Boat Builder's Playdough

Howdy folks. Mark from Nomad Boat Building. Now today I just want to talk about a little bit of a shop hack. Every now and then you get yourself a situation where you've got a hole to fill. That is like a um you put a fastener into something and you want to fill up the hole behind the fastener. We would refer to as bung the fastener. Because of the depth of the hole and the type of fastener, sometimes you don't have enough depth of that hole in order to put a bung in. To put a bung in successfully, in my opinion, your hole that you put the bung into needs to be at least half the diameter of that bung. A full diameter is even better. Half the diameter, I think, is sort of a good, reasonably solid foundation. Anything less than you're really risking it falling out. Now, there's plenty of times when you want to be able to get at that fastener, too. And so for that reason, you want to try and fill that hole, not kind of temporarily, like you want it to stay put, but you want to be able to get at the fastener without having to do a lot of work to get at it. So in those cases, I'll sometimes put a bung in with shellac or varnish or something like that. Something that has like a minimum amount of adhesion, unless the bung can fit really tight and go in dry. That's a possibility, too. Sometimes what I'm talking about today is when you still need to fill that hole, you don't have that depth. And in this particular case, I'm going to be putting something over that hole, but I still want it filled up. I don't want water collecting in behind it for whatever reason. So, let me show you the little trick that I use. A very traditional boat building trick. What I've got in here is like a little homebrew. It's a mix of beeswax and pine tar. I don't know what the ratio is anymore. Maybe 50/50. You melt some beeswax. You add a little pine tar and you play around with it until the consistency you get is one where it's got some malleability to it. And then when it's uh fully sort of cooled off is hard enough to stay put. Basically, this for all the world feels like hashish. Doesn't smell like hashish. That should be your clue. If someone sells you some hash and it smells like pine tar, careful what you put in your pipe before you smoke it. Now, what I like using it for is I like to use it in place of sort of like a marine pitch when you just have like a void you want to fill. You don't want water to be able to collect in there. So, this is a nice stuff to mix up and it's it's nice. It stays nice and soft. So, I've used it to fill voids and things that are going to be buried. So, today I want to use it to fill a hole here on the ganet. I put my chain plates in. I wanted to keep as much meat as possible in the gunnel structure here, but it's such that I just didn't have a lot of depth. I probably could have put the carriage bolt in from the other side, too, but I like the idea of keeping it nice and smooth on the inside. And I thought I could bung these, but I messed that up. So, I had made up some bungs to go in here. But if I put pop those in, let's see if we draw a line across there. You know, I got 316 of an inch. Maybe I could make it work. You know, I could make that work. But on their own, I wouldn't trust them to be really hanging in very well. I would worry that the life of the boat would pop those out unless they were glued in with epoxy. And I don't want to glue them in with epoxy. So instead, we're just going to use this stuff. And you just kind of take a little piece of it. Just start shoving it in there. A little water on there. A little water on my pallet knife. And I can just slice off the extra. Little bit of solvent on this rag. And it just cleans that right up. It's like sticky but dry. So now it's it's really easy to dig this stuff out in the future. Like it's going to take no effort at all to dig that out. That hole's filled. But I am going to cover that hole. I'll show you with what I was planning to just put this little brass plate over top of that hole and fasten that in. That makes it easy to get at and it means that no waters can ever collect in there and I don't have to worry about hot weather melting this thing out of here cuz it's it's uh stuck inside. I mean, it could you you could get a little bit weeping out and really smoking hot weather, but not too worried about that. Can put a little blow of this on the backside to hold my medallion in place. Just center it over my hole. Dial it in. What's cool about this stuff is this like it might harden up a little bit, but not a lot. And we can even use it to lubricate our screws a little bit too. And this would make a not unreasonable bedding compound for hardware. Of course, finishes aren't going to stick to the wax or the hoop, so that's a little bit problematic. You could always put a lick of shellac over it and it'll probably the shellac will probably stick well enough to create a barrier that'll allow other finishes to dry over top. Won't be a great bond, but it'll be something. There we go. Pretty. All right, folks. That's it for this week. I hope you enjoyed that. If you'd like to support these videos, please consider joining me over on Patreon. You can find links in the corner or down in the description. Keep your sticky on the ice. Look at that. It even glues your hardware right on there.