No workee on the boat

Unfortunately this has been a very bad summer at work, with a lot of late nights and weekend work. I am saddened by the loss of much warm summer weather. I didn't intend to be on the Five-Year Boatbuilding Plan, but it may be turning out that way.

I was able to take this previous Friday off; my wife and I spent a couple of days in Port Townsend, WA in order to spend some time together. While I did not have any ulterior motives :), some of you may know that Port Townsend is the home of the Wooden Boat Foundation, (and an annual Wooden Boat Festival, although that was last week). While an F22 is not a wooden boat, it was fun just being around real boats, both in the shop and those that have made it onto the water (the town has a vibrant waterfront; when we were there several cruisers were moored offshore - no multihulls though).

The Wooden Boat Foundation has a spectacularly nice shop right on the waterfront. Most of us would kill to have such nice working quarters:

Here's a view looking the other direction from up above on the viewing balcony:

The shop is incredibly accessible to the public. Visitors are allowed to simply walk right in and view the proceedings, just about as close as you could want.

This made me chuckle:

In between walking all over town and visiting antique shops, I was also able to sneak in some visits to Pygmy Boats and Brion Toss Riggers.

Anyway, hope all is well out there in the F22 boat building world.

Extra layer of cockpit seat foam

Tuesday night I did the final taping on the settee backs - phew, glad that's over. I admit my interior is very basic, but at least it looks like a completed basic interior. I have a few minor upside-taping jobs that will wait until I flip the hull over, but for the most part the interior is done (well, I am contemplating adding a couple of shelves in the aft cabin :)).

Wednesday night I cut and fitted the extra cockpit seat foam layers, and glued it on with bog and wood blocks to hold it down. I tried to relieve the bottom of it in various spots so that it would lie flat as possible (e.g., over the extra uni covering the ends of the aft beam bulkheads).

And tonight, after trimming up the raw foam and rounding over the edges, I laminated the top of the extra seat layers. Port side dryfitted:

Here's a rare picture from the middle of the job (usually I don't like to stop when I'm "on the clock"):

And with peel-ply:

Onwards and upwards. This weekend I hope to get the boat out of the cradles and turned on its side so I can start doing the exterior laminate on the beam mounts.

More settee work

It feels like all I did this weekend was work on the settees.

Using a template to mark access holes for the storage compartments:

Mold plate for the settee back taping:

Mold plate for the upper taping:

In hind sight, I think the taping could have been done from above, through the access hole covers, especially if the window cutouts were already done. It turned out okay though:

After the taping was done, I spent a lot of time cleaning up the insides of the compartments, plus digging the foam out of the access hole edges and filling it. I also trimmed the jagged tape edges with my Multimaster tool; forgot to take a picture of the end result, but trust me it looked great :). Here's all of the trimmings though:

In the picture above you can also see my coaming compartment access hole - I filled the edges on those holes too this weekend. In fact I spent a LOT of time digging out edges this weekend. Here's the settee tops getting done:

And here we are with the settee backs glued into place (not yet taped):

The idea with the settee compartments is that they are accessible via lift-out access covers, but the space on top forms a storage "tray" itself for casual items, bags, etc. I also filled the edges on all of the access covers:

I thought for a long time about extra amenities like a sink, stove, etc, and how and where those might fit into the cabin. In the end though, I'm trying to keep it simple - we can always bring along some water jugs and a camp stove. I don't see us going on anything longer than a 2-3 day trip anyway. And oh yes, keeping it simple means I might actually finish the boat one of these years....

Coamings laminated

Here's the dry-fitted and dry-cut glass for the fwd cockpit coamings:

Wetted-out and peel-plyed:

The glass that wraps-around into the beam mounts was a pain, and I suspect some of it probably lifted off after I quit for the night; will have to fix that later.

You can see in the pictures that I already did the rear cockpit coamings; I used a red sharpie pen to mark the cut lines, but it looks ugly so from now on I will keep to black :).

Here I'm scribing the settee storage compartment top:

Scribing is one of those things that once you "get it", your life becomes much easier...it's a very cool technique.

That first night I taped the undersides of the settee tops (lots of fun), then did the top taping the next night:

I've also been trying my hand at welding. I can safely say that it will take some practice before I try to do anything important:

Here's some observations on welding from a complete newbie:

• It ain't as easy as it looks on YouTube. :)
• Heat control is everything. The tenth bead in a row on a piece of aluminum requires a lot less heat (amps) than the first one.
• "Dipping" the rod without contaminating the electrode takes practice - each of the dark spots in the picture above is a spot where I screwed up.
• Proper sharpening\shaping of the tungsten electrode makes a huge difference in how the arc behaves.
• The foot control is easier than the hand torch finger control (since you already have the "give it the gas" instinct from driving a car).

Those of us here in the U.S. of A. have a three-day holiday coming up (Memorial Day), so hopefully I can make some good progress over the next few days.

Rear beam mount taping plus settee work

I've been forming the rear mount tape flanges by using pieces of plexiglass as mold plates; it was a slow process, basically doing just one side at a time, but I was able to complete the job without having to roll the boat over, and without too much contortionism:

Tonight I glued on the foam pieces:

Tomorrow or Saturday I will be able to trim these up, round the corners, and start laminating them over.

I started working on the poptop setup again. Before our move to the new house, I had drilled pivot holes in the coaming, but they were too low - the bolts could not bottom out. So I filled those holes and then redrilled new ones a bit higher:

You can see I am trying out the plastic bearing pads, but it is hard to get them smooth and clean looking - I think I will switch over to a ply-based pad.

Here I have dry-fitted the settee backrest and am drawing a cut line (with a very crude jig) to make the top of the backrest parallel with the settee seat:

In a previous step I also positioned the backrest to be parallel with the front of the settee seat. Due to a lack of any real sailing experience, I have been unfortunately very indecisive about how to organize most of the storage space in this boat. Deciding that any decision was better than further delay, I've decided to organize the settee rests (both port and starboard) into three simple compartments:

The top of these storage compartments will be a piece of solid foam\laminate; the storage space (what there is of it) will be accessed via small removable doors in the backrest (to be hidden by the backrest cushion).

I also formed the reinforcing shoe for the back of the daggerboard case; here it is, not yet laminated over:

In the "New Toys for Jay" department, I just bought myself a new welder this afternoon, from the Central Welding Supply store in Redmond. It is a Miller Diversion 180 TIG welder:

You can argue that this is overkill for finishing up the small handful of parts on this boat (and you would be right) but I look at it as an investment for additional projects down the road. For starters I plan to make a welding cart to wheel this thing around, then I will move onto the mast support pieces and the pulpit. No I have never welded before, but I've read several books on the subject so I'm sure I'll have no problems (that was humor, by the way).

I am also looking at anodising options for all of the aluminum pieces on the boat (no other builders seem to mention this - are most folks skipping this step as a "nice to have"?). So far I have not found a business that will do small jobs for any kind of a reasonable price. My backup option is to learn how to do it myself. Reading around on the internet, the process just doesn't seem that hard (famous last words? :)) and there are DIY kits available, for example from Caswell Plating. You can even get color dyes to jazz up the boat a bit.