Log from the Sea of Cortez

Many years ago, Robert Ayliffe told me of this Steinbeck story which theorised mans’ primal relationship to boats, particularly the unnervingly consistent rapping on hulls that we all mindlessly do when up close with wooden boats. You can read the excerpt below, it is well worth a boat-lovers’ minute.

How I came to this quote again? I was reading the latest Wooden Boat Magazine, and they announced the launching of Western Flyer, the boat Steinbeck and friend chartered for scientific purposes, and the beating heart of Steinbeck’s novel. It was found derelict and has been lovingly restored. I grabbed a copy of “Log from the Sea of Cortez”, and drank it down.

Read this and tell me your heart did not skip a beat:

“There is an “idea” boat that is an emotion, and because the emotion is so strong it is probable that no other tool is made with so much honesty as a boat. Bad boats are built, surely, but not many of them. It can be argued that a bad boat cannot survive tide and wave and hence is not worth building, but the same might be said of a bad automobile on a rough road. Apparently the builder of a boat acts under a compulsion greater than himself. Ribs are strong by definition and feeling. Keels are sound, planking truly chosen and set. A man builds the best of himself into a boat—builds many of the unconscious memories of his ancestors. Once, passing the boat department of Macy’s in New York, where there are duck-boats and skiffs and little cruisers, one of the authors discovered that as he passed each hull he knocked on it sharply with his knuckles. He wondered why he did it, and as he wondered, he heard a knocking behind him, and another man was rapping the hulls with his knuckles, the same tempo—three sharp knocks on each hull. “During an hour’s observation there no man or boy and few women passed who did not do the same thing. Can this have been an unconscious testing of the hulls? Many who passed could not have been in a boat, perhaps some of the little boys had never seen a boat, and yet everyone tested the hulls, knocked to see if they were sound, and did not even know he was doing it. The observer thought perhaps they and he would knock on any large wooden object that might give forth a resonant sound. He went to the piano department, icebox floor, beds, cedar-chests, and no one knocked on them—only on boats.

How deep this thing must be, the giver and the receiver again; the boat designed through millenniums of trial and error by the human consciousness, the boat which has no counterpart in nature unless it be a dry leaf fallen by accident in a stream. And Man receiving back from Boat a warping of his psyche so that the sight of a boat riding in the water clenches a fist of emotion in his chest. A horse, a beautiful dog, arouses sometimes a quick emotion, but of inanimate things only a boat can do it. And a boat, above all other inanimate things, is personified in man’s mind. When we have been steering, the boat has seemed sometimes nervous and irritable, swinging off course before the correction could be made, slapping her nose into the quartering wave. After a storm she has seemed tired and sluggish. Then with the colored streamers set high and snapping, she is very happy, her nose held high and her stern bouncing a little like the buttocks of a proud and confident girl. Some have said they have felt a boat shudder before she struck a rock, or cry when she beached and the“surf poured into her. This is not mysticism, but identification; man, building this greatest and most personal of all tools, has in turn received a boat-shaped mind, and the boat, a man-shaped soul. His spirit and the tendrils of his feeling are so deep in a boat that the identification is complete. It is very easy to see why the Viking wished his body to sail away in an unmanned ship, for neither could exist without the other; or, failing that, how it was necessary that the things he loved most, his women and his ship, lie with him and thus keep closed the circle. In the great fire on the shore, all three started at least in the same direction, and in the gathered ashes who could say where man or woman stopped and ship began?”

Excerpt From
The Log from the Sea of Cortez
John Steinbeck

Fixing the lead to the hull

Once the tiles were drilled and positioned on the boat, I could follow the drill holes and drill through to fit the bolts.

I hate making holes in a perfectly nice hull, it runs against the my best instincts!

It went very quickly and flawlessly. With coach bolts, the shaft has a little square section just below the domed head, this is to prevent the bolt spinning in the material when you tighten the nut. In my case, this would need to be forced into the hull timber and I was keen not to round it out because the bolt would need removing and replacing for the final tighten once bedded in epoxy. I was careful to orientate the square shaft with the centreline, so I could replace it precisely when it’s all dripping with fresh epoxy.

The next challenge is to devise a plug for the centreboard slot, so it would not fill with epoxy when I bedded in each tile. For this I separated 4mm MDF pieces with a wedge-adjustable spreading mechanism. The mdf was then coated in packing take and jammed into the slot.

I also needed to devise a way to lift each tile and lower it into the fortified epoxy bedding, it would need to be a direct lowering, so as to maintain as much epoxy under each tile as possible and allow for even squeeze out. Using some 16mm ply wood, with a huge course screw in each end, I could use the bending of the ply to force the angle of the screw so it grips the inside of opposing holes in the tiles, the photo hopefully will show it clearly.

Next step was to mix some epoxy and using a pipe cleaner to wet out the tile’s bolt holes from above and below. From here I could use the rest of the mix and add in the high strength filler (fortifier), and bed in each tile one by one.

When one tile was in place on top, I tapped in a pair of bolts from above to align it with the holes drilled. Then I had to scurry underneath and tap in each bolt, driving out the alignment bolts, then orientate the square parts of the shaft with the centreline, drive them home, then scurry back up on top and fumble the washer and nut, trying not to allow the unsecured bolt to slide back down the hole. Which it did often…

Next is tightening up the nuts with a box wrench, then cleaning up the squeeze out, which by then was beginning to harden in the Adelaide summer.

Phew. I could do two in a session, it was hard on my wrists and nerve wracking.

 

On worry.

Or do I mean procrastination? You have read many posts about sanding and fairing, and this is one more, potentially the last (for both our sakes, I hope so).

You put the faring batten on the hull, you look for deviations of more than a few millimeters. You do this in all planes. You argue with yourself what is ‘a few millimeters’. You run your hand around feeling for divets, you mark them as you find them. You fill with epoxy mixed with light-weight filler for sanding, you mistakenly vary the mix slightly from time to time, you save money with some water effected, lumpy filler. You vary the application process attempting to speed things up (troweling ridges vs multiple coats). You sand with varying electric devices, balancing the felt divets with the eyeballed fairing batten results.

Repeat.

Sometimes you over-sand, sometimes you under-thicken the filler. You eventually realise that everyone is correct, this is only a job for hand sanding with a long/torture board. You fight that concept. You plan to hire a fairing team. You can’t find any money for the hire of the team. You wonder where they work and how to find them. You look for more information on fairing. You beat yourself up about not being able to complete this ‘simple’ task that is holding everything up.

You try again on the long board. Your lack of upper body fitness is obvious. The rotten left shoulder bites back. You give up. You beat yourself up and try again. You end up aching and frustrated and the hull appears no better. You ask advice, you get your work inspected, you get varying answers. Everyone is telling you (the truth) that it is a personal decision.

So, you bite the metaphorical bullet, and spend four days hand sanding.

And it now looks and feels pretty good.

It may be fair now!

A friend wins the Rough and Ready

At the Goolwa Wooden Boat Festival, Rough and Ready Race 2017, my new found boat friend, Paul Cleaver, won with his brilliant design and build.

The side wheeler punt, Punty McPuntface swept around the buoy, elbowing out all comers (including loud Americans), to take a victorious bow.

More snot and disco skirts

Starboard side sheathed

Oh joy I am back on the fibreglass!

Wrapping the forefoot with nasty pointy stuff

A mixed blessing fibreglass is. The unarguable protection it provides makes it a necessity, but dealing with it is not fun. The cloth is so slippery it slides out your hand like a wet fish, yet it jags on anything and distorts the weave requiring a stroking session to realign. Applying such large areas of it makes you stir crazy mixing the epoxy, and your wrist gets hammered squeegeeing it. That is all before we consider the health benefits!

The join of two sheets of fibreglass, still to be sanded

My process is to mark out as much as I can handle by myself, which is about two to three meters of 1500mm wide cloth, drape it on the boat and position it, then mark out the area to be covered. I have two objectives in mind, making best use of the cloth and keeping straight-ish edges.

If I had a few more people who could keep my odd and un-planned hours, I would attempt the entire side at once. But by myself, I am leaving gaps between the cloth panels and filling with epoxy mixed with light weight filler.

With the cloth off the boat and the area marked out, I then roll on a coat of epoxy to fill the area, then approach it gingerly with the cloth and drape carefully to my marks, paying attention to straight edges. Then it is into the squegeeing in more epoxy, pushing the cloth into the epoxy against the hull.

It takes two to six mixes of epoxy to fill the cloth sections and any extra goes towards rolling on the adjacent cured area, filling the weave.

Wet ‘glass on the bow

The result is a lean fit with no lifting of the cloth, but the weave will need more epoxy, and this can be achieved whilst it is still tacky, (but not too green), or later after a light sand.

Sanding fibreglass is my big hatred. I desperately dislike the glass fibres that it produces. To combat these nasty, itchy, glassy, sticky-inny shards, I invested in a decent sander that works well with my extractor, and I upgraded the extractor with a Dust Deputy thingo to improve the suck.

The Festo extractor with Dust Devil on top, ungainly but it sucks!

The Dust Deputy adds a cyclonic action to any extractor, or regular vacuum cleaner, much like Dyson has built into their celebrated vacuum cleaners. With my Festool extracter, I have done away with the bag, and just let the Deputy’s bin fill up. With the small amount of sanding I have done since installing the Deputy, I have filled the tub twice, indicating it is catching more than the bag did!

Kate gave me a Festool extractor four years ago, and it was the best thing she could have purchased me. Minimising dust is so critical with these modern materials, I don’t want anything to get in the way of enjoying this boat.

The Festool Rotex sander I purchased is amazing, it has two settings, a random orbit and a direct drive. So with the same 120 grit paper, I can remove material very quickly with the direct drive, and finish off with the random orbital setting. All with the twist of a setting on the head. To add to this, they are very quiet, almost not needing hearing protection.

The 90mm Festo Rotex sander

I chose the small Rotex (90mm) because I wanted it for detail sanding, but now I really want the big 125mm unit. Now I want both. But at $900 each this will not happen soon.

Off to the glass fibre work I go, I’m itching just thinking about it!

Looking at butts.

Temporary butt join

I have to admit to not being a fan of butts.

Actually before I begin on this topic, I need to apologise for the innuendoes you will read in my posts, I was raised on a heavy diet of “Carry On Gang” and “Benny Hill”, more a gift of my father’s father than anyone else.

A butt join is a method of fastening two pieces of timber together by ‘butting’ them up against one another and then securing the union with an identically thicknessed piece that overlaps the joint significantly (see the photo). The main problems with butt joints are that they can induce flat spots when the timber is bent and can be ugly.

My personal preference is a ‘scarf’ join (see wikipedi link), this is where the two pieces are given mirrored, feathered bevels of a ratio greater than 9:1. Meaning the bevel or scarf is at least 9 times the thickness of the timber. Commonly 12:1 and 14:1 is used. The scarf join is very elegant and demonstrates considerable skill to get it to work. My success with scarf joining is about 1 in 4…..(look closely at my Whilly Boat).

I used to be very picky about my woodworking. I steadfastly refused to use power driven screws for many years….then I woke up and smelled the ozone.

Knowing my scarfing success rate…and that the butts can be hidden…and they are not supporting tight curves, I will embrace the butt.