Calendar Islands Yawl build in NY

[Larchmont Jim]

I am about a month into a project to build a Clint Chase-designed Calendar Islands Yawl. This will be the 5th boat i have built... yes it can become an affliction. Er... I mean addiction. Or avocation. Or, to my wife and kids, occasionally an annoyance, especially if I run the sander or table saw in the garage. So I'm starting build log here. Not to impart building wisdom, because there are many threads from much better builders than I, but primarily to show the design and the efficiency which which Clint has dsigned the kit.

I've moved progressively up the complexity and tools-required ladder with each build, and picked up enough skill to attempt this one. I'm working from Clint's plywood kit, but doing all the spars and other solid timber myself. My training ground and progressively expanding toolkit:

1) Pygmy Boats Arctic Tern 14 kayak: japanese handsaw, cordless drill, orbital sandebr /> 2) Pygmy Boats Murrelet: block plane, spokeshave even though i didn't really need them; Pygmy kits require almost no real wordworking (but produce wonderful boats!)
3) CLC Northeaster Dory: sabre saw, trim routebr /> 4) Dave Gentry Ruth wherry: table saw

And for this one, I sprung for a 10" bandsaw even though I probably only 'needed' it to make the oars.

I love my NE Dory, it's a fantastic boat and probably the most evenly balanced boat between being a good rower and being a good sailer that you can get. But I wanted something with a little more volume and freeboard for safety on the Maine Island Trail, but also a boat i could sleep aboard. (With the dory, you must find a campsite at night not just a tight gunkhole. ) But I still wanted a boat easily beachable and movable by two people. Not to mention one that i could build within the confines of a one-car garage. The CIY looks to fit the bill perfectly.

Me and my garage (shop) are located about a mile from Long Island Sound and 6 miles from the NY City line in Larchmont, NY. Next up, some photos as soon as I figure out how to post them.

[James McMullen]

Good for you, Jim! That's a very good looking boat, and Clint Chase knows exactly what he's doing. I'll be rooting for you and following with interest.

[James McMullen]

Probably should bump up to a 20” bandsaw though, just in case. It's okay, tell your wife I said you could have one. Just have her call me if you run into any problems there.

[Larchmont Jim]

If this works properly, it means i have figured out how to post a photo...

https://plus.google.com/109521689897...ts/ZQYZN94vHvT

[Larchmont Jim]

If i follow the plans closely, it ought to come out looking something like this:

https://plus.google.com/109521689897...ts/aSu4NHavL6Y

[John hartmann]

Good choice! Following with interest, and looking forward to your thread.

[Rich Jones]

Will be watching. Nice looking design.

[Clinton B Chase]

Have fun Jim, I'll be watching too, you know where to find me when you have questions

[Larchmont Jim]

I spent the first few weeks building stuff out that didnt come when the, that is the oars and the spars. All out of sitka spruce i got at ML Condon, a fantastic lumber yard in White Plains NY. I got a clear, vertical grain 17' rough sawn 2"x8" for the mainmast, not even the tiniest knot in it. And shorter ones for the other spars and oars. Wood like this is not cheap though; about $500 for all i need for this boat. Here you can see my handiwork, a box-section hollow boom, a round solid yard, rectangular mizzen and mizzen sprit, and two oars. The oars were from plans and patterns from CLC.

https://plus.google.com/109521689897...ts/VE3p5EgcUbJ

[Larchmont Jim]

Absurdly warm weather this weekend meant I could do some table saw work outdoors. To rip a 17' board into staves for the mast you need a >34' space (I guess I am as good at math as at boat building) and that's a bit bigger than my garage. So i got 8 staves milled as you can see in the photo.

[Larchmont Jim]

Also got the daggerboard trunk half-assembled this weekend. Then covered the inside with epoxy mixed with graphite. Muy slippery. Never used graphite before but it sounds like a good idea.

https://plus.google.com/photos/photo...awv=1&hl=en-US

[Larchmont Jim]

Last task of a busy weekend-- getting all of the plywood and chipboard pieces separated out of the router-cut sheets and cleaning up several zillion of those little nubs left by the router... which leaves you with a prodigious pile of offcut wreckage and sawdust. This will become the world's most highly engineered firewood. I kept the larger scraps which may come in handy. This Bruyneel okoume is nice stuff.

https://plus.google.com/photos/photo...awv=1&hl=en-US

[johngsandusky]

Looks like fun.
Maybe I'll see you on the Sound sometime.

[Clinton B Chase]

Wish there was a good way to get a photo from Google Photos onto a post...

[Larchmont Jim]

OK so after an hour and half of screwing around trying to figure out how to post the actual photo in this thread I have figured out that I'm not a total idiot, but that Google makes it impossible. They have some kind of roundabout links to photos that don't work for embedding in this forum. So going through the rigamarole of moving photos to Flickr, now I think I have it figured out.

More laminating to do. The stem is a clever design. Instead of having to cut, plane and then glue a bunch of solid wood strips into a laminated stem, the CIY kit provides you with 5 pieces of CNC-cut ply that you laminate in a transverse fashion (i.e. all the ply pieces run for-and-aft and you laminate around the centerline piece). Even more clever, you just align all 5 pieces with CNC-drilled temp screw holes, and then the edges of each piece tell you where you need to plane to:

[Larchmont Jim]

And the result is like this:

[Larchmont Jim]

Here you can see the whole stem assembly. It also includes a centerline support for where the forward deck will go.

[Larchmont Jim]

And yet more laminating, of the rudder and kickup rudder blade




The kit includes some CNC-cut templates that make it pretty easy to get the right foil shape. I'm not quite there yet, but close:

[Larchmont Jim]

Enough with the laminating alright!!!

Last I think, but not least, the daggerboard. This thing is BIG.

Clint suggests a test fit in the clamped-together daggerboard trunk before you glue the trunk sides together. I tried that and it's already a reasonably snug fit, and I haven't glassed the daggerboard yet. The glass will make it a bit wider. I think I'll hold off on the trunk until the daggerboard is completely finished!

[webishop14]

Wise choice. Embiggening a dagger board trunk can be challenging. Easier to just not go there.

Bill

[keyhavenpotterer]

so enjoying this thread. thanks for posting. from the very first images of CIY




i was captivated and now I can enjoy the great kit design and building skills displayed

[Larchmont Jim]

Thanks Keyhavenpotterer for the photo of the finished boat. It is much more interesting to see a boat rather than a bunch of random parts! I think that is Jim Levang's, he built what was essentially the prototype. Clint was confident enough in the CAD design (or foolish enough to take the risk) that he sold the first kit to Jim without ever having built one. That it went together quite well is testament to the capability of modern computer design...

For those of you in forumland who want to know what the finished design is supposed to be, in addition to that photo I post here a drawing from the plans:

[Larchmont Jim]

Building progress... this weekend was consumed with more pre-hull building steps. Glassing the daggerboard:



And epoxy sealing the rudder (no glass):



Rudder is a kick-up, that is the top and this is the kickup blade:

[Larchmont Jim]

The other big (actually biggest in terms of time consumed) job of the weekend was tapering all 8 of the birdsmouth mast staves. Taking the station widths off of the plans, I drew the shape, cut and planed one stave and then used it as a pattern for the other 7. A pretty squirrelly cut on the bandsaw followed by a lot of planing on the first one, but by the 8th stave I had gotten the bandsaw skill down to where I was able to cut pretty consistently close to the drawn pen-line and not have to do a lot of planing.

I'll need a decent weather weekend to take the bandsaw outside and cut the birdsmouth "v" into each of these, hopefully next weekend.

[Larchmont Jim]

Just for yucks I got out a couple of big pieces and did a quick-fit because I wanted to see something that actually resembled part of a boat. Here is the transom and the next-forward bulkhead, which join together with a very cool tab-and-wedge system for gluing. Side tanks and what will be a hinged lazarette in the center. Plus the center bulkhead sitting forward of it. I am amazed by the size... the tail end of my dory is maybe a foot wide; this boat has a generous "bustle". Exactly why I wanted it -- room enough for a sleeping platform and ability to camp aboard.

You can get a sense of scale by the yardstock sitting on top of the aft bulkhead:

[Larchmont Jim]

Boatbuilding is fun, but getting out on the water is more fun. MLK Day, 2 weeks ago, your humble correspondent in his Pygmy Murrelet kayak out on Long Island Sound. Believe it or not, that woodsy land in front of me is the Bronx, NY:

[Larchmont Jim]

An hour and a half after work spent epoxy coating one side of the transom, bulkheads and frames, plus the 2nd side of the daggerboard. If I epoxy coat them now it will be a lot easier than doing them once they are assmbled into the boat. The masking tape is to keep raw wood where the fillets will eventually go, which will make for a better glue joint.

I am using Raka 127 epoxy for this build. My prior boats were built with System Three or MAS. So far the Raka is working great. The only difference I detect between it and those brands is that the Raka cost literally half as much. Maybe it cures a little harder than System Three (the plane just skips over it). I ordered it directly from Raka in Florida. Good quick service, very happy with it.

[Falcon1]

Looks great! I'm just reading the article on the CIY in Small Boats ( The annual, paper issue) It is a beautiful deisgn.

This is another thread that makes me wish I had ordered a kit for my Ilur. Live and learn.

Please keep documenting.

Mike

[webishop14]

Mike --

Building from the plans teaches you far more than just how to put a kit together. My opportunity (scrap?) pile attests to my learning experience. I'm sure my next boat (also built from plans) will be a much finer build for having built my first.

Bill

[Larchmont Jim]

Building from lumber and plans does indeed develop skills that the kit builder will not gain. I respect those who do it the old-fashioned way. However, I have a more-than-full time job, and way too many hobbies to actually be able to pursue as it is. The kit is an enormous time saver, and most likely a finished product quality-improver. Ultimately my goal is more to sail than to build, so time savings is a wonderful thing. Plus, this particular design was born in CAD on the computer, so it would seem kind of silly to take those CNC instructions and convert them back to a lines plan so that the builder could then spile the planks to recreate what was already created on the computer... and have much less accurately cut planks than the CNC machine produces.

Plus I am a believer in modern technology and think it's pretty cool that it can be used to produce a sweet, traditional looking boat based on some very traditional design learnings. Kudos to Clint Chase for conceiving such cool trad designs for amateur builders using modern materials. I kind of wish I had a Deblois Street Dory, the most awesome uber-traditional boat built in modern ply and epoxy. (It's about one order of magnitude cooler than the CLC NE Dory I do have).

My concession to old-fashionedness is that I am making all of the solid wood parts from rough-sawn boards obtained at a lumber yard. A purist would cut his own trees and saw his own boards from logs. But I live in a city and don't have that luxury. At least I didn't just go out and buy a floating Clorox bottle!

[webishop14]

Hello, Jim --

I didn't mean to disparage your choice. Your priorities are valid. They work for you, and that's all that's needed. I simply wanted to point out that Mike was learning more by building from plan than he would from a kit ("Live and learn" ?).

I'm not about to go out in search of trees to fell, to mill into the planks I need. (1/4" ply?) In the end, we do what pleases us. I would observe that for some of us building a boat is like getting a tattoo -- before the current one is finished we're dreaming of the next one.

Bill

[Clinton B Chase]

I kind of wish I had a Deblois Street Dory, the most awesome uber-traditional boat built in modern ply and epoxy. (It's about one order of magnitude cooler than the CLC NE Dory I do have).

Well that makes me feel warm all over!

I used to be vehemently against building from kits. I was interested very much in building a Swallowboats design but only kits were available which was frustrating for me at the time. I felt that I could learn more from plans and I had some boatbuilding training so that pushed me that way, too.

However, when you build a boat in the computer (notice I did not say design)....when you BUILD a boat in the computer, it is quite silly to try to then build that same boat from plans from a practical point of view, especially if you want to start with offsets. (I don't even make tables of offsets as part of the plans.) However, it is not silly if the builder really has the time and desire to draw out all the parts that would normally come precut. It makes sense to build from plans if you really love spending hours upon hours laying out all the profiles of the normally precut parts and cutting to those lines and cleaning up with hand tools. You get good at those skills!

Then again, I am watching my customers learn heaps about working with epoxy well and spend more time on cutting solid wood parts that fit and spending time on details such as the rigging when that can get rushed. Moreover, they are getting more time in on the painting and fit out because of the time savings. So they get a better boat, it seems.

Then again, I recently converted a boat to offsets for a school project because the goal was to learn to loft. That made sense. They then used full size patterns for a number of parts as well as generated their own from the loft floor. I remember lofting a curved raked transom for the first time and the designer who was in house told us to come get the FSP to compare to our lofted transom. It is a great tool to have patterns and precut parts from the computer.

And to go on about one more thing, the boat comes out on the shop floor only as good as it was built in the computer and transferred into cutting files for the kit. If it goes together wrong in the computer, it will come out the same 'wrong' in the real world. Like Jim mentioned, I was confident enough with my software and my abilities building the boat in the computer at that point to let the first builder of CIY hull #1 have the first wack at building the kit, 1300 miles away. I did build a quarter scale model.

[Skegemog]

Hey Clint, we met at the SRR last summer (you kindly sent me some really beautiful pics of my brother and me in GINGER my NGH Coquina), thanks again.
I just wanted to chime in here and second you about using CAD to engineer stuff for building. I design and build (with help) all kinds of architectural woodwork and furniture for a living and I have literally tons and tons of equipment, hand tools, edge tools, all manner of stuff but the most important tools by far I have are CAD software. Leaving aside the ability to export instruction to CNC equipment, the leverage you get from being able to design and engineer virtually in 3-dimensions is difficult to explain to people not used to using it. And the more complex the end product the more leverage you get. The fact that the license for decent software is no longer prohibitive for a small business helps as well.
I have contemplated "building" a traditional carvel planked boat in CAD just for the pleasure of it. Anyway, I'm glad to see this thread here because this is a little discussed topic and while the graybeards may get disgruntled a good tool is a good tool. Look forward to possibly seeing you at SRR 17, Jim

[webishop14]

I agree wholeheartedly with what Clint has posted. Twenty years ago I "built" in CAD (AutoCAD R14) a complete 3-D model of a high-speed roll-fed labeling machine. As it turned out, the computer I was blessed with was the only one in the company powerful enough to load and display the model (but only with much groaning). Building models in CAD is a great way to design. A teammate and I designed and built another similar machine from the ground up in 3-D, going from design specification to shipping out the back door of the plant in 6 months, with only one part on the scrap heap. CAD is a great tool, and I see a lot of fine looking boats being turned out this way -- eg. Francois Vivier. I would suggest that Clint does more than JUST build models of boats in CAD. Whatever design tools you use, you still need to make design decisions. This, not that; here, not there. Don't sell yourself short, Clint.

[Skegemog]

Whatever design tools you use, you still need to make design decisions. This, not that; here, not there. Don't sell yourself short, Clint.

Hear, hear!