Time accounting

No picture today only some time analysis. When starting the build I assumed I would spend around 400h before launching.

At the moment I am finished with the bottom plank, stringers are installed, most of the frames are ready to be installed and the centre board casing is about half done.

I started the build on Nov 19th and stopped for Christmas on Dec 20, during that time I spent about 59h on the build. This corresponds to an average of almost 2h/day or 13h/week.

So if I continue in the current pace and my initial assumptions concerning build time is correct it will take me 30 weeks to complete the boat, which means launching will be end of June.

I better increase the pace a bit.....

Merry Christmas

Nice morning on the Baltic

On the ferry between Poland and Sweden and the weather is perfect for a sail except it is December.

Last shot before Christmas

Took the clamps of and trimmed the stringers this morning before going to work. I also got a quote for the sails today, around 270€ or 350USD. Do not really know if that is reasonable or not.

Tried to do some Christmas decorating as well, not sure it is clear from the picture.

More of the same...

Today was more or less the same as yesterday, first fitting the other outer stringer and then preparing frames for beng fitted to the bottom plank. I.e. cutouts and supporting braces.

Outer stringer being glued

Dry fitting frame #2

Initially my plan was to have the frames up by Christmas but that is not going to happen as I am behind on the center board case (which is the first assembly to be added to the bottom).

I will be taking a break now and celebrate Christmas with my family so things will be a bit slow here for the coming week.

Wish you all a relaxing ad enjoyable holiday season!

Time today: 2.5h (Total time 59h)

Crazy traffic!

Got stuck in Christmas shopping traffic today, a drive that normally should take me half an hour today took almost two and a half.........

Back home I screwed the watertight hatches to the bulkheads (after wrapping the Christmas presents).

There is some squeeze out of the liquid gasket, but this can be trimmed after it has set

Then I started to glue on the "outer stringer", again the lubricant glue caused some minor problems. The first clamp is the trickiest since you need to hold the timber with two hands and use one to attach the clamp, after that it is smooth sailing!

I also started to make the cutouts in the frames/bulkheads for the bottom stringer. I waited to do this until now so that I could make sure to get a nice fit between the frames and the stringer.

Outer stringer glue up. In the background you can see bulkhead #6 being dry fitted

The stringer cut outs is to the left in the picture

Time today: 1.5h

There is a hole in my boat

Today I made the dreaded cutout for the centre board. Actually a lot less traumatic than I expected. Cut it with my old sabre saw, parts of it I had to do from below since the stringer interfered with the base plate of the saw. The final few cuts was done with a small hand saw in the areas where I could not reach with the sabre.

Had to make a small cut into the stringer as it is the way of the centre board case.

Next I made the filler piece to fill the area between the stringer and the centre board case, but did not get any good pictures.....

Dry fitting the centre board case

My next job was to glue in the second stringer and the centre board filler piece. I started to dry fit the stinger but when I got to the end something was wrong, it did not fit with the stringer already on board, at the ends. It turned out that I had tried to fit the wrong piece of wood, the outer piece instead of the inner piece of the stringer, the inner piece is a few millimeters wider and when I got this in place it all made sense again.

Glueing stringer and filler piece

The rest of the evening I will spend coating the inside of the centre board case with epoxy, wet on wet (i.e. you apply the next coat before the first has set completely) hopefully I can do three coats tonight.

Time today: 5h

Keel laying!!!!!

Started my Christmas shopping, so that took some time from the build. Complete chaos at all the shopping centres today, I almost gave up and went home.

Trimmed the uprights to the right breadth, beveled the tops and screwed the bottom plank to the strongbox. Finally keel laid! (I did not get any good pictures of this unfortunately)

The next step is to fit the chine stringer to the bottom plank, I decided to rip the 20x40 stringer into two so that it would bend more easily. So again (as I do not have a table saw) I had to set up a jig. As a base I used a 150x20 plank, on along the edge of this I secured a 20x30 piece of wood to guide the saw. I put a 20x20 next to the saw guide to get the correct distance to the blade (distance from the blade to the edge of the base plate is 40mm), then the stringer I wanted to rip and next to this another stringer as support for the saw. As usual maybe a picture tell more....

From left to right. 150x20 base plank (below the rest), support stringer, stringer that is getting ripped, 20x20 spacer piece and the 20x30 that guide the saw.

However since my "jig" pieces are much shorter than the stringers I had to move the jig a few times per stringer (I really need a table saw). When the first stinger was ripped I swapped places of the two stringer and did it again.

Both stringers have been ripped

Unfortunately I set the saw depth a little to shallow so I had to run a hand saw along the groove to separate the pieces.

All left to do before fitting the stringers is to clean them up a little with a smoothing plane.

Planing stringers

Then it is time to glue the stringer in place, first I did a dry fit and even though I had reduced the cross section I had to fight a little to get it in place.

Dry fitting the stringer, you can also see that the "Keel laying" celebrations have started

Since the dry fit went quite fine I decided to do the glueing without screws, only clamps (you might remember that I have a problem with screwing the bottom stringer since my strong box is in the way). What I forgot was that the epoxy is like a lubricant so it was a little fiddly to get it to stay in place.

First stringer glued in place

Tomorrow I will glue the second stringer and cut the hole for the centre board (yikes!)

To celebrate the keel laying I started up the fireplace with wood shavings and leftovers from the garage.

Time today: 3h (Total time: 50.5) [I have now passed 1/8th of my planned building time]

Laser level

Today I put the uprights on the strongbox. I had marked them all with a centre line and a horizontal line on the same distance from a reference line (top of the strong back on the drawings).

Typical marking

Then I set up the laser level to be completely (well as good as possible at least) horizontal and at the right height. It took bloody forever to get it good enough.....

Then all I needed to do was to align the uprights with the laser and screw them in place.

Used small wedges to get the uprights level

The beauty of this metod is that even if you strong back is a little uneven in height you can correct this when you fit the uprights.

Then I test fitted the bottom plank and it fell in a smooth curve touching all the uprights, jippiieee!

It looks like a small hump at the left most upright but that is just my crappy phone camera.

Tomorrow I will trim the width of the uprights, bevel them on top and screw the bottom to them, so that will then be the official "Keel laying" date.

Time today: 1.5h (come on it is Friday, right!)

Head scratching and epiphany!

Today I started working on the uprights that will determine the shape of the bottom plank. First I cut them to the right length and the I was supposed to trim them to the correct height and this is where my problems started!
The wood I am using for this is pine (pinus sylvestris) and I got a very nice piece tight grained and very resinous, unfortunately this also makes it very hard to saw..... To cut it to height I need to cut along the grain, first I tried with three different hand saws but it was just too time consuming. Since I am lazy it was time for head scratching..........
Then I tried to set up a guiding board for the sabre saw but I could not get it stable enough so the vibration of the saw made the clamps fall of. More head scratching.....
Then I tried the circular saw, but I could not get the clamps to grip the plank properly as the base plate of the saw is quite wide.
Oh, I wish I had a table saw...... I almost gave up for the day when it struck me that I can set the depth of the saw so that it does not cut completely through the plank, that way I can clamp it further in without risking to cut into the saw horses or the support plank, and my problem was solved!

When you think long enough about something you sometimes find a solution!

I could even make two cuts close together, the right piece is for one upright and the left is for another. The middle goes to the fire place.

My plank was not high enough for the aft most uprights so I made them out of two pieces of 9mm ply glued together. 

Garage overview. On the left you can see my heating system it keeps the garage at a nice 20C. In the middle the uprights that I cut today, they still need to be mounted at the correct height. On the right the aft uprights being glued.

Today I also discovered the disadvantage of the strongbox compared to a beam strong back, the top of the strongbox will be in the way when I will screw the stringer to the bottom plank. Oh well a problem for another day, worst case I will have to screw them from above.

(Maybe Santa will bring me a table saw?)

Time today: 3h (total time 46h)

Scary cutting

Started my day by cleaning up the centre board "plug" I glued yesterday, it is a little warped but I think I can get it straight again.

Then it was time for the dreaded cut of the bottom plank. Not sure why this felt so scary but I guess it has to do with the fact that it is the first really important cutting I have done on the build. It actually went very smooth and after cleaning up the edge with a block plane it looked quite nice (and actually symmetric!).

Bottom plank before planing the edge

After this I started to prepare the strongbox for the bottom by cutting and screwing the cross pieces to it. Tomorrow I will make the uprights that the bottom will rest on to get its correct curve.

Strongbox with cross beams, the bottom plank is on the floor to the left and the piece of wood on top is the centre board.

Finally I did the last coating of the frame and stem, now all they need is a sanding and for me to fit some support timber on some of them before they can be mounted on the boat.

Time today: 2.5h

Aaaah that's better

Redid the marking today. It might seem like overdoing it for only 12mm but I really wanted to get it right, I am not very accurate with my cutting so at least the markings should be correct.
Continued to mark up the whole bottom including the cut out for the centre board, frame and stringer position. There was some serious head scratching today to make it all fit together.

A lot of nails to get the shape of the bottom correct and I only hit my thumb once!

Glueing centre board core, it will be covered by 6mm ply n both sides

Wrapped up the evening by starting to glue the centre board and coating the last frame (#2) and the stem.

Time today: 3.5h (Total time 40.5h)

Measuring errors!

Not a lot of time today, I have been invited to a Christmas party. So after tidying up the garage a little I started to mark up the bottom. The scarf I did yesterday was not the best in history but I think it will be ok, after all the bottom will be covered in epoxy and glass fiber.

Scarf joint

I started to mark the centre line and the idea was to do the grid for the curve of the bottom and the frame positions, to separate them I will do the frame positions with a fine sharpie marker and the rest with pencil. The grid for the shape of the bottom is at 200 mm spacing so the first step is to mark of the centre line every 200 mm, then you need draw a line square to the centre line at each of these marks. To make sure I get this correct I took a piece of plywood with a straight edge, at 90 degrees to this edge I drew a line across the plywood. I placed the piece of plywood on top of the bottom ply and aligned the centre line with the line on the plywood piece at each mark and could then draw the line across. Maybe a picture will make it clearer?

Template for drawing square lines (the lines do not look aligned, but that is only the angle of the camera)

Unfortunately I did not double check my initial marks before drawing the lines, and when I was marking out the frame positions something seemed strange. A quick check with the tape measure showed I had been sort of half a millimeter wrong in most of the markings, so that the boat became 12 mm longer than designed.

Aaahrrrg, this can not be right!!! It is supposed to be 4408mm!!

That was all I needed to call it a day. Will bring out the eraser tomorrow, or just leave it as it is?

Good progress

Today I felt that I made some good progress, usually during the week when you can do 1-2 hours per day it sort of feels like you are not moving along at all. But when you get a chance to put a few hours in the feeling is quite different.

I started the day of with cutting all the pieces for the centre board casing. They will be finally trimmed and glued after having checked it "onboard".

Cutting the case log. Cutting out of one board, while the other is just a support for the saw. To guide the saw I clamped another plank onto the plank I was cutting.

Using a batten (this one will be used to make the mizzen mast) and nails to get the right curve of the bottom

Dry fit of the centre board casing

Then I started with the bottom plank, all I had time for today was to cut the scarf and glue it up.

Planing the scarf, the picture is taken before final planing so still a little uneven.

Glueing the scarf in the same way as I did the scarfing for the strongbox. Screws in a piece of  cheap ply to align the two ply sheets. The two sheets that is being scarfed is also screwed to the "work bench ply" and finally two buckets of water on top of the whole thing.

Finally I also coated the other side of the frames and finalized glueing of the stem piece.

I have been asked how I measure the time that I report on the blog and it is simply the time I spend in the garage. So it is working time including a lot of head scratching but excluding time spent on purchases and generally thinking when I am not in the garage. (I hope that made sense).

Time today: 5 h (total 36 h)

Sunny weather

Blue skies and sunshine today, so I decided to go outside instead of hiding in the garage all day. So I went to the local sailing shop in Gdynia harbor to buy the hatches for the watertight compartments.

After the shopping I went for a short walk around the yacht harbor and the commercial harbor. In the picture below you can see one or our two local square riggers (the other one is more beautiful but I could not get a good angle on that one).

Despite blue skies and sunshine it was actually also very windy and only a few degrees above zero, so after a few more non boat related errands I head back to the garage.

The following was done today:
- Removing excess glue from the frames (especially the early once, before I realized that it is a good idea to wipe of the squeeze out), using a heat gun and a scraper.
- Fairing of the transom inserts
- Started to glue the stem
- Started coating the frames with epoxy
- Marked out the centre board casing sides

Time today: 3 h

Finalising frames

Even though clamp pile is growing I could use a few more, most of the time I am limited by not enough clamps.

Today I did the final glueing of the frames, I also made the insert for the big transom cut-out (where the tiller lines is supposed to be). It was much trickier to get a good fit for the big insert. I made it by putting the transom on top of a 9mm ply sheet and traced the inside of the cut-out onto this. Then I cut it with my Japanese pull saw (excellent saw by the way) to the outside of the line. Then it was time for a lot of sand paper until I could fit it in (this is the tricky and boring part, to sand enough but not more...).

I hope the glueing will be successful, I have a 9mm ply piece on both sides and some stiffening timber in the hope that I will get a uniform pressure from both sides. 

Along the centre line of the transom I will fit a piece of wood that will cover the insert and strengthen my patch work, this is also what I will screw the rudder fittings to.

Tomorrow I will start with the centre board casing and maybe the bottom plate.

Time today: 2 h (Total 28 h)