Speed Testing

I got the FS18 up to 70 mph today......


.....and my bike........



.......at the same time!!!




I have successfully moved the boat to my mom's house in the Panhandle. No problems during transport, but a nerve wracking experience nonetheless. I had visions of all my hard work tumbling down the highway the whole time. It shifted a little during the move but not enough to be a problem. Everyone who has seen it so far has said that it's considerably larger than the impression that they got from this site. That's a good thing I guess. I was really lucky in that I didn't run into any rain on the whole 5 hour drive. If you've ever been to the area, you'll know that to drive anywhere along the Gulf Coast of Florida on a summer afternoon and not encounter torrential downpours rolling in from the water is a statistical anomaly. I was a little concerned with how well I had epoxy sealed all the wood, so I was glad it ended up being a non-issue.

The next few weeks will be devoted to packing, moving, unpacking, and settling in to the new house and new job. After all that is finished, I can start working on the boat again. So expect updates in a few weeks once everything has calmed down.

Elie

Inside Glass

I've been working like a demon on the boat recently in order to get it ready to move tomorrow. I put in 10 hours on it today and with the help of a modified build crew, got the inside glass finished. After prepping the boat in the morning, Frank and Matt came over to help. Things went much more quickly and smoothly than the outside job did, but I guess that's what experience gets you. The procedure was essentially the same as last time, taping the seams, then laying the glass cloth on top of everything. The only differences were that we skipped the peel ply this time and that the seams first required a putty fillet with a 1/2" radius so the glass would take the turn. Almost all the glass here will be either covered by the sole, or hidden under the decks so the peel ply would have been more work than it was worth.

Precoated panels, fillets in place, overlapped tape on keel:


Chines taped:


12 oz. biaxial cloth laid out, cutting down centerline for the bow fold:



Frank of "Frank's Canoe" fame, me, and Matt, professional termite sorter:



Putting together the bow overlap.



No real pictures of the glassing process. We used the squeegees primarily, and it worked out great. Prior to starting today, I cinched the the ratchet straps down on the frames and measured the width at each one. This way when we were done glassing I would know how much to pull the sides in even though the frames had been removed. Hopefully, this will help me get the shape I want when it's time to put the frames back in.





I differed from the plans a little and ran the cloth all the way up the transom. I probably could have glued together my transom sandwich a little better when I started, so I figured this couldn't hurt.



I'm pumped about how the inside laminate has turned out. It looks great. I can't thank Frank and Matt enough. I couldn't have finished this on my own today and I HAVE to get this thing out of here tomorrow. My jackbag of a landlord is going back on his word and kicking us out a week early. Gotta get moving. Thanks guys.

Elie

The Flip!!!!

Today was a big day in the build process of any boat, the flip. I finished up the 3rd layer of the rubrail last night in preparation for today. It all went well, just took longer than I expected, about 4-5 hours for each layer. It stiffened the boat up a good bit, but the tension from it pulled the sides of the boat away from the frames as well. More on that later.

The only place where the boat was attached to the frames was the transom, so those screws came out and we were ready to pop it off the strongback. After remembering to disconnect the transom knees halfway through the move, Frank and I wrestled it out into the front yard. For what it is, an 18 ft boat, it is amazingly light (maybe 100 lbs.) But with just the two of us trying to lift it over our heads to get it off the frames, it was a bear. I think I pulled something in my neck. It's still howling tonight after 2 BC's and 2 Sierra Nevada's.

Anyway, here she is in all her glory:




The truck and flatbed in the background are borrowed from my dad and will transport this Bad Larry to its new home in the Panhandle. It was still tough to get a great shot, but you can at least get a better idea of the lines. She just looks fast, being shaped a lot like what I think a boat tail rifle bullet looks like. The main task for the day was to make a cradle to affix to the strongback to hold the flipped boat. This is the kind of thing that Frank is good at and he took the lead on the design. In short order, we had 4 cradles to match the hull.


Some scrap carpet and trimming of the ends of the cradles and they were ready to screw to the strongback. In the flipped boat, you may be able to see where I marked the locations of all the interior pieces while it was still on the frames.


While most people will keep the whole stringer/frames assembly intact, flip it and put it back in the boat, I don't have room to do that. I broke down all the frames and stringers and stacked them to the side, so I need to know the exact locations of everything I took out, so I can later put them back in.

The cradles we made held the boat well, but the strongback was now way to high to get into the interior to do the next glassing step. The boat came back off and some very bootleg engineering brought the whole assembly to a more reasonable height.


Yes, my shop is an embarrassing mess. This is standard and I think goes well with the hurricane damage hole in the ceiling. Have to get it cleaned before the next big glassing party. Like I mentioned before, one problem that I noticed when we test fitted the frames was that with the force of the rubrail bowing it out the whole thing has sort of opened like a book in the middle, pulling the sides away from the frames. This has been exacerbated by the flip because the weight of the sides pulling down now make it worse. With some ratchet straps cinching it together at the frames, it has all came together beautifully though. Dealing with the straps will be impossible when we glass, so we'll make some presized braces based on the current beam that will pull the sides in right after we do the inside (thanks for the tip Bob). With the glass still wet, we hope this will help in retaining the proper shape.

I have to say that I'm proud of myself today. After months of sanding, today it hit me, I'm actually building a freaking boat. For the first time, I feel like fishing out of this thing is in the forseeable future. Sweet. I think I'll go have another beer. Cheers everyone.

Elie

Rubrail - Part 1

Like I mentioned before, it's time to get the Spook ready to make the haul up to the Panhandle. So I called Frank over to help me rip half a sheet of 1/4" ply into 1 1/2" strips. My new Freud blade worked like a charm. Unfortunately, on the last strip, the bearing in the saw decided to try to catch on fire. Epoxy dust from all the sanding I've been doing probably got in there, and that's a death sentence.

Since I don't have any room to work, I had to turn the boat into my lamination table by covering it in plastic. I then laid out the first round of strips that I had prefitted to the boat earlier. Following the lead of some other builders, when the strips were prefitted on the boat, I drilled a few 1/4" holes through each one. These would later be fitted with dowels in order to align the strips when they were slippery with glue. Next, I precoated the inside face of the strips, the edge of the hull, and the dowels with straight epoxy. Here's the setup.

I've been scrounging clamps for about a year so I was ready for this moment, and I used every damn one of them. I could have used about 10 more. Once the precoat was tacky, I mixed up a batch of Gel Magic. I measured it by weight this time and things went much more smoothly. I slathered it on each strip and then used a notched spreader to even things out. Being the middle of July in Florida, temperatures inside the garage border on preposterous. I mixed up enough Gel Magic to do one strip on each side. If you get it on the strips quick, and don't let it spend much time in the pot, you can do two strips at a time. Barely.

Applying the strips is tricky. The dowels are tough to pound into a slippery strip of ply. And then pound into the side of the hull, all while trying not to get the glue on the faired surfaces. Once the dowels are in, you're golden though. I couldn't take pictures of the process, but suffice it to say, it's messy and nerve wracking. Here are some pics of the finished result.


One of the bow strips requires both a miter and a bevel for them to butt up properly. You can see it in this closeup, as well as a couple of the dowels. Dowels and bow will be trimmed up tomorrow and then the whole process will be repeated again. And then again, for three layers total.

I went around after everything was glued up and cleaned up all the glue squeeze out, creating a nice bead of glue where the strips meet the hull. This would be a nightmare to do when it is hardened up.

Still Fairing

I’ve had a lot of comments recently, all basically amounting to, “I’m tired of looking at that damn fly. Put up a report.” So, I’ll give you guys what I’ve got ……. and what I’ve got is fairing. The bow seam and transom edges need some work, but otherwise the whole boat now has a rough fair on it. By this I mean that all surfaces have had at least 2 coats of Quickfair pulled on and then sanded off with the random orbit. This has eliminated pretty much all fiberglass edges and smoothed out the majority of the big imperfections. It's tough to tell because of the patchy color, but it's all pretty smooth.

It's tough to get a good pic of the boat in it's entirety in the small work space. I'll make sure to take lots of pictures when we flip it. What remains is work on the bow and transom, filling a slight dip where the hull panels were spliced together, longboarding the crap out of the whole thing, and then putting a slight radius on all the hard edges. But all that has to wait. I'm about to get the hell out of the bum-ridden crimefest Gainesville is becoming. This means I have one month to get the boat ready for transport, so I am abandoning the fairing at its current state and going to concentrate on making the thing structurally sound. First step in this is the rubrail. Unlike in many production boats, the rubrail on the FS18 (and a lot of other Bateau designs) is integral to the strength of the hull. It is composed of three layers of the same 1/4” ply that the rest of the hull is made from. After I sand the fairing compound off the edge of the sides, these are glued on in a sandwich about an inch and a half wide. Here’s a 1 ½” strip that I marked as a guide and then sanded off.

Once the rubrail is complete, we will pop the empty hull off of the strongback (looking forward to this step), leaving behind all of the framing still aligned and attached to the base. The inside seams will be filleted and taped, and then the inside will be sheathed in a layer of glass like the outside was. Once it’s all cured the stringers will be filleted and taped into the hull and then it should be plenty strong enough to load onto my dad’s flatbed trailer and move to it’s new home in the Panhandle. Here I can take my time and finish the inside right instead of trying to rush through the whole thing. Bonus. For a better explanation of all of this stuff, check out Bayport Bob’s website in the sidebar. He’s already done it and has pictures of the whole process.

I wish I were progressing faster, but fairing is a slow process and things have been totally hectic recently. It’s definitely one of those things that you just have to do an hour or two at a time and trust that you’re making progress because nothing obvious is getting done. I have had a lot of things take precedence over the boat in the past few months. I'm trying to get all my loose ends tied up here. Cole moved to P-cola, so he and I took one last fishing trip before he left, down to Sanibel in search of our first snook, especially on the fly. We had limited success but a good time. Some faces were rocked. We reached the conclusion that snook are awesome and we would like to catch more of them. Check out Cole’s report on his website in the side bar. Between that, trying to pack the house up, finding a place to live in the Panhandle, and ramped up intensity in the lab, making progress on the boat has been and will continue to be a challenge. Posts may be infrequent until I get settled in August, but I’ll do my best.