Building Forms

The basement exercise room became the room of choice for building the boat....never got any use as an exercise room anyway. I didnt want to tear out the carpet, so the old ping-pong table that needed to disappear became the foundation for my form. I reinforced the underneath side of the ping-pong table with 2x4s and by rotating each half 90 degrees I got a platform 4.5x10. I surrounded it with 1/4" scrap plywood used for floor protection in a former life and I was ready to go. We wont talk about what it took to clear the room out of all the accumulated stuff.

I decided to add 8" to the height of the form going to 32" rather than the 24" called out on the plan. I thought my knees would appreciate it. To support the stem and breasthook, I got a little creative with an extention off the platform to get the height and length needed. With the old stereo speakers now mounted up on the walls and out of the way, Im a-building and a-dancing.

Read More..

Shiny Stuff

I have been working with the pram cover maker to make the stainless steel tube frame to take the cover.  Normally he contracts this to a SS specialist.  He normally makes a light alli tube frame as templates then the SS guy does his bit.  Between us we have made the frame combining his know how and my metal skills.  This has saved over £500 in labour. So under the white cover at the back I now have a fully collapsible frame.  IMO the SS guy is on a nice little number.  The 316 SS tube was a dream to work. 

 The screen frame

 The front screen will be a self supporting structure.

More on this when it gets fitted

 Port side

The other shiny bits added are the mushroom vents.  Its one of those jobs I have held back to when I had nothing much else to.  Currently I am waiting for the internal doors and frames and the front doors.  I should get these next week.

6 fitted and one to do later once the hatch is finally fitted

If you look closely you can see the 3G aerial behind the 3rd vent.  The yellow bit is a cover blocking off the hole for the gas fire flue.

Read More..

Bulkheads

Monday 12th Nov 2007
Bulkheads front and back of the engine room.
As the hull is still floppy, it had to be jacked into the correct shape to fit the bulkheads.
Very slow to fit but a 100% fit makes the boat hull true to shape and is the basis for all the rest of it to follow.


BHD 8 fitted.



Big thanks to Paul for the 2 hours he gave us as we really needed an extra pair of hands.!

Interesting fact... the boat is now split into 3 compartments. You have to get off one bit to climb onto another as the bulkheads are so high !!.

Read More..

The broken technology icon

Here it is, a little icon, a crossed wrench and screwdriver that means something, I dont know what exactly.  I think it might mean that by clicking it, I can mess with the technology enclosed in the box that its in the lower right hand corner of.

But I think of it as the broken technology icon.  And for some reason, it reminds me of the hammer and sickle icon that the Soviets used on their flag.  In their case, it meant that their state was one of industrial workers and farmers.  In this case, the wrench and screwdriver supposedly stand for tools you use to take apart machinery and potentially put it back together again.  OK, enough already with the semiotics.

Read More..

Building the RSJ Frame

In August we built the Frame to build the boat on,

Steel supplied locally and built on our own steel deck staging as we havent level ground anywhere.

Read More..

By The Way We Make Model Boats

Weve made over 300 models. Here are just a couple. We design and  make every single piece of every model that we do. Its very time and labor intensive. We also practice photogrammetry. Weve made models of new boats, old boats, sail, power, ships-modern and ancient and many other things. As a result, we are able to make models of any boat that we can get sufficient information about. You can see more photos on our FaceBook page...

 

1958 Century Resorter - note the "aircraft carrier" foredeck.

1961 Shell Lake Escapade - These were made in Shell Lake, Wisconsin.
Very similar in  style to Dorsett trailerable cruisers.

1954 Chris~Craft 17 Custom Runabout.

Chris~Craft Sea Skiff Utility.

1947 Chris~Craft 22 Sportsman (aka "U22") in diorama display.

Ashleys Hope is a Chesapeake Bay Fantail Deadrise workboat.

Happie is a classic raised-deck cruiser.

The centerpiece of IWC Schafhausens New York Flagship Boutique
at 535 Madison Ave. It is a half-hull model of "Azzam".

A Kennebec River Bateau; the model made for a historian who writes books
 about the American Revolution and the War of 1812.

A basic Chesapeake Bay Deadrise model. It is a waterline model with
scale pier and water to create a mini diorama.

62 NordHavn at 11" LOA.

Shepherd Utility Dashboard.

Trans-Atlantic Racing Rowboat "Ghurka Spirit" crossed in 66 days.

Modern Cruiser based upon traditional Lobster Boat design.

21 1959 Century Coronado - Probably the only Century Coronado model
in the St. Francis Yacht Club in San Francisco.

Again; this is a very small sample of our work. For more information about
our models and related services, please go to

http://intothings.com
 

Read More..

Mark 25 Remote Shift Linkage

I was reviewing my blog yesterday and noticed that I had a comment posted back in April from a reader wanting more detail on my Mark 25 shift linkage as his was purchased in pieces. Here are a couple of pictures and I hope it helps. I put some carpet foam that happened to be nearby under the linkage so the details would not be obscured by background stuff. There is a anchor bracket that is held by the nut holding on the steering bail and the pivot bracket is as shown. I do not yet have a remote shift/throttle control and cables yet, so Im in the hunt for that stuff. I took a quick look at my pre-1965 Mercury service manual and it shows pictures and instructions for cable hook-up when I get to that point. I found the parts manual on line at the Western New York chapter of the AOMCI website. http://pub9.bravenet.com/photocenter/album.php?usernum=737212788&album=49514#bn-photocenter-1-1-737212788/49514/1/116515/

Read More..

Aligning Frames and Laying the Keel

After the confirmation that this boat will make it out of the basement, I secured my frame pieces to the leveled form rails. After checking a hundred times if things were square to each other, I aligned the stem using a string and plumb bob method. I tried a laser but it was better at confirming the set-up than actually doing it.

I used steel carriage bolts for the dry run set up of the keel and transom knee. When I was satisfied with alignments I took the keel and transom knee apart and did the glue-up. When all was, glued, bolted and screwed in place I called it a day. The next day I sighted down the keel and saw hump between frame #1 (middle frame and frame #2 (front frame), which wasnt a real issue, but there was a dip between the transom and frame #1 which was a problem. The picture is sighting down the keel from the front and the flash didnt illuminate the keel after the middle frame. After sleeping on it, I decided to try and realign the transom a bit to straighten the keel forward of the transom.

I decided to shim frame #1 rearward about 1/16" and this gave me some room between the transom and form to re-align it. I pulled a 1/16" shim out to lower the transom, added one at the top of the form angle to the transom and this allowed clamping of the transom near the bottom of the form and I could dial out the dip in the keel with a twist of the clamps. So with the keel flat from transom forward to frame #1, I could move on.

Read More..

Amateur Boatbuilding Coming Alive Again

All things boating have taken a hammering over the past decade, with most people suffering to a greater or lesser extent through the financial woes that flooded the world. Initially, amateur boatbuilding seemed to stay quite strong, while sales of production boats went into a deep slump.

After amateur boatbuilding also started to weaken, it was interesting (but distressing) to observe the progression of the slowing sales around the world. First to go were the industrialised countries, led by USA and UK, then it spread to less developed countries. It is said that when America sneezes the world will catch the cold. When we lived in South Africa we could watch that phenomenon and knew that what was happening financially in USA, whether up or down, was likely to be mimicked in South Africa within a year or two.

The one market that seemed to stay remarkably buoyant was Russia, where amateur boatbuilding seemed to stay strong. Then war and politics stepped in, the Russian economy took a dive and sales of plans to amateurs in Russia also fell.

Boats are not an essential part of life for most people. For some they are transport or a work implement, for others they are a home but for most people their boats are toys, sporting equipment, or somewhere between, certainly not high on the list of essentials when money becomes tight.

Now we seem to be coming out of that slump. The US economy has been showing signs of life for a year or two and that now seems to be filtering down far enough that amateur boatbuilders are again starting new projects. If the normal pattern pertains, the upswing will spread out to the rest of the world as well.

Over the 35 years that I have been designing boats professionally, I have drawn mostly boats that are suitable for amateurs to build. This was not an intentional path in my design career but, in retrospect, was probably the most natural and logical one. My roots are in amateur boatbuilding, when I built a plywood 36ft cruiser/racer in my in-laws garden, based on a design by Ricus van de Stadt. My own first full design was the CW975 for a 32ft plywood racer/cruiser, which I also built after it won a design competition. The third design that I drew was the steel Pratique 35 cruiser for an amateur-builder friend. Next was the Coquette 39 plywood racer/cruiser commission, also for an amateur. Only after that did I receive my first commission from a professional builder for a production GRP boat.

My own 2nd big boat project, the CW975 "Concept Won", in my garden.

This depth of involvement with amateur boatbuilders and designs has resulted in a long string of commissions for amateur builders, mostly for plywood. My own third build big-boat project, in the form of the radius chine plywood Didi 38 "Black Cat", and my well-publicized voyaging in her, have reinforced that trend. For the past 30 years I have always had at least a year of work waiting in  line. That has now expanded to a 2-year backlog and I have had to turn away new commissions to keep the backlog somewhat manageable.

As the slump deepened, the average size of boats that people chose to build slipped lower, until we were selling only dinghies and trailer-sailers. Now that average size is starting to creep upward again, as builders move back into bigger boats. The most durable design that we have is the Argie 15, which has developed a good following that keeps it going strongly through thick and thin.

Argie 15 built by Andrey Borodikhin in Moscow, Russia.

?

In trailer-sailers, the little gaffers, in the form of the Cape Cutter 19 and Cape Henry 21, are the ones that keep going. These lapstrake plywood boats are more complicated projects than a simple stitch-&-glue boat but they are just so pretty that they have attracted a good following. They have also proven to be quick in the light stuff and capable in the rough stuff, so they have grown a reputation for being desirable boats. That resulted in the upward expansion of this design range with the Cape May 25.

Beautifully-built Cape Cutter 19, built by Sergio Vianna of Curitiba, Brazil.

Newest in this series, and already generating much interest even before completion of the design, is the Cape Charles 32. Although not yet on our website and pricelist, drawings have already gone out to the first two builders. This one is a coastal and offshore cruiser, with shallow fixed keel and external ballast, whereas the smaller sisters have steel centreplates and internal ballast. We should have a web page for this design in a month or two. Until then, please email me for info on plan price etc.

Accommodation layout of Cape Charles 32 cruiser.

It is not only cruisers that are growing in popularity. One of the commissions that is waiting for attention is a bigger sister to the radius chine plywood Didi 950, at 11.4m (37ft). I have also been asked multiple times to draw a Didi concept to the Class 40 Rule but am not able to fit in the design in a reasonable time, so have turned down the commissions. Meanwhile other larger boats in our radius chine plywood range are also starting in various countries. This includes the first in that series, the Didi 38, with two new builds starting in Asia.

Didi 950 radius chine plywood racer/cruiser.

We are also experiencing increased interest in steel cruising designs, which have been very dormant for the past 10 years. Overall, amateur boatbuilding is looking a lot more healthy now than it has for a long time. Now we all need the politicians in all of our countries to play nicely together. If they do that then life should improve for all of us. Lets all go play with our boats.

To see more of these and our many other designs, visit http://dixdesign.com/ or http://dixdesign.com/mobile.

Read More..

Cracks Filled Filler Filed

After three coats of epoxy to get the boat surfaces sealed and relatively smooth, it was time for filling the grooves.

Following in the footsteps of others, the method chosen to make the pretty stripes and fill the cracks between the planks was pigmented epoxy. A little tape masking, a little white pigment in the epoxy, some white silica thickener, some loading of blank caulking tubes, some epoxy pumped into the grooves, some going all over the tape, some squeegeeing of the mess back into the grooves, some overfilling, some underfilling and turning out the lights and coming back in three hours to remove the tape.....then repeating the next day or so until the whole boat is a mess. After practicing on my sample board, I figured that I would develop a technique that would make the application better as I went along, but it seemed to get worse. Apparently more silica was not the answer as it became impossible to smooth out and was not a smooth consistency, always more like a vanilla milkshake from hell.

Well actually, the boat looks great in pictures, but the white stripes are a bit lumpy and need some dental type work to smooth the surfaces. After some experimentation with scraping and filing, I think I have developed a method using various files that will make it all OK....I think. As usual, it takes more time than initially thought. Ive got about 2/3 of the stripes smoothed. Then Ill probably sand the entire surface and apply one more coat of epoxy before final varnish coats are applied.

Note: All plans subject to change without notice.

As noted, my plans changed. Due to a few voids in spots and several low spots in the white stripes, I masked off the stripes again and mixed up some more white epoxy with just a bit of thickener and poured it onto the stripes and smoothed it down with a plastic stir stick. The tape was removed after a couple of hours as before and the stripes look pretty good now. I think one more sanding of the whole deck and a coat of clear epoxy should complete this stage....I hope.

Read More..

Alls Well That Ends Well

For the stainless steel rub rail, I decided to use the 1/2" wide, half oval type since at the back of the boat, the edge is not wide enough for a wider strip. It also seemed like it would be a better look on a small boat. However, there doesnt seem to be any ready made end spears available, so I experimented with shaping and forming the end until I got what I wanted. So heres what I came up with:

1) Cut strip to length by clamping strip in some wood blocks and then in a vice. Cutting with a saws-all with a metal cutting blade.

2) Grinding the end to a rounded shape on the bench grinder.

3) Filing the back side flat to remove grinding burrs and flatten edges.

4) Laying strip on vice with end hanging off about 1/2" and forming (pounding away) with a ball peen hammer until underside was flat.

5) Polishing with Dremel tool using abrasive rubber polisher.

6) Final polish with fine grit abrasive pads (1800 to 4000 grit).

After the end was formed, an additional screw hole was drilled about an inch from the end using the drill press and press vice. A spring loaded center punch was used to mark the hole start and avoid wandering. A hole was drilled and then a countersink reamer until the screw head fit.

For the leading end of the splash rail, I made a form to bend the rub strip to fit. Clamping to the form and gently bending the strip by hand the yield point could be felt. With a few gentle bends and being careful not to bend it at the screw holes did the trick. The splash rails took a good part of a day to do, but the result is quite nice, I think.

Read More..