Companion Way Blues

While most of my companionway work was done between other work, I thought it best to present this as a category unto itself.  Much like the age-old corporate argument of whether or not to organize your minions by geography (North America vs. Europe), product (Widgets vs. Bludgets), or functional group (Marketing vs. Finance), I've decided to pull all of my companionway work together -- until next week when we can fire Mark from Marketing.

Last left, the companionway had just been cut from patterns supplied by CLC*.  This went swimmingly, and before long I had all 10 sides plus a couple handles cut from random bits of padauk, marine plywood, and pine.

One thing I'll share is that I really had no idea how this was going to work.  The plans didn't make this out to be a big deal, but being unfamiliar with the carpentry involved, I thought this was way more complicated than it turned out to be.  So like anything that's a bit of a challenge, I procrastinated as long as possible.  I think the manual has this done before the first flip.  Out of excuses, it was time to buckle down and do this.

Before assembly, I put in a couple blocks towards the forward part of the side planks.  I'm not sure what the use of this is as the slide still goes pretty far forward so this little bit doesn't really stop it from going anywhere.  Nevertheless, blocked up they are. This was allowed to cure and then sanded back smooth.

 

I then scored the forward part of the companionway hood.  This is a much larger piece than it looked with just an eyeball.  It crosses 2/3 of the entire cabin and stops just as few inches from the dorade cowls.  The rake, too, wasn't easy to get right.  All four sides angle in some way.  The method here was similar to what I did for the floorboards: a rough cut, then small shaves with the sander until it fit.  Getting this to fit right took the longest of any part of the companionway build.  Eventually I was satisfied with it.  The long, thin board here is holding it in place.

With all four sides cut, it was then time for the assembly.  It was a bit of a pain to be sure everything was square.  Other bloggers and I believe even CLC screwed the companionway sides onto board to keep things square.  I think that works if you're going to fill the holes and paint over them, but I was (and still am) planning to keep the sides bright so holes would not do.

To solve that, I built a small brace out of scrap wood and then clamped this between the two long ends of the hood.  (While the photo below is much later, you can see the brace to the left of the photo.)  This worked really well to stabilize the wobble but still allowed adjustments if needed, unlike a couple screws.  Most importantly, there are no holes in the hood so I can keep that smooth finish.

It's a little hard to see in the photo but it's basically just a stick screwed onto two flat boards, each about the size of a playing card.  This little contraption was then clamped onto the aft ends of the hood.

While the hood cured, I put together the slide.  Small 90 degree blocks were used in each corner to stay square.  Note the marine plywood forward and aft.  While this is definitely thinner than the 1/4" it calls for in the plans, there aren't any structural issues, and as I find out later, it's good to have a small profile here just in case things don't quite fit.

Before fitting the cover, I brought the slide over to the boat for a test.  Worked well enough.

And then brought the hood over with the slide between.  For the first time, I saw how it all fit together.  It was snug but workable.  To help with the action, I ordered some graphite to mix in with the epoxy for the slides, especially the sills.

 

In thinking about the "roof" of the cabin, I always thought it would be neat to have some art 'glassed into companionway slide. Lying down right before sleep, this is one of the last things I'd see. I spent too long online looking for the right design.  Nothing really caught my eye.  I finally settled on one of those olde thyme maps, and in fact I ordered a small poster, but it wasn't going to get to the house for another few weeks, so that wasn't going to work.  That afternoon, while going fabric shopping with my wife -- I'd spent so much time in the garage lately I felt a little guilty -- I found it:  a southern sky star chart.

It's not a perfect fit, and I later learned that the white fabric picks up the red of the padauk too much, turning the southern sky into a decided shade of pink, but it's good enough. I give myself an A for the idea and a B for execution, which is a high water mark.

The legs of each of these (hood and slide) need to be angled to accept the rake of the "ceiling."  This was short work with the belt sander, though utmost care is needed so as not to take too much off.  The hoods for both pieces are part of the kit and overhang the sides on purpose.  This is to allow for some tolerance in the build.  This tops went on pretty easily with some careful pre-drilling and then wood screws which were removed once cured.  You need to epoxy the handle on at the same time as this helps set the curve, though it wasn't until much later that I discovered I put the handle facing the wrong way.  I get that this is one of those things no one is going to notice but me, but I'll notice this every single time I open the hood.  Sigh.

 Once cured, a quick run with the router cleaned up the edges.

  

There was a lot of squeeze out on the inside of this, so much so that I put it aside for a couple days as I couldn't bear to sand any more.  I'd exhausted all of the other side projects I could think of (at least the ones I was willing to do, as cleaning up this squeeze out ranked still-higher than sanding the paint off the cockpit decking -- more on that later.)

Finally it was time for some 'glass.  The 'glass lays evenly across the top and then down about an inch off the bottom of the side.  There are a couple darts cut into this so it also lays forward (the rear of the hood) and in front.  I was able to get this over the handle and down, so I feel pretty good about the strength here.

 

Something told me I should only do the top of the hood so that's all I did at first, and I'm glad I listened to my intuition.  While everything seemed to be measured well, each additional layer of epoxy under the hood meant a wider and wider diameter for the part.  When this finished curing, I found I wasn't able to slide anymore as the top of the slide was hitting up against the forward port corner of the hood.

The only way I was able to fix it was to sand through a couple layers of plywood in the hood to free up enough material so the slide could slide.  I also took off a layer on the slide itself.  Finally, after a LOT of wrangling, I was able to get the slide to slide under the hood with very little resistance.

None of this will be visible and there is definitely a small structural component lost by the thinner plywood.  However, a set of solar panels will be here and no one should be stepping on this so I think it'll be OK.

You can also see the black of the graphite + epoxy on the sills.  This is also in the area where the slide rests on the deck.  I didn't think it would be this dark; it throws off the aesthetic.  I'll have to clean this up before final presentation and I'm not exactly sure what this will look like yet.

 

 

* I eventually found those patterns I thought I'd lost long ago.  At hole 14 on a golf course here in Muscat, I couldn't wedge my pitching wedge back in my golf bag.  I looked in and there were the rolled up, slightly musty plans.  These must've been here since I packed for Nigeria in late 2014, and let's just say there wasn't much golf to be had in Nigeria.  I've no idea why I thought that was a good place for them, and who knows why I thought I'd remember where I put them.

Timber!

Today I hit a trifecta.  I've been searching for timber for the spars on and off for about 7 years now and today I got exactly the wood I wanted.  Well, not exactly-exactly as I'll have to whittle what I got down to spec but I'm thrilled with it all, especially the bowsprit piece. I tend to avoid naming places, but I got these over at Menard's which has a decent lumberyard in the back behind the moulding area. This pile has the chunk for the bowsprit, the four sides of the mast, and the unfinished yard/gaff and boom.

The bowspirt is a 4 x 4 x 12 chunk of beautiful, clear of Douglas fir, shockingly free of knots along the length and solid all around.  This is especially great as it means I don't have to laminate this up and then cut back down.  Of course if I cut it there may be a knot lurking below but upon inspection I don't see anything that would cause any trouble.

The boom, too, was sourced as a clear 5/4 x 6 x 12' of Select Pine.  This cut in half and epoxy'd together is near perfect.  And then the yard/gaff is a solid piece of 5/4 x 4 x 12', too.  This will be about 18 inches longer than the plans call for as it falls into the cockpit otherwise.  One wayward gaff knocked out a PocketShip skipper for a few seconds.  True story.

Careful readers will note that 5/4 is not the same as 1 inch.  I don't have a planer and will accept the extra 5/32 of width.  1/8 inches of wood, 3 inches wide, 12 feet long, is the same weight as a four cubic inches of wood.  Weight won't be a problem and neither will working the lines, so I'm calling that good and moving on.

This last piece of the puzzle means I have all of the major pieces in a rush to get this done by early October.  The sails will be here this week, the trailer is waiting for the keel bunk to be installed, the sailing hardware is on order, and I have all of the timber, lines, and paint needed to make a push.  I might be able to get on the water for a few days just before leaving.  That would be amazing but the amount of work still left to do is daunting.

Re-sand, Re-paint, Re-pair

The second coat of primer had just barely dried when I reached for the final bottom coat.  I was moving along well and was excited to get the bottom done before moving to the topsides.

However, I couldn't shake something about the bottom paint so I went back to the PocketShip manual and the paint specs and realized I'd put topcoat primer, not bottom coat primer, below the waterline.  Big deal?  Wasn't sure.

A couple hours of research later definitely said yes, it's a big deal.  Not only would the water and rough stuff eventually wear its way through, but the actual bottom coat would not stick well to the topcoat primer.  The only thing to do was to sand it all off and reapply the proper bottom coat primer.  The level of defeat I felt was not good so I let it sit this way for a couple days and didn't even open the garage.

When I finally did, I decided to ignore the bottom and move to the topsides.  The grey primer went on quickly and looks good.  Most importantly, it was the right paint for the right job.  Once the topsides primer dried, it was time to get sanding.  So I pulled up my big boy pants, fired up a podcast (or 12) and sanded away about $50 of paint and a million dollars of hubris.  I only have bits of the keel to go before I wash this down and put the proper paint on.

Speaking of proper paint, here is the lineup I was planning to use.  I took this photo just before heading to the Marine Store so I knew which paint to get.

 

 

 

When I got to the Marine Store, like many other stores out there, they were really, really down on inventory and didn't have Ocean Blue, the color I chose for my boat. This color, I was told, would need to be special-ordered and take 2-4 weeks to get to the store.  In fact, this color was normally not in stock and I would need to special-order it every time.  He then helpfully said that Dark Blue is almost always in stock and they replenish that one regularly.

 

Faced with these choices, I decided to make a change to the color.  So, welcome to Dark Blue -- which is incidentally the same color as PocketShip #1.  I wanted a brighter blue but there wasn't really an option if I wanted to make progress.  The other in-stock options were black and red.  I had the red in my hand and decided with the tanbark sail I ordered, it wouldn't look great.  Black would've been interesting but I thought too dark for such a small, perky boat.  It would be like a goth cheerleader; too much of a disconnect.

 

While there, I also picked up West System epoxy and a set of epoxy pumps.  The pumps alone were almost reason enough to switch from MAS to West (MAS still isn't shipping with pumps due to a "global pump shortage.")  West was also about $75 cheaper for an equivalent volume including the price difference and saving on shipping.  In the end, it paid for the wasted primer and contributed a bit towards the right one.

Hoping to get this painting done this weekend and get it on the trailer I just purchased.  Yes, that happened.

Road to Painting

Sanding the world's largest small boat was no fun but it's done, and I'll leave it at that.  With that chore behind me (for now -- I know I have all the top layers still to do) I turned my attention to painting.  This was something I'd been looking forward to for a long time and was excited to get started, which translates to staring at the boat for long hours thinking about how to pull off this next major phase of the build.

 

The first thing I needed to do was to ensure the boat was still level after all that sanding, including hours of sitting on the hull.  Here's a leveler that shows pretty flat but not exactly flat.  Will this cause an issue?  I don't know.  I couldn't see where to fix it so I called it good and made myself aware of a possible correction later.

At least the transom seemed to be straight up and down and left and right.  (I purchased a laser leveler for $40 from a Big Online Company) as well as a tripod for it to sit upon.

Like many builders before, I used the leveler to trace a line in pencil around the boat.  This is where the line from the topsides crosses the chine into the bottom half of the hull.  Part art, part science, I decided to use the "lower line" here for painting.  You can see the faint red line from laser to the left of this photo.

I noticed that somehow the line I was tracing on the starboard hull was a little lower than the line I traced on the port side.  I think it's "heeling over" just a couple degrees so my line wasn't quite even?  Not sure.  It was straight, just maybe a half inch or so lower all across the hull.  That implies that the correction would be half the variance on one side negative and half on the other positive.

I decided to check this by hanging a ruler off the chine and marking the hull where the line would be and sure enough it was consistently lower.

 

So I marked off from the bow every foot or so and wrote down the distances for confirmation, then transferred those measurements to the other side and confirmed again with the laser.  I didn't bother with the "half here half there" math and just applied the full variance.

 

As precise as I wanted to be, the reality was anything within a quarter inch or so would be acceptable and anything better than that would be fantastic.  So writing "7/16" and "9/16" and then accurately transferring that to the hull was aspirational at best.

 

By eye, I laid down some frogtape for the curve at the transom.  I'm going to mirror PocketShip #1's design here by having a "boot strap" run around the waterline.  I used a sheet of paper to trace the curve of the tape, cut this out, and transposed and then transferred the curve to the other side for a match.  

 

 

 

I am glossing over this process a bit.  In reality, it took a couple days, a couple hours each time, and a lot of frog tape to finally satisfy my OCD.  Some builders simply painted to the corner and called it a day.  I don't know why I can't be some builders sometimes.  All I can do now is pray that I don't embarrass myself by having a wavy, uneven waterline. 

 

But before painting, I had to re-open the centerboard slot, a task I'd been avoiding.  Sitting on the hull, using some combination of box cutter, pliers, and the random orbital, this was a bit of a bear and caused quite the mess.  I briefly regretted putting so much 'glass here as I was cutting through it, but eventually appreciated that this is one strong boat.  There is a lot of angst over keel damage and many builders have reinforced this area with epoxy'd rope, graphite, and Kevlar.  I went with traditional 'glass -- just a lot of it.

One thing I wasn't ready for was the amount of stuff that fell into the slot -- bits of 'glass and sanded 'glass and whatever else had accumulated in the garage over the years.  I might have to fashion a vacuum hose to get down there, or alternatively, I can try to blow it out.  I can reach the very bottom of it through the inspection plates on the centerboard trunk but I can't reach the "shelf" as it sits now.  If I let it go like this I'm guaranteed a jam so I'll have to figure out a way to get in there.

I also noticed that while taking this down to a "grey matte finish" I went through a bit too far here and there.  So, again, out came the epoxy!  This is actually serious business to get this right as at least one PocketShip suffered some water damage at the centerboard slot because of sanding through to bare wood.  The swelling of the wood caused the centerboard to jam and that's not an experience I'd like to repeat.

 

After waiting for that to cure and then sanded down again, out came the painting supplies -- finally.

And came up with this --

 

The pictures are way better than the actual painting project.  This was just primer, after all, soon to be covered in "Shark Grey" anti-fouling paint, but it's still pretty great to get to this point.  Over the next couple days I'll have to source a trailer and some more primer, but for now I'll call it a day!

Sandy Bottoms

The last few days have been a blur with many lost hours sanding and re-sanding this enormous boat.  There hasn't been much of an update on this because the incremental progress doesn't translate well to photos or writing or mental health.

Since the big fiberglass episode of 2020, I've sanded the whole hull down to a dull grey, as described.  The manual describes "a full day" could be dedicated to sanding the hull, but it was really more than a week, 2-3 hours a session.  I simply don't have the stamina or the patience to dedicate more than that.  But it got done partly with the help of podcasts.

As a side note, I never really got into podcasts.  I'm the perfect demographic for it, but as a hyper-visual learner, the idea of listening instead of reading never really appealed to me.  Faced with the hours-long choice of the shopvac or the dulcet tones of a journalist or storyteller and maybe learning something, I opted for the latter.

I started with Serial: Season One (the one that really started it all); NASA We Have a Podcast; 1619; The Sultanate (a podcast from an expat in Oman where I will be moving this fall); Every Little Thing; and a couple others.  It really makes the sanding just a bit more enjoyable, and I feel like I've entered a new realm of cultural awareness.  Don't get me wrong -- sanding still sucks, and I'm not listening to podcasts when I'm not sanding, but it is a much better enterprise.  To put the hours in perspective, I finished Serial: Season One and at least a couple dozen sessions of the others during this sanding effort.  Gird your loins, fellas!

Here's the start of it with about a third of one side done sanded down.  This took about 3 hours.  I used 80 grit to get the first stuff down and went over it again with 120 where needed.

 

After awhile, I moved to the topsides and got as far as this before putting down the Bosch and thinking about actually sailing.

Luckily, Chris, a fellow PocketShip builder who lives in the area asked if I wanted to go for a run.  And how!  So after a couple scheduling stops and starts, we were off on a spirited day on Lake Waconia, getting back just ahead of sunset, but not after a great dinner at a lakeside restaurant.

I promised not to pepper Chris with too many questions, but I was just getting back into the flow of things and needed answers.  He was more than happy to oblige, as always, and I'm grateful to call him a friend and source of motivation.  His boat still looks amazing after almost 10 years.

I still had the beast in the garage to deal with, along with a couple logistical problems.  The first was to deal with the various layers.  While sanding, these layers become exposed as lines which are actually small depressions where two layers meet up.  It can be difficult to sand these down well because it's easy to burn too deeply through a layer of glass.  I knew this would be the tradeoff between a horizontal 'glassing job (where you take the 'glass and spread it aft-forward instead of across the beam) so I wasn't surprised to see it.  There's also a risk that the painting will not be entirely uniform over these areas.  Time will tell.

One area that did surprise me was this fenced area on the port side.  For some reason the epoxy here was really light.  A quick rub with the sander exposed fiberglass layers and a sheen underneath.  I can only conclude that I didn't apply a second or third layer here -- and this was only really discovered after sanding it down a bit.

So, out came the epoxy and a couple wasted hours!  This of course needed to be sanded down again, along with a couple small patches because why not.

Meanwhile, I was thinking about how to level the keel.  It's kind of tough to see from the above photo but I spent a couple days figuring this out.  I have a much bigger garage than I did when I started this (I literally moved next door a few years ago) but a much smaller house.  That meant stuff wound up in the garage and in practice my workspace is much smaller.

 

I used a couple small 2-ton jacks and jackstands I was going to return to Amazon to flatten the keel.  The tradeoff was I couldn't use the furniture dollies as I couldn't get the bow high enough to level it out.  After a few hours over a couple days, here is the result:

The angle of the photo is actually a bit off.  The middle bubble is centered and the boat lies flat.  The photo reminds me of a little spaceship hovering over the grey landscape of a moon.  Of course, just after this photo, I bumped the keel and the spaceship fell off and disappeared into the garage.  I still haven't found it.  Whatever.  Onto painting!

Step Back and Admire Your Nearly Completed Hull - Again

I've used this title before, way back when I'd just completed stitching the hull together.  It's hard to believe we're pushing 7 years ago at this point but who's counting.

I finished up my third week of training today and am full up on government fiscal data codes.  The joys of 500-19___y1130000-WHA-5789-5789yy310001-2112-3124!  Luckily I had help on the exam today.  Meet Twix, my familiar.  Working from home isn't too bad.

In between bouts of 'glass I'm trying to get my garage in order.  We have a relative who rents from us who by and large keeps the house in great condition but the garage is just an overflow of... I'm not really sure what's in there.  So after a visit to a big box store who gladly accepted my $200, plus 3 hours of finger-breaking work, I got some shelving units to try to organize this insanity.

That's the easy part.  The hard part will be to actually downsize this stuff through any means necessary.  And of course there's still the other 3 corners of the garage to deal with here.

Speaking of corners, I sized out the 6oz 'glass that'll run along the chine.  This lays over a well-cured 4oz section.  One issue I didn't anticipate is the 6oz doesn't really cover up a lot.  It's only about 4 inches wide and only about 3.5" of that is usable.  Throw down some frog tape as a border and you're basically at 2.5" which is barely enough to do anything.  Yes, size matters!

It took a lot of finesse to get this right, more than I expected, which is par for the course by now.  I was also surprised how much epoxy the 6oz took over the 4oz.  It's easily double, maybe even triple the amount, to fully get this down.

That's a little cause for concern as I'm running through my MAS epoxy pretty quickly and I really, really don't want to spend more money on more epoxy.  Not only do I still have to do the transom, I still have to "fill the weave" for the entire hull and the cockpit.  But I really don't have a choice as I want a strong, secure boat, and the best way to do that is to add reasonable 'glass where it's needed most.

Speaking of reinforcements, here's another section, another 3 feet or so.   I'd originally planned to run one long, continuous chine but it will be far easier to do this in small sections over time.  There will be a small area of about 4 inches along the chine which will not have 4 layers, just 3, but I'll call that OK.  (Note: the 4 layers are from overlapping 'glass during the initial 'glassing, plus the chine reinforcement, plus the 6oz strip.)  I had this prepped to take any extra epoxy after finishing up the bow.

What's that?  Finishing the bow?  Indeed -- behold, the last of the big 'glassworks!  (minus that annoying triangular area again.)

It really is the last of it as any 'glass from here will be touchup work and wherever I need or want some extra reinforcements.  Of course this isn't the last 'glass I'll do.  It's a wooden boat after all, so I expect to do a lot as long as I own the thing.  But no more 24 square feet to wet out before my cup melts in my hand.

The Slog -- 'glassing the hull (again)

Another late night in the garage, but not exactly because of boatbuilding.  I got started late as we had some friends over and figured I should sober up before handling gallons of epoxy.  GUI ('glassing under the influence) is a big no no though not necessarily illegal.

Luckily, before imbibing, I cut out the 12" lengths that'll run along the chine as reinforcements and set them aside. 

A test showed a decent fit, so down went the frog tape.

Much later, I cut then laid out the 'glass for the forward section of the hull.  This defeated me last time so I was not going to repeat the same mistakes.  Instead of trying to finagle a bad epoxy job by the keel nose, I cut a lot of the 'glass away and will deal with it later.  This shows the layup before the surgery where I removed the triangle area.

About an hour later, here is the finished product.  Note the small touchup square a little south of the main part.  There are a few of these low spots I'm fixing as I find them.

The main side looks sleek in the garage light.

Here is the area I'll try to tackle in the next day or so.  Just forward of the new stuff is the triangular patch I'll have to rework as the 'glass won't reach from the bow here.  It's due to the geometry of the hull and people far smarter than me can probably figure out the math.  I just know it doesn't fit.

This is the keel nose where I cut away the 'glass and did not run it up the sides, but I wound up epoxying down some tape.  Luckily, I've done this a few times before and can deal with it by now.

A very (very) light crisscross score with a knife on cured epoxy will cause breaks in the right place.  Then if you put the blade underneath and lift, you can get most of this up without affecting the work underneath.  I sanded this down by hand rather than using the power tool.

So, another section done but I'm feeling the slog, mostly because I know what's next:  lift the tape, sand, and do it again.  And again.  And a few more times and maybe -- just maybe -- it'll be ready for the next big step.