Tag Archives: knees

Caledonia Yawl Project: Installing the knees to the thwart

My next step for the forward compartment was to glue in the perimeter batten to hold the edges of the deck. I used small ribbed copper nails to hold down the battens in place while the epoxy set.

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I will leave the copper nails in as they won’t rust and won’t do any harm.

Then on to the knees that I had laminated a while ago, while I was in a laminating mode with the stems. I had enough off cuts of fir laminating stock to do the knees at that time. But since I’d just run the through the thickness planer when I had rented one for another task.

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The knees were first smoothed with the 1/4 round over bit of the router. That all worked mostly well except on one outer corner of the curve where the wood likely under tension ripped out with the router. I had to then glue the ripped section back down and sand it smooth.  To fit the knees instead of doing a template, I first cut the base angle and then scribed the right angles cuts to fit it to the inner gunwhale. When I made that cut I was a little conservative and I had the plane it down a few times to get it to fit snugly. I then used one side as the template for the other side and it went much faster.

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I’m now just going to do a touch more sanding before I get on to coating it all with Decks Olje. A two part oil finish that creates an fairly easy to refinish gloss coating. I like the rich clear finish it gives. Since I’m not planning on having too much material with a clear finish (Gunwhale, knees, thwart, Centreboard caps and bulkhead trim) I’m not too fussed about the cost. (nearly one third more than the cost of Cetol Natural Teak finish or most varnishes).  I have hesitated with my final choice for a while but ultimately decided to give Decks Olje a shot because of the penetrating oil of part 1 and the ease of touching up. In theory if you keep on top of it you could just touch up abrasions indefinitely without having to strip it all down as you would with varnish. Time will tell if I’m happy with it.

Caledonia Yawl project: Carbon, Graphite and laminations

This evening was productive. 

I managed to add the Uni-directional carbon fibre to the port side of the centreboard.

  

I also laminated another knee.

  
And also covered the port side of the rudder with epoxy mixed with graphite powder (west system 423) and a little colloidal silica (west system 406). This was a big step because now I can’t see the wood grain or the Kevlar weave pattern. All that remains is the shape of the blade, which is looking good.

  

Caledonia yawl project: laminating the knees and carbon on centreboard

Today I helped my friend get a new fridge in a house where the widest door was 28″ wide. We had to take apart the sliding door.

 

everything is back together but you can see the areas where i dug out the nails
 
This evening I managed to get a couple hours and I put the unidirectional carbon fibre on one side of the centreboard. I wet the surface with epoxy and the layed it down and squeegeed more epoxy onto the surface.

  
It’s not perfectly smooth, but I’m happy with the result. I’ll be covering it with graphite epoxy soon and that will be sanded smooth.

I also started laminating the knees that will connect the thwart to the gunnels.

  

 

I used 2 1/4 thick fir lamimations left over from making the stems. With some luck ill be able to cut them down the centreline and get two knees out of each one.