“Roots” and Actual Boat Construction (Finally)

ANNAPOLIS - the birthplace of my boat. During my spring vacation a month ago my wife and I made our annual trip to visit our daughter and son-in-law near Baltimore, Maryland. Annapolis is only 30 minutes away. So, besides enjoying the kids and the blossoms (which bloom at least a month before they do here in Michigan) we took a side trip to Annapolis and that Mecca of homebuilt boats, Chesapeake Light Craft (CLC).

It was a beautiful day. We arrived mid-morning and parked directly in front of what was apparently an office door. I placed the keys of the rental car in my pocket and proceeded to get out of the car. As luck would have it, this was yet another of a myriad of opportunities I have had to inadvertently activate the “panic button” on the key fob of my car. (Has anyone ever actually had a legitimate reason to use that wonder of modern technology?) As always it took me far too long to realize what was happening and then I had to fumble to find the right button on the fob. Besides startling all of us the front of the car was about 40” from the front of the building and poor John Harris, the owner of CLC, was sitting on the other side of the wall. Unfortunately the startled ‘what the heck is that’ look on his face as he suddenly appeared in the window will be the lingering memory of my first meeting with John.

After allowing an appropriate amount of time to pass, which served to moderate our embarrassment and allow John’s heart rate to return to normal, we went in and had a look around. Fortunately John’s desire to make customers feel welcome outweighed his desire to whack me upside the head with a Sitka spruce oar. Upon learning I had purchased a Passagemaker kit and had traveled from Michigan he took us on the 50-cent tour of the fabrication/instruction shop, the CNC router area, and the millwork shop. He was also kind enough to pose for a picture. (That’s John on the right. I'm the guy one student refers to as 'highlighter'!)

During our tour I learned that besides their fine line of boats CLC also makes the parts for kits from several other kit sellers. That fact further underscored my confidence in choosing a kit from CLC.

Having satisfied my need to know that my boat had come from good stock we left CLC and set off for downtown Annapolis. If you ever get to Annapolis besides visiting CLC go to the Visitor’s Center and take the trolley tour of Annapolis and East Port. Annapolis is rich with history, architecture, and scenery as well as the military academy. The trolley tour gives a great overview and provides lots of suggestions for other things to see and do in Annapolis. At the very least you will want to stroll down Main Street, look in the shops, and walk around the docks at the end of the street. For those of us who don’t live on the ocean coast or who haven’t grown up sailing, visiting a place like Annapolis really places boats in a larger context of history, tradition, and technological development.

Our visit to Maryland was accompanied by wonderful spring/summer weather. However, our return trip home involved checking the wings of the airplane for icing and a snowstorm greeted us back in Grand Rapids. Indeed we had some of the worst weather of the “winter” the next two weeks.

Since our trip to Maryland I have actually had some time to complete a worksurface I had been thinking of for other projects as well as boatbuilding. I really don’t care to try to handle 4’ x 8’ sheets of ¾” material by myself and I’d like to be able to move my operation from the basement to the garage and back again without assistance. So, after some internet research, I decided to use 7/16” thick OSB and make 32 equally spaced square cutouts approximately 8” x 8” to leave a 4’ x 8’ grid of 3” wide “slats”.

The sheet ends up weighing half the original weight and the grid provides a multitude of locations for clamping things in position. Of course the 7/16” thickness bends pretty easily so I cut another sheet into 4” wide slats. I made slots in these slats so they would slip into each other on edge and match the pattern of the grid in the worksurface and provide support from below.

I made two of these assemblies and then linked them together with tie plates and used T-nuts slightly recessed into the tops to preserve a flat surface. The whole work surface ends up pretty flat.

So far I have glued up the rubrails and the hull panels and the worksurface system has worked great with one exception. The 4” wide support slats in the gridwork below the worksurface are just the right depth to interfere with turning the handles on the 2” C-clamps I am using. Keeping the handles topside is one solution. I’m thinking of trimming the support slats to a 3” as another possibility.

The scarfs on the mating ends of the rubrail strips weren’t quite parallel so they needed a little dressing before gluing.

And, even though I did some dry runs in preparation for gluing them together, I still didn’t get them lined up along the other longitudinal plane.

But, it turns out the rubrail strips warped in the dry environment of my basement and the scarf joints are no more curved than the rest of the strips so they should bend to the contour of the edges of the hull without much problem.

The whole idea of covering the surfaces adjacent to the glue joints with something like packaging tape works really well. I am using the slow hardener that comes standard with CLC’s kits and 24 hours after the joints were clamped I was able to remove the thin layer of epoxy that oozed out by just peeling the protective tape off. However, larger globs are less accomodating.

My worksurface arrangement worked out extremely well for aligning the hull panels. I could conveniently clamp alignment blocks to my grid so I could slip the panels in proper position for gluing and clamping. (Probably should have done something similar with the rubrails.)

I used alignment blocks thick enough so both sets of panels could be stacked as indicated in the instructions and held in perfect alignment.

And Now This Late Bulletin: The other night I had a little epoxy left over and didn’t want to just pitch it so I tried to glue the daggerboard handles to the daggerboard without any means to hold them in alignment. As other builders have indicated the parts are pretty slippery with the epoxy between them and getting them to line up while clamping them was a (messy) challenge. With that memory and looking ahead to other miscellaneous tasks I can accomplish while waiting for the glue joints on the hull panels to cure it struck me (Duh!) I can use the same procedure I used for aligning and clamping the hull panels with the transom doublers, skeg halves, and daggerboard trunk. I just have to make sure that I have the worksurface and alignment blocks covered with wax paper or packaging tape anywhere the epoxy may ooze out or run. Sweet!!

Here’s some pictures of the setup I had for the transom doublers and skeg halves.

It's a little difficult to identify the blocks used for positioning the parts because many are also OSB like the worksurface. In the middle picture you might be able to see the trimmed packaging tape used to mask off the area adjacent to the transom doubler.

Progress thus far:

- All four sets of hull panels glued at scarf joints.

- Bottom panels glued at scarf joints.

- Transom doublers glued to both transoms.

- Handles glued to daggerboard.

- Getting pretty good at estimating how much epoxy I need for a given step without a nice thick "medallion" left in the bottom of the mixing cup.

- Priorities straightened out (a little boat building every day).

This is way fun!