Sunday, June 21, 2020

Pascagoula Diamond Bottom Catboat MARGARET ROSE 18 Jun 20 Keel Batten and Skeg

18 Jun 20:

Planned to apply a second coat of TotalBoat WetEdge Fire Red to ZIP but Skipper intervened, she said ZIP looks great, we had good coverage, and if I kept painting she would never dry. So we rolled her out by the flagpole to let the Florida sun bake the finish.


That gave us time to work on MARGARET ROSE. We drew out the keel batten/longeron, Skipper okayed it and I cut out a master batten from cypress with the DeWALT 20V brushless 6 1/2 inch circular saw. I cleaned up the corners of the centerboard slot with the DeWALT 20V jigsaw.



Once we were happy with the master we cut out 3 more layers from 3/4 inch stock, with one layer being from the first pine board we bought when we were fiddling with the design a few months back. We need thickness on the bottom so we can bevel for the Diamond bottom (V bottom) and still have meat left to fasten into. The Sharpie makes a nice saw kerf wide line, easy to see and cut along.


Maybe the boat's name should be SAWDUST, because that is what it looks like we're making.


We screwed the bottom board down to the deck, then screwed each layer to the board below it. Then we hoisted the transom end to get some prebend going, that end needs to rise a little over 12 inches for the final shape. Let me back up a minute, I was sitting in The Moaning Chair trying to figure out whether to prebend first or cut the shape first. Skipper suggested that it might be easier to cut the board if it was flat vs curved, a no brainer.


I was also trying to figure out how to jack the boards from underneath and Skipper suggested that we use her hoist. That worked great, the line raised the end about 8 inches and I got inspired to add a ratchet strap, that raised the boards up to the required 12 1/8 inches.


The skeg was next, how to make a 12 inch tall skeg from boards under 11 inches wide? I ripped some 3/4 inch scrap to 1 1/2 inches wide, then we stacked the strips until we got a stack just over 12 inches. I scribed the keel curve from underneath the keel to the side of the skeg, then tried to carefully carry the enire stack of 16 strips over to the work table, to Skipper's immense entertainment. I almost made it, the last few feet the strips started to delaminate and I got a nice pile on the table. It was easy enough to line them back up based on the scribe mark.



Next I unstacked the strips and dry fastened them together one at a time with #8 silicone bronze screws. This will be our version of drift pins, I may or may not leave the screws in when we epoxy all the strips together in a few days.



Trimmed the curve with the DeWALT 20V brushless jigsaw.


Dry fit the skeg. Which was another question. Fit the skeg to the keel or the keel to the skeg? We are going with skeg to keel. But first we need to epoxy all the skeg strips together and run them through the thickness planer to get the sides smoothed down.


Keel Batten video: https://youtu.be/a_bgCER5bE4



Log of MARGARET ROSE.

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