Ama (?)

We spent the weekend in the mountains, in the presence of good friends and a lot of tempting timber.  Finally, when I found a downed aspen trunk that looked straight enough and about the right size for the ama (outrigger), I couldn't take it any longer.  I asked our hosts if they would mind me taking the tree, and they gave their permission enthusiastically when they heard what I wanted it for.  Turns out they'd given permission for a relative to fell the trees for a project, but he got a job out of town before he could use them, and they'd been languishing since.

So I now have a 13' aspen log on my dining room table. 

I've stripped the bark off of it, and it's firm wood with no rot damage.  I've also taken from the plans some rough "by eye" guides for the shape of the finished ama's cross-section at certain points:

However, there's one small problem, and it has cropped up every single time I've dealt with found timber: It never turns out as perfect as you thought it would.  It's always a little crooked, or a little too short, or something. 

In this case, the aspen trunk is a bit crooked, but acceptably so.  The real issue is that none of what I brought home quite reaches the 4.75" diameter recommended in the plans.  The fat end is a little too skinny:

A 4.75" circle leaves gaps all around at the
fattest part of my ama candidate.  Is this okay?

and it just gets skinnier from there, down to around 3.00" diameter at the skinny end.  So there's a real chance that this ama won't provide enough flotation when it's on the leeward side, or enough weight when it's on the windward side.

On the other hand, it's aspen, so it's light and strong.  And it's by far the closest thing I've found so far, unless you count the two-piece aspen trunk offered to me by a friend.  And having stared at a fair number of tree trunks now, I have to say I'm not sure I can find anything else this straight.

As for whether it's too light.... outrigger guru Gary Dierking has instructions for a foam and fiberglass ama on his website, so flotation must matter more than weight.  Flotation is a product of size and density; this ama is a bit small, but it's also at the low end of the recommended density range, so it might work out after all.

So my plan is to set it aside, maybe work a little on shaping it when I have free time, but not to invest too much in this piece until I decide it's my best option.  When I'm done with the hull, I'll shape an ama out of the best piece of wood I have at that point.  If initial sea trials are disappointing, I might even try Gary's foam & glass option. 

Link Dump

Won't be much news around here for a couple days, so here are a couple links of interest to outrigger sailors.

• First, a document about how to handle the "Malibu Outrigger," a sailing outrigger one-design class.  Of particular note are the sections about safely launching and landing through the surf on a beach, which I've been wondering about.  This link comes to you courtesy of Tim Anderson, outrigger adventurer extraordinaire.
• And second, I've also been wondering how the heck one reefs a crab claw sail.  Well, according to this article on Proafile, one doesn't "reef" (i.e., reduce sail area) a crab claw.  But one can "de-power" it quite effectively by means of a line between the spars.  Scroll down to the section titled "Reefing" to read about it - though the rest of the page has some good info, too.

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.