Sundry Shopping v1 - Trailer Purchase

Usually late at night, when everyone's asleep and I'm done with my homework, I look for things to buy for my unfinished boat.  It doesn't matter how much I'd spent just hours before, or how many boxes are due to arrive.  I look.  Sometimes, it's stuff I really don't need, like stainless steel cowls (price: $200 each).  Or, maybe something I'd like but will put off for a bit, like an inflatable raft.  Or something I really do need, like plastic cowls (price: $22 each).  I'm pleased to report that I've solved a major problem yesterday.

Behold, my trailer, a Karavan KKB 17 1800', purchased from a local shop.

They had it in stock and agreed to hold it for me until I was ready to use it.  It's similar to the EZL80B that some owners bought and its specs are in line with the custom Trailex model.  I tried to get West Coast Trailers to build me the same one that a fellow builder got, but the guy couldn't be bothered to return my phone calls despite me begging for him to take my money.  One time, the WCT guy couldn't take my call because he was busy negotiating a new lease.  If he agreed to build my trailer he might be in a better position to negotiate.  So, no -- don't use West Coast Trailers.  Once I'm done with the painting and able to clear the garage a bit, I'll call some friends over for a Boat Flippin' Party, Part 2, and put it on the trailer for good where it'll sit until I finish the build.

But let me tell a little story about how I got to this point.  You see, I'd spent the better part of two weeks and dozens of hours researching, calling, and visiting trailer folks without much luck.  The problem is PocketShip is a strangely shaped boat.  It has a keel, but not much of one.  It's short, but wider than its length would suggest.  It's heavy (relative to its size) and tall.  So a narrow, long trailer doesn't work, nor does a short, wide one.  It can't fit it onto a personal watercraft trailer and anything that fits a bigger boat uses a much bigger trailer (like 20 feet long).  I really like that it's just over 17' end to end and the swing tongue brings it down to 15' for storage.

I'll need to add a keel trough (I can't put a roller forward as it doesn't have a long enough support bar there) but otherwise it's decent.  Just a tad wider, heavier, and shorter than the Trailex trailer, it's also about $1,500 less -- and that's a lot of dough!  Not to mention I don't have to put it together.

Speaking of dough, Doordash dropped these off today:

 

 

A sweet suite of donuts for an early birthday present from a friend of the family.  Things are looking up.

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!

Transom Fiberglass Fun

The book states (paraphrasing) that when you're 'glassing the transom, the end is in sight.  Well, behold my end!  This one is a bit darker though not any less shiny. 

I plan to keep this bright except for some trim around the edges.  The trim will be about the width of the rub rails all around.  I wish I could keep the whole thing bright but I had to glob up some filler for some of the corners at the transom skirt back in the day.  The rest of it is really pretty.  I think it's sapele if I remember right, real wood not the marine ply, so its rich hues shine through.  I've been researching marine decal makers so we'll see how that goes.

It does feel pretty good to get this done as I wasn't sure how to pull this off, given the transom has been sitting on a couple tires for about 5 years with nothing supporting it otherwise.  So, a visit to a generic hardware store and $40 later got me two small jacks which I used to lift the end enough to gain access to the transom skirt.  I used a couple small boards of padauk to protect the boat from the jack.  They're also both on furniture dollies so I can move the boat around if needed.

As I write that last sentence, I have glossed over the sheer terror I felt when I was underneath this 1,000lb object with nothing supporting it except the two generic jacks.  An inadvertent kick and I'd be a pancake, or at least trapped in the cockpit.  No kidding -- I checked to be sure I had my phone just in case.  I think I'll visit a big box store tomorrow to get a couple cinderblocks for more permanent and safer support.

But with the boat off the ground I also noticed a potential problem.  Years ago, I fixed a mis-measure at the companionway entrance, and right in the same spot where it's been sitting on a tire for awhile the entrance is bowed a bit, bending in towards the cabin.  I'm not sure how I'd go about fixing this;  I'm hoping that now that it's relieved of pressure it'll reshape itself.  It's not that bad, but it's noticeable, at least to my eye.  Nothing I can do about it now except to continue with the bottoms up part of the build.  When I re-flip it I'll be able to see how bad it is.  In the meantime, the support point is now the anchor locker which is a far better place for it to be.

With no way to fix that, I went ahead and did the transom.  I was able to get some 'glass on the transom skirt at the same time, bringing the 'glass around the bend a few inches up.  This wasn't easy to do and I almost regretted the effort as I could've just stopped at the bend and sanded it clean later.  But I figured I'd give it a try.  I had to cut a small dart right in the  middle but otherwise it wasn't too bad and it'll be a good strong joint when I double this up on the flip.  I was also able to double up on the sides, too, and got those down.  Without breaking my arm too much, I've got the 'glass thing down pretty well by now -- just in time not to ever have to do it again.

With some extra epoxy on the cup, I also dropped a couple strips of 6oz 'glass where the transom meets the bottom of the hull.  I'll add a couple strips on either side of those once they cure.  I was also able to finish most of the reinforcements around the chine, keel, and bow.  Here's a section where two bits of 6oz 'glass meet.  There's another 4 layers of 4oz 'glass underneath this so I feel pretty good about the strength here.  Except for maybe a bulky look when painting I don't think you can go wrong with too many reinforcements.

One challenge I had with all the thin strips of 6oz 'glass was figuring out how to lay the frog tape as I couldn't get the width just right as the keel and everything else changes shape over its length.  I was eyeballing it most of the time and then realized that I could just use a small bit of it and have an actual size template against which to place the tape.  Wow, wish I noticed that earlier as it would've saved a few yards of tape.  So now I can just run this little guy along the tape and see if I sized it right.

I'm aiming to get all the 'glass work done in a couple days so I can start with the epoxy layers, but I'll need more epoxy to do that, so CLC gets my credit card again.  Pouring money into a boat I may not even get to sail is really depressing!