Steam Bending Inwales and Thwart Risers into the Poulsbo Boat - Episode 9

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. Good morning folks. Okay, it is Monday morning. We are on week eight. Week seven was very short. It was just a couple of days, mostly troubleshooting, because at the end of week six, I got really frustrated. So up here at the stem, this was a real bugger to bevel off. I probably put like four hours into messing around with this side. And then this side, I probably had it done in like one hour. And that's just because there's just so much shape going on in here. And when there's a lot of shape, it can be really hard to decide if you're getting things right. So the way I deal with approaching these, you can't use like a little skinny baton to figure this stuff out, because there's so much twist going on. The best thing to do is to use something like a piece of plywood. And it's got to be maybe not quite as stiff as your plank, because maybe you need to steam it or something like that. But like, this is 1-8th door skin. It's okay, but like 3-16ths is a bit better, because it's a little closer to how your plank is going to react. So you just bend this into place and play around with beveling off until it all sort of fits. But I mean, it is torturously difficult for me to get this right. One of these days, I feel like I should set up a boat and just set up like a mock stem, bevel it off, and then throw it away, do another one, throw it away, do another one, throw it away, like do it over and over and over again, until I get it what I feel is right, you know, through sheer repetition. Because so much time goes between doing one boat and doing the next, that the nuances of getting this right always kind of escapes me. Anyhow, so these battens here, these are to support the planking I'm going to use here at the stem, because it's going to be light 3-16ths inch plywood. I'm going to do two layers of that and one layer of 1-8th. And so the 3-16ths will oil can between molds. And so this batten here is just to support the edge of that planking, so that I can get it to lay down fairly. I'm going to plank up from the sheer, and then when I get up here, I can sort of adjust what the shape and size of this plywood guard is going to be that I'm going to create. At the back end, we're going to make it out of heavier stock. Because I've got it on hand, I've got a bunch of 3-8ths left over from the Gannett project. So we're going to use that plus a layer of 1-8th. And then up at the bow, we're going to use two layers of 3-16ths plus a layer of 1-8th to make up our full half inch thickness. All this is ready for planking now, or rather, I still got some taping to do of the mold, but it's essentially ready for planking. And it doesn't look like I've done a hell of a lot on this backbone, you know, to bevel it off, but check this out. I've got the pile of sawdust. It's quite a substantial amount of wood that comes off that keelson in order to get it ready for planking. You wouldn't think it to look at it, right? It just looks like it took a little, just a tiny little bit of shaving off the edge, but no, it's quite, quite a huge amount. Now there's a couple more things that I want to do before we start planking. If you recall, I was going to install the in-whales and the thwart risers before I planked the boat. Now this is a bit of a backwards way to do that. Usually you plank the boat and in-whales and thwart risers are something you add later on. But because of the extreme shape of this boat, I wanted to utilize the structure that the mold provides in order to bend those in place, and I'm going to laminate them. So when they're done, they're very rigid and they're going to help hold the shape of the boat, much more so than if I were to just steam bend them out of a single piece. Now this boat is hefty enough that I don't think I could steam bend them out of a single piece. Perhaps if I had some really high grade bending oak and a lot of time and patience, I might be able to pull that off, but it's far easier to just laminate them. You spend a little bit more time doing glue-ups and things like that, but in the end I actually get a better structure for this particular boat than if I were to just try and do it out of steam bent material. Now the plan is to bend these in place, laminate them, fair them off to accept planking, and then as I plank the boat, I'm actually going to put some tape over them so that the planking does not bond itself to those in-whales and thwart risers. I'll just use plastic staples or something like that when I encounter those so that the planking doesn't hang on to them permanently, and after the boat's turned over, I'm going to break those free and that's going to allow me to fair off the inside of the planking and fiberglass the inside much more easily than if I had these longitudinals obstructing my work. After it's glassed, we'll reinstall them and bond them in place with epoxy and some mechanical fasteners, and we will have a really bomb-proof longitudinal structure in this hull. I thought this might be useful. I've got this in-whale here that I need to bend in place. It's going to be made up actually of three pieces all half-inch thick, and so to that end I need to know what the angle is that I need to cut the end of it at, and so I thought I'd show you the methodology I would use to figure that out. Okay, so the first thing I do is I take a light batten, and I'm going to put it in the same position that this in-whale is going to run in. So I'm going to swing it in here, and the inside face of it is touching my molds, so I have to think about the inside face of it and where it wants to land. So that'll be there. I'll do my best to try and make it sit in the same orientation as the in-whale itself. By using this little batten, I can put a little bevel up inside of here, pick up that angle, and there we go. That's the angle I want on the in-whale. We'll start by marking the first angle. Make sure you get past any snipe that you have on your stock. I'll take this off for a second. So generally what I would do is I would try and pick up an angle right here. I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to try laying off a three-degree angle that I can measure from. Okay, so if I grab my angle to three degrees, so now this represents the angle that I want my part to match up to, and so I've got this angle. Now I need the vertical angle. For reasons that are hard to explain, I want the in-whale to be three degrees off of plumb for its entire length, and because the stem is at a slight angle, that makes this compound angle I'm trying to figure out particularly challenging. So what I'm going to try is just drawing that three-degree angle right on this piece of scrap, and we'll cut that and we'll just compare it. We'll just see how it jives. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. Okay, let's see how that works. Pop this out of the way. Well, that's not quite there, but it's not too far off actually. What I'd probably do then to fix that is just scribe a new plumb line and use the same angle as before, and we cut again and try it. I think that's going to work okay. Okay, fussed around with this a little bit, and now it's fitting reasonably well. So at least it's close enough that I can put it on the end of my in-whale, and after it's bent in place, I can play around with the fit a little bit. I can kerf it if I want to, but this gives me a good enough feel for the right angle. So I'll save this little stick and we'll use the reverse angles on the other side obviously, and so it gives me a really good starting point. So worked out in the right miter or close to the right miter for the ends of these in-whales. It's not quite 100 percent, but it got me in the right ballpark, and I've steam bent my first one in here. So I ended up steaming both ends separately. When you're working alone, there's only so much you can do. I was most concerned about trying to get this end steamed in effectively, so I didn't want to have to worry about what was happening at the other end. And then back here, I needed to cut it to length anyway, so I got the other end steamed. This one, I only needed to worry about getting some downward bend on this, because there's sort of quite a... doesn't look like it, but there's actually a fairly significant bend coming through to the back here, and then I needed to work out what the length and angle was of this end cut, which is... I'll show you how I do that. Now I ended up trimming this just a hair too short by accident, which wasn't a big deal, because of the way this fits up against the back of the stem, I've got some wiggle room. This is able to slide outboard just a little bit without the angle being changed, so that means when I add my other laminations, the effect of it is the outer one is going to be a little bit proud, and I'll just shave that back to fit, so that will be fine. All of these are going to get shaved back anyway, and even at the stern end, I think I need to add a little extra section of material to make up for the bevels. This always helps, just mopping down your part with a little water before you throw it in the steam box, get a little extra moisture on there. I really quite like this little fiberglass tube. It has been a really handy steaming device for a lot of years. All right, wrap our towel around that. Okay, that will do, so I'll leave that cooking for like, waiting for it to come to steam, and I think I did about 45 minutes. This is about half inch thick, a little bit more, half an hour would be the sort of the benchmark, but it's bone dry, and so for that reason, I'm going a little bit longer, so 45 minutes worked pretty good on the other side, so we'll go with that. So all my other sections are made out of Doug fir, and I was playing around with them, and it's Doug fir, like you know, you think mahogany would be the stiffer of the two, despite being heavy, but despite the mahogany being heavier, the Doug fir is actually in many ways way stiffer, and so when I was trying to just play around with bending this in place cold, this was like, I was really straining to get it to move at all, and I decided to just split these into two. Instead of fighting, trying to steam it, I probably still will steam it, but I just decided if I just split these into two, it's all going to get glued up anyway, so it'll just be an easier bend, less risk of breaking it, especially because I found there was a fair bit of bend that had to happen back here, which is also right where the scarf lands, and so I can't steam over the scarf, because it'll, the scarf will probably fall apart. I thought about splitting them partway, and I thought, you know, it's such a hassle to get glue in there later on, like why waste my time with that? Let's just rip them in two, and make life easier on myself, so that's what I did. All right, I've drawn my miters onto the end of this inwell, that material that I've got to cut, and I just thought I'd show you a little something. I'm trying to cut something like this, like we've got the two pieces that are a bit floppy, right, that are going to mess up my cutting ability, and there's another factor, that is that this is a long skinny thing that doesn't want to stand up on edge easily, it wants to lie flat like this, but trying to cut a joint that's more skewed this way by hand is rather difficult to do, it's just visually hard to do, so we want to try and stand it up, so here's just a simple little trick I've come up with, which is creating kind of like a little bench vise, I've got these little angle blocks kicking around all over the place, because I use them for so many things in the workshop. Okay, so now we just want to clamp this on here, we want to make sure that we've got enough clearance past this stuff to cut this effectively, without it having so much overhang that it's problematic. Actually, go the other way, go this way. Ideally, we want to cut on the obtuse side of the line, at least start it, I'll try and explain that. This is a compound angle across this face, and then across that face, this makes the obtuse angle, so these combined angles mean that we're not necessarily cutting into a sharp corner, the way it would be if we were cutting on this side, this angle goes that way, and this one sort of goes that way too, so I've got two choices in terms of which side to start on, this is the side that's going to be easier to start on than this side. By starting on this side, it's very easy for me to get started on this corner, and I'm immediately trying to correct my angle of attack, such that I'm following that line, and then that line carefully, in fact, it's easy for me to sight right down the saw to see that I'm getting the right angle here, and if you're getting it right, it actually sort of, well, I guess in some cases, if it was a 45 degree angle, you would see it as a 90 degree angle in the reflection of the saw blade, but I never use that, I don't find that very helpful, as you're getting towards that final corner, you want to be gentle, so you don't get a breakout if possible, you can ring the cut too, I often do that, so to ring the cut, I would have to come back the other way, and come up following the same cut, come up from the inside, I've got a couple of hairs coming off the bottom, and my cut's not 100%, I can see I'm a little proud on this side, so I would, you know, either take a sanding stick or a block plane, tidy that up, going that way, okay, that'll be fine, so much more limber, okay, I can feel that this last bend, I don't want to push it, I can feel this one, this is going to want to break, so I'm going to have to steam these as well, I do technically have two steamers on that machine, I've never tried running two different steamers at the same time, but maybe I should try that, I don't know how that would work, but it'd be an interesting experiment, just put a short tube on here, maybe we'll try that, let's see, is this enough, yeah, that'll probably work, reach, reach, adjust, yeah, okay, all right, let's try it out, double barrels, yo, okay, all right, so my in whale has been cooking for 45 minutes, that one's probably been going for about 15 minutes, good full steam, so I'm going to take this apart now, and so I've loosened off everything that holds this in place, except for one little keeper, that'll keep it from falling off the boat, kill the steam on that one, and I think we need to get rid of this, slide that out of the way, that's good, so place there, come on, get in there, okay, good, my notches are a little tight on this side, clearly, the main thing is I want to make sure I get the twist into here that it needs to have, this is not a lot, but it's a little, too much angularity, too much angularity, there we go, that worked, so there's a, there's something you can consider, like this is just a little piece of plywood, and we're just forcing, using it, it to sort of force this little guy over, so these are being pretty useful in this project, actually, now I think that's probably good to go, so I'll bend that in, and then we can move the steamer to the other end, and start steaming the tail of this guy, good, what I want to do is just put a bunch of clamps on here to marry these together as much as I can, so fir is steamable, it's not the most forgiving wood for steaming, that is, it's not like the level of suppleness you can get it to go to is very limited, but it is doable, and I was first getting started out of boat building school, I was apprenticing on a tall ship build here in Victoria, the Pacific Grace, we were steam bending four by tens, they were probably like 30, 40, 50 foot long, and we were putting as much as like a, I don't know, like a 30 degree twist in them, in addition to the bend, like I wouldn't have thought you could do that, but we were doing it, that looks pretty good, let's move the steamer, so I like to try and position my steamer such that the tail end of the tube is over the bucket here, probably go this way, and that that way most of the water that's draining out of the tube just goes back into the bucket and recirculates, this end doesn't need a very radical bend, so we'll probably only steam it for, you know, more like half an hour, that'll be fine, so now the angle of this in whale is off a little bit, so we're just going to correct that before we move on to dealing with the stern, slip a little piece of plastic in here, protect the stem, and we're just going to kerf this joint, so I need to fit this in whale, I need to cut it to length and get the right angles on it, I can't just mark off the edge of the transom, we have to use a different technique altogether, and that involves using a little batten, so it helps to have a batten with a little bit of stiffness, so I'm going slip it alongside my molds, so it's hitting a couple of molds there, and it's, it's going to largely mimic what the in whale would want to do, and so what I want to do is spring this in, slide it forward until it's touching my mark, actually I'm going to rotate it down a little bit, I want to, I want to get a specific point, this is almost the same as what we did at the stem, but there's a critical difference, which I'll show you now. Okay, that looks pretty good, and so what I want to do is, I want to make sure that this batten is clamped to the in whale further back, so I'll just pop a clamp on that, and do it right here in fact, this will allow us to transfer an exact length from the transom to the in whale. All right, with that in place, I need two bits of information, I need the, the rake of my transom, so I can pull it right off the in whale right here, I'll save that, and then I need this angle right here, so I can grab that, it doesn't matter which side I grab that off of. Now if I wanted to spring the bow out, and just swing this into place, and park it in the same spot, and then trace around it with an offset block, I could absolutely do that too, but that's more trouble than it's worth from my perspective, for this particular context. So then we spring that out, and now I can mark the in whale itself, by running this batten right along the edge of it, so we get the same lengths, and that'll be my first point, transom rake first, there we go, and we'll do the outside, and I'm going to run that transom rake down the back side too, so I have a second reference to cut to, and I'm not going to bother with the shorter angle across the bottom, because I can't see that anyway, so that's ready to cut. Now take our batten out, and now we can swing this into place, but this, this little guide block I had is going to be in my way, get rid of that, there we go, when I drop it on there, that's pretty darn good, it can come back just a hair, which is what happened on the other side too, so I'll show you how I did that. So in order to adjust that down, what I want to do is spring it down just a hair, so it's not getting captured by the rake of the transom, so I'm just going to do that, push it down a hair, so what I want to do to move that is, I'm going to put a clamp on it up here between these molds, this is a sanding block, some coarse sandpaper on one side there, clamp that on really good and tight, okay, now with that clamped on tight, there we go, that'll do, nice, so that gives us a nice clean fit, all right, well we've got those inwales on, well they're not on, but they're bent, so those are three layers, maybe I should just leave these overnight, move on to steaming the fork risers in, that might not be a terrible idea actually, and then tomorrow we glue. So I've decided to do the fork risers as well, while I'm steaming, just get all the steaming done, so these are yellow cedar, just in two layers, it's not quite as much bend, so I could do, get away with less of a bend, or at least the heavier material, all right, this looks like I've got to swing it back, oh man, okay, yeah, so set the timer again, that was half an hour, that went well, okay, that went well, so one of the things I neglected to do when I made the molds was actually account for the bevels, like I didn't do proper mold reductions for the stringers, so mold reduction would take this angle into consideration and reduce the mold accordingly, such that we get this coming back far enough to contain the whole stringer, I just used a nominal inch and a half at every mold, knowing I was doing this, but just deciding to be lazy about it, but now I think I'd like to have these set down a little deeper, because otherwise I've got a lot more material I've got to remove off the outside, so I'm going to do that in place, so over here I've just sprung the stringer out, I can see it from the inside, maybe a bit better, maybe not, so I've strung the springer out, sprung, sprung the stringer out, and I'm going to just bevel off these guys a little bit, so that it can come in a little bit tighter, and then we'll pop it back in and drive it home, so that it's the proper set at the proper distance, and then we can mark the other end and trim it to fit, so I'm just going to do that with this sanding stick, which is the same width as the stringers, I can slip it in here, so I can start it out tight, I'm already almost an eighth of an inch, so what I want to do is just bevel these off until I've knocked them until these can sit in just about, such that there's about three quarters of an inch protruding where the, you know, outside the mold, so check this one, go a little bit deeper, it's just about there, a little tiny bit more, that's good, got to retape that before I glue, and this one's a little harder to check because, let's slide this back a little bit, okay, I want to get this back in and make sure it's sort of in place to set for the night, while it's still supple, there we go, that will do, so now when my next one goes on, it's closer to the full thickness, it's going to be a little bit proud, which is fine, I still want a little bit to fair off, for the most part that looks really good, so god damn it, there's the next one, these are long, so here's a little thing, having these u-shaped keepers, that's really handy for just pinning these things together, you know, to sort of bend them in place real quick, not exactly clamping, but it's proving to be quite handy, okay folks, we've got our in-whales and our thwart risers bent, and they are ready to get laminated together, so we're going to save that for the next episode, I hope you join me for that, I want to thank you all for watching, and I especially want to thank all my followers on Patreon who make these videos possible, if you'd like to support me over on Patreon, you can find links in the corner or down in the description, okay folks, I'll see you again next time, catch you later.