International 2.4mR Sailboat Project - Episode 11 - The building jig part 2

Got to remember to weigh everything before I put it on the boat. 337 grams. Okay, so I'm keeping a track of everything's rough weight before it goes in and as I remove material from it I'll grab up the shavings and weigh those out too. All right, my first stem didn't fit quite properly. Well, I mean it fit on here but the beveling job was wrong. It was a little bit perplexing because this came off of my lofting and usually I'm pretty much bang on. I checked my lofting. I checked everything and it looked like everything was fine. The stem's in the right place. Everything's in the right place. So the best thing to do is just move ahead and make a new part. So instead of pre-shaping it, now I'm shaping it directly on the boat. Well, I'll pull it off to cut it but in order to determine where my bevels are going to be I'm doing it on the boat. And so I've got some battens laid out following my molds. The way I figure out exactly where the bevels need to go is I use one of these little beveling tools here and basically I can run it like this, pick up where this little pointer touches the stem on the inside here and then of course and then I can run it over to here and pick up where it touches the stem on the outside. And do that in both locations picking up both inside and outside dimensions. And this is really just carrying this line around to both sides of this and this cutaway just allows you to get around the corner that's on there which ultimately is going to be your bevel. So a very simple little shop made measuring device. You make them as needed and it does a beautiful job for this kind of thing. With our new stem shaped and installed we can move on to the rest of the mold. I'm going to use this light batten to represent my keelson and it's going to fair across the deadwood and back here there's going to be a small skeg that we're going to add. This tin can kind of represents that skeg. That keelson is going to join to the horn timber right there with a small transom. The skeg is going to get added on later. It's going to be much easier to plank this area without that skeg being there. I hear the port side of our mold is now strapped and gives us a real sense of form. This is pretty exciting to do. Relatively easy for the most part but it had a few turkey bits which I'll get on to in a bit. I left the starboard side unplanked and the reason for that is I needed to bend that keelson in place and leaving it unplanked gave me lots of places to clamp it to and to make sure it fared into that deadwood. The first step in fitting the keelson is to steam bend it in place. It's pretty stiff so once that's done we've taken the fight out of it and we can fit it to the rest of the parts. The main part it has to fit to is the deadwood. After our initial fairing job on that deadwood we're going to put the keelson back in place and check the fit. This thing was fairly stiff even after steaming and so there's a fair bit of fussing around to try and get it just so but for the most part it fit great and there's just a little bit of extra work to do to try and feather out the ends of those deadwood so that it just perfectly. With the keelson now fitted to the deadwood and to the stem we can move ahead with actually bonding it right to the boat and it really only gets fastened in a few places. It gets fully glued to that deadwood and to the end of the stem and the rest of it is just temporary fastenings. There's going to be a small transom that connects the keelson to the horn timber but we're going to add that a little bit later on in the process. We'll wet out all the surfaces with unthickened epoxy before applying thickened epoxy to make sure that we've got a rock solid 100% bond between these parts. Having all those station marks on the inside of our keelson now comes in handy while we're trying to position it with all that epoxy in place. A couple of screws do some of the temporary holding but then we're going to add some clamps here and there just to make sure everything's perfect. So there's our keelson and deadwood construction all fastened together and we're going to move on to fairing that out a little bit later on but first we're going to talk about the strapping of this mold and some of the efforts that went into that. I strapped this mold just using common pine. I bought one by sixes and ripped them down into 5-8 inch thick strips. Now there's the odd spot where the strips were not laying fair enough and so I had to put a little shim in there like this. Just red cedar glued in place and that'll just get scuffed off when I do the fairing job. It's really not a big this isn't about looks this is about giving ourselves the right form. Back in the area of the tuck things got rather tricky. I managed to get it to sort of fair together but it's a bit piecemeal with the different little bits and pieces coming together. But now we have the other side to do and so we get to have another kick at the can. Now it's really interesting to see how different the sides feel with one side strapped over and the other side wide open like this. Now to get going we're going to need to fire up the steam box to deal with the twist in these little tiny planks. I'm taking a very different approach to strapping this side. I'm going to go with my sort of major strap locations first. Before I just kind of worked my way up from the sheer with dinkity dinkity dinkity and then as I start to get to the difficult areas I was running into trouble trying to get it all sort of juggled in there. So I'm going to start with the difficult stuff which is mainly dealing with the tuck here and this hard turn right down here and then fill in the gaps after that. So that should save me a bunch of time. I'm having to steam my battens to get them to fit down into the areas of the tuck. There's quite a bit of twist there. So I'm using quarter inch crown staples to hold them in place and even with that sometimes they pop free and I have to really hit them a few times with the stapler to get them to stay put. Now you notice I'm using my little plywood jacks that I use when I'm fairing molds out in order to give myself an extra pair of hands while I'm fitting these battens in place. This was kind of a fun exercise because I had to try and fair these battens in just by eye without any specific references. The goal is to try and fill in all the spaces and to get the battens to lay down in such a way that there's minimal twists so it would be easy to fair out later on. Yeah I think that went definitely better. Okay let's try that again. That works pretty good. Right now I'm working a bunch of steelers into this area to try and make up some space. So much twist here. I'm trying to find a more elegant way to resolve it. It's not too dissimilar from what I did on this side. It's going to look a little different on this side but that doesn't really matter. The important thing is that it fairs out. So my mold's all strapped and my apologies for not getting it really on film. I was just in one of those moods where I didn't feel like working with a camera hanging over my shoulder. I just wanted to really focus on the project itself and the strapping. I'd love it to be prettier but you know what it's really not a big deal that a mold is disposable and if this is the mold that I was going to be using over and over and over again I would build it differently entirely I think and I would certainly make it a whole lot prettier. But that said it's fairing out very nicely throughout the main body of it. It's really just a question of taking the long board and scuffing across. I just try and make sure that all my stringers get a nice little scuff across the base of it. If the odd corner doesn't get hit that's not a huge deal. As long as the bulk of these stringers are presenting the face and the contact with the mold is good that's good enough. I'm just going to start fairing in the stem here and we're already pretty close. Now of course I'm just looking at my layout lines and trying to make sure that I'm staying close to those. Now this stem is going to have a cup water on it after the planking is on. Because this is sort of a very what I would call a modern design they don't tend to have a lot of crisp edges on them and the nose of this gets sort of a very rounded off profile. So it makes it a lot easier to deal with this area because even if it's one side is out by just a hair you're never going to notice it when it's done compared to if you had a cup water with some very crisp edges where you have the bevel relieving into the face of it. That's a lot harder to get fair. I'm using these Durablok long boards and this is not an advertisement. I get nothing from these guys. Although hell I would mind a little backing from these guys. But anyhow great product I have to say. It's like when I first picked one up I was very hesitant to do so because I felt it was pretty pricey. I can't remember what the cost of these were. They were like 30 or 40 bucks or something like that for one of these blocks and I thought for a piece of foam pretty expensive. And if you could get your hands on the same sort of foam by all means I would say just make it. But if you can't you just need to buy them. I have to say they have saved me a ton of time over the years. They really do a beautiful job of just conforming perfectly. I mean they're stiff enough that they really do a good job of fairing but then they're flexible enough that they'll conform to winds in the surface and they're really comfortable to hang on to. I wish my adhesive backed paper would hang on to them a bit better. They tend to sort of not grab at the edges a lot of the time because dust gets in there and I'm at a loss as to how to clean these off properly to make them stick. I've tried all kinds of different things it never seems to work. But anyhow I'm going over the whole boat. I'm using say a 36 grit long board paper here and the biggest challenge of course is back in the tuck and we'll go take a look at that in a moment. So it's right back here in the tuck that things get really challenging. So what I found on the other side was I had these stringers spaced out a little bit and it was really hard to judge exactly what my shape was turning into so I tried to plank this side a little tighter. Back towards the aft I don't really care about it because it's such a straight easy area to deal with. I can have plenty of gaps between my planks. Right here where things change really dramatically it's very difficult to judge what's going on and there's a few spots where these couple of planks right here don't exactly fare together entirely the way I'd like them to or rather it's very hard to tell exactly how they should fare together. So I've been working away at it using a round bottomed long board here and using this sort of sweeping action I find works well for these sort of areas of drastic change. I might actually come in here with a bit of a filled epoxy and just lay in a little bit of a gob so that I can fare this through and know that I've got a good shape. Just to make it easier to feel those transitions. I've did a little just a little bit of that on the other side but of course I don't want it to be so impenetrable that I can't get a nail in there later on when I go to plank this because I might have to tack my planking down in a few spots. And of course my wood is a little bit gummy from being in the steam box. It's the soft pine really sort of soaked up the moisture quite a bit and so it's not sanding out very well so there's only so far I can go on here today successfully and I'm going to have to come back and deal with it a little bit more tomorrow I think. But for the most part I'm pretty happy with how this is turning out. I think it's going to work out quite well. I'm pretty anxious to get on to the next job which is fairing out the keelson. So as soon as I'm finished with the bulk of this fairing I'm going to come back here and we're going to start beveling all of this off and I have to remember to collect up all my shavings because I need to weigh this out. All the parts that stay in the boat I need to try and have a good idea as to what the finished weight is just because I don't know how accurate a scale is we're going to have later and it'd be nice to know exactly what does our finished boat weigh. So I'm pretty happy with my half strapped mold idea. It certainly makes things easier in a lot of the areas to fair out because there's just less wood to deal with but I think in these areas here where there's a lot of tighter curves I should have strapped it solid just so that I can judge that a little bit better. Live and learn.