The Arctic Tern Project

Volume 6                           Issue No. 6                       June 2009

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A Morale Issue

Ok.  First off, I have a confession to make.  I’m working to a deadline.  I’m trying to make it to the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival in September.  Now, deadlines can be a potent motivator and a fun challenge but sometimes they can squeeze the joy out of the whole thing.  This past month has been a struggle to maintain morale and motivation and to regain confidence after the ballasting fiasco and other lesser mistakes and foibles.  It’s also been struggle between doing what I think is right and just saying “good enough” in order to have a shot at making the festival.  In the end “doing right” has won out and meeting the deadline is secondary.  I’m happier this way.  It’s the way I’ve been building the boat from the start and to change my approach now, just to make the festival, is ludicrous.  I’m still gunning for it, and desperately want to make it, but I don’t want to compromise quality for it.  That may sound a little “high-and-mighty” but it’s not meant that way at all.  I just need to continue working in a way that keeps me happy with what I’m doing.

 

If you are interested in the character building/altering aspects of boat building and the struggle between good (making a boat) and evil (perfectionism) I encourage you to buy and read Larry Cheek’s entertaining book The Year of the Boat where he takes you through the ups, downs, and philosophical meanderings of building a Sam Devlin designed Zephyr.  This Arctic Tern project is featured in chapter 13.  Larry is also documenting his current project; A Devlin designed Winter Wren (A smaller sister to the Arctic Tern); in his on-line journal Three Years of the Boat.

Wrestling the Epoxy Beast

Ok. Last month I had overcoated all those bits and pieces with epoxy and threw my sander down in disgust after sanding through to the wood on the first few pieces.  This month I got back at it and managed to get through the whole bunch without making a bonfire out of them (although it was touch-and-go there for a while).  One good thing I re-discovered are the virtues of 3M ScotchBrite pads for dulling down a surface without burning through to the wood underneath.  I use them as a final step on corners and other sensitive areas after sanding the bulk of the piece with 150 grit.

 

 

Most of the pieces survived the epoxy treatment but the log rails for the sliding hatch really took a beating.  After the sanding I discovered that some of the corners really needed some softening up (rounding over) in order to hold epoxy and paint.  Also, the Teflon slides that previously fit so well, no longer fit the grooves.  So I mercilessly rounded over those nice crisp corners and really reamed out the grooves.

 

The result was a bit of a mess.  The hatch now fit again but the fit was sloppy.  There is a flaw in this design in that the fit of the hatch depends too much on the vagaries of coating thicknesses.  I was pretty much about to abandon it in favour of something else but decided to try to save things by lining the track groove with something permanent that wouldn’t need to be epoxy coated or painted.  Small diameter copper plumbing pipe had the right dimensions so I split some of this and used it to line the track grooves.

 

 

I discovered, amazingly, that the cheese-grater rasp can be used to shave down copper.

 

Ok, so I reassembled the sliding hatch and, after paring down the Teflon slides a bit, things seemed to fit ok.  I still wasn’t thrilled with it but decided to move on to other things for the time being.

 

I bought a whole bunch of cheap ¼” bolts from the local building supply and used them to remount the portlights while filling the over-bored mounting holes with epoxy.  This worked out great and each mounting hole is now lined with a nice thick epoxy layer and the holes are now perfectly positioned.

 

I also made up a template for the curve of my headsail track and got the local sheet metal shop to bend them to this.  They worked out great and mounted with ease.

 

I drilled the sliders to accept this stand-up spring and mounted my sheet blocks.

 

Tapering the Rub Rails

Alright.  I was starting to get my mojo back.  You may remember, way back when, that I’d tapered the rubrails in one dimension (width) with the block plane but couldn’t face the prospect of tapering them in thickness as well.  In a flash of inspiration I came up with a way to do this that wouldn’t involve a lot of handwork and peering down the length of the rail to see if I got it right.  The method I came up with is to get a nice straight 2x6 from the lumber yard, screw the rubrail to this, place a plywood guide along it at the desired angle to get the taper I wanted (1/8” in 8’) and then run the router along the guide.

 

This worked so well that I re-did the width taper using the same method.  Fantastic.  I’m really happy with the additional taper and glad I did it.  You may be able to see the difference in the following photo although the shadow makes it difficult.  The rail on the left is tapered only in width while the one on the right has the thickness taper as well.

 

Gluing on Some Pieces

Ok, time to permanently attach some of those epoxy coated pieces.  On go the cabin trim and the mast partner.

 

 

Mounting holes get filled with thickened epoxy then cheese-gratered down.  I put tape on the cheese-grater to prevent it from digging in.

 

 

Corner pieces get faired in.

Back on the Interior

Alright.  Now I head back inside the boat and do some stuff in there.  First off, I get some brass sheet and line the area where the heater goes and then mount the heater.  Looking good.  Originally I was going to use copper sheet here; and then I thought stainless (it’s cheaper); but finally decided brass was the best as it complemented the brass knobs on the heater.

 

The next thing I do is finalize the shape of the berth-front trim.  I wasn’t entirely happy with the original shape of these pieces because they had some sharp edges that I thought could be painful in a sea-way but I was unsure about how to soften things up without losing definition of shape.  Also, the height of the trim at the entrance to the forward berth made moving in and out of this berth difficult.  I came up with the following modifications to solve these problems.

 

 

 

 

I like these changes.  Although some of the “crispness” is gone, I think some of the pain will be gone too.  And I think these shapes actually fit into the rest of the interior better.

 

Ok, the next thing on the list was to route wiring from the where the heater and the base of the mast will be back to where the battery is going to live.  I also was routing bilge hose and propane hose through this area.  It’s surprising the amount of wiring required considering this boat has very little electrical equipment.  I needed to route two 12 gauge 3 conductor wires for the mast lights; one coax cable for the masthead antennae; the knotmeter paddle wheel cable; one 14 gauge 2 conductor wire for the heater fan; plus one extra 14 gauge 2 conductor wire for future use.  All this just fit inside some 1” bilge hose so I thought I’d use this for conduit.  Here are holes I figured I’d drill up under the settee to route this mess.

 

Here’s the anaconda that is the wiring.

 

 

The one downside of using the bilge-hose for conduit is the plastic is a little “sticky” and makes feeding the wires difficult.

 

Ok, the next thing I did was to varnish the light fixtures I made.

The Final Save

One near-casualty of the whole epoxy coating exercise was the forward hatch.  This thing has been difficult from the start.  The frame pieces were small and fiddly and suffering from repeated sanding. 

 

The groove for the vacuum hose gasket in the lid was taking a beating as well.  And, truth be known, the whole vacuum hose gasket idea wasn’t really working out.  The only reason I did it was because I couldn’t find weather stripping in 1/8” thickness.  I did finally managed to find some and so relegated the vacuum hose gasket to the “seemed like a good idea at the time” bin and so filled in the vacuum hose groove with thickened epoxy.

 

 

I tested out the weather stripping and this worked really well.  From this point on I began to like the hatch more and more and pronounced it “Saved from the Bin”.

 

One thing that may not be saved from the bin is the sliding hatch rails.  I’m working on an alternate design that I think is better but more on that next month.

Next Time

Finalize hatches; more interior work.