it perpendicular the hull, and moved it up and down following the angles of roving, then held it upside down and blasted the other side of the roving. Fastest way I've come up with for paint removal... Though it has crossed my mind that it'd take all of a half hour to grind the inside of the hull smooth with 40 grit on an 8 inch... But that would sacrifice some strength, and I'm not into that even though the Triton is built sturdier than the temple mount...

As far as order of operations go, take out the shelves and top of the bulkhead and grind it all flush before removing the settees. I wasn't thinking straight when I started from the bottom up... Ended up twisting and contorting to make it all happen... cest la vie. Small boats are not as easy to work on as big ones, though a day of grinding does noticeable things.

Cheers,

Zach