Be seated

 One of nice things about building your own boat is you can imagine little features and wiith luck make them happen. I thought the footwell was a good candidate for a foot grate, as is is sure to accumulate an inch or two of water somewhere along the line, and that water in your shoe does have a demoralising effect. 

I made a trial grate out of some Tasmanian Ash that Harald up the road gave me. One of this month's jobs has been adding cleats on the side seat faces, and with a bit of judicious sanding and rasping, the grate sits snugly at cockpit sole level, which will be handy for sleeping. 

And it also works as a rowing seat.  

I am ridiculously pleased with this very basic bit of carpentry. And heaven knows I need some morale boosting on the boat building front, as the build is going more slowly than I anticipated. I am about a month behind where I thought I might be a month ago. I expected to have the seats and sole down two weeks ago. Instead I just finished filleting port side seat today, starboard side and lazarette still to go.

Partly this slow progress is due to me routinely underestimating the tasks and how long they will take. Partly it is because I slope off and do other things. Like going sailing. Now the weather is getting warmer at last, I gratefully accepted Chris's suggestion to go for a sail last Tuesday.

We had an energetic sail over to Point Cook, lunch on the beach, and a lovely sail back. And then I could spend the next day fiddling round making a video of it all.  Which doesn't get the SCAMP built any faster. 

But it does remind me why I am building. I am very glad I am building this boat. I have big plans for it.

Lazaretting

 

In boat building, as in most activities I guess, there are lots of inter dependencies. You can't put the rear cockpit sole down till the outboard doubler is in, which might interfere with the lazarette support which needs the seats in but they can't go in till you put the side cleats in which requires you to know where the lazarette goes. I dry fitted what I could, and decided arbitrarily on a location for the forward lazarette cleat, based in the size of my fisherman's anchor which I hope to store in there. The crunch will be whether I can get a hatch small enough not to interfere with the tiller but big enough to get the anchor in and out.

Funny word "lazarette", lots of dodgy etymological theories out there on the internet about the origin of the word, but Lazarus clearly is in the chain somewhere there.

I am slowly  chipping away. Maggie is appalled at my slow progress, but should have the soles and the seats down in the next week or so.  Maybe ready to turn over by the end of next month.  

Stephen who has bought plans for #667 came to have a look at progress and try out the cuddy for size. It will be really nice to have another SCAMP in progress.  I better get cracking or he will be on the water before me!

Steaming along

 After a lot of shilly shallying, I cut and scarfed  new pieces for the gunnels. I can use the other bits for the deck carlins.

When I came to clamp a new piece, it was clear it was not quite going to fit.

Clamped as hard as I dared, it was close but no cigar. So I tried a method both Gerard Van Drempt and  Chris Hurren suggested ... clamp one end and steam and fix small sections as you go. 

Anne has a nifty little hand held clothes steamer. Using a bit of plastic bag about a metre long, I steamed progressive sections for about 5 minutes each, then clamped that bit in place, then moved on to the next bit.  Slow but it worked nicely.  I have 9 gunnel and carlin pieces to fit so I hope I get a bit faster.

I can work on the gunnels while I wait for the epoxy and then the undercoat and paint on the cockpit sole sections to dry. After much indecision, I finally cut the circular holes for the Armstrong hatches in the sole pieces. I am not sure that having the large hatch into the water-ballast tank is such a great idea. 

I have put my centreboard pin on the water-ballast tank side, and if ever I need to get access to it I will be glad of that big hatch. That damm centreboard pin has consumed a disproportionate amount of time. I suspect the bushings are ever so slightly out of alignment. I could jiggle it home before but now thanks to my over cunning bolt system,  the darn thing is a few mill off sitting fflush. The good news is I managed to not epoxy the plug into the garboard drain fitting.

So, the project is still moving, and if I keep moving it has to get somewhere. There have been some lovely if chilly days this week, it would be really nice to get back on the water. 

I have finally settled on a name for the SCAMP: "Anjevi". In good Welsfordian tradition (look up "Joansa") it is an amalgam of my family's names: Anne, Jess and Vincent.  And it sounds a bit like Anchovy, which Wikipedia tells me is a small, blunt nosed fish, sort of appropriate for a small, blunt nosed boat.

Now, I have to decide on a colour scheme ....

Whisky plank and Welsfordian curves

 I finally got to glue on the whisky plank on the weekend. I tried to get Oz to pose for a shot to record the occasion. He was deeply disapproving.

The odd bit of wood is a brace, to hold the ply in place firmly till the epoxy sets. 

Anne is in the Epworth hospital in Richmond after knee surgery. I have been catching the train over to visit most mornings. Hopefully another week or so and she will be home.  

I can get an hour or two of work done on the boat most days, but somehowI am a bit inefficient and muddled at the moment.  EG I mixed a batch of epoxy yesterday then could not for the life of me find the handle I needed for the roller to spread it.

One looming challenge is to get the 10 by 30 mm stips of Oregon to conform to the graceful but quite steep curve of the gunnels. Gerard kindly bought me some long plastic bags for steaming. We tried it, but, silly me, I put the start of the bag and the steam pipe input right at the point where I had epoxied the scarf joint. Which of couse melted the glue and the joint failed.

Today I tried carefully clamping on a gunnel strip, little bit at a time. And it seemed to work. Tomorrow I will screw it on, and try my luck with the next strip. 

Jim at the Dinghy Shop is back temporarily from his cruise up north. He hit a large solid object which should bot have been in a marked channel, and damaged the keel of his boat. Proving the maxim it is an ill wind etc I was able to stock up on screws and order some more epoxy and various fittings. And the 2 x 250mm  Armstrong hatches I ordered moths ago finally arrived, just in time to do the cockpit sole.

So, not great progress but at least still moving forward. Beautiful day today, would have been lovely on the water!

Ark etype

 

Doreen, a lovely lady from the Mauritius, told me "your boat looks like a little ark".  And by golly, she is right, I can't stop seeing it that way now. And I do feel like a sort of Noah.

I should really be sanding and painting the inner compartments, but I couldn't resist trying the 3rd planks. The good news is they fit pretty well. The bad news is I really can't reach the forward compartments that need sanding, epoxying and painting, so I will have to take the planks off again. Oh well, it was a good morale boost.

I temporarily put the seats and the cockpit sole in as well, and proped the cabin sides up, and had a good sit and a think about tasks to be done. Much easier than actually doing them. The challenge of getting the carlins fitted is looming on the horizon. I bought a more powerful table saw, which ripped the pieces ok, but generated a huge amount of sawdust. I am very envious of Campbell's dust extraction machine.  The charred bannister that Harald up the road gave me is a lovely bit of Oregon under the burned bits. I am thinking I will try my hand at making a birdsmouth mast, now I have the machine to cut the staves.

Chris suggested a sail on Monday, which turned out to be a great idea. It was a fantastic Winter's day sail, complete with a fantastic dolphin encounter. I know it will take longer to build the boat if I keep goofing off, but there will be plenty of days when I can't sail, so I am resolved to seize every opportunity.

Chris made a really nice video of the day:

Learning

 Gerard kindly helped me get plank 2 on last week. I had been fiddling round not making much forward progress, so his help getting over the plank 2 hurdle was much appreciated. 

It's great to see the structure taking on a more SCAMP-like appearance. I dare to hope that this might turn into an actual boat one day.

It sure is a beamy little thing, almost half as wide as it is long.

 I am pretty much finished this round of filleting and cleating. It has been a salutory learning experience and I hope I have learned something approaching patience. The effort today sanding the dodgy fillets that I put on yesterday when the light was fading and I was tired is a good reminder that it's just not worth it. Speaking of light fading, the quality of my late afternoon fillets has improved considerably now I am using a camping lantern and can sort of see what I am doing.

The precision of the cnc kit has really helped with the planks. Even Maggie the Quality Control Officer is impressed. She really likes the boat, something about all the compartments appeals to her cat brain. And on good days we get lovely afternoon sunshine in the carport and she can snooze contentedly curled up in front of the jig.Very companionable. Ozzie is now shut inside while I work, after a couple of incidents where he has taken himself off for a walk round the neighbourhood while I have been distracted with the boat.

Next tasks to finish off the compartments with a few more coats of epoxy and some paint, before they get too hard to access. And put hatches in the cabin sole and side seats.

Works will slow down for a while too, as a trip away and other commitments will soak up SCAMP time, but the project will take as long as it takes, and I am enjoying it.

Garboard and washout

 

To adapt John Lennon's great insight, life is what happens when you are trying to build a SCAMP.  I have made some progress in between outings other commitments though. I put in all the cleats that the seats and cockpit sole will attach to, drilled out and epoxied in the centreboard case bushings, added the mini bulkhead for the footwell and finished off most of the fillets. All of which is almost invisible and not particularly morale boosting. 

Yesterday I drew and then planned the bevels on the garboard planks and got them more or less in position. Jim at the Dinghy Shop who cut my cnc kit couldn't do the bevels, and I have been wondering how it would go. Turned out it's pretty easy to plot and plane them and i can fine tune when plank 2 goes on. 

Good old stitch and glue. The cnc cut planks fitted way better than the panels I cut from plans on my last build, and the Skerry turned out OK,  so despite the odd chink of daylight, I tightened up and clamped as best I could and proceeded to tack fillet today. It is so cold I am not sure the glue will set enough to risk taking the wires out tomorrow. I think I might leave it for tomorrow and maybe start on the rudder. It looks like every pair of planks will take me about 4 -5  days: dry fit 1, tack weld 2, setting day 3, fillet and glass 4, epoxy coat 5. 3 sets of pairs of planks ... I  guess that's the next two weeks lined up.

I took the Skerry up to Yarrawonga last week for a planned trip with some WBA members down to Tocumwal, but a lot of rain upriver saw the river levels rising, Parks were advising groups not to head down, and the weather was pretty bleak. We settled for a day's rowing on Lake Mulwala.

There are channels marked through the forests of dead trees. Coming back, Jim from the WBA and I tried the acquatic equivalent of bush bashing, and picked our way directly home past submerged and barely submerged stumps.  I managed not to hit any, Jim was not so lucky and got stuck on a few. The larger trees make great nesting spots for sulphur crested cockatoos. As you row past, pairs of proprietorial heads pop out to watch you closely till you are out of range. 

Gavan had engine problems, dinner at the pub disagreed with me, it was bloody cold and it rained a lot. It was all a learning experience. I think I will focus on the SCAMP till the weather warms up a bit.