Odds and End(ings) - Centerboard sheave and inspection ports

The third trip to the Big Box store finally yielded the prize. It was a quest like finding the rare white rhino: a bolt that would fit the sheave pendant that also came with a fitted acorn nut. And of course, stainless steel they must be. Zinc, chrome, and chrome plated weren't going to work. It was a quest I've been on for the better part of two months. Finally, the quest came to an end and I'm the proud owner of an installed sheave pendant!

View of pendant sheave installed with new hole, too. Too cold to epoxy this yet.

Pretty much all of Big Box's nut sizes. Gave up trying to be precise, so I bought.. a few.

Deck plate and pendant installed. The white-white contrasts nicely with the Choice Cream.

Nice little acorn nut. This is sealed in silicon.

Of course, nothing's quite that easy. I began the evening "simply" going to install the deck plates on either side of the centerboard trunk, the deck plates that are used to push down the centerboard in case it gets jammed, which kinda happens a lot, and unfortunately, sometimes happens somewhat permanently. I knew I'd have to trim the top part as the deck plate bumps up against the cleat. I didn't know I'd have trim the entire circumference around as it protruded into the centerboard trunk itself a good 1/4". With both of them installed, I'd lose 1/2" of clearance for the centerboard. Sure enough, when I tested the opening with the 2/3 done centerboard, it wouldn't fit.

Halfway through sanding this down. It stuck out much more at first. The writing is "CTBD Port" for "centerboard trunk port side" -- seems like ages ago that I put this on!

For the protrusion, I debated looking for "low profile" deck plates but resigned myself to just sanding the darn things down, and that I did. I turned my random orbital into a stationary sander. Three discs of 60 grit later, 12 #8 1/2" stainless screws, and a few dabs of silicon, and I've got pretty good fitting deck plates. But that wasn't until I also had to sand out the opening itself as the 6" deck plates seemed to be 6 1/8". That was frustrating. Some of that is due to the epoxy and paint that gummed it up a bit, but I swear the holes in the centerboard trunk were a little small. I left these a little proud (in other words, still protruding maybe 1/16" into the centerboard trunk) but there should be plenty of clearance now for the centerboard itself.

Bulkhead 7 doubles as a workbench to clamp the sander.

It's nice getting stuff out of boxes and onto the boat. I special ordered the sheave from the Marine store back in April and bought the deck plates in the summer. You can see where I thought I'd be in the build. It's a minor miracle I didn't lose them with all the box moving I've done over the last couple months, but there they are, installed on my boat. I have to repaint some spots where I scuffed the finish but it was worth it.

I also drilled out the hole where the pendant enters the footwell. I had to buy a 5/8" drill bit for this and frankly overpaid for the privilege, but I must say the Irwin bit I got is a very, very sweet bit. Highly recommended as it chomped through the trunk blocking straight and true. It's pretty cool to see this little feat of engineering come together: the pendant runs from a cleat on the footwell, into this hole, across the pendant sheave, and through a hole in the centerboard to raise and lower it. Simple but effective. Like most holes on the boat, this will be completely filled with epoxy, then redrilled slightly smaller so the wood is never exposed to water. The trick here is to ensure that the second drilling is exactly in line with the first. It does no good if the angles are off and part of the wood is protected and part of it isn't.

View down the hole to the pendant sheave.

Finally, the speaker boxes are done. I should say speaker corners. I decided against boxes because I didn't want this sticking too far into the cabin, plus wanted to direct the sound to meet in the middle. I had to return the original 6.5" Boss Marine speakers for a set of 6.5" Pyles. The Pyles were a little more money but were "low profile" with a 2.5" mounting depth. The Boss speakers wouldn't fit into the corners I created for them, but the Pyle ones do. They're grey, not white, but it won't be too bad. They supposedly sound better than the Boss ones but I haven't heard them so the jury's out on that.

View of speaker 'boxes' from above.

I've decided to let go of my wiring obsession in the forward locker. Yes, I could build runners and hide them all but there are going to be a lot of wires back here and to hide them would just not be efficient. Perhaps some day when all is said and done and I have free time (ha!) I'll rework the wiring, but I'm comfortable with that decision. And really, unless someone sticks his head through bulkhead 2 and strains, it's really hard to see anything back there, anyway.

I'm pleased with the way this section turned out, but I'm going to wait until I get a break in the weather (looks like tomorrow might be 55 degrees) to do a final pass with some thickened epoxy to shape the fillets. It's totally about aesthetics and I'm in no rush to get these done until I like the way they look. Only then will I paint this part, which might be next year.

One thing I noticed while working with my cell phone running Pandora is how the forward locker seems to amplify sound. The phone was sitting on the xylophone/battery box holder, maybe 3/4 volume, and it was so loud I had to turn it down. Granted, I'm in an enclosed space in my garage, but just a few feet away sit two 200 watt marine speakers coupled with another set of 100 watters that will go in the rear of the boat. That boat's gonna be jumpin'.

White Dot Special

Another late night, which I'm guessing is going to be the norm. I happen to very much like my wife and my life outside of my basement workshop, so I try to stay above ground as much as possible, especially in daylight. I'm a human, not an animal! So 3.5 hours mixing epoxy and sanding and sawing can go by really quick when starting at 10:30pm. I do get to roll out of bed at 8:00 and work from home tomorrow (today?), so I can afford a 5 hour sleep night. But I can't keep this up.

I spent most of yesterday's session cleaning up the madness that is casually named "epoxy squeeze out". That's really not appropriate. White stuff from hell is more apt because that is exactly what it is. A few sanding pads later, and I've gotten the centerboard trunk and its friend the centerboard all gussied up, as my clamps will attest. This is actually a major milestone and I'm happy I got this far without totally ruining things.

I'm reminded of one of my favorite PocketShip blogs, where the advice was to take pride in progress, no matter how small. If you were able to find the pencil that night, call it progress. Otherwise, you'll forever be disappointed. So with a few more manual pages done and done, and with enough lead to do at least the centerboard pour and finishing over the weekend, I'm seeing progress. I still can't find my pencil, though.

I need more clamps. Seriously.

Right after this, the manual says to douse a rag in acetone, put it on the end of a stick, and wipe the inside clean. Makes sense on paper. In practice, it was more like suiting up, getting swallowed by an elephant, and passing through to the other side. Acetone, if you're not familiar, smells terribly. It is basically nail polish remover. Add that I was doing this in an enclosed space a few feet from my furnace and I really, really wanted to finish. Even with a mask, I could smell it. The manual also notes that acetone can spontaneously combust. Lovely stuff!

So after a few wipes inside, I shined a light in between the inside faces of the trunk and found this guy. He's cute, but he's trouble (trouble, trouble)

Crisis averted.

This is a dried piece of thickened epoxy that was trying to gremlin his way between a smooth centerboard movement and a forever jam session. Basically, the centerboard has to smoothly move in between these panels for the rest of the boat's life. I got him a few seconds later and pulled him apart into a dozen little pieces. That'll learn him. I then aggressively wiped the rest of the board down and hit this area with a reverse Shop Vac. In a couple days, I'll never get to this area again, so I'm spending a lot of time trying to get this right.

With the centerboard clamped up, I turned to the final piece of blocking for the keel. It's a bit of an odd duck in that the bottom part is to be cut at 15 deg and the top at 25 deg. This relatively simple act of geometry took four tries and a few board feet of Menard's finest select pine.

This is what scrap wood looks like.

Another little complexity is that the end piece, according to the manual, is 'slightly larger than 3/4" to fit the profile of the aft keel blocking'. In other words, I had to thicken it up. The keel blocking came out to 105/128" on my digital caliper while my 3/4" lumber was actually 97/128", or 1/8" thinner. That was fortunate. I cut this shim from the first attempt at the nose block. Not a big deal, except of course I cut the angles wrong on this thing, too.. twice.. I chalked it up to getting antsy because I thought I'd be done and in bed in 90 minutes. That was a nice thought!

On a Roll

I felt a bit on a roll tonight and couldn't really stop. I'd been staging the laminations and blocking so that they'd all be ready at the same time. Not sure that was the best technique because suddenly I was overwhelmed with blocking from all angles, much like Adrian Peterson would see when running up the middle. I have a small basement shop that's getting smaller by the day. Since I never got around to building the flip top table(s), my power tools sit on the floor until ready. That means lifting the bandsaw up on the workbench and putting it back down when done, all 75 lbs of it.

Neat view of centerboard in centerboard trunk. Not sure I've seen a photo like this. I was dry fitting to see if my fillets would get in the way; they don't.

That experience was uniquely offset by hand planing. Just about every woodworker I know loves hand planing. The rhythmn, the smell, the progress, the smoothness. It really is therapeutic. Exhausting, but therapeutic, especially after sanding-sanding-sanding down all the squeeze out from my mediocre epoxy work over the last couple days. Planing was followed by the random orbital then 120 grit on a sanding block. It's about as good as I can make it. The manual says the block will churn through thousands of miles of water. God, I hope so!

Planing. It's what's for dinner.

Getting the keel nose block down to form.

I had a surprise visitor today. Chris stopped by with 50 lb of tire weights so I can do my lead pour this weekend! Chris is awesome. He had his whole family in the car, heading up to a huge hobby store near my house. I'm sure they were all thinking, "For Pete's sake, he just got done building the damn boat. Now he's gonna basically build another one?" Nice people, that group. Too bad I was covered in sawdust from planing the nose.

The trouble is, I don't like to spend money where I can avoid it. There's 'clean' lead and there's 'dirty' lead. Dirty lead comes in the form of the tire weights that have a lot of waste materials with it, such as the 50lb bucket here.
 

Yay Chris!!

Clean lead can be bought from eBay for about $1.20 a pound, including shipping, which requires much less work, but of course is more expensive than free.

Boo ebay!!

However, given how much trouble I've had calling tire shops, this might actually be the only route I have available. Two Tires Plus and two Good Year shops near the house both would not/could not sell me their weights. Oh well.. in the scheme of things, not a big deal. Just not expected, which I should expect to happen more and more.

Stops and Starts

Nose block pattern with 8' pine.

I had the nose block pattern with me while rummaging through the garage looking for the aft part of the keel when I looked up and saw two of the remaining planks of pine looming over my head. I used the first one to laminate the nose block itself, which was curing as I was moving on to the keel blocking. From plank to nose block in two days; that's pretty cool. I suppose I'll have many of those epiphanies over the next couple years, but it just reinforces the feeling that I don't think there's much better than sailing a boat built largely by your own hands

Unfortunately, at this rate, I'll be sailing in 2017, because it doesn't feel like I've gotten very far. I've been warned not to compare the rate of my build against other people's, but it's hard not to compare. By now, 2 weeks after receiving their kits, some builders got their hulls together (not counting the German fisherman who basically lied his way to page 200 in a day).

But it's still progress nonetheless. Chris lent me his plans so I was able to finally make the keel blocking to spec, at least the lamination part. I'll cut it to the pattern on the band saw tomorrow night. One thing that confused me a bit was where the vertical plank goes. It's about 8 inches long and sits roughly in the middle of the longer pattern part. but it's not clear exactly where it goes. Turns out it forms the butt joint for the aft and bow parts of the keel, about 1 inch on either side. With that puzzle settled, I glued up the centerboard itself, putting a few weights on top to ensure a good fit.

How many laminations do you see?

I'll add some commentary here about what can possibly go wrong with the keel build. PocketShip blog addicts may have noticed that a common problem is that the keel is often built crooked. There are two possible causes. The first is the keel is tapered so that if it cures without support, it will sag. The second is that the pattern has a LOT of play in it. It's supposed to start dead center and end dead center. Not carefully marking these centerpoints on the pattern when transferring it to the blank can easily put things out of whack, e.g. crooked. So between ensuring that the keel sits flush while curing and properly transferring the pattern (there's a novel idea!) there's quite a bit to look out for when putting this together.

I did make a mistake on the centerboard trunk, however, over the weekend. I laid down a strip of frog tape (as seen in an earlier post) but forgot to peel it off before the epoxy cured. That meant the frog tape + epoxy is now a permanent part of the boat. I tried really hard to scrape, cut, and sand it out and tried to dissolve a little with acetone, but eventually gave up as I started getting into the fiberglass itself. The one thing I didn't try was heat, but I didn't want to weaken these important joints. If I cut my own patterns, I would've cut them again. Alas, I'm resigned to sailing with frog tape in there. I'm hoping the frog tape doesn't destablize the joint. Liberal amounts of thickened epoxy applied like a fillet covered it up nicely. It should stay clear of the centerboard but I'm not happy it happened. I'll do a test of the centerboard once it's all built to make sure the board can move up and down easily.

Fillets over frogtape.

On the other hand, that's a pretty sweet fillet right there. Tomorrow I'll finish the "box" and be done with three pages of the manual. Then I'll try not to mess up my nose block blank which puts me on track to do a lead pour as soon as I can get some lead. Progress feels good!  (four laminations in the photo, btw -- long keel blocking, vertical keel blocking, nose blank, and centerboard)

Plans? What plans?

How the day started.

It's late, just about 4am, and I've just finished laying down the centerboard trunk blocking. It was surprisingly fun; I got to use just about every power tool in the shop and I think it came out OK. In the scheme of things, it's pretty simple. But the blocking started with a varied-width 5/4 length of pine that had to be milled down to 1" and then ripped to the requisite widths. That meant I got to fire up the thickness planar for the first time. That thing can make some noise and throw some sawdust, that's for sure.

Earlier today, I sanded down the insides of the trunk to the "uniform grey" that's recommended for such sanding. It doesn't look like there's fiberglass on there anymore. Part of me wants to keep it bright so I know I didn't sand through the whole shebang.

It wasn't all good today, though. I called around a few tire shops for those magical lead balance weights I keep hearing about. Yes, they have them, says the tire shops, but the ones I called are under contract with battery manufacturers. Others said they only use steel these days. I found some on eBay for about $1 a pound. I need about 108 for the keel, 10 for the centerboard, and 200 for the ballast. I cried. This was an unprepared expense (and doesn't include the cost of the cast iron pot and heating elements.) I'll just have to bite the bullet here and likely forgo the stainless steel mooring cleats. Plastic is just as good, no?

I wound up buying 25 lbs to get started. That should be enough for the centerboard itself, which will give me time to figure out what to do about the other 100 lbs. I won't need the ballast for another year or so, likely until right before launch. But with the way the EPA and Sierra Club have been pushing, lead seems to be an endangered species, so I plan to stock up on it now. Lead shot bags from Cabela's (a major outdoor/hunter supplier) cost $65 for 25 lbs. While the advantage is these will be "pure" and free of the crap that a tire shop weight will have, it's also almost 3x more expensive. Cabela's math vs. eBay math works out to $780 vs. $300. The sounds you hear are my pockets emptying.

To add to the pain, late last night, as I was preparing to mill the keel blocking, I was really confused as to how do that. The manual says there's a pattern in the kit but it's not clearly labeled. I assume it's the tapered item just above the gaff puzzle piece? So I did what all PocketShip builders do: I went to the forum. After a few hours without an answer, I wrote Chris. He said check the plans.. I said what plans.. he said, the ones that come with the kit? I've been through the boxes and rest assured, there are no plans. I think we found the problem, said Chris. Partly vindicated, I wrote CLC Friday, but with this being a high holiday among certain folks (Easter - which means you've spent all day painting eggs, or you're preparing for an early mass tomorrow followed by brunch), I don't expect to hear from them until Monday at the latest. Since the centerboard trunk blocking is fairly straightforward (no tapering) I went ahead and did that tonight.

Dry fit and the first few feet of frog tape.

Close up of rounded edge, cut with band saw.

Not all the clamps I own, but close.

Close up of clamps and squeeze out of aft trunk.

I briefly used the centerboard as a table top. Bad, bad!!

In the meantime, Chris offered to head down to my boatshop with the plans I need. Turns out, at this stage in the build, I need those plans quite a bit. The keel nose, keel blocking, and centerboard blocking are all covered in those pages. If I get far enough along, the rudder blocking and bulkhead cleats are also needed. These are all things I can do in my basement while the weather struggles to get above 45 degrees.