Building a Skerry

What I did on my summer vacation

• Day: Who knows, I lost count
• Total Build Time: Don't know, don't care. See above

One of the things that has stalled any interest in moving ahead with this boat build is...you guessed it, sanding. You hate, I hate it, we ALL hate it. Using a palm sander to fair the hull was proving to be an exercise in futility, and I knew I needed a random orbital sander to do the job. A good friend offered a loan on a well used Porter Cable unit, and I jumped at the opportunity to save a bunch of money not buying a new sander (although the Festool Rotex is a REALLY nice sander!) I plugged it in, started sanding, and in less than thirty seconds pieces of the sander were flying in every direction! The sanding pad was dry rotted and was disintegrating, throwing pieces of itself everywhere in it's final death throes. Well, now I had a problem. How to sand all that hull without taking forever? Fortunately, I'm a smart guy and knew what the ONLY possible solution was...go out immediately and buy that brand new Festool Rotex!!! What an amazing sander, and it should be for the price! But I'm a firm believer in buying the best and buying once, and Festool is by far the best. It took relatively no time at all to sand the entire hull smooth in preparation for the finish coats of epoxy, which I have yet to apply. 

As a result of continued shoulder issues, the one month sabbatical that I had planned to take in September to do a bike trip had to be postponed until next year, so I decided to take two weeks off anyway and see if the shoulder would recover after being away from work. While slowly getting better it was still not healed, so I decided to just make the best of it. 

September is always my favorite month of the year because of the annual Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival, which I never miss. This year was particularly beneficial for me because Chesapeake Light Craft had brought their demo Skerry (the same one that inspired me to build mine), and that afforded me the opportunity to have a closer look at it to compare and contrast with my build. Not only was it educational, it also gave me great perspective because they obviously didn't sweat the details anymore than anyone else, and that helped me accept the flaws and problems with mine. No boat is perfect, and as the following pictures show, every build is a balance of good, and "good enough."

The stern fillets on the CLC demo Skerry. Gaps, glops, and god-awful epoxy mess.

Same with the bow. Yeesh.

I'm clearly spending way too much time on trying to make my boat look pretty!

I wanted to have a close look at their bow and stern profiles since this was what I had to do next. Even their bow is a bit asymmetrical. The varnish looks nice though!

Same with their stern. These both show something important that will come up later.

Now, back to MY boat build!  

I had to do some cleanup on my rails in preparation for rounding them over. I found that my Lie Nielsen large rabbit plane fit the rails PERFECTLY. This made short work of cleaning up the undersides of the rails, and keeping them square.

Once I had the rails cleaned up I started to work on roughing out the radius for the bow...

...and stern.

This brought out a big challenge. CLC tells you to round over the bow and stern of the upper panels...BEFORE putting on the rails. WTF? Why would you do that? Now you have a round profile that you have to bring two square rails in to meet! Grrrr. As you can see if you look closely, the rails have a gap at the rounded part of the bow and stern. And, looking back at their finished boat you can see that they just continued sanding back until the rails met the panels. If the panels were left sharp until this point you would have a finer entry and exit point at the rails. Dammit! Well, get out the block plane, surefire rasp, and sanding block and get to work!

Stern roughed out...

...and the bow.

The next step was to round over the rails. I wouldn't know what the final bow and stern profile was going to be until I figured out the rounded over shape, so I grabbed my router and a 3/8" roundover bit and...the bit didn't fit through the router base plate. Crap. I was going to have to free-hand the round-overs with the router, top and bottom! Yikes! 

It made sense to be concerned about this step because I screwed up, BIG TIME. The rails taper at each end and this made the router dig in really bad on the bottom of the rail. So bad in fact that I thought I was going to have to cut a bunch of material away and put in a patch. Funny enough though, as I started to remove material to taper and hand round-over the rails...I ended up having to take so much off to bring the rails back past the gaps that I had enough rail to work with when all was said and done! HUGE sigh of relief!!!

Beginning the shaping after the round-over disaster. Yep, I sanded through the veneer of the breast hook. It looks way worse here than in real life, and I really don't give a damn at this point! 

Less of an issue in the stern, this looks really nice

Beautiful round-over with a nice scarf!

 I also needed to put a fillet along the skeg. This was one of the only things I have done on this boat that went smoothly!

I put the boat on my little ultralight Yakima trailer to move it around for sanding, epoxy, etc.

The final pic for this post. After sanding the exterior it's truly looking at its ugliest! Pretty soon it will start to look much nicer as the epoxy, paint, and varnish go on. At least I hope it does.

I was also very excited that during the final "sail-by" at the Wooden Boat Festival one of the guys from CLC had their Skerry out on the water and I was able to see first hand how it sails. I have to say, I was very impressed! The boat was really stiff and heeled very little. It's also fast! I watched it run away from CLC's PocketShip, a much bigger boat that carried a lot more sail area. The Skerry is also a very pretty boat under sail, which is important! Seeing it helped get me inspired again to get back to work on mine, and seeing the quality of their build helped me get mine back in perspective. Below you will see a quick video of the CLC boat coming into the beach at the end of the sail-by. Until next time, enjoy!

Embracing the "New Normal"

Pain can be transformative. And transformation can be a good thing. So therefore, pain is a good thing...right? RIGHT?!?!?!

At the end of April I had a re-occurance of a rotator cuff issue that has plagued both shoulders over the years. Usually it hurts for a week or two, and then gradually gets better, sometimes requiring some physical therapy to help it along. This time was much worse though, and even with PT it was healing so gradually that I had become really frustrated and impatient, and was very worried that I might finally need surgery. Riding a bike became excruciating, and was obviously agravating my shoulder and only making it worse, so I stopped riding to give it a rest. The timing couldn't have been worse because I had just built a brand new, totally custom, titanium fatbike and now I could barely test ride it, let alone get out for an adventure on it. I was sinking into a deeper and deeper depression, gaining back the weight I had worked hard to lose, losing the fitness I  had worked hard to gain, and becoming even harder to be around! Something had to change.

Then I had an idea. I simply needed to rethink my approach to cycling. Biking was foundational to my lifestyle and fitness routine, I just had to find another way to keep riding while my shoulder was healing. And what kind of bike would allow me to ride, but keep any weight off of my shoulder? What would be my "new normal?"

 Wait for it... 

A recumbent would be my only option if I wanted to keep riding! 

 I started doing endless research online trying to find what I thought would be the best bike for my needs. I wanted something comfortable, efficient, fast, manueverable, with resale value so I could recoup my investment once I was healed up, if I decided to sell it. I had narrowed my choices down to a few well known brands and models, but there were very few recumbent dealers around. I knew that I absolutely had to test ride before buying, it was just too strange of a beast to buy without riding it first. I finally found Rose City Recumbents down in Portland, and after numerous emails with the endlessly patient Jonathan, I arranged for a day to come down and do some test rides. I am so glad I did, because there were several models that I thought would be great options, and after riding them for only a block or two I immediately knew that they were not at all what I was looking for. 

At the top of my list was the Lightning P-38, a short wheelbase speed machine that had set many records over the years, but also had a reputation for being the best all around recumbent on the market. It was a major stroke of luck that Jonathan had a used P-38 in stock, in my size, and in my color...BLACK! Several test rides later and the choice was clear, the P-38 was by far the most comfortable and easy to ride bike out of the several bikes I rode. And being lightly used, the price was quite reasonable for a niche bike. So, I added a new horse to the stable! 

I brought it home and almost immediately took it out for a ride. I ended up riding almost twenty five miles which was pretty good for the first time on a new bike in a new riding position, and after being off of any bike for a month and a half. My legs were tired, and my knees were a little sore from the boom being set too close, but most importantly my shoulder didn't hurt at all! 

It's going to take some time to get used to this new beast and getting the fit dialed in, but I am looking forward to rediscovering cycling in a new way, and getting some exercise and fitness back into my life again. A long term review will be forthcoming, so stay tuned!

Building a Skerry

Disappointments and creative solutions

• Day: Who knows, I lost count
• Total Build Time: Don't know, don't care. See above

For some reason, I have been really dragging my feet on this boat build. Perhaps it's the frustration of working with the kit components, or the lack of creativity in building from a kit, or absolutely hating  epoxy, but I just can't get too excited about going out to work on the Skerry these days. Even less inspiring is working on the blog, writing about working on a boat I have barely touched in the last 6 months! I have also had some major disappointments in the building process, and although I know the boat is going to sail well, it is certainly not going to be the showstopper I had fantasized about building. Well, it is what it is, so let's get on with the pics and see what I have to show for my work up to this point!

My previous post had me scarfing panels, of which there are six total. 

Safety first for "Team Rusty!"

In this pic you can see the finger scarfs. These were the first of many disappointments in this kit. As stated before, the scarfs were super tight. So much so that it was virtually impossible to clamp them flat. This meant that when sanding them flat there was no avoiding sanding through the outer plies. I was very upset that I was not going to be able to finish the boat "bright", a term that means varnishing the entire hull. This can look spectacular if the construction is perfect...but not on this scarf! A standard scarf would have been more attractive, simpler to manufacture, stronger, and easily varnished. This is one of the many reasons I probably will never do a kit boat again. That and the many issues coming up that I haven't even gotten to yet!

The bottom and first panels are set out ready for the stitching process.

The first set of panels goes on. The bow and stern don't come together very well, with big gaps where the panels meet. The construction manual says this is OK though, so I don't worry about it too much.  Little do I realize how bad it is going to be!

Before the second set of panels can be stitched on, tapers need to be cut into the "gains" where the panels fade into each other at the bow and stern. CLC has precut where the gains terminate so you are stuck with how they want you to taper them. The rabbet plane cuts a beautiful taper, though.

With the second and third panel's tapers cut into their gains it is time to stitch on the second set of panels.  Once the second set is stitched on the frames are added, which pushes the panels out into their final profile. The gaps in the second panels at the bow and stern are monstrous! Huge, gaping openings show massive amounts of light through. It is impossible to bring the gaps together with the light gauge wire supplied with the kit, so I end up having to drill additional holes and use bailing wire cranked down with vice grips to try to bring the gigantic gaps closed. It still doesn't really work, and my only consolation is knowing that epoxy can fill the cavernous spaces and at least make the boat watertight. Still, at this point I am pissed at how this kit is coming together!

There is nothing I can do but move on and stitch up the third and final set of panels. In this pic you can see the light shining through the huge gaps. 

The bow is not as bad, and seems to look pretty much the way I expected after reading the building manual. There is a big gap at the prow, but I think I can work with this. But the stern...

Look at this incredible mess!!!!  All of the wire here is under incredible tension just to get the gaps to close even this much. And the gains taper down so far that they crack as the panels are brought (forced) together.  This is just not what I was expecting from a company with the reputation CLC has. What the hell?! Move on, keep going...

Epoxy is spread into the gap between the bottom and first panel and slathered into the huge gaps bow and stern to start bringing structure to the hull. 

Once the epoxy cures I pull out the masses of wire and see if the hull explodes from all the stress on it. Miraculously (and mercifully), it holds together!

It's time to flip the hull over. A large fillet is added bow and stern, and then a strip of fiberglass is smoothed over it. Hopefully this will help hold the bow and stern together!

There is now a massive amount of sanding to do to fair all that hideous epoxy and make a desperate attempt to create a smooth hull shape. It turns out ok, but I have to sand through a lot of plywood to get a fair hull. Yeah, definitely painting this mess. 

A layer of fiberglass is added to the bottom and first panel to give strength and abrasion resistance.

It is a beautiful hull shape!

Now several coats of epoxy are rolled on to seal the outside of the hull. The epoxy runs like crazy no matter how thinly I apply it, and a lot of that will just be sanded off later to smooth out the hull. I hate epoxy. I sand and sand, but with my palm sander I don't make much progress. I guess I am going to have to get a Festool random orbital sander! 

Once that all cures I turn the hull over again so I can install the breast hooks and rails. I threw the interior panels in just to get a feel for how the boat will look when it's done.

The rails have traditional scarfs (thank god!) 

While glueing up the rail material I decided to laminate the skeg. For some stupid reason I didn't do this on a flat surface...and it came out with a slight curve in it. Dammit! I can fix this later, but it was a stupid mistake.

I fixed it by clamping the skeg down and glueing the wormshoe to it. The hardwood wormshoe will hopefully hold the skeg straight. (It does.)

The next few shots are of the rail installation, which goes pretty smoothly. The rails are double laminated and I didn't have enough clamps to do both sides at once, so they went on in four steps.

Test fitting

One rail glued up, the second rail goes on. You really can never have too many clamps.

The third rail is attached. Creative solutions are invented to pull that rail into place!

Maybe I should have been a structural engineer!

And the fourth rail goes on!

I have a rotator cuff issue that is really slowing me down. So until next time, whenever that may be...