So it’s been a while since my last post. Well a lot has happened. In the last post I had started planeing and faring the hull getting it ready to fiberglass. This took a lot longer then I thought it was going to as, once again, I really didn't know if I was doing it right. Well, I did it right, at least for my first time. Fairing the hull (taking out any dips and hollows) involves a lot of sanding, spreading fairing putty (a mixture of epoxy and a special filler), sanding some more and repeating this process several times. I finally got it as good as I was going to and was ready to glass.





And... last Saturday was a good day. My friend John and I (mostly John) fiber glassed the first hull. It took about three hours and went really smooth. To do this we first spread a very thin coat of epoxy to seal the wood then laid the glass on the hull and cut the cloth to the size we needed. The glass cloth is a weave which we needed to lay on a 45 degree angle to the center line of the boat allowing for maximum strength. In doing this we used 3-4 pieces of cloth overlapping by about 1 inch. After the cloth was cut and positioned we rolled back the overlap and began spreading epoxy on the first section. Again this is a very thin coat of epoxy, just enough to wet the cloth and make it stick to the hull. We repeated this process for all the pieces until it was covered.

Since Saturday I have rolled one two more coats of epoxy to eliminate the texture of the cloth and I am now ready to pull the first hull off the mold. Finally! Then I get to repeat the process again for the second hull. Hopefully, since I know how to do it now, it will go a lot quicker.

So... tomorrow I am planning on pulling the hull off and placing it in the holding jig. This is a "table" of sorts with a hole cut in it in the plan view (looking down onto the top of the hull) shape of the hull. This will hold the hull as I glass the inside and lay in all of the internal structure of the hull.

I hope to have pics of the hull coming of Monday.

Finally, work on the actual form of the boat has begun!!!!








Since my last post I have covered the mold with plastic preventing it and the hull from becoming permanently attached. Then the side panels were stapled in place. Throughout the entire process staples are used temporarily to hold the panels and strips of wood in place while the glue dries. Then the stem piece was glued in place. This is a 4" wide wedge of wood running from the keel to the sheer (where the deck and the hull come together). this gives the bow some good strength. Once that was in my friend Ian came over and helped me start stripping the hull. This turns out to be a pretty easy job as the strips fall nicely in place. Where they meet at the bow was a bit tough, but not too bad. Though I don't have photos of it I have removed the staples and have started planning the hull to smooth it out. The next few steps in this project is to finish smoothing and fairing (making sure there are no hollows or humps) the hull, wrap it with a layer of 4 ounce fiberglass, pull it off the mold and set it into the holding jig where I will put in all of the internal structure.

Well things are moving along. I did get the side panels cut and shaped on Saturday July 01 as I hoped but haven't done too much since then. I have to say that this was a rather scary part of the process. I have already thrown way a large chunk of money in the failed first attempt at this boat and could have thrown the same away if I cut these panels wrong. They say measure twice cut once, for me it was measure 10-20 times cut once and measure again just to make sure even though it would have done no good.


Cutting these panels was actually pretty easy. The shape of the panels had to follow the tangent line between the rounded hull bottom and the flat hull sides, which is not a straight line. If you look back at the previous post and the last photo it shows a blue line and a red line. It is the red line that I need to transcribe onto the panels. To do this I measured every couple of feet from the blue line to the red line and marked those on the panels. Then I took a 19 foot baton that I made and bent it to lay through the points that I measured giving me and edge to draw a line through.



After the line was scribed I removed the baton and eyeball cut with a jig saw about 1/8 inch away from the line. This just removed the mass of material near the line so I could use my router to finish it. When the rough cut was done I replace the baton and used it a router guide to finish the cut and make it clean. Then I need to cut the other side (which would be the top of the hull). After talking with John and his son Ian, who has sailed this boat and many others, we decided that the freeboard (vertical height) of this hull could be lowered by two inches. So I measure two inches up from my base line and repeated the same process as I did for the first cut.



So the panels are now cut and ready to put on the mold. I did a test fit the other day and everything is coming together nicely. I still have a few things left to do on the mold before I wrap it with plastic and begin the actual hull construction.

The next step....I first need to make a wedge of wood to fill in the bow of the boat giving it a nice solid edge. This will allow me to round the bow and give it more strength. When that is done I can wrap the mold in plastic sheet. This is so when I glue things up they don't become permanently attached to the mold. That would just suck! Then it’s off to fitting the side panels for the last time and begin gluing in the redwood strips.

Well it’s been a couple of weeks since my intro post and I have made some decent progress on the boat. It has taken longer then I hoped but things come up and I can't always get to it when I want.

The first step is to make a form over which the hulls will be built. In my case this step was a bit easier as my friend John Lindahl is letting me borrow his old vacuum bag hull mold. This is nice as I know this mold is fair (no hollow areas). I still need to modify it, however, as it was made for a 1/2 inch thick hull and mine is only 1/4 inch. The difference in thickness is due to a different construction technique. The other reason to modify it is to create a wider transom. This mold is for a 5 1/2 inch transom and I need about 8" transom to help displace my weight better.






To make the transom wider I had to cut a new transom board (the transom, by the way, is the back of the boat), which you can see in the first image. From this same image you can see the battens (the long strips of wood) and the gap between them and the hull until you get to about the middle. This gap had to be taken up by creating two rings about 1 - 2 feet apart, shown in the second and third image. The second image shows the battens better which also told me how thick to make the rings and keep them fair.

Making the rest of the mold wider was relatively easy by adhering long strips of 2 inch wide by 1/4 inch thick ply-wood running lengthwise on the hull sides, and every foot or so wrapping the rounded hull bottom with 3/4" wide by 1/4 thick pieces of wood as shown is the fourth image. The fifth image shows the battens again and how they fair from the modified transom to the rest of the hull.







The second step in the process is to create the hull side panels. These panels need to be 18 feet long and made out of 2-2 foot by 8 foot panels and 1-4 foot by 2 foot panel. To do this I have to use a process called scarfing. This is beveling the edge and gluing opposing bevels together. The bevel provides a large enough surface area to glue both panels together. To scarf them I lay up to 5 panels together about an inch apart and hand plane them down and finishing with an orbital sander. To glue them I use a two part epoxy and clamp them by screwing them between two boards. When the panels are assembled I need to cut them to shape a specific shape shown by the blue and red line in the last image. This line is created by measuring from the blue line up to the red line and those dimensions transcribed on to the 18 foot panels. Hopefully I will have that done this Saturday July 01. We shall see it that happens.

Ok, a little background about me and my boat building. I am an industrial designer (product design and development) working for a small design consultant in Holland Michigan. The majority of products we design happen to be boats. This is not necessarily where my joy of boat building comes from, though it does have some influence. My joy in building them comes from wanting a project to work on and needing one that is unique. So my first project was a '17 Chesapeake Light Craft kayak. I finished that about two years ago. After a year I was bored again and needed a new project. Over the past couple of years I was introduced to sailing through my cousin and fell in love with it. So the progression leads to building a sailboat. Throughout building the kayak I had help from a friend who used to build hull and deck plugs (boat terminology, sorry there will be a lot) for the same company I work for now. He, in the past had build several catamarans and suggested I give that a try.

So, last summer I started on my first attempt of building my "A" cat (an "A" class catamaran is '18 long, 7'6 1/2" wide multihull sailboat with 150 square feet of sail. I will be adding links to "A" cat websites soon for those who want to see a complete version of what I am building). My friend, John, told me of three techniques for building the cat. The first is a "stitch and glue" process. this involves joining two flat panels (cut to specific shapes) at the keel (boat term) with plastic zip ties, gluing them together with epoxy and fiberglass tape, then folding them into shape (see photos). The second is strip build, using cedar strips that are 3/4 x 1/4, and lay them together over a form. The third is vacuum bagging. This is a light weight construction of very thin ply-wood with a honeycomb core. It’s then laid over a form and a plastic bag is slipped over it, sealed and the air sucked out of it. I chose to use the stitch and glue method for the first attempt.






The first hull of the first attempt went ok with a minor problem after folding the hull up. I managed to crack the transom (boat term again). This was pretty easy to fix in the end using some epoxy mixed with some filler and sanded to shape. The second hull, however, did not fair so well. While folding it into shape I managed to put a 9 foot crack down the middle. That makes it kind of difficult to sail. This happened in the fall at which point I needed to clean things up as the family, who was letting me use a portion of their barn needed it to store their own boat for the winter.


It is now spring, I just bought a new house with a huge garage (yes I had the boat in mind while looking at houses) and I'm ready for the second attempt. This time I'm using a modified version of the strip build method. The hull sides will be made up of 4mm Okume ply-wood while the rounded hull bottom will be the strips. This will be a bit easier in construction and certainly less stress on the wood.