I’m still sticking to the goal of trying to get paint on this upturned hull before the end of summer, but it’s getting close. I’ve now had to define “the end of summer” as the end of September, but I do think I’ll be able to get the hull painted by then. Topside paint after flipping the boat back over will either have to wait until next spring/summer when the weather warms or I’ll have to figure out how to heat (and keep heated) my garage. Will cross that bridge when I come to it…
Building the rudder cheeks #
Before paint goes on there’s a note in the build manual that it’s a good idea to measure and mark out on the hull where the gudgeons will attach for the rudder, since marking up the hull is a lot easier to do before paint goes on. Luckily, I managed to read this and remember (the note comes long after the manual has finished talking about painting the hull - sigh). In order to figure out where the gudgeons go though, you really have to build the rudder cheeks first as you can’t be sure how far apart the pintles will be until you actually mount them on the cheeks.
Adding thickness #
After looking at the stack of parts that came in the kit and trying to fit my rudder between them (my rudder into which I glued copper bushings with external shoulders) I decided that I’d need a little more thickness in the stack (an issue that’s apparently not uncommon with other plans builders). So I cut out one extra set of interior pieces from a piece of plywood that was the same thickness as the other pieces.
As it turns out I didn’t need this much space, so I could have used a thinner piece of plywood scrap, but oh well.
Cutting paths for control lines #
Thinking about the rudder control lines, the manual says to just run them up through the rudder cheek assembly and have them come out the same hole that the tiller fits into. Hoewver doing that exposes them to the elements and (more to the point) means they’ll be fraying away on your paint job on the rudder cheeks themselves. I decided to run some flexible copper tubing through the rudder cheek assembly to provide a dedicated internal pathway for these.
To do that:
- I had to get copper tubing large enough to support a 1/4" line
- I wanted the curve of the path followed by the line to be fair and to have the lines leaving headed in the appropriate direction on each end - forward along the tiller up top, and downward towards the rudder on the back
- I wanted to make sure I left enough “meat” up top between the channel for the tubing and where the tiller goes so that wood wouldn’t chip out.
Eventually I decided where the entry and exit points should be and then grabbed my french curves and kind of eyeballed something that looked fair between the two points. I cut out the channel on only two pieces of plywood, as they would be thick enough to support the copper tubing sandwhiched between all the others.
The glue up #
After the spacers were cut for the copper tube, next was to glue the entire assembly together.
First you coat everything in epoxy, then you use thickened epoxy to glue all the pices together, using the alignment dowels to make sure everything lines up.
Trimming the dowels and copper tubes flat with the surface of the assembly came after everything dried.
Locating and cutting mortices for the pintles #
Next up was figuring out where the pintles would go. I intend to mount the pintles to the cheek assembly using through bolts, so basically the only guidance here was to get the pintles as far apart as possible while still ensuring the bolts would go through the entire thickness of the assembly and they wouldn’t interfere with the copper pipe.
Of course, by the time I actually started to locate the pintles, I had long ago thrown out the piece I used to mark the path taken by the curve, so I had to eyeball this and hope I don’t hit the copper tube!
Since I added thickness to the whole assembly with an extra layer of plywood, I’d have to cut mortices into it to fit the pintles. This I started doing with a sharp chisel.
You can see in that photo that I was having trouble getting the curve to be smooth at the top edge of the mortice. I only had the one good chisel, and it just wasn’t working well to cut the curve. I considered buying some gouges, but after a quick consult with neighour J decided that I should just be doing this with a router, and so I cut a router template to the right size.
The other benefit of redoing the cuts with a router template is that it allowed me to make the cuts a little wider and deeper while still being consistent. I was originally cutting them with the chisel to be a tight fit, but I need to remember that this piece (including the mortices) will have three coats of epoxy, primer, and paint in them before the pintle ever gets to them, and all those layers will take up space.
Lined up pretty well
Drilling holes, filling holes #
To drill the holes for the bolts, I tried to line up the pintles in the center of the mortices (since they were a bit larger then needed for all the layers of paint mentioned above) and then marked where the holes would be. I then brought the piece to the tool library and used their big drill press in order to try and drill the four bolt holes in straight through the piece.
As it turns out, the drill press at the tool library is a bit old and janky and (come to find out) doesn’t excel at drilling perfectly square holes, so I probably would have been just as well off using an external drill guide and a hand drill for the four holes, but nonetheless I made it work. And I didn’t hit the copper tubing, yay!
At this point, I did a bunch of things that I didn’t take pictures of…
I drilled out the bolt holes to 1/4" for the pintle bolts. They didn’t quite work (see drill press not being quite square) but they were close - using a hand drill with a 1/4" bit to enlarge some of the holes slightly, along with “coaxing” the bolts through the piece and the two sides of the pintle with a rubber mallet, and all four managed to get home.
Marking where the gudgeons go #
Now with the pintles mounted to the rudder cheek assembly, it was time to hold this up to the boat to figure out where the gudgeons went.
Still without pictures (sigh), I drew the centerline on the boat and extended it down the transom. Then I held up the rudder cheek assembly (upside down, since the hull is upside down), and tried to eyeball it so that the tiller handle would go through the hole in the transom at roughly the middle of that hole, and that the middle of the two gudgeons were centered on the center line of the transom itself. An extra set of hands from M helped greatly here.
Eventually, I marked the top of where the gudgeons were landing on the transom. Then I pulled the rudder assembly away and held up the gudgeons alone, ensuring they’re perfectly centered on the transom center line and butted up against the top line mark. At this point I marked all of the holes.
Now this isn’t perfect - ideally the holes would be drilled entirely based on where they sit while mounted on the rudder cheeks (for example, if they’re not perfectly aligned down the center of the rudder cheek assembly itself then they won’t line up when trying to mount them this way), so I decided I’d drill out only one of the gudgeon set of holes, and I’d leave the second set for when I can actually mount the rudder assembly on the boat right side up.
Drilling the holes #
So again, this was drilling 1/2" holes to fill them and then drill out 1/4" bolt holes as the gudgeons would also be mounted with through bolts.
The fact that they’re slightly oversize also makes coming back and drilling the 1/4" holes slightly easier and ensures I’ll have a good seal of epoxy around the bolt hole.
Both sets drilled
For the bottom set of holes (which is actually the top most set of holes when the hull is upside down) I ran into a bit of an unexpected situation. I was expecting to use bolts for both gudgeons, but in the bottom set of holes after drilling through the transom I ran into one of the solid pieces of wood glued up against the transom that make up the back edge of the lazarette, meaning my bolt hole didn’t actually go all the way through, just into the 2x4 at the back of the lazarette (actually the four holes just barely broke through the bottom surface of the 2x4 for the back edge of the lazarette framing. When I filled the holes with epoxy just a small amount bulged out there into the lazarette itself.)
So now, instead of using bolts for holding the bottom gudgeon, instead it will be four lag screws, with only the top gudgeon using bolts. I did still drill oversize holes and fill them with epoxy however, and will now drill pilot holes for the lag screws into these drilled/filled holes at the moment when I’m ready to mount the rudder.
Primer #
Now with the gudgeon holes located, it was time to get the hull ready for paint by priming first.
I decided to go with Pennant Primer from System Three for the primer. I’m a big system three fan as they’re somewhat local to me and I like the fact that it’s a water based epoxy primer (fewer nasty chemicals/fumes). The instructions for Pennant primer say to use three coats, with the working time before a recoat being the same as for their epoxy, namely 72 hours. That lets me sand only once after all three coats instead of between each coat, so I’m in.
A 3 foot, 10 foot, or 30 foot boat? #
A note on the finish detail level for this boat. I was originally aiming for something around a 10 foot boat, meaning if you look at the boat from 10 feet away it looks great with no obvious missteps. This is a lower quality of build then a 3 foot boat, since obviously you can spot many more imperfections from 3 feet away then you can from 10.
The other competing factor with this is that this boat is also meant as a trial run for various techniques and materials before I bulid the next boat, to find out what works and what doesn’t (for me, at least). For example, the use of pennant primer was also the first time I’ve ever used a two part paint product (turns out that’s no big thing - I might use more of those in the future).
So when I looked at the sanded-ready-for-primer hull, I could tell it wasn’t perfect. There were some uneven bits, and my fillets in particular in certain areas looked bad. But I figured it was a 10 foot boat, this was the hull, it would be ok.
I put three coats of primer on over the course of three days, then allowed it another three days to fully cure.
While the primer is sitting there curing and you can’t do anything on the hull you’re left looking at all the imperfections, most of which are magnified quite a bit by the presence of the primer, and you start to think about maybe you could improve some things. I was also, at that point, still thinking I’d be using high gloss on the hull, and high gloss really apparently makes all the imperfections pop, so I started to reconsider what I was doing here. Maybe my 10 foot goal wasn’t being met at the moment.
Fairing #
The worst offender, probably because it assaulted you as the first thing you saw right as you walked into the garage, was on the bow where the extra piece of fibreglass that acts as a rub strip was applied (and that piece was so thick it had to be 6 oz). There was a very noticeable ridge running along the length of that under the primer. In other spots along the hull there were also very noticeable bits.
At this point, I decided I should fix them. I also reasoned that this would give me the opportunity to try out fairing mixture, as I’d never used that before either.
So I sanded the hull down, marked out the areas that I thought needed some fairing compound (I wasn’t going to apply it to the entire hull but rather just to the problem areas), bought some System Three QuikFair, and started to apply it.
Using the fairing compound itself was pretty easy. It’s super easy to mix, and when applying it goes on smooth. The trick with it that I learned is that during application you want to feather all edges of the spot to nothing - you don’t want to leave a single “high edge” from the fairing compound to the surrounding surface, as that will be the hardest part to sand smooth if you do and that edge will really stand out under primer if you don’t (don’t ask me how I know this, see if you can spot it on my finished hull from 10 feet away).
Sanding the fairing compound is also relatively easy (much easier then sanding a fillet, for example) which makes sense given it’s supposedly made with microballoons. All in all, it’s pretty easy to work with - I’ll do it again.
Priming coats # 4 and 5 #
The instructions pretty clearly state that once sanded though it needs to be sealed before paint can go on, and one of the nice things about pennant primer is that it will seal the fairing compound, so I set about priming the boat again.
I was going to just put one coat of primer on and then sand and get ready for paint, but I’ve decided I might as well put three more coats of primer on as I was sanding through it occasionally when I was last getting ready for paint, so three more coats to try and prevent that (and more carefully sanding next time) seem like a good idea.
So here’s the boat after two more coats of primer (third and last will go on tomorrow).
Since I was mixing up the primer and had some left over I also primed one side of the rudder (I’ll prime the edge and the other side at some point in the future, perhaps while priming the top side of the hull)
One side of the rudder primed
I still need to fully seal all edges of the rudder cheek assembly with epoxy before it’s ready for primer, so that too will happen before I crack open primer again.
Really the only downside to the two part paints as far as I can tell is that you have to be careful about judging how much you’re going to use and thus measuring that out and mixing. I find it’s better to make a little more then you need since then you don’t run out during the painting operation (potentially losing your wet edge), but it also means you inevitably waste some paint each time you mix a new batch up. Oh well.
That’s all the progress through today. One more coat of primer on the hull tomorrow, then wait three days for it to fully cure, then (carefully) sand the hull and time to finally make a decision on the paint I’m going to use and go buy it and slap it on the hull. Should be able to get that done by the end of September…should be…