Small Boat, Big Problem - Part 2 - Repairing a badly damaged lapstrake garboard plank

Howdy folks. Welcome back to Nomad Boat Building. In our last video, we started this difficult repair on this small acorn dinghy. We made patterns to replace the garboard plank. We ripped out the old one and we started cleaning up the surfaces to put the new one back in. So, let's just take a quick review of what the game plan is for this repair. Uh, plan A did not go as planned, which was to leave a little what we call a rabbit. So that I was going to create a shiplap joint between the two planks. The reason that went south is because I was using this batten that was attached to here to guide the router. But that batten wasn't able to lay fully flat against this plank throughout its whole run. It sort of was kind of rising up off the surface. And so the depth of the router bit was inconsistent. And I want a consistent depth through that shiplap to create a good joint. So, I tried to make it more consistent using a router plane, but I I just I couldn't pull it off effectively. I ended up basically kind of burning through the the thickness of the plank. It's a little thinner than I had anticipated it to be. So, that means I need to come up with a new plan. And this is really common in repair work. And it's always good to have in the back of your mind what a plan B might be. So, I do have a plan B. And there is a plan C as well. While plan C would be to just get this plank out entirely and fit an entire new plank in here. I really don't want to do that because the way this boat's put together, they've used a flexible polyurethane. So that means that these hood ends are all glued in with that and they kind of it's very hard to get them out. That's not going to happen gracefully. And these planks are nailed in. So I'm sticking with this plan. What I'm going to do is create just a beveled edge on this so that we're basically going to have like a scarf joint that runs the whole length. So, we'll cut back like half an inch, bevel that off, and then the new plank will also have a a matching bevel. And we'll glue those down together. I don't even know how I'm going to tack it together. Maybe I might have to use pin nails or something to just sort of pin it along the way and then pull the nails out afterwards. But at the very least, even if I had to shore down, at least I'd have one plank shoring down, pressing against the next one to help close up that joint. So that's the plan I'm going to follow. It means the pattern that I made before, which matches this line here, is just going to have to get a little bit bigger. It's going to have to get a/ inch wider roughly in order to facilitate that beveling. That's easy to do. And I think that's my best bet. So, what I want to do now is I got to clean up this whole surface here. There's lots of bedding compound or polyurethane stuck to the face here. And it's also here on the keson. It was between the under the plank as well. So, I want to get that all cleaned off really nicely. I'll probably do something to fill all the nail holes in the keson. Just put little wooden plugs in there. I've got to clean up the edge of this plank as well. So, we just square it up. I think I might focus on getting the other plank together. Start to get it fitted and we'll worry about the bevel last. Although I should probably bevel it while it's still flat. Yeah, that'd be the best thing to do. It'll do a rough fit. Make sure it fits well. Then bevel it and bevel this one. And then we'll focus on steaming this into place and uh tweaking the bevel to get it to fit up here. I got to finish chopping this out. But I got to get in here with a chisel and just whittle all this junk out of here. If you're going to do repair work, you really want to have some what we call nail chisel, which basically is a chisel. You don't mind driving into some nails. The very best ones are borrowed from your brother-in-law. There's the nail I couldn't get initially. See if we can leave our this thing out. Grab that. Now come on. The ring nails you got to tease them. Little wiggles to break the bond. Don't try and just yard them out in one go. In a perfect world, I want to get down to just bare wood. get all the old compounds off of there so that when I put my own compounds in later on, I've got clean surface to apply them to that I can be sure will uh give me a good result. Just very carefully pair back to surface of the wood there. This was not really well fitted in the first place. I can tell just by the amount of goop in there and the shape that it has. So, we're going to have to put more goop in ourselves, unfortunately. So, I'm cleaning out what's called the rabbit. this little notch in here. The rabbit should be 90 degree corner ideally. Well, not exactly. There should be 90 degrees on the plank edge and then the uh the back edge of the rabbit itself usually kicks back, you know, two or three degrees so you have room to put cocking in there. In small boats, though, it's not uncommon to just make it square and just put the plank in with some flexible adhesive like this. And that serves as the cocking. You don't necessarily bother with the uh with cotton cocking because there's just not a lot of room there to to hold it very well. Okay. Now, I just want to try and tease this corner out. Now, I've got a fastener here that I'm going to have to deal with one way or another in order to fit a new plank in. I usually don't stop this process until I've got all my surfaces really good and clean before moving on to the next step. Just want to clean off any loose and flaky paint because I can't rely on a good tight waterproof joint in here because I know this isn't very fair. Later on when I put my plank on and I put this in with some more flexible adhesive, uh, I want to be able to clean that up without it being a nightmare. I'm just going to clean up this edge. It's a bit raggedy from cutting away that tongue. I want it nice and fair. So, we've got our planking stock here. Now, I didn't have any stuff in stock that was long enough to do this in one shot. Or rather, I had stuff in stock that's long enough to do this in one shot, but it would have resulted in more waste than I would like to uh be stuck with. And I mean, this exa perfect example of this was probably a piece of waste material from using some longer planking stock or wider planking stock on another project. So, I got so much stuff piled up that's in this sort of, you know, four to six foot range that I got to try and use it up. And it's I think it's more cost effective for me to use this and do a scarf joint in it than to get out a big piece of full length stock and have to split it down to get it to this thickness. Anyway, now putting a scarf joint in this seems like it's like um extra work, but in some ways it isn't because what it's going to allow me to do is fit the front portion and the back portion separately. And that's going to give me more leeway to get the shape fitting just right. And then I can lay out where my scarf has to go, cut and glue that scarf. I've done this sort of thing many times before and uh it's it's kind of my preference. This end of the board has got the most pure vertical grain happening in it. So, I'm going to keep this as the forward proportion. And I think I'm just going to leave these together um and just slip it down so that the aft portion will get scarfed on down here just in the same orientation. And that way we get the best consistency of grain across the plank at both ends. And any grain running angular grain running this way um will be consistent from piece to piece. I mean, this is all vertical grain, so there isn't really grain running the other way, but there's always a little something that is going to impose the grain being cutting clean in one direction rather than the other. So, this is just a simple way to keep them oriented. So, we'll do that. I'm just going to I'll mark this one with this edge here and this one that edge there so that we can keep those clear. So, my plank pattern when I put that onto here is going to go on it like this. This needs to get made wider by half an inch. We'll worry about that a little bit later. I don't need to put the scarf dead center. I could put it stagger it off to one end. I almost wonder if I should stagger it off towards the bow. Looking at the boat where it's flattest. No, I think I think dead center is probably best. So, we'll we'll end up with some waste, but that's not the end of the world. Okay. Uh I want to compare this to the boat. So, let's do that. So, what I want to do here is just try and jam this right up into my rabbit and see how it fits. See, right now, this is fitting up nicely here. This swings way off back there. So, I probably want to adjust this pattern before I do anything else. All right. So, what I'm going to do, I'm going to take this apart. make up this pattern a little differently. I probably just do a little bit of whittling. I don't want to change this too much. It's kind of a a low gaming spot right here. I think I will give it a little little tweak. Tweaky. You see the thing is I know that this was built with students and built quickly. The uh the fell that ran the lap straight course when this was built, he he liked trying to jam this course out in a very very tight time frame, which I don't really agree with. And as a result, you got to got to let a lot of stuff slide sometimes. I mean, he had valid reasons for doing that at the time. The course I run is a little definitely different. I try and I've I've lengthened the course by a few days relative to the way it was done before. And um I've built this specific boat twice, but we're going to build a a different boat in the the next running of the course, which is going to happen this fall. This is 2025. It'll be in in uh November. All right, say that's looking quite good. Let's get rid of this little level of glue. Repair work is fiddly. Okay, I like that. I like that. That's going to work. You know, just judging by the way this is sitting in here right now, I think I could ease this rabbit just a little bit here. I realize this is maybe springing up a little bit high, but I don't think I'm going to be able to spring it down very readily. Okay. So, here's like a very quick and dirty plank fit that I can use to check how this fit's going to be. It's still running a little high. better. I don't want to take off too much because it's going to be I don't know what kind of other problems I might be making for myself, but I think I can get away with a little bit. Okay, back to what I was doing. That's going to fit in there nicely. If you recall when I made this, the old plank was still in place. So, it's sort of a rough estimate coming off of the face of the keel rather than the inside of the rabbit. You know what? I'm going to cut this up. I'm going to redo this all in little pieces because I'm going to get a better result by not fighting the full length of it. So, let's do this. There's actually a deceiving amount of shape that is in a garboard like this. Okay. Now, like that. That's suitably tight. So, we'll get the hot glue gun out and we'll basically make a put a gusset across these guys. Just formulating all kinds of ideas about how to make this all work together. Now, when I first offered this up, it looked like I was probably like off by like a quarter inch at either end relative to the shape. But, if you notice how I'm just bringing it in slowly, I'm not taking that much off. It just takes a while to get the plank down into the right orientation where it's going to give you the an accurate reading. So, it's a it's you're kind of like massaging your way to the finished shape, if that makes any sense. It's important that I try and get this into the same orientation the new plank is going to be sitting in. We're almost there. There we go. Looks really good. Now the last little piece. This is all more about how this fits. This is all going to get overlapped and then beveled off. So, I've actually got a fair bit of wiggle room. I just want to try and make sure I'm getting a really good accurate interpretation of what this whole line is relative to the eventual plank edge. Okay, that looks great. Okay. Carefully pull our spiling out. And I think we'll use we'll just use like this joint as a reference mark between the two halves. So there's a bit of snipe here. We always hold back from the snipe. And when working with um red cedar, especially dark red cedar, I like to use a a white pencil, but it can be challenging to get a good crisp line to follow. So, I'll sometimes run a regular pencil over top of that to give me a something with a bit more contrast. So, we carry this line all the way to the end, even though we're going to be cutting the end off. Sharpen up our pencil. A really sharp pencil can have a bad habit of like grabbing the grain of the cedar and getting drawn off the mark. That just happened just right there. So, you got to be a little conscious of that. It helps depend if you are drawing. So, you're kind of running downhill off of the the grain of the wood, if that makes any sense. Like petting a cat, you know? So, that just ran off track again because I was going into the grain, not off the grain. Okay. And now I want to add a half inch for our bevel onto the ends here. At the very end, I need to actually extend the curve. Okay. Uh, better take a bevel off of the boat. So, I'll go off my bottom edge there and just figure out what kind of angle I need to follow to stay on track. We can leave just a little a hair of extra material to whittle back from if necessary. Okay. So, there's the front bit. And we'll use a flexible bat to get that shape to get the bottom shape. And now I'm just going to do the same thing with the back half. We'll just justify to the towards the back of this plank a little bit more. Okay, we set our spiling off someplace safe. We don't want to ruin that in case we need it for any reason. There's that. Now we can cut those out on the band saw. I often cut this stuff out on table saws because it's so um like I'll cut this line out on the table saw because it's so straight. It's easier. This one I'll cut out on the band saw. This doesn't even need cutting. I can do that just by uh planing. That's my preference. Yeah, this is just a rough off cut. Heat. Heat. Okay. Now, under normal circumstances, I would kind of leave this a little bit large and fit it into place and make sure this all fits before I commit myself to the final width, but this is kind of a captured part. And so, I don't really have that luxury. So, unfortunately, what I'm going to have to do is just make it as close to my spiling here as I can steam it and fit it and make up for any discrepancies with a heavy bead of cocking along the rabbit, which is okay because we need that anyway. And then, of course, the bevel we have along the lap here is going to have a little bit of a little bit of wiggle room, but not a lot. We'll get the sight down it. Look for any discrepancies. And we'll offer this up to the boat before we do any steaming or anything. Make sure it looks like it's going to fit. Hopefully, I have to steam the end of this. The tricky part about doing that is just trying to figure out exactly how to clamp it into the boat. So, I think I have an idea. I have to see whether it's going to work. Let's see how these fit. Let's see about this one. Okay. Well, I think all I can really do is work on my bevels. Yeah, looks like that's going to work out. Okay. So, back side of this needs a half inch bevel. So, I actually ran a um I used a marking gauge on here and ran it down the length. And now I'm just using the white pencil to sort of highlight where that line is because it's all pretty much invisible. It occurred to me that the edges of these planks are relatively straight, so I could rough a lot of it down on the table saw. So, I'm just going to take the bulk of it away with the blade kicked over to the relative angle that I need to use, which I think is about 45°. And then we can finish it off by hand. Okay, now to clean the bevel. This is probably going to be pretty harsh on my plane, but there's not much I can do about that. What we want to do is just attempt to describe the initial bevel and get it sort of worked all the way down the length, holding back from the both edges a little bit and then slowly tweak it down into its finished bevel. Touching both my layout line and the inside edge of the plank. I'll just do this in sections going about halfway initially I think and then come back and do it again. So, at the halfway point, I'm about a/4 inch away from my layout line and normally an eighth of an inch away from my inside edge. Getting into the part where it winds. Everything's getting a whole lot trickier all of a sudden. For the most part, it's going well. This cedar is planting beautifully. The trick is to not go past my feather edge, but to also hit my line on the inside. So, I'm sort of having to a little bit dance back and forth between the two edges, focusing my plane pressure on one or the other to achieve that. The tighter the twist, the smaller the plane I need. That's aggressive. These little thumb planes can be great, but they're a right pain to try and adjust. Hey, hey, hey. All right, folks. I think that's going to be it for today, but we're going to pick up where we left off in the next episode. I certainly hope you're going to join me for that. If you like these videos, you'd like to help support the channel, please consider joining me over on Patreon. You can find links in the corner or down in the description. All right, folks. We'll see you next time.