Sea mist

So here's the very first coat of Norglass Enamel, in "sea mist".

I like this stuff quite a lot. It takes a good long time to set up, and gives me plenty of opportunity to fuss with it. I started by rolling with a 5mm mohair roller then tipping with a brush, but ended up just rolling. I'll probably thin things out a tad for the final coat and roll/tip then. For the moment I'm waiting impatiently for this to harden fully before going at it with 240 grit wet and dry.

I bought 3 litres of this stuff, this coat used a little over half a litre.

There's a lot of floaties in this first coat - for subsequent coats I'm thinking of mopping the garage floor a couple of hours before I start to reduce the dust.

Ready for paint, cradle, and starting to make mast staves.

First some cat content. It's been noted that I've gone a couple of posts without including a photo of my cat. Here he is with one of his new favourite toys, a frayed piece of double braid rope:

With my skeg completed I've been patiently fairing my hull, in preparation for painting. I started with epoxy mixed with micro-ballon fairing powder on the really dodgy bits, then did a couple of coats of unthickened epoxy, then went at it with 180 grit sandpaper until most all the gloss is gone.

I've (rather controversially, it would seem, if the woodenboat forum is to be believed) decided to dispense with undercoat. My reasoning is that I've already gone to the effort of fairing and sanding out the epoxy to 180 grit. Undercoat is only there to provide an easy to sand substrate, so it adds nothing.

Money is reasonably tight for us at the moment. A trailer is many months away, regardless of whether I buy one or build one. At some point real soon though I'm going to want to flip the boat back over the right way so I can do decks etc. In order to enable this, I've knocked up a quick cradle, out of Jarrah and Tassie oak. It's got two shaped bunks for the hull, much like the bunks on a trailer. I'll put large caster wheels on it so I can move the boat around once it's back upright.

One of the hazards of boatbuilding is that suppliers are incredibly slow. I ordered paint a week ago but to the best of my knowledge it hasn't yet been sent. In the meantime, I figured I'd start making some of the staves for my mast. Here's what happens when I scarph three 2.4m long bits of Jarrah together. Firstly I have to open the back door of the garage and poke it through, and then of course it rains.

Next step is topcoat on the bottom of the hull. I've decided to go with Norglass "enamel" (polyurethane) in "sea mist", which should camouflage the boat perfectly when it's capsized a hundred nautical miles off Carnarvon.

Network Solutions are evil.

So if you're one of my stalkers, you'll have noted that my other blog, littlefishbicycles.com, has disappeared. If you're desperate to see the guff I wrote there on frame building, I highly recommend you learn how to use the wayback machine.

I set up the other blog a number of years ago, when I had a vague idea that I might end up building bicycle frames for profit, either as a part-time gig or else as a full-time semi-retirement thing. I do a pretty good bicycle frame, but the whole gig just isn't profitable, like with many hobby things. The reason my frames are pretty good is that I spend an absolutely incredible amount of time obsessing over them. If I was to charge for my time, nobody would (could!) buy one. If I cut corners so they didn't take as much time to build, they wouldn't be special. They'd be the same as what everyone else makes. Catch 22. Yes I will continue to build bicycle frames. No I won't sell you one. You're going to have to learn to live with that disappointment.

In any case, the name registration for littlefishbicycles.com was due to expire this year. It costs me money to keep the name registration going, so given that I've lost interest in that I decided not to renew. That's where the trouble started.

I had littlefishbicycles registered with Network Solutions. Back when I registered the URL, they had a complete monopoly on .com internet names, so you went with them or else you didn't get a name. So I registered with them, paid a small fortune for the privilege of them doing, well, not actually very much, and made use of my name.

A few years ago I faced a similar dilemma. I knew my domain was going to expire soon, and I was vacillating about whether or not to renew. Then a few months before expiry I got an email from Network solutions thanking me for my payment. I was surprised, as I was certain I hadn't authorised an auto-renew. I gave them the benefit of the doubt though and let it pass. I logged into my account, found the auto renew checkbox, and ensured it was turned off.

So you know where this is going, right. A few months ago, I got an email from Network Solutions, telling me DIRE THINGS were going to happen soon, because my URL was going to expire. I logged into my account and made sure the auto renew was turned off, and left it at that. Sure enough, a week or so later, I get an email from them saying that my bank had refused payment, and that I needed to update my credit card details. They'd had a go at charging me, but this time my card had expired so it didn't work.

I logged into my account with them to find a cancel button. Nope. Nothing. There isn't even an email address - just a US phone number. I can see now what would happen if I tried calling that. My business would be important to them, and I'd be reminded of that for half an hour whilst on hold. So I didn't bother. Frankly I figured they'd be stuffed because of the expired card.

So since then, I've been getting emails from them every couple of weeks, telling me that they'd tried (again) to bill my card, and that my bank had refused. Eventually I got an email from my bank asking if I'd authorised payment to this mob. I told them I haven't, and so they cancelled my card, and are reissuing me with a new one.

So now, thanks to these pricks, I have no access to my account for a week or so while the new card gets here. And when it does, I'll have to update my details with all and sundry. I did a web search on "network solutions unauthorised charge" and get a really amazing number of hits. Turns out it's their standard business practice. If you're an IT professional and you read this, please, please, don't do business with these bastards. If you know an IT professional, please warn them.

In the meantime, I've found my old card is just perfect for applying and smoothing epoxy to my boat.

Crazy woman with drill

Was too impatient to even change out of my work clothes.

Laminating the Skeg & Stem

I'd laminated the stem previously, from three thicknesses of 4mm Tassie Oak. Here it is finally attached to the boat, sealing off the end-grain at the bow:

I'm currently doing the rest of the skeg, from laminations of my favourite timber to plane, Jarrah. This is done in three pieces - bow, centreboard case surrounds, and stern. I've mostly finished shaping the bow and stern pieces. The bits around the centreboard case need another bit of 19x40mm Jarrah laminated on at the stern end before being planed down to shape and then screwed and glued in place.

My upside-down boat makes a handy workbench.

Clinker planking detail

This is the detail of the joins between most of the planks on my Navigator, or at least what I'm aiming for :)

Fairing and fibreglass

I spent a few evenings prepping the hull for fibreglassing. This basically consisted of sanding back the rough edges and filling holes with filler, then repeating the exercise a couple of times until I was reasonably happy things were fair.

I bought 10m of 135gsm fibreglass, and laid it in two strips either side of the centreboard case, with a little overlap where the keelson will end up. Here's the first side placed. It was quite a bit easier than I anticipated. Just lay the fibreglass on the hull and pour some unthickened epoxy on top, then work the epoxy in using a plastic squeegee. The fibreglass just lays down nicely. Then once the epoxy has had a little time to set up, the excess gets trimmed. The photo shows in between trimming the edge and the stern.

At this point the weave of the fibreglass is clear, but it's gone completely transparent. This shows it's properly wetted out and that there's no excess epoxy, which would allow it to float off the surface of the ply.

The other side is done exactly the same. Lay the glass down and soak it with epoxy. Here's what the fibreglass looks like immediately prior to mixing the goop.

Once both sides have set up, I coated it again in a coat of unthickened epoxy, then a couple of coats of thickened goop, thickened with micro-balloons to the point where it was still just pourable. My squeegee is the perfect tool for application, followed by the sponge roller to even out any overly thick bits.

Once this has set up, I'll sand it smooth and then coat out the rest of the hull with thickened epoxy.

Capsize!

I'm really, really sick of fillets. I figured that rather than grinding on with the interior, I'd flip the boat over and have a go at the underside. So today was flipping day.

We started by hoisting the boat straight up. Some Jarrah beams rigged between two industrial shelf supports provided a lifting point, and we used slings around the hull. Once the building frame was pulled clear, the boat is now hanging by a thread, as it were.

Then we slid the rope along the sling to rotate the boat. It was incredibly slow, hard work. Mogget's a little offended that his favourite perch is now at 45 degrees.

Mogget shows his extreme bravery by wandering underneath while it's suspended. His mum's knot tying abilities are nothing to write home about.

I was pondering doing more work on the fillets at this point. Much better access.

Here's the tipping point. There wasn't quite enough space under the beams for the boat sideways, so we had to lift them up a bit. I did this one corner at a time.

Everything happened quite quickly after that, so the camera was forgotten. Here's the boat resting on it's king plank and one sawhorse at the aft, after breaking the sawhorse I tried to use to support the bow.

A couple of hundred dollars later we had some high zoot-factor Kincrome sawhorses, and the boat was lifted again (this time from the centreboard case end logs) and placed delicately on the sawhorses.

Last step is to open a bottle of Kiwi wine (in honour of the Kiwi boat designer - John Welford), and drink a toast. Thanks Perry. I know I yelled a bit, but it all worked out well in the end. The bottom of my boat looks a right mess.

Finished planking, fillets, sanding, fillets, sanding, fillets, sanding...

I know it's been a while since I last posted an update on my boat progress. It's been pretty hot here, and although our garage is under the roofline of our house, it's got no air-conditioning and gets very hot inside, so my progress has slowed markedly. In any case I have made some progress. Firstly the completion of planking:

Once planking finished I got down to the seriously boring task of epoxy coating, filleting, and sanding. This is still underway, and won't be finished for a few weeks yet. The interior has lots and lots of corners. I want to put a fillet on as many of those corners as I can, because it looks nice, because it makes the boat immensely strong, and because with a fillet there is no way that I can trap water.

From the bow it looks rather like a boat.

The process for filleting is to mix an extra-thick batch of epoxy and push it in the corners with a paddle-pop stick, then go over it with a larger tongue depressor to remove most of the epoxy and leave a nice clean fillet. Any bits I miss I have to sand down later. There's lots of motivation to clean it up before it goes off, as it's really hard to sand. It's slow because there's an amazing number of corners on the inside of the boat, and because I'm a bit anal-retentive. I'm telling myself that attention to detail at this point will be worth it in the long run, making painting easier and making the boat a whole lot easier to maintain.

If I try to do too much at once, the epoxy heats up in the pot, which makes it go runny, and then rapidly go everywhere but where I want it, so I have to work methodically with small batches. Anybody who knows me will know that methodical just isn't me.

I also finished off the centreboard pivot. It ended up reasonably straightforward. a 19mm diameter length of bronze rod, which fits into some turned flanges. The flanges have a groove in which a 19mm x 3.2mm o-ring sits, and the whole lot is held together by a turned cap, made from silicon bronze, and held in place with a 10-24 silicon bronze screw either end. There's no need for massive axial strength - the screw simply locates the pivot and holds the caps down, which in turn press the o-rings into their grooves and hopefully keep water out. Please expose the fillet booger.

Here's a photo showing the cap taken off, exposing the o-ring. I'm hoping this is plenty strong and keeps water out of the cockpit.

Snakes!

So we've put two little Western Browns outside the building at work in the last two days. Might have a nest.