Finished shapin the thwarts with a 45 degree chamfer along the lower edge, primarily to lighten the look of the thick teak. I could have run the teak through the planer and thinned them down, but Skipper wants the weight. Once the ends were trimmed we attached the last set of cleats to the forward thwart with silicon bronze screws, piloted and counterbored with a combination Fuller bit.
The heavy hitters from this router bit set have been the 45 degree chamfer and the 1/4 inch roundover bit. And sometimes the flush bit.
A bit of TotalBoat Gleam Satin varnish for the seats.
Thwarts, gunwale and knees will get varnish. The rest will get a coating of paint. Teak oil might be considered down the road.
It's hot in the Boat Works. The barn door is too low unless you're a hobbit. We want more light. And since the hobbit door on the bow opens onto 2400 square feet of sunny hot concreted during the Summer, Skipper has abandoned me for the shade off the stern. So we are going to install a 72x80 French door with 30 glass panes.
I spent part of the day removing the loft and relocating flotsam, jetsam and spiders, to make room for the door frame. While I could butcher a hole to fit it, I'm hiring a pro carpenter to install the frame.
Time to cut a hole in a perfectly good boat. We drilled a pilot hole for the jig saw, cut what we could from the inside then flipped the boat. Oops, first we shaped the ends of the trunk posts, they stick through the hull and will be cut flush with the bottom. Shinto rasp does the trick for this bit of butchery. Rounding the post keeps there from being hard corners, which can lead to stres points, cracks and leaks.
Used the Japanese pull saw to finish the straight line. Those cuts will be our reference on the bottom for where to start the curved ends.
I rough trimmed the curved ends with the jigswa...that's spelled wrong, but I like it... then used a half round file to clean up the cut. Next was a test fit of the trunk and we dropped the daggerboard in to see if we made the slot wide enough. We did.
We rolled out the boat and tested out the shade behind the Boat Works, the French door will open onto this area. Skipper approved. We'll make a little quarterdeck with bricks we found in the forest, where Skipper can Skippervise from.
Trunk fastened with THIXO Flex. Fastned from the bottom with #10 Frearson head silicon bronze screws, piloted and countersunk.
I took out my calibrated Sharpie and marked the hole to cut for the daggerboard trunk. It is offset per design to keep the keel backbone strong, and so the keel will slide up onto a dock or boat or whatever without catching on a spot where a hunk is cut out for a trunk. Per design.
Bevel gauges are handy tools when building boats; they can be used to measure, mark, and transfer angles from one work surface to another. They can also be used to directly set accurate blade angles on cutting tools, versus transferring measurements from a larger bevel to a protractor and then to a saw’s bevel gauge. We used a 9″ sliding bevel gauge when building our Penobscot 14 and while restoring an 1880s Mississippi River skiff, but it was too big to take angles in small spaces, made an awkward fit in a pocket, and kept getting left in a variety of hiding places. A few years ago, I began looking for a smaller, handier bevel gauge, and found the aptly named 3-inch Bevel Gauge at the WoodenBoat Store.
The gauge is made of brass strips that are 1/16″ thick and 1/2″ wide, and has angled points at the ends. For safety’s sake, the points are not sharp, and the edges are softened to be kind to hands and workpieces. The large aluminum screw is easy to adjust and set the right amount of friction between the blades. The screw’s low profile ensures that it does not snag inside a pocket. The ends of the blades at the screw are evenly rounded and their pointed ends line up accurately. The bevel gauge has a nice weight to it, indicative of a well-made tool and, most importantly for me, it slips easily in and out of a pocket.
Finding the angle for the top of a seat cleat
Setting the angle on the bandsaw
Cutting the seat top bevel
Checking the fit.
The small gauge is simple to use; the tightness of the blades can be adjusted to slip smoothly to a setting and then hold it. The blades can also rotate 360 degrees, an advantage over sliding bevel gauges that can’t take small angles without having the blade extend beyond the pivot. The short 3″ blades allow the tool to be placed in small places where larger bevels can’t fit, and take more accurate angles where a curved surface is involved. Settings can be taken from the boat and quickly transferred to the workpiece. The gauge is thin, just 1/8″, so it is better suited for picking up angles from a lofting than is a traditional sliding bevel with a thick wooden body, which elevates the blade above the lines. And the bright brass makes the gauge easy to see when the bevel is placed in a dark area of the boat. The 3-Inch Bevel Gauge is useful, simple, small, portable, and reasonably priced. I’ll hang on to mine and give them as gifts to my boatbuilding friends.
Took a measurement from the plans to figure out how far forward the aft thwart goes from the stern transom. From there we can determine thwart cleat placement. 3 inches is what I came up with.
We want the thwart about 1/4 inch below the plank line, so we used some scrap to mark the thickness of the thwart, which then shows us where the cleat support will be attached underneath. Mark around the cleat with a pencil.
Now that the cleat position is marked we can drill small holes from the inside, to show us where bigger holes will be drilled from the outside.
The cleat need a bevel on the top so that the thwart will sit flat. With the hull level side to side...mostly...we can use a level and pocket bevel gauge to find the bevel for the cleat.
Then we transfer the angle over to our saw or handplane of choice, which today is a bandsaw. OBTW we haven't used a bandsaw a lot, in fact we just bought this used Delta 12 inch over the Winter.
If your cleat stock is square, you can cut any edge and the bevel will work. Ours is rectangular, and we want the wider face to be the "side" that is glued and screwed to the plank. So we scribble a pencil mark to show which way we want the cut to go. It's not a line to cut to, just a way to make sure the stock is oriented correctly.
We used the corner of the cleat as our cut line, seems I wandered a little but I'll fix that with a hand plane or sander....Spoiler Alert...the sander was faster.
TLAR Method...That Looks About Right.
Now we drill those small reference holes from the inside face of the plank, only deep enough to get through the plank. The larger pilot/counterbore will come in from the outside of the plank. I goofed here, can you see what I messed up? I marked the top and bottom of the cleat, but not the fore and aft. So my SWAG (Sophisticated Wild Ass Guess) for where the aft hole could go was too far back. Look close and you can see the little 3 inch pencil mark just above...and forward...of the new hole. I figured it out when I drilled the pilot hole from the outside with the cleat in place...and missed the cleat. Oops. No time for The Moaning Chair, there's quite a few designed epoxy holes on this boat, anyone who points out one more hole can watch us have fun boating from their vantage point ashore. A new pilot hole further forward and some thickened epoxy got us back on course.
Another thing to check, and we've goofed before, is that the depth of the counterbore is set for the screw we are using. It's good here, but sometimes I have set the combination pilot bit/countersink for a longer screw, then forgot to reset it for a shorter screw. The pilot bit gets larger the deeper the pilot hole, so the correct length screw will not bite. It's not a problem if you can say "Oh well" and use a longer screw, but it becomes a problem if the screw pokes through the other side of the pieces being fastened. You could go up a screw size, say #8 to #10, but Sir Richard will notice that. Or fill the hole and redrill.
Pilot holes and counterbores. We go deep enough so that the head of the screw will be a tiny amount below the surface of the plywood, which allows a skin coat of fairing compound. On 1/4 inch (6mm) ply it is easy to get overzealous and drill the counterbore entirely through the plywood, which leaves a useless hole.
We set up the thwart pattern jig as before and scribed the hull plank curve, more significant aft that amidships.
Ready to cut the curves and bevels as we did before on the middle thwart. Ignore the measurements, they are wrong!
Using the WoodenBoat School method, they screw the pattern end pieces to the cross battens, remove the clamps and use the full pattern to mark the stock.I tried something different, I measured the widest part of the seat, unclamped the pattern ends and placed the pattern ends out to that width, then tried to get the pattern front and back edge as flush (square) as possible with the blank stock. Can you see already my introduction of error(s) for the sake of trying to avoid drilling a few screw holes into scrap teak? My idea worked great on the middle thwart, but not so much on the aft thwart. Luckily my error was in the "too big" range, so I scribed and trimmed the aft thwart down to the proper fit, which is what the pattern method is trying to get us to avoid in the first place.
Bandsaw still life.
Ahhhh, the dry fit glamor shot. Not quite as snug a fit as the middle thwart, and certainly not on the first pass, but I'm going to say that I left a small gap in spots to allow for wood swelling and water drainage.
