Still Working in Florida

I hope those of you who are regular readers of my Tiki 26 blog will not lose patience. I will be back at work on the boat, but for now I am still working on a special project in south Florida. I often travel to work on projects, but not usually for this length of time. I don't like having to put my boatbuilding on hold, but everything is a trade-off and what I will get out of this will really help me buy time and materials to complete the boat when I return. Being here in a condo within a short walk of the Atlantic Ocean makes me want the boat more than ever. The coconut palms that are everywhere around here remind me of my good times in the past spent in the tropics, both sailing and sea kayaking. But for now I have to hang in here most likely for the entire month of August until this project is finished.

The project is quite a departure from my usual carpentry work on boats and houses. It is a massive teak pergola that we are building as part of a remodel at a Palm Beach mansion. This is quite possibly the "mother of all pergolas" as the project manager put it, and such a project would only be possible in area with wealth the likes of what is found around the Palm Beach area. This pergola consists of two half circles at each end of a new swimming pool, each half circle made up of an inner and outer series of curving 5" by 8" laminated teak beams. The outer circle has a diameter of 59 feet and the inner circle 38 feet. These two separate runs will be connected by 3" by 6" purlins across the top. For the past three weeks a team of 10 of us have been laminating and fabricating the beams and purlins, starting with the massive piles of teak shown below. We are now in the process of cutting dadoes, drilling holes, slots, etc. for the assembly process, which I will describe in greater detail with more photos in my next post.

Below is the teak stock as it arrived at the shop for processing. This is approximately $150,000 worth of teak, 3"x 6" purlin stock 14' long, and 1" x 8" beam stock for the laminations, also 14' long.

A Few Weeks On Hold

Here is how I left the project: the port hull is glassed and ready to be sanded and faired, and the starboard hull panels are assembled complete with the lower stringers and coated with epoxy.

I'm in south Florida this week, the first of a few that will put my boatbuilding on hold while I work on a big teak carpentry job that will contribute a lot to the final outfitting and purchasing of equipment for my new Tiki 26. When I return I hope to work full time on the boat for awhile.

I will post more about this interesting project that I'm working on in the days to come. I first met David Halliday, owner of Boatsmith Marine Carpenty, back in 2001 when I sailed my 26-foot monohull to the southeast coast of Florida for the winter. I was living aboard at the time and looking for boat-related work while in the area, and the job I found then has led to many more trips south to work for David on special projects. His website can be found here: http://boatsmithfl.com/

Port Hull Sheathing Complete

Tuesday morning I finished the sheathing of the port hull (from the sheer down) with the completion of the starboard side. The entire hull will need at least two more coats of epoxy, but after the second filler coat I like to give it time to cure enough for sanding before applying the third coat with a foam roller. Fairing coats will come much later, when I get ready to prep the hull for painting.

Below is a close-up of the sheer stringer detail, showing how the fiberglass cloth easily conformed over the stringer due to the angle on the bottom edge and fillet to the hull panel. This stringer will be overlapped again with a strip of cloth cut on the bias after the decks and cabins are on and I make the hull to deck joint.

The lower hull panels for the starboard hull are complete on the bench on the other side of the shed, but I won't begin any further assembly until I return from a big teak carpentry job that's going to take me to south Florida for a few weeks. Before I go I plan to get another coat of epoxy on these panels though, and the third coat on the port hull, as well as begin some of the assembly of the beam components.

Hull Fiberglassing Details

Saturday morning and part of today were spent working on the fiberglassing of the port hull. The second keel reinforcing strip I added Friday was cured by Saturday morning, as was the final pass of filler epoxy around the stem to hull joints. I began by sanding and fairing the stem into the hull panels, then laminated a reinforcing strip of glass cloth cut on the diagonal over and around the stem. This strip goes from the sheer to the keel, overlapping the keel strips.

The photo below shows the detail of the stem to keel joint with the glass cloth over it and all excess epoxy squeegeed out.

Another area that I wanted to reinforce with an extra layer of cloth is the skeg to hull joint. This wide strip on each side of the skeg joins the keel strip and wraps around the leading edge of the skeg from both sides.

After the epoxy on these extra strips was cured, I sanded the entire hull and pre-coated it with a thin layer of epoxy applied with a foam roller. I've found that precoating a hull prior to laminating the glass cloth works really well and prevents any chance of the wood soaking epoxy away from the glass cloth and creating a dry laminate.

I let the precoat dry overnight and then sanded it this morning in preparation for laminating the cloth on one side. Since I'm doing this the easy way and laying up the cloth with the hull on its side so I won't be fighting gravity, I can only work on one side at a time, so today I did the port side of the hull.

After the hull was sanded and then wiped down with alcohol, I draped on the glass cloth and prepared to mix up large quantities of epoxy for wetting it out. It's already hot here this time of year at 8:00 in the morning, so I'm having to work with slow hardener and moderate sized batches of epoxy to keep it from going off before I can get it spread and squeegeed.

The wetting out was done with a combination of brushing and pouring and spreading with a squeegee. This is a big fiberglass job, especially when you have to work fast because of the heat. To get such a large piece of cloth to lay down evenly without wrinkles or trapped air bubbles, it is necessary to start in the midships section and work out towards the bow and stern. One detail that worked out really well was the angle I cut on the bottom edge of the upper topside stringer. This angle combined with a small fillet to the topside panel and a small radius on the bottom edge of the stringer allowed the glass cloth to lay down nicely and transition smoothly from the hull to the sheer. This detail will pay off in the long run, I think, with reduced chance of rot getting into this stringer, which is a common problem on the Tiki designs.

Below is the hullside with the second, filling coat of of epoxy applied after the first coat dried to a tacky state. Laminating this hullside took more than a half gallon of epoxy and the corresponding amount of hardener. Tomorrow if this coat is completely cured, I hope to flip the hull over and glass the other side. I'm leaving town in a little over a week to do a big teak carpentry job in south Florida, so I'm trying to get as much done on the boat as possible before I have to go. In addition to this work on the port hull today, I also finished joining the other lower hull panels for the starboard hull, and glued on the stringer. These panels will be ready for assembly after another sanding and second coat of epoxy on the inside surfaces.

95 Degrees in the Shade

Summer is here in Mississippi and it's hot. I put in a good nine hours today, just breaking past the 200 hour mark in the total build time. Most of the time today was spent sanding. This is not the most exciting part of boatbuilding but it has to get done. I'm still working on fairing the exterior of the port hull, endlessly filling and sanding, and filling and sanding some more to get smooth transitions between the panels so that when the hull is painted it will look consistant and well-shaped. As I work on areas like the stem and the fillet between the bottom edge of the upper stringer and the hull, I'm also working on more reinforcing cloth on the keel. Shown below is the second layer of glass cloth on the keel. This is an 8-inch wide strip that overlaps the previous 6-inch wide laminate. The first photo shows it as it is draped on dry, with the blue masking tape in place to aid in cutting a straight line after it is partially cured.

In the photo below the same cloth is now fully wetted out with epoxy and ready to be trimmed just inside the tape line. The leading edge of the skeg is getting extra cloth, as will the stempost.

In the photo below the tape has now been removed and a second layer of epoxy applied. I'm still working on the stem but hope to get a layer of cloth on it tomorrow. In the background you can see my other project on the workbench. This is the first lower hullside assembly for the starboard hull. The buttblocks are held on with temporary screws going right into the bench with plastic sheeting in between to keep from glueing the panel to it. The clamps are holding the stringer that goes on the upper edge of the hullside. This assembly was cured when I quit for the day, and the panels for the other hullside are laid out on the bench waiting for assembly in the morning.

Preparing to Build the Connecting Beams

After the trip to New Orleans on Monday to pick up more Joubert plywood, I reorganized my garage shop at my girlfriend's house so that I can begin building the three main connecting beams that hold the hulls together. These beams are a fairly big project with all the parts and details involved, so I didn't want to have them taking up space in the shed where I'm building the hulls and I needed projects to work on in both places since I divide my time about equally between them. The plan at this point is to build the beams here, all the way through the priming stage, then move them down to where the hulls are. After they are out of the way in the garage, I'll build the cockpit here as well.

I've got enough plywood now to complete the project, except for the cabin tops and the cockpit and seat boxes. It was pouring down rain most of the day Monday while we were in New Orleans, and though I had the wood tarped, I decided not to risk it all getting wet, and needing a bit more will be another excuse to go to New Orleans for a day sometime in the coming weeks.

Today I finished laying out and cutting all the beam webs and floor parts that are made of plywood, and went by my local lumber yard to pick up some clear grained Doug fir for the many stringers these beams require. I ripped all these to the proper dimension, and what you see on the ply table is the result. It looks like a lot of material for three beams, and it is. As I said, these beams contain a lot of parts and the construction of them is no small project. I'll begin by joining the halves of the web and floors together in my next work session in the garage. Tomorrow it's back to the shed where I hope to continue work on the fairing of the hull exterior and get some more glass on the keel, skeg, and stem post as I work toward sheathing the entire hull.

Shaping Hull Exterior and Glassing Keel

The new Rigid 6-inch random orbital sander has been getting a workout and has proved its worth over the past couple days. I turned the hull upside down and set it up on the new, extra-low sawhorses I built for the purpose and began the tasks of shaping the hull exterior. This involves fairing all the hard edges of the keel, skeg and stempost and filling and fairing the joints where the hullsides meet the keel and the topside joint where it overlaps the lower hullside. Getting a smooth, rounded keel was relatively easy after the epoxy filling the joints cured. I went ahead and laminated the first keel strip of glass over this - a 6-inch wide strip of 6-ounce cloth cut on the bias so that it will conform to the keel better. This will be followed by a wider strip of perhaps 10 inches, and then the cloth sheathing the hullside will also overlap the keel, making a total of 4 layers of 6-ounce cloth in the vulnerable area.

To lay the keel strip, I first taped off the perimeter of area I wanted the first strip to cover, then placed the overlapping cloth strips over the keel, letting them hang past the tape line. The cloth is then wetted out with epoxy, and the excess resin removed with a squeegee.

After the epoxy sets up enough so that the cloth does not easily pull away, but not so much that removing the tape is difficult, I cut the cloth with a razor knife just inside the edge of the tape line and pull the tape and excess cloth away. A second epoxy coat is applied immediately after that while the first coat is still tacky. Then it's left alone until full cure, when I will come back and sand it with 80 grit until it is smooth enough to lay on the next, wider layer of cloth.

The leading edge of the skeg needs to be rounded over to reduce turbulance and resistance as it moves through the water at speed. Here it's been partially shaped, but still needs more thickened epoxy at the hullside joints before it is completely faired and ready to glass.

Here's a front view of the upside down hull on the low sawhorses. I can't find any noticeable problems with the fairness of the hull panels. This hull really went together well and is going to look great. I just hope I can build another one just as well to match!

Another view at the bow. Filling and fairing all the details around the stempost and upper stringer is tedious and time consuming. I've still got a ways to go on this, but at this point all the main fillets are made and temporary screw holes in the hull panels filled. I'll be away from the hull a few days but when I return to the shed I hope to finish the exterior fairing and get the sheathing done.

Today I cleared out space in the other half of my workshed so that I can begin making parts for the second hull. I went ahead and scarfed the stringers for the lower hullsides this afternoon. The panels are all cut, epoxy coated and ready for assembly, as are the bulkheads and the stem and sternpost. I plan to assemble the lower hull panels and wire them together, but not set them up for installing the bulkheads until after I assemble the topside panels and glue up the mast. The reason for this is that I have a 26-foot long workbench in this half of the shed and I want to complete all these long parts before tearing it down and making space to set up and build the second hull. The fully assembled hull panels can be conveniently hung from the outer wall of the shed while the mast building process is going on.

Tomorrow I'm going to New Orleans to pick up some more Joubert BS 1088 Okoume plywood. This trip will be to get what I need to build the crossbeams, as well as the bunks for the second hull, and some of the 6mm for the decks and cabin sides of the first hull. I'm taking my stepdaughter with me on this trip and after picking up plywood at Riverside Lumber, we plan to go to the French Quarter for the afternoon and especially to the Cafe Du Monde for some cafe au lait and beignets.