What Machines Do You Need for Boat Building? - Part 1

[Music] welcome back to Nomad boat building I'm Mark rotin and today we're going to talk about which stationary machines you might need for boat building so you've gotten interested in boat building and we're going to assume that you've gotten yourself a few hand tools and you've gotten yourself a few power tools and you're ready to make the leap into the next Stratosphere of shop equipment and that is stationary machines so I'm going to talk about which stationary machines I use in boat building how I use them and we're going to go over the priority in which I would acquire those machines if I were to start all over again now of course each of those machines comes in different sizes we'll talk about that and they all have different features and we'll talk about that a little bit too what this will not be is a review of different brands of machines because I've got what I've got I haven't used everything that's out on the market you're going to have to judge for yourself which ones are the best suited to you the type of boat building you're doing the size of the boats the type of ruction is going to govern your decisions to a certain degree take all of this with a grain of salt in the world of stationary machines generally bigger is better but that doesn't mean you need to start by getting big industrialized machines most of us do not start out that way and you don't have to start out that way either if you can get your hands on some great but they have their downsides sometimes they have different power requirements there're certainly a whole lot harder to move around and perhaps you really don't need a really big machine for the stuff that you're doing so let's just jump right into it okay the year was I think 1990 1991 I was just finishing College I was just getting into Woodworking and I bought my first machine 75 bucks bought it at some dodgy downtown importer took it home on the bus a bench grinder should 100% be the very first stationary machine that you get for your Workshop up and the reason for that is good quality boat building really relies on using sharp hand tools to do all of your finer work to get those tools sharp you're going to want a bench grinder to do a lot of the beveling of plain blades and chisels sharpening paint scrapers sharpening drill bits what have you there's a million things that we sharpen in order to do our work and a bench grinder is the one tool that will do that job very efficiently most of the time now if you're buying bench grinders you really want to get the largest diameter wheel that is available to you uh the standard is like a 6-in wheel you can certainly make good use to that I find that that is a little bit on the small side for sharpening plain blades and chisel blades that is mostly because I personally like to use a hollow grinding technique and the concavity of that Hollow is just a little too uh great for my taste using a 6-in grinder so I would say a bare minimum should be like an 8 in grinder and in fact what I use now is a 10in grinder so as I say right here I've got a 10-in grinder and I bought the best quality one that I could lay my hands on I didn't have a lot of variety at my disposal if it were available I might have preferred to get one with say a Baldor motor for instance but this one was just fine uh this is about 3 or 400 bucks I think pretty much every grinder comes with silica carbide wheels on them you're going to want to get a white aluminum oxide wheel for sharpening so that's going to be a slight extra expense and I went one step further and actually put balancers onto these wheels to try and get this to run as smooth as possible I feel that that was worthwhile because the result is is a machine that runs very very smoothly and quite quietly so if I turn this on once it's up and running it's almost a silent machine I don't need to use hearing protection while using it so some things to look for uh the tool rest of course is the most important part and no grinder comes with a great tool rest for the most part but um this one isn't too bad I had to do a little shimming to get it nice and square to the wheel it's a good heavy cast iron piece of material here the wheel housings on this are quite nice thick steel they're not quite an eighth of an inch but they're they're pretty hefty and so as a result these tool rests hang on pretty nicely compared to this other machine that I have the wheel housings are pretty flimsy and so the tool rests on it are a little on the flimsy side so here's a typical budget grinder that my local Canadian Tire hardware store it's got these magnifying visors which I suppose are okay but the tool rests are just stamped steel one of them's got this v- Notch for sharpening drill bits which I'm not a fan of gets in the way and mostly these are at a fixed angle that can't properly articulate for grinding tools on my old grinder I made new tool rest that could properly articulate for grinding Edge tools now I've have added an aftermarket tool rest here this is a Veritas tool rest from Lee Valley Tools and it works pretty good it's not perfect but it has a nice range of adjustability here and I think that's really helpful and frankly if I were to do this all over again I'd consider even fabricating one of these from scratch something where I could have a few micro adjustments in there just s to really dial it in to match up with the wheel nicely now of course one of the things you need to think about with a grinder is dressing those wheels so I have a diamond dresser here that works really nicely it's important to keep that wheel clean this one you can see right now has got a bit of stuff built up on there so we want to clean that off in a perfect world you want to dress off this wheel so that it is essentially Square to the tool rest this is the one place that you should have no trouble finding something in the used tool Market there's a lot of um older armatures that have got the wheels set up have a belt driven motor attached to them you can go with one of those by all means 50 bucks should be able to get you some sort of grinder now I would absolutely gun for an 8 in as your sort of Target 6 in will do and 10 in is nice but it's kind of a luxury and it's not necessarily even a great advantage over an 8 in now I don't think there is any stationary machine that comes in so many variety of sizes than band saws in my opinion the band saw is the heart of the boat building shop whereas a cabinet shop would have a table saw as the Heart by all means the band saw is the heart of the boat building shop and you will very very unlikely find a boat building shop anywhere in the world that doesn't have a band saw now is bigger better in the form of a bansa in a boat shop depends on the size of the boats you're working on obviously so for the small boat builder like myself who builds trailer roll size stuff you don't need a huge saw I mean I've got an 18in saw here which is a beautiful old machine once owned by Boeing airplane plant but I don't use it all that much in fact I keep a smaller scroll blade on it and I just use it for more fiddly stuff 90% of the bansa work that I do happens on this one right here this happens to be a 15in machine but 14 is the more common size and this does almost everything that you need it to do now the one thing it has limited on is the depth of cut for doing resawing but there are some machines that offer an extension post that you can put into your machine to make it larger I can't do that with this particular of machine but that's something to look out for now you don't need a ton of power so this Oliver Band Saw is like 1940s era probably has a massive direct drive motor but it's only a half horsepower such a big motor though that that horsepower has an awful lot of torque and it runs a bit on the slow side it can do the job the General on the other hand it's got a smaller belt drive motor it's 3/4 horsepower something in that range is probably just fine 3/4 one horse would be even nicer but you don't need a Monster Band Saw to do most of the work we do okay so I also have this little tiny 9-in band saw this really only gets pulled out for doing model making type stuff but it is capable of a little bit of joinery the downside to these is the size of the blades you can get for them are really light and flimsy and you can't really put a good quality aftermarket blade on them but if you to go up a size we'll say like a 12 in you probably can get something that's not terrible that said I would say the 14in band saw should be the thing that you focus on acquiring if any at all now so let's look at some things that you might want to look at in a band saw okay first and foremost we're looking for a nice cast IR Iron Wheel we want something with some weight to it that has some centrifugal energy so that when it's up and running that's helping to bring that blade down through your work a light flimsy aluminum or pot metal wheel is not necessarily all that great and you certainly don't want to get ones with plastic Wheels it's quite possible you might find smaller band saws with plastic wheels and the next thing you want to look for is a decent blade guide now I think a lot of the saws have pretty much the same thing aail able which is usually a Xanax or pot metal kind of configuration down here and mine did as well but mine broke I had to fabricate a new one for this band saw I've got a video on how I did that you can check that out and of course you can get aftermarket ones there's a company called Carter that makes a really nice uh aftermarket blade guide assembly and they make them to fit several different common Brands now I've never bothered with it because I think the simple configuration of some guide blocks and in case mine are made out of ebony but they could be lignum VTE or steel or bronze ones that you could use in there that are going to work just fine I think the biggest key is whether or not you can adjust them quickly and easily you know these have got some turn knobs that loosen them off and then then some adjusting wheels for adjusting them back and forth and I find that works pretty good of course you need the same thing on the lower guides if at all possible now I've added some gasket material to my Banda to try and make a little more airtight for dust D collection I don't think any Band Saw has particularly great dust collection set up on it the dust pickup on mine is down here on this side it would be better if it were up close up here near the throat of the band saw okay now there's a couple things I wanted to mention one of them is I think it's a great idea when you have a band saw that has a positive stop at 90° and mine has a little adjustable post down here that allows that to happen now I mentioned that because there's another saw that I have to use once in a while at a different shop that doesn't have that and it is a huge pain in the butt to have to zero this up every time you want to make a cut that is other than an angle cut now this little Band Saw is surprisingly good for what it is uh I mean it's it's got some decent weight to it even though it's a pretty light little machine Let's just open it up here it's got steel wheels in it it's got a little cleaning brush down here on the lower wheel which is kind of nice and what I find quite interesting is it's got a DUS reflection Port down here below where the blade comes through and drops the sawdust so that's actually quite a nice little feature this is a 1/5 horsepower machine it's got some blade tensioning advice printed right on it and it's got a bit of advice inside as to how big a circle you can cut given a particular blade width that's kind of a nice detail too I like the blade guide adjusting mechanism here with this little rock and pinion mechanism that's actually quite nice and it's also got a blade tensioner so that you can release the tension when you're not using it if you like and you can change blades more easily but not having to screw around with a big tensioning knob like I have to do on my other machines the last thing I really like about this band saw is the fact that the slot is in directly in line with the blad so it's easier to put the blades on and I like the fact that it's got this little square throat plate here which makes it very easy to fabricate new throat plates as they wear out now of course a lot of band saws come with a rip fence which can work just fine although you do have to make sure that you dial in that rip fence to align with the track of the blade there's a trick to doing that and you can find some videos online about doing that so I do use the ri prints with a certain amount of frequency but there's another type of fence that is really useful on a band saw too this is what we call a single point fence see it's got sort of a dull point to it so you would just line this up just in line with the teeth of the band saw you clamp that down right there and then that allows you to actually control your cut as you're going through there in case your Blade's wandering a little bit maybe it's dull or maybe it's just not tracking the way you want so we used to use this a lot in boat building school and now the last thing I should mention is you might have heard of a ship saw and ship saws are basically band saws but they differ in that the entire assembly of Wheels is the thing that tilts the table stays stationary and this whole this whole uh upper saw runs on some trunions that allow it to tilt now it should be nice if you get one of those in a smaller size and I know that they have existed in the past you might find one in the say maybe 24 in size but for the most part you're only going to find ship saws in those really large like 48 in configurations and pretty much antique machines there might be some newer machines out there guaranteed they're going to be very expensive for our purposes though building small boats it's not that big a deal to work on a tabletop that's tilted for the most part we're using small parts that are quite manageable that way okay say why would I choose a band saw as my second machine to buy over for instance a table saw well part of that is because of the kind of work that I do but also no matter what your boat building project is there are going to be parts that need to be cut with compound angles and parts that are probably going to need to cut with curves to them and the band saw excels at that if you have a lot of ripping to do you could probably find someone else with a table saw who'd be willing to do a bit of ripping for you but the chances that you're going to find someone else with a band saw that can do the kind of work that you need done on a band saw is very slim and more often than not you need that band saw sitting right beside the boat that you're working on whereas stuff that happens on a table saw you could probably do a lot of it offsite quite easily and then bring the materials to the project so a band saw would be my second machine and I would aim for something in the 14in range and this is one time if you can find a better quality Machine by all means do so that said I have seen lots and lots of band saws for sale used in the $500 range and the thing about band saws is the technology is very simple and it's virtually the same from one brand to the next so you could pick up any sort of offshore made Band Saw and it is probably going to be almost exactly the same as your domestically made band saws the main difference is going to be you know what's the quality of the motor in it which is changeable and did they put decent bearings into it which are changeable too so I would focus on get something that's got uh the basic elements that are not so easy to change out like good quality wheels on it and you know as much of a solid base as possible and I like band saws that are on a large size basee as opposed to ones that are designed for tabletop use for the most part now if you can find a big old industrial one great but they can be a bit of a brute to move around you're not going to find any aftermarket parts that suit them at best you might find some tires that will fit them this guy I've got to separate it into two halves just to be able to move it at all and even still I need equipment to move that stuff around because it is heavy even the base is like/ inch thick cast iron all the way through [Music] okay we finally come to table saws this should be the third tool you buy more than likely now if you're just doing like strip built canoes or something you might get the table saw before you get the band saw because in strip building ripping materials is like the primary thing that you're doing in that type of construction that said you still have to make the mold and for doing that the band saw is by and far the better machine to do that with so I kind of Stand by my earlier statement that the Bandai should be your second machine now the main thing we use the table sawt for is ripping material rough ripping material for our work uh we do certainly a bit of joinery on table saws but not a lot because so many of the things on boats are curved table saws aren't really made for doing that now you will see me freehanding planks over top of a table saw in order to cut curved lines and if you're careful and you're thinking about a few important factors uh I think you can do that quite safely although it is certainly not considered a safe way to use a table saw you can make a lot of accessories for table saws too so the table saws are probably the most versatile machine in The Woodworking Shop but when it comes to boat building its primary purpose is usually a ripping material and secondary we do a little bit of joinery where it comes to doing ripping operations I will use this in conjunction with with a jointing sled so it's a long sled that rides in one of the t- slots here and that allows me to take the rough saw edge off of a board and then I can rip it to whatever width that I want it to the other operation is cross cutting and so you're going to want a cross cut sled you know these are so integral to how we use table saws I am kind of flabbergasted that none of the table saw manufacturers make it seems kind of crazy to me that this is the one accessory that we all make ourselves and yet at a table saw is is it absolutely 100% needs this accessory to do so many safe operations on it now I won't speak to brands on table saws exactly however I mean I've got my general here which I absolutely love and I'll never get rid of it we have to put out there that saw stop probably has one of the better professional quality table saws out there at the moment and it has the additional advantage of having their sop technology built in there which will save fingers now that said that technology has to be turned on I have a friend who almost lost fingers on a saw stop machine because he had it the technology locked out for cutting some green wood that he was doing but there are other safety measures that he did not take into account that would have saved him so um technology can only save you so far you still have to use your head and that's the really important thing saw stop occasionally saves fingers when people have forgotten to use their first line of defense which is clear logical thinking when it comes to table saw bigger definitely is better if you can afford a professional quality table saw by all means do that however I understand that we're not always there I've seen plenty of professional boat building shops that have gotten away with contractor size table saws maybe not your small table top style ones but still they're not really big saws so this is your general cabinet maker saw three horsepower for cabinet makers table saw you want something that's probably at least three horsepower although there are slightly lighter versions one and a half or two horsepower will do it however in boat building we spend a lot of time ripping stock and especially heavier stock and for that reason you want more juice if you can get it we want a really good quality fence that is the number one feature that we want to make sure we put effort into even if you get an old saw if you can put a higher quality fence on it then you should do that and this is a bessire style fence they're still around as far as I know and I would say that's sort of a great fence to go with you don't need a lot of bells and whistles you don't need ones where the fence comes off and flips down and things like that those are nice features but they're not absolutely necessary your main goal should just be one that's really good and Rock Solid that's easy to adjust now if you can't afford to get a good aftermarket fence I'm going to link below to another YouTuber named John Heights who makes some shopmade table saw fences and accessories really interesting ideas while we're at the table saw I should mention that a rotor table is sort of a natural accessory to the table saw just because we tend to have this extra surface it's the logical place to put a router table we don't really use them a heck of a lot in boat building but they do come in handy once in a while my rer table is an old one that Veritas first came out with this was one of their prototypes actually it works fine you know it holds your router in place comes in and out of it relatively quickly it doesn't have any fancy stuff going on it whatsoever but it does the job and having it married into the table saw top allows me to use the table saw fence as an accessory to the router table okay let's talk job site table saws for a moment now there are all kinds of contractor tabletop table saws uh some of them come with stands and things like that now the one thing I would say is if you're just getting started absolutely that will get the ball rolling but what you need to do is build it into a tabletop itself you need to extend its footprint somehow we don't need a lot of width usually for the kind of work we do but a little bit more you know if those tables are only about yay wide you need something more like yay wide and the key ingredient that we need is an outfeed table so I've only got a couple extra feet added onto this in the form of this leaf that hinges down but I use this in conjunction with my joinery bench that acts as my outfeed table so they're at the same height giving me a nice long long outfeed table and I think that's critical to using a table saw safely cuz otherwise you're trying to put pressure on work back here while gravity is trying to take it down to the floor back there not really good situation okay stop I know what you're thinking you're thinking I'm going to take a 4x8 ft sheet of plywood and I'm going to use that as an outfeed table and then when I rip plywood I'm going to have a full 4x8 ft sheet of outfeed table to support my 4x8 ft sheet of plywood don't do it I've seen so many shops try this and you know what happens that 4 by8 foot sheet of plywood oute table turns into a work surface covered in crap that cripples your table saw doesn't work keep your out Fe table as small as possible for the bulk of The Ripping that you do and have something else that picks up the slack like I do my up table couple of feet deep that's it and then my workbench takes up the slack works great keeps me from using my table saw as a workbench mostly and if you could have another table at the same height for infeed even better in fact for quite a few years I had a little rolling cart that was the same height that was a beautiful little infeed table it has since grown a miter saw on top of it so it stopped doing that job but I do miss it I think if you're willing to build a tabletop around your contractor saw pretty much any of them will do so I would focus on which ones have got the best mechanics for changing the blade angle maybe raising and lowering the blade and of course the fence which is always in important detail now your mid-range table saws are better than your portable ones obviously you're probably going to spend I don't know 1,200 1500 bucks on one of those if you can't justify a full-size cabinet saw then I would gun for one of those okay I'm going to throw a few links below to a few different other YouTube channels that have some really interesting little ideas about using contractor grade table top table saws and how you can sort of stretch the use of those into more of a cabinet type saw all right folks we're going to hit pause right there we're going to pick up where we left off in the next video now don't forget I also have a video out there on which hand tools I need for boat building and which handheld power tools I need for boat building so please go check those out until next time I want to thank all of you for watching I want to thank everybody on patreon who makes these videos possible if you can help me out on patreon I really appreciate that you can find links in the corner or down in the description so get out there get yourself a machine or to and get boat building see you later folks [Music]