Fairing This Hull Nearly Broke My Brain - Building the Poulsbo Boat - Episode 8

Hey folks, welcome to Nomad Boatbuilding. We're picking up where we left off on the Poulsbo boat project. The Poulsbo boat was a popular sport fishing boat built by Ronald Young in the Poulsbo, Washington area. Ronald built his using traditional carvel planked construction. We're building ours using a modern cedar strip construction, fiberglassed inside and out. In the last episode we started fairing off the backbone and mold and today we're going to pick up where we left off and get this part of the job finished up. I have not touched this boat all week long. I got to the end of last week when I was fairing out the backbone and the mold and the transom and such and I was just getting so incredibly frustrated because things were okay all through this sort of stretch up until about here and then suddenly shapes start changing radically. Yeah, so I was getting these crazy variations in shape like I'd have the batten would be touching one mold and then it would be like a half inch or three-eighths of an inch off the next mold and then touching the next one. I was like how could there possibly be that much of a gap? I couldn't decide what was right and what was wrong. I was really starting to doubt myself and then I spent probably like a whole day just scratching my head, going back to the lofting, trying to decide whether or not I'd screw it up somewhere. I even pulled some of these molds out and checked them against the lofting. So the few things that I discovered was A, I need to sort of follow the run of the planking to make it work well for this specific hull design. B, this hull has sort of some awkward flattish spots along it. Usually when you're fairing you kind of spring a batten around something it'll just want to touch off on all your molds when you got a nice fair organic shape but when you got something that's just like a bit artificially flat suddenly that batten doesn't want to touch in those spots and it really it's hard to know whether or not you're doing the thing. So anyway the point being is that I found if I if I force my battens in to sort of jive with the sort of flatness of the hull shape as the lines show the molds start to work out okay but it's when they sort of spring free which is what I'm used to with rowing boats they're a little more naturally organic I guess a lot of the shapes that I'm used to building and so those having sort of an odd bit of a like tanker flatness to the side is not something that I'm building. It seems like really odd to my eye. Anyhow when I when I decided to go along with that it it all worked out okay so I went from being like ready to pitch this thing into the dumpster to getting comfortable with the idea of moving ahead with planking it. I might have a little bit of shimming to do here and there to get it all to work but I'm just gonna roll with it because I was making myself crazy. Now the last thing I wanted to uh that I've been addressing is up at the bow there's a lot of twists so let's go have a look at that well there's a lot of twist two places there's a ton of twist down here at the transom and then up at the bow there's more okay so there's enough twist up here that I decided I can't really get battens to swing down into place that is the the cedar strips that we're going to use are got enough thickness to them that they don't want to twist very well they almost need to be twice as wide which is not something I would have thought of but uh anyway they're all ripped down now so I can't do anything about it so I decided maybe I should try just doing the first little stretch here with plywood or solid wood but I grabbed some plywood here because I got it on hand some quarter wrench and I'm just playing around with the idea of bending that into place gluing that in and then we start strip planking back from that and I'm quite liking that idea so this is quarter inch ply and I feel like it's maybe just a little too stiff still I've got to kind of horse it down pretty hard to get it to fit because it's such a bluff bowed bow I'd like to try and keep the hollow sections up here if I can but I do think this is a possible solution still a lot of twist here maybe even go with lighter ply like three sixteenths two layers of three sixteenths and then just like an eighth on top of that and then I get a really robust entry especially considering this is you know something's going to hit your boat it's going to happen up in here okay now I've learned I've got to get rid of these notches for the next little step which is just fairing down towards the shear line so I'm just tacking these uh little bits of ply in here bridge that gap okay I got to use a full length batten for this last bit I found that if I don't set up the batten that's basically following the run of my planking like the exact run of my planking for this last little portion the shapes just don't work out it has to do with the fact that this dives away so fast I suppose I don't know I've never built a boat with this kind of tumble home before so when I was trying to just run the batten kind of willy-nilly anywhere uh I was getting nothing but grief but when I set it up so that it was following the run of the planking like following the shear line it worked out okay on the other side so that's what we're going to do crab walking around this friggin boat all the time is getting tedious as hell too so you don't have any idea how much time is taken up doing this just snaking around the workshop trying to fit yourself into the little space you've got so much twist here man okay all right I've got something I can share with you I think first of all when you're fairing out a mold it helps to have a batten that's if not full length like three quarters of the length but this one's full length and um there's there's a really good reason for that even though I can only concentrate on a certain area if I offer up this batten down here for instance I'm hitting my transom nicely within my margins of cutting away I can see as I project through visually that I'll hit the outside just fine so this little section looks good in here for this mold and this mold this one's good this one's good we're starting to rise off a little bit here because the tension in the batten I should really get another batten jack over here before I move up forward but I want to show you something really specific okay I'll just throw this on there to as a batten jack all right come here okay mold number four here so I'm touching all the way to the transom that looks great this one suddenly has got like a quarter inch gap okay now one might suddenly immediately think um okay that's that's problematic that means I got to take some material off this mold or off all these ones going back a little ways but the front end is not sprung over to the stem so watch what happens as I spring this forward that moves in and starts touching now the next one's springing out free a little bit and uh but I'm not quite hard on my stem as well could be that I'm a little hard up forward here where it's because it's a very bluff bow so I might shave these down a hair but my main point is is that back there like one two three four molds back and suddenly when I flex that batten into place it suddenly starts touching so that's an important reason for using a long batten when you're fairing out your molds and so the way I'm addressing this fairing process for the most part I'm not cutting anything off just yet so I'm taking my batten jacks and I'm just moving them up a few inches at a time like two three inches I'll move this one up a few inches and then I'll just keep testing how these molds are fairing out it's not too bad again it feels like this guy could probably stand to come down just a hair and to that end I'll just be shaving the corner off of it until my stem is faired in properly it's hard to even tell so what I'll do next is once I'm satisfied that there's nothing massively wrong with these molds is I'll start bringing my stem in down to a closer to a final fit and keep checking that things are looking good in through here and on the way back and when I'm like within a sixteenth of an inch or something like that then I'll decide whether or not I need to shave down that mold. The molds proved to be quite fair in the end so I've just moved on to my transom now. Procedure is very straightforward just keep checking with the batten and keep adjusting the angle until it looks right. Here's a good little trick for this I've chalked the back of my batten to mark where the high spots are. If you're liking these videos you can support me by giving me a thumbs up, throwing me a couple of bucks with super thanks, subscribing to the channel, turning on notifications and of course you can join me over on Patreon. Find links in the corner or down in the description. Using lines we developed from the lofting I was able to rough the stem down at the workbench. We left it pretty proud of our marks coming within maybe 3 16ths of an inch of the final lines. I did that because this boat has got an awful lot of shape to it and so I didn't 100% trust the lines I was laying down from the lofting. We left it quite a bit more proud where the stem was going to have to integrate with the keelson because I wanted to make sure those came together nicely and so once it was all assembled we could start roughing those two parts together. It might seem like a little extra work to do this but the peace of mind is well worth it. This line back here we call the bearding line. This line up here is technically the back rabbit because this has a cut water on there so the rabbit would be where the face of the plank meets the face of the cut water. So anyway that's the back rabbit technically and this is the bearding line. My bearding line layout lines are a little off the marks in the right direction meaning I have to take off more than is there. It would be worse if I had them too far back and I cut to those lines and then found myself with a big gap. So what I'm doing is I'm slowly moving my batten up the boat trying to get a neutral run of the batten around the molds notching these as I go. I'm coming up about two and a half inches each time and I'm running my saw right to my back rabbit line just a little outside of my bearding line. Then I grab a chisel and I'm using the corner of the chisel to kind of plow some lines through here to get rid of the waste. I'm not worried about coming down to my line on the back. In fact I'm staying well away from it as I just get rid of the bulk of this wood here. I'm trying to avoid chipping out a big piece on the back side if I can. Then as I get most of the the junk away and I'll come back here I'll go a little bit deeper and try and dig out a trough for that batten to sit into so I can judge exactly how close we are. The closer I get to my finish marks the easier it is to judge how far I have to go and so I can work with a little bit more confidence. I think the most important part of doing this is just having patience making small adjustments and checking your work. It's that checking over and over again that ensures that you don't overshoot. Overshooting means extra work and so it's actually faster to work slower because fixing mistakes always takes more time than avoiding making mistakes in the first place. This isn't sponsored but for any of you interested in hand tool woodworking and especially wooden boat building I highly encourage you to get one of these Pattern Maker's paring chisels. This one is a three-quarter inch Henry Taylor. It works really great. I also have a bunch of Sorby's which are a little thinner, a little more flexible. I like those too. I get the Sorby's at Lee Valley Tools. I don't know where to get the Henry Taylor. As I'm getting closer I'll come in here to the raft and bring it down a little closer and the last thing I'm doing is I'm trying to marry the part that I just made into the last part that was fitting well and just double checking that it's all looking good as I go. This last portion of the stem to deal with, the forefoot, is by far the most challenging for me at least. What I find so challenging about it is battens wrapped around the boat tend to have to take a fairly radical twist from the bottom onto the stem in this portion and so I find it difficult to use them to give me a good accurate reading of what that shape needs to be. I'm always worried I'm going to overshoot the amount I have to cut away or undershoot the amount I have to cut away and I seem to do both with equal proficiency and so finding that sweet spot in the middle where it's exactly right is the thing that I struggle with the most. The way I currently try to work out these shapes is by using a surrogate plank, usually a piece of light plywood, something that's maybe 3 16ths of an inch thick or a piece of solid wood that just happens to be wide enough to mimic a plank and I'll clamp that in place and twist it down onto the stem and use that to try and judge whether or not I'm taking off the right amount. It's a hard thing to explain and so we'll just put this to the side and just know later on when I'm doing the planking job I'm going to be having to come back and deal with this little problem. Now while I continue to erroneously scrub away at this forefoot which I'll have to repair in some way down the road, I want to thank you all for watching and I also want to thank my followers on Patreon to make these videos possible. I also want to give a shout out to the Pulse Boat Historical Society who loaned us the photos that we used at the beginning of the video. They also sent me a newspaper article about Ronald Young and his boat building business which I'll post on my Patreon page for everybody to see. And I hope you'll join me for the next episode when we start installing the in-whales and the quart risers. That's it for today folks, we'll see you later. Hey if this is your first time joining us maybe you want to go back and watch our previous episodes. I put the playlist down here.