Port hull planking continues

I'm still planking away; am somewhat disappointed by the rate of progress but there's a lot of surface area to cover compared to the floats, and a lot more walking around from one side to the other.

Here I'm putting a gentle curve into one area of a plank; this takes me no more than about 3-4 minutes:

Tip: heat both sides of the area you're trying to bend.

I just recently purchased those knee pads in the picture above. Wow but are they ever comfortable; you almost forget you're working on your knees half the time.

A shot from the rear; I'm drilling screws into the foam:

As I worked my way up toward the bow, I wasn't happy with this particular plank and decided to remove it and re-do the battens:

After removing the plank, I added some extra screwing blocks. It sometimes helps to be able to screw the battens down to more than just the form frames:

That right-angle drill attachment comes in handy between frames 1-3, where space is tight.

I keep re-discovering planking tricks that I had forgotten back from when I did my floats. For example, use a clamp to give you leverage when trying to twist a batten into a flatter position:

Here's how the battens near the bow keel ended up:

I did use the hot box for the last three bow planks and it was a life-saver, so I'm glad we constructed it; that curve by the keel is really tricky to get right with a heat gun. I found that my heat box has a very thin line between just right, and over-heating. "Just right" is about 3 minutes, 15 seconds; once you get past 3 minutes 30 seconds, it starts to scallop something awful.

Ah, now that looks better (at least it's good enough for me):

Laying in the next-to-last bow plank:

I had an Oaf Moment (tm) and cracked the keel batten right in front of frame #1, and had to brace it out with several blocks:

It can sometimes be difficult past form frame #1, to know what things should look like. Yeah, the battens extend out but let's face it they're made of wood which may not behave quite the same in all situations, or maybe you didn't quite screw them at the right angle to frames 1 or 2. I remember fighting with this area on my floats, but the main hull is worse simply because it's larger. Here's a side shot of my last bow plank to give you an idea:

Notice that I made almost no pretence at trying to make that last curve at the keel. I actually got the bow template out to check, only about 4-5 inches in front of form frame #1 are used, and it's obviously a very thin area, so I'm not concerned. If it doesn't look quite right post-join, I'll build it back out with putty.

Compared to the bow area, the flat gunwale sections are a breeze. They do require you to get grungy in order to drive in the screws though:

I struggled all the way up to the bow, trying to minimize the gaps between planks. I'll have to repair some holes with some extra foam before I laminate, some of the holes are just too big for putty alone (eg, 1/4"-1/2" gaps running a foot or so). Eventually I figured out what I was doing wrong and got my scribing technique to work. Here's a custom scribed plank that is correcting the plank orientation back to vertical (or nearly so):

Here's where I quit for the day:

I have only a few feet to go before I reach the stern, and maybe eight more feet of gunwale. Then I'll get started on the keel high density, and doing the putty in between the planks. I was going to try to use a polyurethane glue, and glue the planks as I went, but I was having enough trouble just coordinating things as it was - so I decided to stick with what worked before, even it makes the boat heavier than need be.

Hull planking begins

Had some errands to run in the middle of the day, and when I got back home I was short on time and feeling a bit desperate to make some progress on the planking. So I resorted back to the old-fashioned method; here she is folks, the first hull plank of my F22:

May she spawn many more overnight, while I'm asleep!

You can see in the above picture that I've changed over to running the masking tape along the join lines, rather than along the full length of every batten. For the most part I'm using 10" planks, with three screws through each batten. And I never did try to track down a better screw, so I'm still using the panhead screw + two washers combination that worked well for me on my floats. I'm getting a really tight "suck down" with the screws, and the foam is following the battens very nicely IMO.

As soon as I got the above plank in place, I realized that I'd forgotten to make provisions for the high-density strip that runs along the keel. It's only two inches wide (4" in the finished hull), and I'm going to use marine plywood for that part. I didn't want to make the join hanging in open space between battens, so I mounted an extra batten right beneath the keel batten and ran some tape the length of the battens:

I'm not attaching screws to the top batten in the area where the keel strip goes, and leaving plenty of room in the batten below:

The fourth plank was almost 16" wide (decided to not rip it in half), and I started to feel the need for some extra "hands":

For this extra wide plank, I used four screws per batten. The plank straddled a form frame, which made things fun.

At the "bottom" of each plank, I do a quick-and-dirty scribe so that the planks follow the rising edge transition:

Nothing precise here, I just use the jigsaw to cut to the line as best I can. Any gaps in the join will get filled in with putty\bog. Note that I'm running some masking tape along the batten that helps form that edge, since I expect a lot of putty squeeze-out in that area.

I finished five planks today, doing almost five feet of hull:

Not too bad of a start.

I'm somewhat conflicted regarding the heatbox versus the heat gun techniques. Frankly, as long as your screws have good holding power it doesn't seem necessary to have each plank perfectly thermo-formed to the battens (at least for the F22, other boats might be different). For example, here is my second plank ready to be screwed down, after a tiny bit of thermo-forming; obviously I didn't spend much time with the heat gun here:

I would agree that a perfectly thermo-formed plank will lay more nicely and makes the screw holding power less important. It also might put less stress on the final composite (and the half-laminated composite, before the hull halves are joined and the exterior laminated) -- but I don't know how important the latter point is, or if it matters at all. Anyone know?

Hot box progress

This morning I wired a switch for the hot box; this took a couple tries, I just don't think intuitively when it comes to electricity I guess, but it turned out:

I also installed four casters on the bottom of it, so it rolls around the garage easily. Last night I bought a small roll of reflective foil-based insulation:

After wrapping, stapling, and taping this on three sides of the box, I had this:

There still seemed to be too much heat loss out of the front though, so I ended up sealing the front with the insulation as well, and cutting a small slot for the foam to slide in and out. Look, the Heat Box Monster is sporting a yellow tongue:

My box is only about 4.5 feet long, some of the longest hull-side planks need about five feet, hence the extra foam hanging out above. Not a big deal.

Closing off the front produced a dramatic improvement. After only about five minutes of exposure the part of the foam plank that was inside the box felt extremely pliable and soft. Almost too soft -- when I experimented with laying it into the mold, it was very easy to make depressions in the foam by pushing against it. You can also see that one end of the plank exhibited some scalloping:

Still, the hot box experiment is showing great promise at this point. I'll have to get an egg timer (wife is gone, I'll go and check the kitchen next) and experiment some more to figure out the appropriate exposure times. Then I'll mount small grab handles on top, and perhaps a small lawn mower engine to make it self-propelled, etc. Haha, just kidding.

Main hull battens mounted

Yesterday I was able to get the aft half of the hull battens mounted. First task was to mount stringers along the outside of the form frames, to ensure each one was plumb. The two frames for the aft cabin roof were not very cooperative, probably due to an existing bend\warp in the plywood, and had to be assisted with some braces:

(the clamp you see above is holding a spirit level to the frame)

Eventually all of the frames were plumb with temporary outside stringers mounted:

Then I started on the battens. I started at the aft end of the hull, because the curves looked easier and the only battens I had on hand were my pine sticks from the float construction. This went pretty quickly:

I went ahead and battened the aft cabin roof frames, because I think I have enough room to foam and laminate that entire area in one operation. I don't have the same confidence for the main cabin roof, so that will be done separately.

Today my first job was a run to the lumber store, for more batten material. Being a chicken regarding some of the curves up by the bow, I decided to splurge on the good stuff (clear cedar) this time. (For you local folks: Martin's Lumber and Hardware in Everett (on Broadway Ave) may look like a run-of-the-mill operation from the outside, but appearances are deceiving - they have an excellent selection of clear cedar, fir, hardwoods, etc, in super-long lengths too (eg, today I bought 1"x3"x14' battens - they also had 16' and 18' lengths). A wooden boat builder told me to try them out several years ago, and I've gone there ever since.) Getting the cedar was a good decision, it was much easier to work with (no knots to fight with, and less splitting) and it bent into shape really nicely. I wish I had spent the money for this stuff from the beginning.

Andrew had arranged to come over today to help watch and work, and he showed up shortly after I got back with the lumber. Working together, we made short work of getting the forward hull battens mounted from the keel to the top of the gunwale:

I put a lot of extra battens in the gunwale area, because I anticipate using that area as a walkway (with some thin plywood to help distribute the weight) when laminating the main cabin roof.

At this point, I'm now ready to start laying the foam planks. I've decided to use 10" wide planks (I went with 8" on the floats). After briefly messing around with the heat gun on the first plank, Andrew and I decided to take a shot at making a hot box for heating the foam planks. I scribbled down a design and then we made a quick trip to the hardware store for electrical items and some more wood. This is what our initial attempt looked like:

It's quite rudimentary, but the bulbs did light up! :-) When we tried to heat up a foam plank though, it never did get warm enough to be super-pliable. Looking at Rod's fixture, this could be because my bulbs are not close enough together. I can't put any more in though, eight 250W bulbs is all my 20 amp circuit seems to be able to handle. Andrew and I next tried reducing the vertical distance between the bulbs (moving the bulbs 4" closer to the foam), but this didn't seem to help much. My next attempt will be to staple some reflective insulation material to the outsides of the rack, to see if the generated heat (there is a lot of heat for sure - you can feel it when standing next to the lamps) can be more contained.

Anyway it was a fun day -- Andrew, thanks again for coming over and helping.

Hull frames mounted

First thing I did today was paint the spots under the rails that I hadn't been able to spray. Then my son and wife helped me move the port float outside:

It's not as nice as inside storage would be, but what the heck these things are gonna be in the ocean someday, a little rain shouldn't hurt them.

My neighbor Sean loaned me his laser level to re-check the level on my strongback, and even gave me a tutorial on how to use it:

Here I am looking at the laser dot on the measuring tape:

I was reasonably happy with the existing level considering that I'm working on a dirt base. The entire strongback was at most 5mm out of level across the entire length, measured at each of the 4"x4" beam mounting points. Using the laser level and the adjustable saddles on my pier blocks, this was trivial to correct.

Next up was mounting the frames, working backward from frame #12. Here is frames 4 thru 12, looking aft:

This is a forward-looking shot, with all frames but #1 mounted:

Looking pretty good IMO. I should have ample working room around both sides of the hull too, which will be nice.

The plywood I'm using is cheap 3/4" construction plywood (the good stuff costs too much, and I don't want to use particle board outside). While working I noticed that many of the frames had lots of visible voids along the batten mounting edges. So I finished the evening off by mixing a quick batch of high-density putty and filled all of the voids in, to help the batten screws hold better.

Tomorrow I'll start mounting battens. I am still undecided if I will plank and laminate the hull half in two portions, or try to do it all at once. (Obviously I need to think fast, if I'm mounting battens tomorrow!).

Back from vacation

My family and I just returned from a week of vacationing in Southern California. For some reason we generally like to drive on these trips instead of fly - today was a doozy, over thirteen straight hours of driving, but we ended up with a total return trip (San Diego to Bothell, ~1300 miles) time of 19.5 driving hours (Los Angeles traffic just plain sucks!) One year we even drove from Seattle to Florida, to visit DisneyWorld - now that was a driving trip! We're back now though, safe and sound - Home Sweet Home!

Being pasty-faced Seattle-ites, we all now have red-neck style suntans (sunburns, actually - forgot to bring the protective lotion and then tried to tough it out). This was an old-fashioned American vacation meaning we visited centers of high American culture like DisneyLand, Universal Studios, SeaWorld, etc. I was able to dodge Six Flags again - phew, good thing because I'm a total wimp on roller coasters (seriously). I'm kidding about the American culture bit but it was fun; we have a lot of memories of these places from when our children were younger (used to live in Southern CA a long time ago). But I did mention to my wife that this is my last trip of this type, unless and until I have grand kids to take along.

I'm very glad to be back though - was getting jittery with no boat work - and I'll be getting back to work on the F22 tomorrow. Looks I have lots to catch up on, with a new blog (Menno's) and updates on all the others. I still have to do the touch-up paint work underneath the wingnet rails, then I'll be getting to work on the main hull. During my absence, my neighbor Sean left my new CNC-cut main hull form frames in my garage -- they look great at first glance! I'll post pics in my next post. I have two weeks of vacation left to go and the weather should be good, so hopefully this means I'll be making fast progress on the main hull.

I took a book about boat electrical stuff with me, and read it at night. Learned a ton about stuff that will never be needed for the F22 (inverters, generators, etc), but much of the rest was very useful, basic knowledge. Like cabling standards and nomenclature, battery types (wet vs gel vs AGM), calculating daily battery load figures, etc. Great stuff, but I need to now remind myself to keep things realistic for my F22. This is supposed to be a lean-and-mean trailor sailor, not the Queen Mary. :-)