Dreaming

I managed only a little progress today.  The lashing pads I cut out last night are shaped and matched, a process made vastly easier by the belt sander.  There are 12 lashing pads, and I'm not great at assembly line work, so I had 12 slightly different rectangles when I set the saw down.  No worries - clamp them tightly together and run the belt sander over the edges until they're all identical(ish).

I put the first coat of epoxy on the lashing pads this evening.  While I was spreading epoxy, I coated the last little bit of the stem & stern post tapers, and did the flip side of the deck beams I started on yesterday.  Here's the night's work, all layed out and curing.

Life is about to get a little busy again - some wet weather is headed our way, which forces me to stow my panels indoors and keeps me from using little scraps of time here and there for small boat tasks.  And I don't expect any significant time to work on the boat out of the next five days. 

So I've started dreaming a bit, which is dangerous.  (cue dream sequence sound effects...) One of my dreams for this boat is to take it on some coastal expeditions.  I'd start out with something mild and forgiving, like Padre Island, Texas, but I'd love to someday sail California's Channel Islands in it, like Tim Anderson did in his slightly larger outrigger canoe.

And, don't forget, there are also the WaterTribe races, the "best known" example being the Everglades Challenge.  All of their races are designed to test small craft and their skippers for versatility, seaworthiness, endurance and portability.  Entrants frequently use sea kayaks or similarly minimalist boats, sometimes rigging a sail for the downwind portions.  But there are also classes for small mono- and multi-hull sailboats. The Melanesia would fit the Class 5 definition, I believe, provided something were done about reefing the crab claw sail and building positive flotation into the hull.  Personally, I'm not big on swamps, gators or mosquito clouds, so I might give Florida a pass.  But the North Carolina Challenge?  That sounds fun. 

Whoah, there, did I just say out loud that I'd like to enter my as-yet-unbuilt outrigger canoe in a 100-mile endurance race, or sail it offshore in Southern California?  That's crazy talk.  Get the boat built, learn to sail it, try a little local camping expedition with it, maybe.  That's lofty enough for the time being. 

But it's definitely true that these crazy visions keep me motivated.  There's not much glamour in mass-producing lashing pads, so every little bit helps.

Sweating the Small Stuff

Here's a tip for any aspiring Melanesia builders out there: finish shaping all of your parts before epoxy coating them.  Otherwise, you'll end up having to do tiny-batch coating on things like the stem- and stern-post tapers, which is where I am now.  It's frustrating because it's keeping me from stitching the panels together and moving forward.

Since I'm using pumps with my epoxy, the smallest batch I can mix is way too big for the tiny spots I'm coating, so I've been looking around for other small parts to work on.  Oh, yeah, the deck beams and lashing pads!  Completely forgot about those....  So I put a first coat on the deck beams and cut out a bunch of lashing pads last night.  I'll finish the last of the stem/stern post touch up today, and coat the pads & beams while I'm at it.  Once that's done, it will be stitching time.

Melanesia Video

For a while now, I've been searching for video of a Melanesia under way.  It would be so helpful to see the rig in action, to see somebody using a steering oar, to see the details of somebody else's finished boat.  But there were none... until a few days ago.  Here's Youtube user andy4us's video, taken during a sea trial in his almost-finished Melanesia:

Momentum

Stem post - what will become the bow.

A long weekend and some beautiful weather gave me the opportunity to really leap forward on the build.  By the end of the day today, I had the sheer stringer/gunwale bonded to one of the side panels, bevels planed on all panel edges, and had begun stitching the bottom panels together.

Stitching is a major milestone, because it's at this point that the boat stops being an entirely imaginary thing.  As you can see in the photo at right, the stitching process transforms flat panel shapes into a curved hull section.  It is now possible to squint and see the boat emerging from all of this work.

That said, I've really stitched more together here than I should have.  The stem and stern post finish work isn't complete - there's Sharpie and rough epoxy visible on the stem post photo at right - so I need to extract them, sand 'em a bit further, and lay on some more epoxy before reassembly.  I couldn't help myself, I needed to see the shape.

Center frame forces panels near-horizontal;
in distance, stem post forces panels near-vertical.
Between, ply visibly twists into the proper shape.

When you begin stitching the bottom panels together, there's nothing to keep them from lying flat, face-to-face.  That's where the frames come in.  There are two frames, one exactly amidships and another about 35" further aft.  They force the plywood to lay almost flat at those spots, and the stem- & stern-post stitching force the plywood to lay almost vertically at the ends.  In between, you get a "tortured plywood" hull shape that transitions gradually for the first 8' of the hull, and more quickly at the stern.  This produces a sharper bow and a rounder stern, which are important in handling the canoe under sail later on.

Over the next week, I'll complete the second gunwale installation, drill the side panels to mate with the bottom panels and end posts, and complete the finish work on the end posts.  Once those things are done, it will be time to complete the stitching, at which point I'll appear to have a hull.  But the stitching wire's job is just to hold the hull in shape temporarily.  That shape then gets bonded together permanently with fillets (thick seams) of thickened epoxy and fiberglass tape.

I suspect that the filleting will take a couple weeks worth of evenings and weekends, and there are the decks to install, too.  So we're not likely to have a complete hull before mid-October at the earliest.  And even then, there's the issue of coming up with the ama, outrigger poles, steering paddle, spars, completed sail, rigging.... sigh.  This canoe will almost certainly not sail this fall.  But it's conceivable that it might float as a paddling canoe before winter sets in.  That would be great motivation for the finishing touches, so that I can have a proper launching in the spring.

Even that modest goal of a spring launch is the product of a rosy outlook, but it's a rosy outlook fueled by the vision of a hullshape finally starting to emerge from my odd collection of plywood shapes, and that should keep me rolling for a while.

Impatient!

With life settling down a bit, I've been anxious to make some headway on the boat.  I'm in the middle of epoxy coating the interior panels, which requires two coats to achieve an even, thorough protective layer.

Unfortunately, you can't rush the chemical process of curing epoxy.  So I've been coating, waiting, sanding, cleaning, coating, waiting....  I've set up a workstation in the back yard, where I have a piece of plywood on sawhorses and covered with a sheet of plastic.  The weather has held, for the most part, and the only real problem is the thousands of grasshoppers who can't wait to scratch their initials in my finish surface.

The payoff for all this waiting, though, is very exciting: the next step is stitching the hull panels together.  That will be a red-letter day.

Other facets of the build....

• Rounding up found lumber: as mentioned before, I have a line on a carbon fiber windsurfer mast.  No real movement on other poles or the outrigger ama itself.
• Sailmaking:  I'm displeased with the quality of my hand-stitched center seam, and trying to figure out how to run the fabric through my wife's fragile sewing machine.  Need to source some stout machine-friendly thread and learn how to use the infernal device....
• Paddles: I lofted the lines for the steering paddle onto a piece of scrap 2x12 the other day, but the plank has a lot of twist to it, and I don't think that's going to work.  So I think I need to go buy more wood to laminate another blank together, before trying to shape it.  I also need to get belts for my 1950's Craftsman belt sander.  The teardrop-shaped propulsive paddles are awaiting final finish sanding and varnish.

Bottom Panel Join

Life has not provided much project time lately.  But the other day, I managed to sneak enough time to make the final cut in the bottom panels.  I had misinterpreted the plans, thinking that the bottom of the canoe was formed from a single tortured panel.  It was very confusing, trying to imagine how you could possibly force the plywood to take the shape I knew it needed to take.  Eventually, I realized (thanks, Terry!) that the bottom is actually two panels stitched together at an angle.  It all makes so much more sense now.

Today, favored with good weather and a little free time, I set up my makeshift bench outside and used it to bond the 4 bottom panel halves into 2 bottom panels.   I skipped the boat nails this time, because the shortest bronze ring nails I could get are a little longer than two thicknesses of my plywood.  This made the clamping stage a little bit fiddly, but I made it work by using the arrangement shown in the photo below.

Having sworn last time not to skimp on epoxy when joining panels, I made far too much this time.  It was thickened with ground fiberglass, but it seemed to work acceptably, so I used the remainder to coat the panels.  Spreading it seemed to work the glass fiber out of the mix, so that it behaved more like regular epoxy.  Hopefully, it won't be too messy to sand smooth and recoat later.

The powder/epoxy mix didn't come close to covering the entire surface I had laid out, so I mixed up another batch of plain epoxy and coated everything.  It was the first coat on the bottom panels; I have a couple other pieces waiting for coat #1, and then everything will need a second coat before I can begin stitching things together.

A few other items:

• I scored a Ryobi random-orbit sander for $5 at a church rummage sale.  Random-orbit sanders are optimal for finish work because they produce more regular finshed surfaces than non-random-orbit models.  Great deal!
• My system for hanging the work in the porch ceiling is really poor.  I threaded some rope through pieces of PVC pipe and expected it to stay level as I hoisted it up, but it wants to flip over instead.  I'll need to work out a better answer before too long.
• A friend who's into windsurfing is giving me a 2-piece carbon mast with damage to the joint.  If I can repair the damage, I could have a very light, very strong spar for the crabclaw sail.  I like this idea because it means less weight aloft, which makes it harder to capsize the canoe.  Now I just need another broken windsurfer mast for the other spar....

I'm Back! Also, Prehistoric Pacific Navigation

If you looked at the long lag since my last post, you might think I'd died or given up on the boat or some similar tragedy.  But no, I've just been away off & on since late June, visiting Maine for my grandmother's 90th birthday and, a month later, her funeral.  In between, my wife and I took a few weeks to drive to Maryland and back to visit other family and show the kids around our alma mater.

Along the way, I've been lugging around a copy of We, the Navigators by David Lewis.  It's a scholarly (i.e., thorough and somewhat dry) treatment of the various ways that Pacific seafarers managed to get around without charts, magnetic compasses, or any other modern instruments.  Like any other indigenous culture, it all boils down to thousands of years of accumulated wisdom about surviving in their part of the world.  Such knowledge is difficult to keep alive these days, and not something you can fully understand if you're not of the culture that produced the body of knowledge.

But Lewis sailed thousands of miles with Melanesian, Polynesian and Micronesian navigators to better understand their skills.  He does a great job of breaking down the various facets of their navigational techniques, and explaining each.  I think I got a few ideas that might help me with my much simpler coastal navigation tasks on our next charter. It was also inspiring to see what they were capable of, these people behind the indigenous design I'm building.

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Meanwhile, I've resumed work on the boat.  I epoxied the butt joints in the side panels yesterday, which went... so-so.  I clearly should have used more epoxy; I fear that there are some voids in the joints, but they're not so bad that it would make sense to rip them apart and try again.  Note to self: for critical points in the build, let's not be stingy with the material that keeps the boat together.

I still have the bottom panels to join, and there's a funny story there.  I've been puzzling over the rather extreme flex that's put in the bottom panel, wondering how people manage to do that.  My confusion lasted longer than any reasonably intelligent boat builder could explain.... Eventually, I realized that the bottom panel as I have it cut out is actually supposed to be halved longitudinally.  So I'll be digging out the ol' saw one more time to do that cut, then joining the fore & aft sections of each of the bottom panels with more butt joints next. 

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Finally, I came across a very nice Flickr set from Tom Puchner, an Austrian builder.  I'd seen a photo or two of his Melanesia launch party, but had missed his construction shots.  They're great, as are the very artistic shots from his recent test sail with a new, hollow ama.  Any time I feel my motivation flagging, I'll take a look at the beautiful  photo to the right and let it work its magic: keep at it, and this could be you sailing home as the sun disappears beneath the waves.