Love Me Tender, Volume VIII

Many a boat builder has, at some point, become so frustrated with a boat that they just wanted to take a saw to it, slice it into a million little pieces and be done with it.  Some have even act on the impulse. But most pull themselves together in time to save that object on which they have invested so much time and effort.  On an unrelated topic, I just sawed my boat in half.

The good news is that this was not fit a fit of boat building rage, but rather part of the plan.  You see, the Eastport Pram that I am building is the nesting version.  The forward section is designed to be removed and nest in the aft section for storage and transport.  I current cannot imagine any need I have for this feature currently, but just thought it too fascinating not to build.

From the crispness of this picture, you can see how steady my hands were.

One would expect that sawing a nearly-complete boat in half would be a highly nerve-racking experience, but I did not find it too bad.  The only part that caused me any digestive uncertainty was in marking the cut line.  I took the cheater route there and bought a long, long, long 1/8" drill bit, which I then plunged through the spacer in the take-apart bulkhead and repeatedly drilled through the hull with.  While this resulted in a perfect series of dots that I could connect with the saw, the act of drilling holes in the hull was, for me, a test of sweaty-palmed fortitude.

After that, the actual event was a non-event.  I took up my handsaw, and voompa, voompa, voompa, done.  I loosened the 6 bolts on the takeapart bulkhead and the bow gently slipped off.  Unable to resist, I swung the bow section around and nested it in the aft hull.  Perfect fit, and a relative tidy package.

It nests!

It was a good thing too, because the smaller package enable me to easily get the boat out of the way while the car comes into the garage for a series of maintenance and repairs.  Gosh, a car in the garage, what a novel idea! Do not worry, though, fair reader.  Once the oil is changed, the radiator flushed, and heater is working again, boat building will resume.

Love Me Tender, Volume VII

Sealed, sanded, and skeg secured.

They call it stitch and glue, based on the notion that those two words encapsulate the major components of the construction method.   I would propose,  however,  that this is a little misleading,  and that it actually should be called stitch and glue, and glue, and glue.  And sand, and sand, and sand, and sand, and sand...

It helps build a heated "tent" in
order to get epoxy to dry in a cold garage 

At last report, I had just wrapped up the glue part of stitch and glue.  With the hull solid, covered with fiberglass, and sealed in epoxy, it was essentially structurally complete.  Not pretty or usable,  but structurally complete.  In keeping with the "sand as much as possible, as early as possible" philosophy that I have been employing on this boat, I decided to take some time out to sand the hull before moving on.  As a note, I don't know that pre-sanding is saving my any construction time relative, but I do believe I'll get a modestly higher quality product in the end.  Plus, shorter sanding sessions are slightly more tolerable than a massive end-of-project sandathon.  

Glue, glue, and more glue.

I recently was on Chesapeake Light Craft'Craft ' website, where I ended up watching a whole series of YouTube videos on building your own stitch and glue kayak.  I don't know that I learnt anything new, but I was nevertheless enhanced through the whole thing.   The best part had John Harris looking straight into the camera, saying the words, "remember," cue  deep, deep reverb, "sanding is FUN, is fun, is fun, is fun, is fun..."  That was pretty much all that went through my head whilst sanding the hull.  

Adding thwarts, rubrails and other
 sundry bits help flesh out the hull

Next up, it was time to glue a bunch of stuff onto the boat, it from the aforementioned "structurally complete" state to the afore-alluded-to "more usable" state. Among things that were glued on were the skeg, rub rails, quarter knees, dagger board trunk, thwart supports, and probably a few other other bits and pieces that I have since forgotten about.  Each of these is individually a physically small part, but each serves an important function.  Less intuitively, and more transformationally, each part really helps to fill things out visually. What once was  the hollow shell of a hull, takes on new robustness and soon assumes the form of a sturdy little boat.

Now, what happens next will violently challenge that notion of sturdiness....

But that's the subject of another post.

Love Me Tender, Volume VI

Ah, the highs and lows of stitch and glue boatbuilding.  You are lured in by the siren song of building a beautiful wooden boat quickly and easily.  You taste the ecstasy of having a boat appear before your eyes in a matter of hours.  And then, when the stitching is done, reality sets in.  The bulk of the project looms before you, and it consists of messing with epoxy mudpies and sanding.  Lots of sanding. 


After stitching together the Eastport Nesting Pram, the next step was, naturally to glue it together.  Gluing comes in two phases. First, small thickened epoxy "tack welds" are applied along the seams.  The purpose of these is to hold the boat together so that you can remove the stitches.  After the stitches are out, the seams are completely filled with thickened epoxy and big, structural, epoxy fillets are applied at transoms, bulkheads, and wherever else they may be called for.

The Eastport Pram is what Chesapeake Light Craft calls a "lapstitch" boat...not to be confused with a glued lapstrake boat, mind you.  That's something else entirely.  In CLC's parlance, a lapstitch boat is a boat built with stitch and glue construction that has the looks of a lapstrake boat.  Part of what makes this whole system work is that when the boat is stitched together, there are fairly large v-shaped gaps behind the laps.  In the gluing phase, these gaps behind the laps all get filled with thickened epoxy, creating the appearance of tightly fit laps and structurally joining the planks, giving the boat its strength.

Under the shroud are newly glued seams.  With cooler weather,
it helps to "tent" the project and heat the tent to
all the epoxy to set.

Interior fiberglass

After all of that thickened epoxy, comes fiberglass inside and out on the bottom of the boat, and more epoxy to fill the weave and seal the unglazed parts of the hull.

I remember on my first kayaks that the epoxy work, and especially the fiberglassing were big deals, major milestones.  After building Solitude III, the magnitude of these tasks is somewhat diminished.  Creating epoxy fillets has become old hat, and wetting out fiberglass has become an exhibition of well-practiced skill.  Indeed, I now feel the same sense of artisanship in wetting out fiberglass that I have previously felt welding a block plane.  It comes with a satisfaction that partly compensates for the fact that you still are just working with gooey, sticky mudpies, and that all you have to loak forward to is endless sanding.

Love Me Tender, Volume V

I've heard various versions of the history of stitch and glue boat construction.  Numerous people have cited numerous other people as "inventing" stitch and glue.  Numerous others have even made varying claims to have even developed it themselves.  I imagine there are several explanations for this ambiguity.  Indeed, it is entirely conceivable that multiple people developed the same idea at roughly the same time.   After all, Leibniz and Newton both developed calculus independently at roughly the same time in history, so why couldn't multiple boat builders independently develop stitch and glue?  More likely, though, one can imagine a continuum of development, where  various builders introduced innovations that now form basic elements of what is today recognized as stitch and glue.  So, the builder who came up with the idea of pre-cut plywood panels probably lays claim to inventing stitch and glue, as does the person who first introduces wire stitches, as does the fella who slopped on the first epoxy fillets, et cetera.

Regardless of its origin, stitch and glue is almost certainly the most popular construction method in amateur boat building.  Although there are several factors that contribute to this, such as not needing any super specialized woodworking skills or tools, I think the biggest factor is the near-instant gratification that comes with stitching the hull together.  Generally, stitch and glue boats are built from CNC-cut kits, and stitching the hull together is one of the very first steps in the construction process.  Within a few hours of starting construction, the builder starts aligning plywood panels, stitching them together with wire sutures.  One to two hours later, the builder steps back, sees the fully developed form of a boat hull and cannot help but exclaim, "it's starting to look like a boat!"

After several months of procrastination and working on other projects, I finally went out to the boat shop and allowed myself to indulge in that most sublime joy of stitch and glue building.

Love Me Tender, Volume IV.5

It has been several months since I last made any progress on the Eastport Pram project.  Life, traveling, and other projects have taken priority.  It happens.  The great news is that the boat sits ready to be stitched and glued, the most fun and rewarding part of any stitch and glue boat building project.  This means that there is something to look forward to (unlike, say, a whole lot of sanding), and that it should be easy to get started again once time allows.

This is not to say that all boat building activities have ceased at the Lee Boatworks.  In the past few months I managed to complete a CLC Cradle Boat for my newborn nephew.  As an aside, the Cradle Boat was CLC's fifth-best selling kit in 2013.  I guess I played a small part in that.  :-)   Coincidentally, the Eastport Pram, and the Eastport Nesting Pram also made the list.

Love Me Tender, Volume IV



You never know when it's coming, but you know it's coming.  It's the boat building disaster.  Every boat construction project has one: a mistake, slip, error, or accident of such  magnitude that is appears that there is no way to recover, at least not without hours upon hours of rework and substantial expenditure of additional funds.  Coping with this moment is the true test of a boat builder's skill, ingenuity and emotional resiliency.

I managed to finally get up the gumption to get out and do the sanding that I wanted to get done before stitching together the hull of my Eastport Pram.  My motivation level shot up, as I could now enjoy that single most rewarding part of stitch and glue boat building, stitching, where in just a few short hours the hull of a boat emerges from a pile of plywood. 

Indeed, I quickly stitched the first set of planked to the bottom.  It was getting a little late in the evening, but I figured I would spend a few more minutes and get the added boost of getting the second set of planks started.  That's when I noticed it.



The rabbet should have been where my finger is.
But it's not.

John C. Harris, owner of Chesapeake Light Craft, designer of the Eastport Pram, and author of the very fine set of instructions that comes with the boat, issued stern warnings about this, and I sure tried to heed those warnings.  Yet something went wrong.  You see, the Eastport Pram is what Chesapeake Light Craft markets as a "lap stitch" boat, in other words a stitch and glue boat that has the appearance of a lapstrake boat when it is done.  To accomplish this, a rabbet is cut into one edge of each plank.  However, this rabbet has to be along the right edge or the whole thing doesn't work.  And somehow, despite all the warnings in the instructions and in the plans about very carefully marking which edge gets the rabbet, I cut it wrong on the second set of planks.  Don't ask me how.
So, how did I deal with it?  Did I collapse into a piteous pile of despair?  Or, did I rise to the occasion in a solid display of boat building fortitude?

I despaired.



"Inlaying" wood in the bad rabbet.

All fixed up!

Then, I pulled myself together, and contemplated the various possible courses of action.  The first natural instinct of any boat builder is find recourse in epoxy, and indeed the very first thing that came to mind was to somehow fill the old rabbet with thickened epoxy and cut a new one.  This idea was quickly discarded however, as the practical question arose of how that much thickened epoxy would take to later being bent into a boat-like shape.  I also though about just cutting the new rabbet at leave then old one, though this got thrown out on both its aesthetic and structural implications.  Next idea...more plywood, cut new ones, increase total cost of materials some 20%.  OK, how about this one...find some 1/8" thick (the depth of the rabbet) color-contrasting wood, cut it to the right shape and inlay it in the old rabbet.  With any luck, it might even look intentional.  We have a winner.

Love Me Tender, Volume III

Every time I have built a boat, there has come a point where progress ground to a halt for weeks or longer.  Every time.   Looking back on this, there are a couple of key factors that lead to crossing the event horizon into the boat building black hole.  First, usually there's some sanding that needs to be done on the project.   Also, the weather usually is improving and other activities start competing for my time...hiking, kayaking, house 'n garden maintenance, maybe even getting out sailing in my newly completed PocketShip, Solitude III.   In any event, my desire  to spend time in the garage working is severely diminished.  And knowing that all I have to look forward to is sanding....

This is currently the case with the Eastport Pram project.  I have several epoxy-covered planks sitting there waiting to be sanded.   After about an hour of sanding, I would be able to start stitching the hull togother and have the enormous boost of seeing the boat quickly come together.  Indeed, in the interest of making progress, and getting that big morale boost, I've even been tempted to skip sanding all together...just get the hull together now and sand later.  But sealing and sanding the interior of the planks, while the are still flat, accessible, and easy to sand is the entire reason that I could decide to seal them in epoxy before stitching!  I don't want to have to sand the inside of the boat once it is stitched.  No way.

Elliot Creek Falls

So, for now, the project is sitting there, waiting for me.  Now, if you'll excuse me, it is time to go hiking...

Love Me Tender, Volume II



Transferring the plans to plywood.

Contruction of the Eastport Pram is underway.  As was the case with PocketShip, the first step is to lay out the parts on the plywood.  This is done by transferring the full size plans to the plywood using a punch awl, and then playing a giant game of connect-the-dots with a pencil.  The Eastport Pram's plans are fantastic.  Most of the parts are arranged on the plans the same way they are supposed to be arranged on the plywood, so there isn't much jiggering the plans around to get everything to fit required.  Just roll 'em out and mark away.  Kudos to CLC...these are really well thought out.  As a bonus, since this is a much smaller boat, laying out the parts didn't take too much time (compared to the 50+ hours required for PocketShip).

Transom doublers

Some quick jigsaw/circular saw work was all it took to cut all the parts out, bringing me to where I would have started if I had just bought the kit.  Next up, epoxy started flowing as I glued all the transom and take-apart bulkhead doublers together.  Also, taking a lesson learned from building the Pram's 1/2-scale sibling, the CLC Cradle Boat, I've decided to pre-coat interior surfaces with epoxy and sand them prior to stitching....hopefully that will make things easier down the road.



Epoxy flows!

Love Me Tender, Volume I

As we inch towards better weather, I have been dreaming about the many exciting adventures that I'd like to have with Solitude III in her first sailing season.  Daysailing is great, but this boat is made to go places, to cruise, and to see experience the world from the unique perspective of a small boat.  I can close my eyes and picture gliding into an quiet anchorage in the San Juans, dropping the hook, rowing my tender ashore, and romping about.  Of course, there is one minor issue with this dream.  I don't have a tender.

One could easily question the need for a tender for a boat that is under 15' on deck.  But Solitude III feels like a much larger boat, and beaching her every time it is time to go ashore just seems wrong somehow.  So, despite the nonsense of having dingy that is over half the length of the mothership, I've decided to start construction of an Eastport Nesting Pram.

The Eastport Pram is a John Harris-penned 7'9" rowing and sailing dinghy.  The neat feature about the Nesting version of the Eastport Pram is that you can unbolt the bow, stow it in the stern, and have the whole affair package down into 4'9"x4' rectangle. Not small enough to store aboard Solitude whilst under way, but it should allow me to transport it in her cockpit when headed to the boat ramp. 



From plans plywood will spring great adventures.  This will become a boat.

Although it is available as a kit through Chesapeake Light Craft, I have chosen to build for plans.  It sure would be faster and easier to start with the kits, but after the precedent set on Solitude, I'm not sure if I can seriously contemplate building from a kit again. 

So, here goes...  I have already ordered plans and plywood.  I still have epoxy left over from the PocketShip build, so this should be a good opportunity to use it up.