A Boat Story Part I Woodbury, NJ

February had at least 75 days this year, or so it seemed, and about half way through, cabin fever struck me with such force that I was compelled to clean and organize my shop. Since moving back into this house after our ill-fated horse farm adventure, it had become merely a repository for assorted junk. But underneath it all, I knew there were the shop machines I had had inherited from my dad, the large assortment of power tools that i had accumulated in my professional (carpentry) career, and boxes and boxes of antique planes and other antique hand tools that I had feverishly collected and restored as part of my quitting-smoking therapy 15 years ago.
And suddenly I had a working shop, badly in need of a project. Although I've had kind of a bug for several years now to build a hurdy gurdy, the cabin fever left me vulnerable to a serious case of spring fever, which left me dreaming about fishing, my other passion, and the approaching arrival of spawning striped bass in the Delaware River. I could either build a hurdy gurdy that could float, or more practically, a boat capable of bringing me to the stripers' doorstep.
A casual web search turned up a site (http://www.svensons.com/boat/ ) that published old boat plans from Popular Science , most, apparently, from the 50's and 60's, when the editorial assumption was that real men liked to, and knew how to, build things, like homemade toasters made from coat hangers and sheet metal, or a particle accelerator you could make on the weekends from toilet paper tubes, aluminum foil, and a 4000 watt transformer you have laying around in your basement workshop. Although the plans they published were practical. they made assumptions about the skills and available materials of their readership that I suspect were exaggerated, but served both the ego and the tendency to procrastination of the typical reader

For instance, here is their plan to build your own steam engine. (if you need the rest of the article, email me, but you should be able to wing it.)

At my job, which at the time involved turning an old warehouse into upscale condominiums, we had been using a glue down laminated floor material, which was tongue in groove,, 5/16" thick, and with a fairly durable coating on the finish side. Though the plans called for marine plywood, coated on the outside with fabric and some kind of paint that has no doubt been outlawed for 35 years because of its devastating effects on the environment, and its ability to cause cancer at the merest touch, an alternative began to shape in my mind. I immersed a piece of the flooring in water and left it over the weekend. On Monday, not only were the finish and lamination unaffected by the drenching, but the tongue and groove worked perfectly with a mated dry piece. If I used this material, with the finish side showing inside the boat, and substituted fiberglass on the hull, I could make this boat both seaworthy and evocative of the sporty runabouts of that era made by ChrisCraft and Thompson, evocative being the key word here, because by no means do I possess (yet) the ability or the budgetary means to duplicate the gorgeous craftsmanship of those wonderful old boats.
I settled on a plan that would suit my needs as a fisherman, that I could reasonably launch and trailer by myself, if need be, and that would fit in my shop, since it was still too cold to imagine doing any of the work outside. Here's the plan I chose: http://www.svensons.com/boat/?p=MechanixIllustrated/FlyingFisherman
The average person considering building from one of these plans probably has, or has access to, all the required tools, like a table saw, a bandsaw, sanders, a router. One thing I happened to have, which most people don't, is a 75 year old Stanley # 20 adjustable bottom plane

By adjusting the center wheel on this amazing plane, you can set almost any curvature, convex OR concave. In the same way that a standard try plane will, after a number of passes, present you with a flat edge, this plane, after cutting the board to the rough curve with your band or sabre saw, gives you a perfectly smooth curve, which, if you don't change the setting, can be duplicated on your next piece. I would highly recommend that if you are thinking of building any kind of boat, that you locate and purchase one of these, and if you're not schooled in plane blade sharpening and plane setup, that you take a little time to familiarize yourself with those simple, increasingly forgotten, but essential skills.
So the first step was building the forms, for which I enlarged the plctures in the plans enough that I could accurately get the proper dimensions. To scale the curve, I laid it out on a half sheet of plywood i had laying around, and transposed the angles with an adjustable bevel square. To get the curve, i scaled the height at the center, and using a flexible steel rule, bent it until it laid on all the marks, and got my son Jack to trace the line, since you definitely need a third hand for that operation. I did the front frame piece first, because the rearward frame has the same curve as the stern, and I wanted to reuse the plane setting, as previously mentioned. The stern was made up from two pieces of 1x12 oak, which I ran thru the joiner and glued up with a biscuit jointer, then laid out and scaled the same as the frame pieces. It is reinforced on the sides and bottom with additional pieces cut from 1x4 oak, with notches in those pieces for the frame members, as seen in the plans.
It's funny now, because once I got the frames and the back made, I thought I had really made something...it hadn't occured to me at that point that I would eventually trash 2/3 of what I had built, the two frame pieces and the 2x6 form for the keel being more or less a "mold" for the boat, rather than part of it. So here's what I had

Then the stern in various stages

I chose yellow pine for the inwales and the chines, which create the framework for the outer shell, and oak for the keel. The stem, because of its severe curve needed to be cut out of 2x12, which I doubled up, glued with resourcinol, and screwed. Now I just had to attach the inwales and chines to the stern,bend them around the frame, determine the angle and length to cut them and attach them to the stem. It turned out to require considerable force on the chines to screw them to the stem, and one pic shows my blood from where I drove the point of my screwgun into my thumb

In the second picture, you can see how much more severe the bend is in the chines, as compared to the inwales. Besides, I sign all my work in blood at some point.

After some adjustments to the joint where the chines hit the stem, I was ready to begin applying the flooring to the sides. Starting at the back, this went smoothly enough, but as I worked my way to the front, the double curve made it increasingly hard to keep the tongue in groove joints tight. I had been gluing these joints all along, and I found that by applying a bar clamp when neccessary, I could close them up, and once it was glued and screwed, everything was cool.
I have to pause here to thank my friend Dan Witten, a talented woodworker from Jamaica, who fed my enthusiasm for this project with his own. After I had one side sheathed, Dan came over and helped me do the other side. This job is more than twice as easy with two people. He also helped with the tedious work of mortising the bottom supports into the keel.

With the sides complete and most of the supports in place, it's starting to look like a boat .

Dan helping me install the floor supports. When Dan saw the boat project for the first time, he said "The bow-ot is Tight,Mon" Thanks, Dan.

Starting to put on the sides

How the "flooring" looks on the inside of the boat


The side supports were actually done before the bottom supports, but after the sheathing was on. Each pair, going front to back, was slightly different due to the changing contours of the sides and bottom. I started with one shape, and custom fit them (in pairs) as I went along. I made them from some 1x6 mahogany that I had kept around for several years, in anticipation of just such an occasion. I could have used oak or even yellow pine, I suppose, but I love the contrast in color, and since I already had it, it felt like it was free.
I had run out of the flooring material, so I decided to do the bottom in plywood. Since I was going to fiberglass the whole outside, I used 5/16 S2S exterior plywood, mainly because it was difficult to find marine grade plywood locally. (Thanks, Home Depot, for putting all the Real lumber yards and hardware stores out of business.)

The foremost 18" or so was done with two pieces, because of the severe curves.

It actually looks like it might float, which would be nice.


The rest of the bottom was all one sheet. There is a support underneath, where they all come together.

I found an online source for fiberglass materials, and ordered 6 yds. of 42" wide fabric (just enough) and one gallon of resin. I ended up buying a second gallon later. Having driven junker cars for most of my life, I was acquainted with the basics of fiberglass work, say from having to patch a football sized rust rotted spot so that the piece of crap would pass inspection. But on my NEXT boat, I will take a little more time and care with this phase of the project. As Elvis said, "fools rush in where wise men fear to tread." A word to my fellow fools...If you ever find yourself using a belt sander to sand off globs of fiberglass, forget the macho stuff, and wear a respirator. I don't know the clinical effects of breathing microsopic glass particles in a confined space for a half hour, but I do know that my entire respiratory tract was messed up for a week, and for a month I fought the reflex to put on a mask when i heard the word "fiberglass," or even "glass."

To be continued....