Nope, that's NOT a re-run from last February. :P
I've pretty much tried to keep progress reports based on the month and sometimes, with a letter suffix denoting multiple reports in a month.
Since I'm starting into the second year of this project, the first number will be the year, second number the month and then letter suffixes as required.
And I hope I NEVER get to #3-1, #4-1 etc.!! :o
So what do you do when it's too cold outside to put epoxy on the hull, or to paint outside? ???
Work on wood projects that you can do in the garage!! :D
These are going to be dead lights for the cabin sides, an inside ring and an outside ring to hold a round piece of Plexiglass captive.
I originally considered finishing them bright, but in my aging years, I'd much prefer going sailing to varnishing, every few years or so.
The outside rings will get a copper colored paint to give an ersatz bronze port look, and the inside rings will be painted to match the inside cabin area.
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The alignment marks are for the screw holes to line up and also denotes the top of the rings.
I opted for the more nautical-looking 6-screw dead light instead of the easier-to-do 8-screw fasteners. 8)
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Next, I needed a box to hold my Optima mini Contest compass that I acquired, recently.
I want to mount it on the center line of the boat and in front of the mast trunk slot.
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Yeah, I changed out that saw blade, after these cuts were made. :-[
When your blade won't cut soft Okoume . . . . . . :-\
Cut-out for the compass and a trial fit.
I anticipate putting 4 bronze wood screws in the corners.
This way, if I ever have to replace the compass, I will only have to swap out the plate and not have to perform surgery on the boat itself.
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The SCAMP (however inadvertently!) may be the perfect design for a "Geezer Boat"; a boat easily handled by Senior Citizens.
It's not totally perfect however, and I felt it needed some hand holds on the cabin roof to help while boarding and disembarking, at the dock.
Starting to get to the age where I need all the steadying I can GET!! :o
(I have been relying on the handholds on Urchin for quite some time, now.)
I had acquired these teak grab rails at a ridiculous close-out price on-line, some months back.
Since the cabin roof is only ¼-inch plywood I needed some doublers to act as backing plates for the rails.
Yeah, I know they're a little short, but it's what I had on hand from my scrap bin. :-[
Clamped them together for marking, in yet another vain attempt at symmetry.
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Countersinking with a Forstner bit for the eventual teak plugs.
The plugs will be varnished then driven in wet, something I learned from my mentor, Charlie Jones .
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Look, Ma! The holes line up with the marks!! ;D
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Next was drilling with a ¼-inch drill bit all the way through for the ¼-20 bolts.
Overkill? ???
Perhaps, but I like hand holds you can hang on, in a pinch.
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Final step was adding a chamfer to the exit hole.
When I finally bed these to the cabin roof, that chamfer will hold additional bedding, like a mini-O-ring.
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Clamped to the backing doublers to drill holes through the doublers.
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Then marking the underside, so I get the right piece of wood on the right side of the cabin roof and facing in the right direction. (A = "aft".)
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The temperatures finally got warm enough one day, to attempt putting on the primer coat on the foils.
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Had to hang everything up again.
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All sanded, tack-ragged and ready to go! :)
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Hmmm . . . . . I SWEAR I had better coverage than what THAT looks like! :o
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(Note to self: Quit pushing the contrast so much, when editing pics!) ::)
Rudder stock and rudder blade primed.
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After a couple of days to dry, I sanded everything smooth.
It was fairly straightforward; sand with a power sander until you can't see the brush marks, then sand by hand, until you can't feel the brush marks.
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In a moment of weakness, I was seriously tempted to just leave them like this and then if anybody asked, simply tell them, it was "Sandy Beach Camo". :P
Think anyone would buy it?!? ;)
I placed the pintles on the rudder stock and partially drilled some marker holes for drilling out the rudder stock.
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I had previously filled the over-drilled holes with graphite epoxy.
It was GREAT ;D to see black shavings and NOT see any wood shavings!!
Meaning, that I was smack in the center of the epoxy and my bolts will be sitting in epoxy and not wood.
It is my goal to make sure that no fastener goes through wood; only epoxy.
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If the holes look a little larger in this pic, it's because I chamfered the holes for the same reasons as the teak hand rails.
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A preview of better times to come.
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Hey! >:( You psych yourself up any way you can, to keep going! :P
One of my better projects last year was insulating the garage door.
It has really paid off, being within 10ºF of the temps inside the house and anywhere from 20 to 40 degrees warmer, than it is outside.
I also have 2 small heaters in the garage and even managed to get the garage temp up to 70ºF on a 30ºF day!
Meaning: I can PAINT!! ;D
First coat (of 3) on one side of the rudder stock.
(The sides of the hull are also going to be this color.)
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Coming out pretty good.
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Now that I seem to have gotten the garage temps in the usable range for epoxy and paint, there are a number of small projects I can do, in order to keep progressing with the build.
However interesting this project has been to do, so far, I WANNA GO SAILING!!!! :'(
Preferably, this year.
Charles Brennan
Charles, those colors are spectacular. Well done and great progress. Looking forward to seeing her in her full attire!
From Charles post above:
"In a moment of weakness, I was seriously tempted to just leave them like this and then if anybody asked, simply tell them, it was "Sandy Beach Camo"."
My answer to a similar question of "If anybody says anything", is to NOT invite those people back again. I don't need the negativity in my life.
Charles , that color is reminiscent of my '63 Chevy Impale interior . AquaMarine ... or was it Seafoam green...
Should make it pretty easy for the Coast Guard to find you
That color reminds me of South Florida and the 60s. A longtime favorite. I am also planning on putting some hand holds on the cuddy top.
Timm, The color on the 63 Impala was aqua; I'm using Petit EZ Poxy Sea Foam Green (#3333) on the Irish Pennant.
seafoam.jpg
Originally, I was thinking of painting a "mini-me" version of Urchin with a white hull, dark blue sheer and boot stripes and pale blue decks and cabin roof.
Then I realized I was just trying to prolong Urchin memories, instead of allowing the new boat to make brand new memories and that it was unfair to the little boat.
So I went with the furthest away color scheme, I could think of. 8)
Best of all, my wife was agreeable with my color choices, which hardly EVER happens!! :o
For future reference, the interior/cockpit. sides and decks will be Hatteras Cream (#3208) and the bottom of the hull (including the center board), the cabin roof and the transom cap will be Grand Banks Beige (#3520).
Hope this clarifies,
Charles Brennan
Doug, Since you'll probably get to your cabin roof long before I manage it, please take LOTSA pics!! :D
Also, please detail any problems you had doing so, and how you solved them.
Inquiring minds want to know,
Charles Brennan
Dude, you are Mister Detail!
There is a guy about 50 minutes from me with a large inventory of salvaged sailboat parts. That's where I picked up my motor mount and compass for a total of $50. He had a lot of teak in one shed. I plan on calling to see if he has some hand holds. It's a sailors delight to scrounge thought the "bits and bobs" as the British say. I just haven't focused doing it. I actually stand on the cuddy roof to set the mast, and they will give me something to brace my foot against.
A beige in the sun is easier on the eyes and doesn't get hot like something darker.
That color reminds me of my dear departed Galaxie 500, Pearl. Tropical Turquoise was her color, with a white roof.
Your attention to detail is impressive! Love the handholds. Keep up the good work. You will sail one day!
Tremendous paint progress, and great colors.
The attention to details, and amazing photo documentation of the build is impressive.
At my stage of Geezerhood, I should consider an RC model yacht, but my present state of unsteady is unsafe to try to stand on the banks of the local ponds. Not complaining, though, walked 2.4 miles yesterday. The retired living complex where I now reside has a model Yacht Club, but I am not going send $400 to China for the one design kit.
Your grab rails approach is different than mine, but my materials were different. I hate varnish, and made oak rails, epoxied, then sprayed with bronze paint. Attaching, the rails were placed properly, penciled around the "feet", and small holes drilled in the fiberglass cabin top. The rails were returned to their places, clamped with weights, and holes started from inside. The rails were then drilled for 1/4 inch coarse SS bolts, and threaded and counter sunk for sealant. The holes were drilled 80% of the thickness, and threaded 75%, finished with a tap ground flat on the end, so all the thread depth was useable. The cabin top was then drilled out to clearance for the bolts, and fender washers were epoxied inside to spread the load.
Thus, there were no plugs needed in the top of the rails
One major difficulty that I had that you do not, is that the cabin top was curved, and there was a lot of sanding to get conformance with the cabin top.
Doug SC may have interest in my technique for attaching grab rails.
KRUSEN
Thanks, Krusen. Thats well thought out. I will probably do something like that.
Kruse'n, My! :o You guys are GREAT at sending me down research rabbit holes, when you make suggestions! :P
I've done woodworking, and fiber glassing and varnishing and wiring, etc. on boats, but never to this scale, i.e. building a whole boat.
So I am wide open to ideas and suggestions, but I am also still enough of a hard-nosed skeptic, to want to have research and hard numbers, that backs up those ideas.
Because . . . . .
"If You Can Put A Number On It, It's Science; If You CAN'T Put A Number On It, It's VooDoo!" ;D
After about a dozen or so web sites and as many engineering materials tables later . . . . . ???
Discovered Oak is 1120 pounds of force, vs 1155 pounds of force for Teak, making for a harder wood (Janka Hardness Rating) than you used.
Discovered tensile threaded pull-out in wood, courtesy of "The Wood Handbook: Wood as an Engineering Material" from the U.S. Forestry Service (an extremely amazing and useful source, if you can live long enough to find what you're looking for, in it!) :o was 361 psi pull-out for Oak, using coarse (¼-20) threads.
Teak pull-out was 400 psi for ¼-20 threads.
HOWEVER . . . . Good ole 316 Stainless Steel ¼-20 nuts have a pull-out of 600 psi. Four holes per hand rail, gives me 2400 pounds of tensile load before failure, or roughly 5 times the empty weight of the hull.
Oak would only handle 1444 psi, or 3 times the empty hull weight, with coarse bolts.
Your approach is clearly superior, cosmetically speaking and eliminates having to use coarse dry wall screws to lift out plugs for re-finishing.
My solution is (I believe) structurally superior, 8) at the cost of additional refurbishment efforts from time to time, and is in keeping with my own personal credo:
"A Thing Worth Engineering, Is A Thing Worth OVER-Engineering." ;D
Which is why most things I build, are nailed, glued, screwed, blued, and tattooed!! ;D
I was intrigued by your approach, although not intrigued enough, to start searching for new teak hand rails! :P
And we can let Doug SC make of the data what he will and let him go from there. ;)
I never learn more about what I am trying to do, than when I have to explain and/or justify my decisions; testing those decisions from time to time for validity, is a very important part of this build, to me.
Thanks for the input (and keep it coming!) :D
Charles Brennan
I was intrigued by the force a falling body induced into a full-body harness at a safety demonstration. I can't remember the exact numbers but I think a 6ft drop of a 200# person exerted somewhere in the neighborhood of a TON. And then I looked at that cheesy harness someone had given me with a deer stand and just shook my head. Over engineering those handholds is NOT a wasted exercise. Also, the demonstration was conducted with those lanyards that reduce shock loads, so without those, the numbers would have been even higher!
Doug, Nothing like doing something, then describing it on a forum, only to have someone make a really good suggestion or comment that TOTALLY INVALIDATED EVERYTHING!! >:( That you had just painstakingly accomplished. :'(
Ah, well.
Thinking about Kruse'n's idea, I was reminded of the "Mastering Epoxy with Russell Brown, Part 1 - Introduction to Filleting" video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDoauHaOfBQ
In it, at around the 2 minute mark, he demonstrates how an epoxy joint is stronger than the surrounding wood, by breaking a filleted joint.
Several other boat building forums claim the same thing about epoxy/wood being stronger than just wood, alone.
It occurred to me, that if one over-drilled a handrail hole to say 5/16" or 3/8", then filled the hole with thickened epoxy (I hasten to add: something structural, like 403 glue and NOT non-structural, like 410 micro-balloon fillers) then after it was cured, you could drill and tap as per Norm's description; you'd have a much tougher and stronger pull-out force than just wood, alone.
I can't find anything on the web to calculate, or get a hard number of what that pull-out force might be, but I have to believe it would have to be somewhere between the 400 psi of Teak, versus the 600 psi of Stainless Steel ¼-20 nuts.
I'm already committed to my method, but you never know what I might scrounge up at a marine flea market, somewhere! :)
If I trip over some fantastic deal somewhere on teak hand rails, prior to getting the cabin roof done, I might re-think the idea.
While I'm not hard-core enough to eschew ALL Nautical Proud-work for say, Starboard, or Stainless Steel hand rails, anything to help minimize on-going maintenance would be desirable.
After all, I MUCH prefer SAILING ;D on boats, to WORKING :'( on boats!
Just an idea to consider,
Charles Brennan
:) Never one to dispute good research or different opinion, Charles has a winner.
On the other hand, I had some fine quality oak, and the tools to do it my way, and the function and appearance was good enough to fool some of my sailing friends and all of my neighbors. From a short distance, it is the color of teak. Strength wise, it survived my worst attacks going forward while heeled. Not scientific, but practical.
I am surprised that teak pull out numbers are as high as they are.
There was no above deck unpainted wood on my Mac, the tiller pilot anchor reinforcement white to match the seat, flag base, oak with bronze paint. Below deck, all varnished.
I expected DougSC to be more interested than Charles, but posted outside the Scamp thread, would easily fail to be noticed. Thanks for being friendly to the thread drift, Charles.
KRUSEN
What are those bolts called, that have wood threads on one end, and nut threads on the other? I had considered embedding those in the grab rails, pushing the nut-thread end into holes in the deck, then bolting them through a matching set of grab rails on the (I know it's not a ceiling, but that) inside. Secured with a nut, or better yet acorn nut, the setup would provide grabbers inside and out.
If I ever get my boat out again.....:(
Quote from: Noemi - Ensenada 20 on Jan 14, 2025, 08:24 PMWhat are those bolts called, that have wood threads on one end, and nut threads on the other? I had considered embedding those in the grab rails, pushing the nut-thread end into holes in the deck, then bolting them through a matching set of grab rails on the (I know it's not a ceiling, but that) inside. Secured with a nut, or better yet acorn nut, the setup would provide grabbers inside and out.
If I ever get my boat out again.....:(
Hanger bolts
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Noemi, Hanger bolts are not nearly good enough for a suspenders-and-belt kind of guy. (Who likes to Over-Engineer stuff!) :D
A ¼-20 hanger bolt typically has a pull-out strength in Teak, of around 270 pounds when using a Grade 5 bolt.
That's less than half of the 600 pounds I expect from my ¼-20 through-bolting of my Teak handrails.
What helps make my approach (mostly!) ??? bullet-proof, is that I used a Forstner bit to achieve a flat surface bottom for the round head bolt to sit on. This means that the Janka Hardness rating of 1155 pounds of force for the Teak wood compressive forces surrounding the bolt, is also helping to counter the bolt's tensile forces. The Teak wood is 1155 pounds and the tensile strength of a ¼-20 grade 8, 316 Stainless Steel bolt is over 4000 pounds. In my case, the weakest link in my chain of materials is the ¼-20 Nylock nuts of 600 pounds each, times 4 bolts, for a combined load of 2400 pounds.
Had I used a counter-sink at the drilled hole at top of the hand rail and then used a flat head bolt as a fastener, (Look, Ma! No Teak plugs required!) :P it would have split the hand rail, nearly as soon as I torqued down the nuts.
Kruse'n's interesting solution uses ¼-20 tapped threads directly into Oak, for a pull-out strength of 361 pounds. (Since Oak is not as hard as Teak.)
Had he not used coarse threads, and had (for example) used finer ¼-28 threads, the pull-out strength would have been reduced slightly, to 311 pounds.
Due to the coarseness of the lag-side threads of your hanger bolts, the wood can only support a pull-out strength of 270 pounds. Times 4 holes gives us slightly over 1000 pounds (1080 lb) for total loading.
The reason for this (after all, ¼-inch is a ¼-inch, no?) is that the hanger bolt's lag screw is partially fracturing and crushing the wood fibers, as it cuts into them, weakening the surrounding wood. Kruse'n's tapping method cuts grooves into the side walls of the threaded area and does not weaken the wood, through crushing.
For your postulated application of back-to-back fastened grab rails on deck and over-head (ceiling) I would have recommended Forstner drilled holes in both sets of grab rails and a ¼-20 bolt and ¼-20 nut attaching them together, followed by teak plugs.
Stuff I do to my boats, is usually performed with the following question in mind:
"Would I bet my Life, on a given item: n holding up in extremis?"
Seen a lot of "in extremis" in my life, Chica.
Have had enough stuff fail on me, that should NOT have failed, >:( that I now beef up everything I touch, just because.
It's also why I never give a thought to the hand rails I installed on Urchin 45 years ago.
I've hung outrageous things on them, used them for tying off to stuff I had no business tying off to and yet, here they still are; because they started OUT being over-built.
I am shooting for this same peace of mind, on everything I am building onto the Irish Pennant.
Hope this clarifies,
Charles Brennan