today I glued the rudder blade and the rudder assembly. It seems premature as the boat has not taken shape yet. But it is part of my space management approach to do all of the flat tasks while I have the flat surface in the strong back.
Continue reading Caledonia Yawl project: Gluing the rudder components
The apron and stems took much more expoxy than I had anticipated. This time I splurged and bought the gallon of resin and hope that I won’t have to make a trip back here soon. Note that the 15′ 2×6 douglas fir on the Larry vs. Harry handled fine.
Continue reading Caledonia yawl project: Buying the keelson lumber and preparing the centreboard
Having access to a thickness planer makes this activity much easier and more precise. I was able with relative ease to plane the whole length of both the apron and stem down to the specified thickness on my own. I did spend some time fretting about keeping the angles square and not ending up with a weird parallelogram that would give the bow a weird twist. fortunately the thickness planer coupled with a square and some judicious hand planing kept everything progressing smoothly. When planing the apron down to the right 2″ thickness i was sure to keep checking that it was square.
Continue reading Caledonia yawl project: planing the bow apron and stem
When I ripped the strips for the bow stem I was not sure what the appropriate thickness would be so I played around with everything from 1/8″ to 3/16″ and up to 1/4″ most of my strips were 1/8″ thick.
Which meant that to create a 3″ thick stem I needed nineteen strips. Each strip needed to be buttered with epoxy and with so much surface area that turned out to be about 850ml of epoxy or nearly a whole can. If all my strips were thicker I would have used much less epoxy. The lesson that I learned is that when laminating use the thickest strips that the mould will bear.
Then Fortunately Patrice came out to help me with the laying out of the stem on the mould.
I started this morning with a borrowed thickness planer, which allowed me to get the apron down to the specified 2″ thickness and the stem down to 1 3/4″ width.
The challenge was to keep checking the length of each piece to make sure it was square. I had to use the hand planer a couple times to get it nice and square the whole length so that the thickness planer did not perpetuate the wrong angle.
Once I finished the getting the stern apron and stem to the right width, I started on the bow apron glued up with epoxy and microfibres for better gap filling in the lamination and strength.
On Saturday my assistant and I went to the lumber yard to get one more 2×3 to rip for the bow apron lamination and a couple 2×4’s that may end up being used for the floor timbers.
I had planned to glue the laminate strips in one go on Wednesday evening. But as things go when doing something for the first time, things take longer than expected. It was a cold evening and the epoxy was more viscous than I expected so spreading it on each laminate took much longer than I anticipated.
Continue reading Caledonia Yawl project: Gluing the the stern apron and stem laminate strips
