Spring Has (Finally) Sprung

I went outside today and was amazed at the difference a few days makes.

This didn't look like this 3 days ago.

Just a couple days ago, I was waxing philosophical, wondering what grilled groundhog tastes like, for that little bastard got the timing of spring all shades of wrong. Alas, we hit 72 degrees today; the snow's gone, so are the winter doldrums. The faint smell of summer was in the air: budding trees, lillies, and lilacs. What could possibly be missing from such a sweet and serene scene? Why, bubbling lead, plastic, and adhesive, of course!

Who needs lilacs when you can have lead?

Enthused, I broke out the safety gear and the components of my smelter and hooked it all up together. The smelting equipment was pretty bare bones but worked well. I got the idea for the setup from the good old boys of West Virginia, the same fellas who melt tire weights for buckshot and fishing lures. They know what they're doing; some claim they've melted tons of lead. How? Slowly, carefully, and courtesy of Wal Mart. My burner is a double camp stove from Coleman, one that uses standard 16.4 oz propane tanks. I was in the market for one anyway, so the $30 was worth it.

The foundry, courtesy of Wal Mart. Keel nose block awaits the pour.

The cast iron skillets came as a set of 3. I used 2 in this effort, saving the largest one for something that might resemble real cooking some day. The key to these skillets is the little lip for the pour. You definitely want to be able to guide the pour evenly. I was not disappointed. The handle was a little short, making grasping this a little on the delicate side. But the skillets held up under the heat and was just big enough to manage the weight of the lead. Finally, an important component is the scraper. I used a stainless steel egg turner. I have seen some fairly complex smelting set ups and I can say with certainty that it's not needed.

Yeah, this might be overkill.

I knew it'd be a day-long project (judging from other bloggers) so I set about early. I quickly settled into a rhythm: do a couple melts and pours, work some emails, do some more melts and pours, some lunch, an in depth discussion on a major work deliverable, melts and pours, and finally, relief. Part of the relief is that lead is heavy. It's quite a work out. It also took a few sessions to get into the rhythm and to understand how much to do at any one time. Smelt too much and you may not be able to control the pour. Smelt too little and you might be spending the better part of a week getting the requisite number of pounds.

I started with the centerboard with the eBay lead. I was surprised how well it melted. I set a timer for 6 minutes and it was melted in 4. By the way, melted lead is really pretty. Silky smooth, it looks like liquid mercury but more silvery. I'm on the lookout for one of those cast iron corn cob things so I can make lead weights from the leftover, as setting up the smelting stuff is a pain and while it's there might as well melt some more stuff.

Centerboard with one pour to go. Will add epoxy and sand smooth.

With the centerboard done, I set up the keel. That was a bit of a balancing act. I melted and poured the remaining of the nice eBay lead then started on the tire weights. Not sure what to expect, I got everything I thought and more. Wow, that stuff is nasty. If I could spell carcinogen I would. I'm not surprised people give up at this point and run out and buy $260 worth of pure lead shot but I think that's a bit of an overreaction. As long as this is done outside, away from delicate things like people and pets, and you're wearing a respirator and full safety gear, it's not so bad. It took around 10 pours to get the 90+ pounds of the keel aft section done. I did all of this at one time, but there's no reason for that, as the manual says. A technique I picked up towards the end was to skim the major dross off the top of the melt, then carefully add another handful of weights. With lead already melted, the new stuff melts pretty quickly and you've got an instant 2-3 pounds with very little extra work.

Lead will smoke and bubble when first poured. Smells like camping. The bubbles are to ensure the pour didn't disrupt the levels.

Finished keel nose block. This will be leveled with epoxy before the keelson gets attached.

The aft part of the keel about half-way poured. Took a break here for lunch. Notice the bow in the middle.

Omelette please. Bacon, sausage, and extra tire weight clips. The long weight in the middle was not lead after all.

First bucket (plus eBay stuff) done.

A few things to keep in mind if you're going to try this. Just to reiterate: you absolutely, 110%, must have a good, working respirator. The stuff that bubbles off spells cancer as it floats above the lead. You must also have good welder's gloves, eye wear, face shield, long pants, and long sleeves. There's no point in risking life and limb for this. Suit up and be diligent.

Another thing you may have noticed in one of the photos above is how the long length of the keelson looks a little squeezed from the clamps and landscape bricks. I didn't notice this when I was first poured, but only much later when I was about to secure the cap. It turned out I had a good 1/4" at least on both sides when the wood came back out, meaning I poured too little lead. A later post details this adventure.

An easy fix here, if these are the materials you have, would be to clamp a 2x4 or something similar the length of each side, then clamp on the landscape bricks. This will even out the pressure of the squeeze and won't collapse in the middle as I did here. Lesson learned!

I'm not wearing pants.

The lead pour is one of those things every PocketShip builder reads about and isn't sure it can be pulled off.  Experiences range from "worst ever" to "wasn't so bad" to "I smelt for fun". I'm towards the latter end of that. To say I enjoyed it would be a stretch. I think what I enjoyed more was the idea that I sourced these tire weights, sorted them, melted them, skimmed them, and they are now a permanent part of the boat. This means I can finally finish up the centerboard once and for all, and get the keel ready for the crate. I'm just about done with this phase of the build and it feels awesome!

The Runaround

The belly of the beast.

A few random things over the last couple days, nothing individually exciting, but not exactly boring, either. I called some tire shops in a last ditch effort to salvage some wheel weights and on the fifth call, someone said yes. All it takes is one, as they say. I hiked over there to a shady part of town (hence, the name of the tire shop will be Shady Tires) where a burly dude walked me to the back of the house and pointed to a metal drum with a very fancy "lead" sign painted on it. He asked what I was going to use it for and I said a sailboat. He said, that's pretty heavy for sailboat. Point, Shady Tire man. If I were indeed planning on putting a 30 gallon steel drum with 300 pounds of lead in the water with a sail on it, I suppose it wouldn't work very well as a sailboat. Good thing life jackets are on sale at the new West Marine.

Before anyone could change their mind, I asked if he would help me load it into the car. This car, by the way, is really a car. It's not even a very big car and at one time was considered a semi-luxury car. It's definitely not a truck or even a minivan. So into the passenger seat goes the barrel full of lead. I got into the driver's seat and said I'll bring the barrel back and drove away, dumb with luck.

Very fancy lettering for a lead barrel, no?

I got home and immediately began sorting the wheel weights. After five minutes, I was thinking eBay wasn't so bad. This is nasty, nasty business. I paused and wanted to really be sure what I was doing, so I went to my bookshelf and pulled down that particular volume of the Encylopedia Brittanica and turned to "identifying wheel weights". Oh, wait, that's what I would've done in 1984. Actually, what I would've been doing in 1984 was trying to hack my way into a blue box to make free long distance calls from one county in New Jersey to another. It definitely wouldn't be building a sailboat.

Who knew smelting could be so popular? There's a TON of information on smelting lead for bullets (or "boolits" as they say) including the pros and cons of different smelters, what happens if you get zinc in the mix, and how to use sand to extract the alloys. Google told me that melting lead is srs bsns in parts of the U.S. for making fishing weights and bullet casings. If one were to draw a Venn diagram and overlap those two populations, suffice to say it's the same family from West Virginia. I'm hiding behind these guys during the coming dystopia.

Best I can figure, my guesses were correct. As a quick primer on which wheel weights are lead and which aren't: if it has raised lettering and has any of the following on it, it's lead: AL followed by anything, P, MICRO, or MC. Anything else is likely not lead, especially those labeled Fe or Z for steel and zinc, respectively. Yes, I realize Fe is actually short for iron but I didn't make up the labeling standard. The small stickies can be lead or not lead and require further testing, which is generally by cutting into it with scissors or something similar. If you can make a dent in it, it's lead.

AL-MC is OK. FE is not, so says Jim Bob from WV.

My barrel didn't turn out to be quite 300 pounds, though. I managed to extract about 120 in wheel weights which when melted down will likely yield about 100 pounds of lead. That plus my eBay cache plus Chris' bucket will yield plenty for the keel pour but alas not enough for the ballast. After this week, if I'm able to do the lead pour, I might just be ready to pay someone a buck a pound for pure lead ingots.

With that sorted out (did you see what I did there?) I turned my attention to some boatbuilding. My wife was working late so I had a little extra time. I gouged a small notch for the boom on the boom gallows and sanded it down to 220 then put on a layer of epoxy. Oh. My. It looks awesome. The pictures don't do it justice. Another layer of epoxy tomorrow and then I can varnish it. It doesn't have any holes for the struts or the tie downs but I'll do that later when I'm sure the measurements are right. The recess is about 1/4" smaller than the pattern but I didn't want to cut into the white. I think the manual has a small veneer in place there and I've seen people do leather but I figured this was the least complicated way out, plus looks the most natural. I do want to research the leather option because this little groove is destined to take quite a beating.

Made the recess with the new belt sander.

Sanded to 220 then first epoxy layer. Looks awesome.

I also managed to get the roundover done on the centerboard trunk, made the little bit of timber between the keel nose block and centerboard trunk, attached the lead containment plywood to the centerboard, and glued down the aft part of the keel. I was going to do the rest of the glue up for the keel structure but it got to be about 12:30 and if I started I was looking at a 2:00 bed time. I actually have a ton of work to do tomorrow so need to be rested; the glue up can wait a little bit since once that's done it'll be the pour and that needs good weather. Did I mention it snowed today? We didn't get the 12 inches (yes, 12 inches) expected but it's pretty miserable outside. Perfect for some spars and perhaps the tiller or rudder or any of the various other mini-projects that this build requires. But I'm really itching to start some stitching.

Once again, little bits of timber taking way too long to make. I knicked off the top 1/3 (flush with the point) to be sure I got enough lead volume in here. For anyone keeping score, this angle is 55 deg.

Roundover on centerboard trunk. This is HIGHLY visible in the cabin and in fact is the spot right up on the floorboards. This has to look good or else I'll stare at it and weep every time I'm about to go to sleep.

Screws on the lead backer.

Part of the reason I didn't finish the glue up is I wouldn't have enough clamps for it.

Update several months later: Notice a mistake. The keel blocking runs up to the edge of the keel board. This should be 1/2" from the top to allow for the cap.

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.