And yet more...

So, let's see...

Centerboard lammels laminated.
Bottom panel cut out.
Building jig spacers cut, but not placed.

That's all for now.

Bit o' Progress

So, again, nothing terribly photogenic to report. I've been working on getting bits and pieces glued together, but nothing boat-shaped has occured yet. I got the stem laminated together this weekend, and got the chine doublers stuck onto Frame 1.

One task that's been intimidating me for a while has been the centerboard. Getting it shaped properly is going to be a bit of a job, and even getting the lammels all glued together seemed like a mountain to climb. This weekend I realized that I didn't have to glue all 23 strips together at once, so I started with gluing 6 together, and it seemed to go all right. I'll glue the other ones together similarly, then glue 6 to 6 and 5 to 6, then finally 12 to 11.

(By the way... made a rookie mistake. When I was coating the lammels with unthickened epoxy, I laid them down on a sheet of plastic atop some plywood to cure. Well, all the extra epoxy dripped down and pooled under them, leaving 1/4 thick nubs of plastic all over the place which I then had to remove with an angle grinder. Would have been smarter to lay them on top of wooden dowels, or even leave them on-edge rather than on the flats. Something to remember when I put the rudder together.)

I saw where someone on the Welsford builder's board made a negative template of the centerboard profile out of a scrap of plywood; basically cutting a foil-shaped hole in the middle of it. They could then slide the template onto the board while they grind/sand/plane away at it to see where the high spots are. This is what I'll probably do.

I've found that if there's a task in front of you that seems like a big deal, it slows down the whole process. I've been intimidated by the whole centerboard/centercase assembly for a while, but I have to have it finished before I can start making the boat look like a boat. Now that I have a plan in mind for how to actually do it, I think my progress speed will increase.

I heard from Gary at CC Fasteners this past week. They had to have some of the screws I need custom-made since they don't normally stock #8 and #10 silicon bronze screws in 3/4" length, and I need a bunch of each. Turns out the screw threading machine at the manufacturer is giving them trouble, so it's going to be another week for my screws. Okay by me, as I have other glue-related tasks to finish. :)

So, to-do list:
Finish centerboard laminations
Get some 9mm somewhere I can draw/cut on it, build centercase.
Finish putting 20x20 and 20x45 bits on the frames
Drill / cut drain and ventilation holes in the various pieces.
Find a long enough batten to finish tracing the outline of the bottom panel, then cut it out.
Clean up scarf joint on bottom panel.
Make up bottom panel spacers, attach to building jig. Attach bottom panel to spacers.
Get lead for c/b weight. (This thing is going to be HEAVY. 45lbs of lead on top of the solid oak centerboard.)
(a miracle happens)
Launch boat.

Piece of cake, eh?

Welsford Builders on Google Maps

This is short, but I figured it deserved a post of its own.

I started a publicly viewable and editable Google Map to show where builders are around the world. The Google Maps customization is good enough that you can add photos, links, etc in your location pin, so I figured it would be a neat thing to try.

Here's the LINK.

More progress, and pictures!

So, it's been a few weeks. I took a long weekend this week to see if I could get some more accomplished, and it seems to have worked well.

First off: Scarfing pics, for those naysayers out there.

This is what the scarf looked like after cutting and planing...


And this is what it looked like right before the epoxy went on... (I was by myself, so no pics of the actual epoxy application.)



Last weekend I cut some stock down to have 20x20, and managed to get an "action" shot of myself doing it, with Alex's help. Also ran into town to exchange some System 3 Gel Magic that was defective, and pick up some discount clamps.


So, this weekend... what did I do? Building jig time! (For anyone interested, the knife on my hip is a Bark River Pro Scalpel II. Very handy little every day knife.)


In addition to putting the jig together, I also moved the bottom panel ply onto it, then cut out some miscellaneous 12mm pieces from the edges. You can't see it in this pic, but I've transferred the measurements from the plans to the panel. Have to wait until I have another person to hold battens for me to draw it.



Turns out that I should have bought a few more clamps last weekend. I keep hearing "You can never have enough clamps when building a boat," but I wimped out and only bought 8. Shoulda got more while they were 40% off!

That's frame 5 going together. What I now realize I should probably do is to get together all the bits and pieces that I need, whip up a batch of unthickened epoxy, and paint the mating pieces all at once. Then the next day I can come back, mix up some thickened resin, and put them together. Also, I should drill some tiny pilot holes and use nails to align them while clamping. I was a little panicked putting frame 5 together trying to line everything up. A few nails would really help with that.

And finally, last big thing that I did this weekend was that I got the stem pieces cut out!


The big problem I have now is that I want it to start looking like a boat! It's still mostly looking like a pile of cut-up plywood and oak, but at least you can see the size it will end up being via looking at the building jig.

Signing off for now. :)

Scarf! Scarf!

So... three big but non-photogenic steps this weekend:

A) I epoxied the two sheets of 12mm ply that will make up the bottom panel together.

B) I cleaned up space in the garage for boatwork.

C) I drove over to my wife's grandparent's house and used their thickness planer to plane down the 4/4 stock to 20mm. Also planed one piece of the 8/4 down to 40 for the centercase pieces.

I am now ready to spend this week ripping and crosscutting some 20mm stock down to size for making the centerboard, and I have the stock to make the centercase. I'll also probably spend some time fitting the frame pieces together. Next weekend might bring the building jig. If so, I could cut out the bottom panel, fit it to the jig, and have something resembling the first step in a boat in my garage!!

OMG!

Lumbering along

As it was a long weekend, I decided to try to make some more progress. Thursday I went to the lumber yard and bought some wood. A LOT of wood. Brought it home in the truck, got it loaded into the garage.

Friday, with the help of my stepson/apprentice, I got some of the 8/4 white oak ripped down to 20mm width for use as stringers. It's amazing how much wood goes into even a smallish boat like this! In the photo above, the pieces for the stringers are the three with red painted ends. That's about 2.1 inch thick by 10inch wide by 12 foot long chunks of oak. I did find some checking on a few of the pieces (see below)... will have to find out if this will cause a big problem with the finished boat. I'm hoping not, since the stringers don't provide much structural strength, but I'm going to ask the forumites to be sure.

Saturday, built a scarfing jig and made the first scarf joint on the 1/2" ply that will form the bottom plank of the boat. Got through most of it with the table saw, then cleaned it up with my Lee Valley low-angle block plane. Never used a plane before, but this sure is a nice tool!

This weekend I hope to get the building jig together. I'm also hoping to get over to my wife's grandparent's place where I have a thickness planer available to thin down the stock for my centerboard.

Progress!!

So, after a bit of a hiatus, I'm making progress again. No pics this time, but I've cut out one my pieces for Frame 6, and the vertical "add-on" pieces for 3, 4, 5, and 6. I'm through cutting for the day... have to find a better dust collection system. All of the pieces so far have been made using our household vacuum cleaner to catch the dust, and I think it would be a better idea to try to rehabilitate the old shop vac we have rather than break our very expensive vacuum through over-use.

Anyway, I've got all of the rest of the pieces I need to cut out of 9mm drawn on, so it's just more cutting now. I did eventually draw the pieces up in AutoCad and plotted them out 1:1. From there it was very very easy to just trace around the edges of the cut-out shapes.

The temperature is supposed to get all the way into the positive double digits this weekend, so I might take a break from the basement work and go out there to put the building jig together. Woohoo!

A little how-to with Sketchup

Hiya folks.

First off, I do plan on cutting some more wood today, but I thought a little post about how I use Sketchup to help visualize things might help out some of you who aren't familiar with it.

Sketchup is a 3D surface modelling program distributed for free by Google. "Surface modelling" just means that the things you make in it are composed of surfaces, and aren't actually solid models... .but this is not really important for what I'm going to show you today.

I'm using a cut-out plan for the Pathfinder pieces that I found on the JWBuilders forum. It shows a plan for cutting out all the frames economically, using the minimum amount of plywood. What it doesn't show is all of the dimensions... you have to pull those from the plans. As anyone who's worked on a Pathfinder has seen, several of the middle frames are formed of one large, wide piece that spans the width of the boat, and two smaller pieces that attach to it and go up the sides. When you're cutting the wide pieces out, the line forming the top of the frame member is not dimensioned. You could, of course, use a scale ruler to try to get that dimension right, or transfer the angle from the plans using a bevel. I, instead, use Sketchup.

When you start the latest version of Sketchup, it will ask you for a template to use... I use the Woodworking template in millimeters, since John's plans are metric.

Start off by forming two lines in Sketchup using the TapeMeasure tool (shortcut T). These lines should be perpinducular, with one forming the centerline of the boat, and the other representing the waterline.

Next, again using the TapeMeasure, draw lines up and down from the intersection, using the dimensions John gives you for the length. How do you enter dimensions? Well, here's the sequence:
1. Choose the TapeMeasure tool (either clicking on the icon, or hitting T on your keyboard)
2. Move your mouse down from the intersection. It will drag a green arrow with it.
3. Without clicking anything, type 150. You'll see this show up in the "Measurements" box in the lower right hand corner. Now hit "Enter"
4. Poof! You just created a little measurement line exactly 150 mm long. This is the bottom measurement for frame 3 on the Pathfinder.
5. Repeat the above, pulling lines down 80mm, and up 48, 210, and 453.

6. Now, starting at the little crosshair designating the point 150, click again and drag to the right (it will drag a red arrow). Type in 402, hit Enter. The point at the end of this line is the corner of the bottom stringer shown on the plans. Repeat with appropriate dimensions for the above measurements.
7. After finishing the above, choose the Line tool (L), click on the bottom center point, then the point to the right, and up around the curve of the hull. This will create solid lines connecting these points, and you now have the shape of frame 3, dimensionally accurate, drawn in Sketchup!
8. To check on the dimension of the top of the frame, use the T tool again to measure up from the intersection of the waterline and centerline, this time to 57mm (a dimension helpfully provided on the plans). Now use the T tool to measure to the right from that point, straight over to the diagonal line. The line you're dragging might try to pop to an intersection... if it does, then hold down the Shift key while the line is still red. This will force it to follow that angle, and not shift around. When you drag the end of the measuring line over the diaganol, it will show you that that dimension is precisely 816.9mm. (it won't look exactly like the picture, but you'll see it.) Edited to add: I screwed up in the image... the dimension is actually 816.9, not 817.9. Durrr.)

You can also use Sketchup to check the dimensions on some of the curves. For example, this is what I found on the top of the Transom. You'll see a circled area where the curve doesn't cross the little crosshair. At this point, John had given an offset of 178mm, but I found that it was actually 171mm to produce a fair curve. I did this by drawing in all the points similar to how I did for frame 3 above, then drawing an arc (A on the keyboard) from the endpoint to the middle, making sure that the arc landed on one of the offset points. All of the offsets John gave landed almost exactly on the line except for this one. I then measured from the starting point down to the intersection of the dashed line and the arc, and it came up as 171.1mm.(You can also click on "Window > Entity Info" in the menu bar, and it will open a little window showing information about the entity you've clicked on. Clicking on the arc will tell you that its radius is precisely 1495.4mm.)


I know this probably sounds like a lot of work, but Sketchup is a remarkably user-friendly program, it's free, and checking your dimensions in this way helps (me, at least) to visualize what I'm about to do before I apply pencil (or saw!) to expensive plywood.

Hope this helps someone out. :)

Jason

Oh yes, I forgot to mention: There are all sorts of free Sketchup lessons online, from step-by-step guides like the above, to videos on YouTube, to people who have posted animated Sketchup files you can download and watch right in the program. Try:
http://www.sketchucation.com/
http://www.aidanchopra.com/ (This is a page from the author of Sketchup For Dummies... it has videos showing you things from the book.)

First pieces cut!

So, I had some time to kill this weekend, so... first pieces cut.

And, since I just couldn't wait to see how big it was going to be...



Drawing out the pieces wasn't that big of a deal for me... I've taken a manual drafting class, and this is just like that, only on plywood. What did help is that I had Google Sketchup open on my computer in the next room. I could quickly draw the piece out in Sketchup to make sure all the points on the curves fit, and then nudge them around until they do. It's also nice to draw a smooth curve that fits the points in Sketchup, then measure the arc to find the radius. After that, it's usually easy to draw with a 4' ruler converted to compass duty. Sorry for the short post, but sleep is beckoning.

About me, and about Pathfinder

So who am I, and what am I doing?

My name is Jason Folkers. I'm originally from Florida, but have been living in the Canadian prairies near Calgary since 2003. I caught the sailing and cruising bug from some of my friends back and Florida, and now have dreams of sailing over blue water to a distant island paradise.

Don't we all?

The reality, though, is that boats that can make journeys like that are relatively pricey, and living in the middle of the prairies doesn't lend itself well to learning blue-water sailing skills. As a result, I started looking around for something a little smaller that I could use on local lakes. At the same time, though, I wanted a boat that I could potentially tow out to the British Columbia coast and sail around the islands.

In my search I came across quite a few smaller boats that would do this, but my eye was caught by a design for an open wooden cruising dinghy by Kiwi designer John Welsford. The Pathfinder was designed to be a slightly larger version of his very successful Navigator design. At 17' long, it's short enough to build in my garage, yet long enough to spend significant time on should I have a few weeks off to sail in BC. It has a relatively low-tech, low-stress rig, great load-bearing capacity, and can handle pretty serious weather. It also only weighs about 600 pounds, so I should be able to tow it behind a normal car, with a simple trailer. Building the boat myself allows me to spread the cost out over the build time, and gives me something to tinker with and improve my woodworking skills.

So, that's the intro. Where am I on the build progress? Well, just yesterday I picked up my plywood that I had ordered in from Westwind Hardwood in BC. They carry the Hydrotek brand of Meranti plywood. This plywood is supposedly lighter and more abrasion resistant than the Okoume ply I could get locally, and was significantly less expensive, even including the $300 shipping from BC to Calgary. The sheets were packaged well and arrived swiftly... I wouldn't hesitate to order from Westwind again.

Next steps are to loft the frames from the drawings onto the plywood, and start cutting them out! I also need to order silicon-bronze screws and assorted hardware, order in a few more tools, and get my first load of epoxy. Pics will come as soon as I start doing anything worth seeing. :)