Chine Fillets and Shaping the Ama

Saturday hovered slightly below epoxy-curing temperatures all day, frustratingly.  I'd sworn I would make some progress this weekend. 

You can see how the ama is a little crooked.
I figure the traditional boats made do with what
they had available, and they sailed fine.
Right?  If it doesn't work out, I think I'll probably
just make a foam & fiberglass one for version II.

Well, if you can't work with epoxy, you can at least work on the other parts of the boat, right?  I pulled the ama (outrigger log) out of storage and went after the ends, which I'd done only a little rough shaping on before.  After a bit of work with saw and rasp, I was pretty happy with the shape.

Stern end of the ama is a little fatter than the
bow, because most of the boat's weight will be
carried aft (I think).

 

 

I pulled out my 1950's-vintage Craftsman belt sander and did a bit of general sanding along the length of the  ama so that it will be ready to paint.  I'd call that effort about half-done; I stopped because the old sander was starting to sound like it needed another overhaul.

Today warmed quickly to around 75 degrees, and I had a fairly open schedule, so I lowered the hull and prepped the chine fillets.  This involved sanding the epoxy-coated plywood I'd be laying the fillets on, hammering the copper stitches down so they wouldn't protrude from the fillets, and masking the entire length of the chines so that I can have a nice clean edge when I'm done. 

I also masked the benches, thinking I might as well fillet them into place while I'm at it.  And I prepared the lashing pads for installation - I forgot to put them on the panels before stitching the hull together.

Chine fillets done.  Note how smooth they are,
compared to the bilge fillet.  Also visible are
the lashing pads (clamped in place) and the
bench fillets.

Finally, I began mixing and applying fillet epoxy.  I've hit on a pretty dependable recipe - 4 pumps each of hardener and resin, then 3 little cat food cans full of microballoons and 3/4 of a can of silica thickener.  The resulting paste is workable, but doesn't sag or flow much at all, a vast improvement over my earlier efforts.

It took 4 batches - 16 pumps in all - to fillet both chines.  Then I changed over to microfiber & epoxy to glue the lashing pads to the hull.  Unfortunately, I grossly overestimated the amount of epoxy needed to do that job, so I was facing the prospect of about two pumps worth of waste.  I hadn't done the benches yet, so I scrambled to mix in the thickener and glass bubbles that would allow that. 

The somewhat gloopy bench fillets.  Since the mix
was so wet, I won't be able to remove the tape
until tonight at the earliest.

Of course, my trusty recipe was off because I was starting with an unknown amount of resin (after applying some to the pads).  So I ended up with a somewhat drippy mix that produced a nice, curved fillet but dripped down the sides a bit.  Cleaned it up with a paper towel as best I could, but I expect there will be some remedial sanding required to fix the drips when it's all cured.

All in all, a very productive weekend.  Looking ahead, there's a bit more filling and sanding to do on the fillets, then I'll be fairing the outside of each, and then (finally) it will be time to fiberglass them.  But I'm almost out of glass balloons, and getting low on epoxy, too.  So I will probably need to place an order for some supplies first. 

Bilge Fillet Complete-ish

Nice weekend weather gave me a window of opportunity to finish up the center seam on my canoe.  I remembered to use the tape trick this time, and the line came out nice and clean (except for the horrors of the frame fillets).  Considering that I don't intend to paint the interior, I think I can live with the result.

The reason I describe it as "complete-ish" rather than "complete" is that there's a sanding and fiberglass taping step still to do.  One smooths the top of the fillet out into a graceful curve, then epoxy and glass tape are applied to protect and strengthen the joint.  Combined with the filler and glass tape on the exterior side of the joint, the result is sort of an I-beam structure that gradually blends into the plywood.

Also, there's a bit of remedial filleting to do before we can glass over it.  Towards the bow, my mixture was a little thin and didn't fill as high as the wire stitches, as you can see in the second photo here.  The glass tape really needs to have a smooth surface to sit on, or else you get bubbles of air beneath it.  So I'll have to fill that in a little, too.

But I think I'll fillet the chines and the outsides of the joints first - that way, I can do my glassing all at once.  Hopefully, that will give me a chance to get "good at it" and produce a better result.

The weather man says that our unseasonably warm temperatures will continue for most of this week, so there should be some good opportunities for filleting in the early evenings.  More news as it happens....

<SARCASM>Oh, How I've Missed This</SARCASM>

It's been a really, really long time since I had anything to report on the boat building front.  I let a week of warm temperatures slip by without resuming the project, because I was finishing up a car project (not a Land Rover, but sort of close: a 1987 4Runner) during that time.  But the 4Runner is finally sorted & registered, and I seem to recall stating a spring 2012 launch goal for this canoe, so when the temperatures rose to epoxy-curing levels again, I knew it was time to put the excuses aside and get to work.

I lowered the hull, swept and vacuumed the dust out of it, and mixed a big batch of thick fillet epoxy to do the semi-vertical stern joint with.  Found that a cat had urinated in the boatbuilding supplies box, right on my dust mask, so I had to mix without a mask.... Had a little trouble getting the mixed epoxy into my ad-hoc applicator system (the Ziploc bag with a corner cut off).... Accidentally spilled epoxy on my table saw table.... And proceeded to make a fair mess of the work, to boot.

When the spills were cleaned up, and all the epoxy had been coaxed into its rightful place (more or less), I straightened up and surveyed the carnage.  To be fair, the stern looks better than the bow, really, and both of these places will be covered by the decks when the boat is done, so I should stop complaining.  Despite the hassle of filleting, it really is good to be back at work on this project.  As long as the weather holds, I'll be working to meet that launch goal, and I'll keep you posted.

Videos Are All I Can Offer When It's This Cold Out

Greetings, loyal reader.  Between the frigid weather which keeps my epoxy from curing, and the long list of home maintenance/repair tasks I've been working on lately, there's not much new here in Coastal Colorado.

BUT there are a few exciting new videos to share.  First, Austrian builder Tom Puchner has posted a well-made video of his beautiful Melanesia "Velella" under sail in force 3-5 winds. Velella has admirable finish quality, and I'm especially jealous of his bamboo spars, kiato and hiking poles.

Not only is it the best Melanesia sailing vid on Youtube at the moment, it's also the first one with a decent view of the steering and sail-handling work required.  The video is shot using a GoPro HD camera lashed to the outrigger pole, providing a good view of what's going on.  A few particulars I'd like to point out:

• Tom's wearing a wet suit, and with good reason.  The Melanesia is a very wet boat - it comes from a culture that never really had cold weather to contend with.  
• He moves around a lot when sailing it.  Crew weight placement matters a lot in the Melanesia.
• There's a tacking sequence that starts around 5:30 that gives an idea of how snappy these things are through the wind.  Tom lifts the paddle from the water and sets it in the hull, then scoots forward to encourage the stern to slide around.  He tries once or twice to complete the tack by handing the sail across to the other side, but that doesn't work, so he paddles the bow through the eye of the wind and sheets in.  Elapsed time is close to a minute.  The former casual monohull racer in me cringes at the idea of a tack taking longer than 15 seconds.  I wonder if he'd do better with some ballast stored in the bow?  I've read that can help with this problem. 
• Compare all that to the jibe at around 0:55.  Just point downwind, flick the sail over to the other side, disentangle one's self from the sheet, and you're done.  Clearly, jibes are far easier than tacking in these, and there was no violence to the transition like you'd expect from other sail shapes.
• I wonder if it would be better to mount the mainsheet lower on the spar, and lead it to a point a little further forward, out of the ?  It seems to be causing Tom some trouble.
• In a strong breeze and when the wind's on the hull side (as opposed to the outrigger side), the outrigger float ("ama") dives and throws up considerable spray.  I happen to know that Tom's using a very sleek and buoyant homemade foam ama, so when you notice that happening, imagine it being much worse on a boat with a timber ama like the one I'll probably use.  

What else do you see in Tom's video?

Next up, another, much briefer Melanesia video from an unknown francophone builder.  This one offers a few still shots of the canoe strapped to a van roof and being assembled on the beach, then cuts to some footage taken from inside the canoe while under way.  The camera's POV is too close for the kinds of insights that we get from Tom's video, but there are some good views of the sail lacing and steering position, and the canoe scoots along nicely with two adults aboard. 

The final video I have for you is the launching of James Wharram's latest design, the Melanesia's big sister "Amatasi."  Like Melanesia, Amatasi is a design that carries strong ethnic influences.  It does not use crab claw sails, but it does use the steering paddle and the general hull shape is very similar to the somewhat smaller Tahiti Wayfarer.  The video doesn't really show the craft under way, but it does offer a chance to see designers James Wharram and Haneke Boon in a moment of triumph.

That's all for  now.  I hope to be able to bring my hull into the house for a couple work sessions after the holidays, but until then there's not likely to be much to write about in this boat building blog.

Trending

We've been without internet for almost a week now at home.  I could claim that's why there hasn't been much news here lately, but I'd be lying.  Despite the lack of distractions, I haven't made much progress on the hull recently, and now we've got Weather rolling in that should keep me from doing anything with epoxy for the foreseeable future.

So it's a good time to talk briefly about something that amuses me greatly: the trendiness of outrigger canoes.  I noticed not long after starting this build that there were images of outriggers cropping up here & there in popular culture.  I didn't think much of it at first, but then I saw the Patagonia catalog for summer 2011, which prominently featured this gorgeous photo (and a few others) by Trevor Clark of outriggers in the open ocean off Hawaii at sunset.  Most of the shots were of paddling outriggers, but there was one in the catalog of a sailing outrigger as well.

I've seen a few other cultural references to outrigger sailing.  The great and recently deceased navigator Mau Piailug drew some attention as he worked to re-establish traditional navigation skills in the Pacific.  And Hawaiian-style outrigger racing and outrigger surfing began to crop up in the mainland USA.  As a windsurfing friend explained with regard to the stand-up paddleboarding craze, Hawaii has always had a periodic influence on fashion in the USA.

Fast forward....  Today I was faced with proof that outriggers have Arrived, and that I'm participating in a Trend.  The proof?  A US quarter dollar coin with a sailing outrigger on the reverse.  It turns out that  a series of 6 non-state entities were honored with coins in 2009, presumably to mollify them after a decade of state quarters rubbing their collective nose in their political non-entity status.  Among them were the Northern Mariana Islands (the one I'd found), and Guam, both of which featured crabclaw sails in their artwork.  The NMI coin shows a tacking outrigger, while the Guam example uses a proa.  Both cultures mentioned pride in their ancestral seafaring and navigation skills as reasons for including the vessels on the coins.

So I guess I'm a hipster now, building an outrigger canoe like all those other trendy, Patagonia-catalog-reading, US quarter-spending boatbuilders out there.  Who knew we were so commonplace?

If you'll excuse me, now, I need to stop borrowing internet connectivity from the office, and gear up for the bike ride home through the falling snow.  Maybe I'll do a little work on my sail before I go to bed.  It would be nice to have some progress to tell you about next time I'm able to get online.

Focus!

I mentioned in yesterday's post that I'd been avoiding hull work because of my troubles with epoxy filleting.  That's certainly true, but it's not the whole story.  I've also been a bit distracted.

My dad is a lover of antique British automobiles.  It's an illness I have avoided, for the most part, out of necessity: they are expensive toys, and I've consciously chosen a frugal path in life.

But there are times when the symptoms crop up.  I've been frustrated with our modern SAAB wagon recently, because it is unreliable.  It's also expensive to repair, because it's complicated and the engine bay is terribly cramped.  Historically, I've done a lot of our family's car repair, but this machine is just too unfriendly to the driveway mechanic.  It makes one long for a simpler conveyance.

Like, say, a 1974 Land Rover?  Yes, that would do nicely.  One cropped up on Craigslist recently, and the seller was kind enough to show me around the truck even though I made it clear I probably wouldn't be able to buy it.  It's stone-simple, easy to work on, and will probably be purposefully trundling along long after my prima donna SAAB has been crushed and melted down for scrap.

So for a while there, I was reading about Land Rovers online when I should have been filleting my hull.  Until I recognized the pattern, and pulled myself out of it.  I don't want this project to languish because I got distracted; I want it finished and ready for the water when the coming winter draws to a close.

My dad has a saying about this, which he reminds himself of whenever he's momentarily distracted from a goal: "Focus!"  It's a concise way of saying that yes, there are many things that would be nice to have, or fun to do, but you've chosen this thing, and you need to stick with it until it's done before you start something else.  Otherwise, you risk achieving neither because you've spread yourself too thin.

The boat I'm building is only 16 feet long and has a tiny, simple hull.  But it's still a project composed of many little tasks, some of which are tedious.  You don't successfully finish a project like this unless you're able to stay on track and power through the unglamorous patches, like... like... um....

...like an old Land Rover slogging doggedly along a muddy track towards a distant destination.  Yeah, that's the perfect metaphor.

Epoxy Fillets 2, Rich 1

I've been avoiding the epoxy work on the boat lately, to be honest.  It's much less glamorous than lofting, cutting or stitching.  Worse still, it's messy and difficult to do well, and the prep involves sanding, which I don't like much.  But my collection of plywood parts won't be a boat until I fillet every seam on the thing.

So I finally got a little time and a little gumption together, and filleted another bead along the center seam.  It went much better today - so much so that I'm willing to claim victory over the dreaded epoxy fillet in this encounter.  I think part of the reason was that I'm working in a more open section of the boat, where it was much easier to apply and work the epoxy.  But it also helped a lot that I mixed a stiff batch of epoxy today, so there was no dripping and relatively little flowing or pooling to mess up my efforts.  I'm starting to get a good feel for what the consistency should be, finally.

The epoxy cures noticeably slower in these cool fall temperatures - today's working temp was around 60 degrees F.  I'll pull the masking tape edging up tomorrow morning or so, and if I get favorable weather I'll continue the center seam to the stern post.

Looking ahead, there's still the tight detail work around the stern post to do, and then I'll need to fillet the side panel seams.  So with today's work, I'm something like a fifth or a sixth of the way through the filleting process.  And after that's done, there's fiberglass tape for the inside and outside of every fillet, and then fairing the hull smooth....  Much to be done, in short, but it feels good to make some progress and get a better result than my last few attempts.