|
John provided full scale Mylars generated by his Autocad system so there was very little manual lofting to do.
The stem was the first project. It is laminated up from 1/4"x5" mahogany over a particle board mold The mahogany was soaked in a trough of water for a few days and clamped up on the form to
dry. Then they were glued up four laminations at a time.
Once the stem was mounted on the molds and squared up. It was shaped with a power plane to lay fair to the molds.
First, guide notches were chiseled every foot or so using fairing battens to check the angle. Then the rest of the stem was brought down to the bottom of the notches with the power plane.
The molds were cut from the Mylars using the methods described in "Gougeon Brothers on Boat Construction". The nail head method of transferring lines was not to reliable with these big molds and
neither was a ponce wheel so I built a fingered batten that Gougeon described. It took about three weeks to cut and erect the molds using 3/4" particle board and 2x4s.
Here I am in front of the erected molds stacking strips of Atlantic white cedar.
The strips were finger jointed and glued up into 40' - 48' lengths. I built a 12" wide by 50' long bench down one side of the shed to insure that the strips would be straight. I used finger joints because there were over 500 joints and as long as the joints were staggered, scarfing was not necessary.
Planking was done from the keel down and from about half way the top sides in both directions.
I could lay 4 strips at each session, two sessions a day. If I had enough clamps I could have laid 6 each session. (I have about 30 bar clamps)
I used West 105/209 with Cabosil mixed to a mayonnaise consistency. It was Summer so I used the slow set hardener.
It only took one session to figure out that the caulking tubes were a waste. I got a couple of boxes of quart size Glad freezer bags. Fill them with epoxy, cut off a corner and wrap around a short length of 1" dowel to make even squeezing easier.
About the Middle of September I ran out of wood and had to wait for another batch of cedar to come out of the kiln. I used the time to rough fair what had been done.
The hull was pretty fair already so the main work was knocking off the corners with a belt sander.
Then I went back over the low spots with epoxy and microballoons. I probably went to far with the fairing at this stage because after the first two layers of glass were applied, I had to do it all over again.
I planked the topsides up to about 2" short of where the closing strip would go and left the ends of the bottom strips square.
Once the bottom was finished, I used a circular saw with the rip fence resting on the topside strip and trimmed the length of the boat exactly 2 strips wide. Then it was a simple matter of laying the two final topside strips.
|
