A Seil in California

[pez_leon]

Thanks everyone for the answers - just what I needed to hear. It sounds as though joining the sail and oar club does not exempt one from the realities of mildew. I will continue to rinse and fully dry sails. WRT fabric I am leaning toward waxed canvas, pending the results of a trial project. I will mull it all over and keep you posted.
Meanwhile: sewing eyelets.

[pez_leon]

I have developed a taste for canvas work. First up was a tool bag for punches, grommet sets, and eyelet sets.

[pez_leon]

When boat camping I carry a metal grill for cooking over campfires. In the past it's been a messy, sooty, oily item to stow. We'll see if this waxed canvas case helps. I don't know the material well. The hope is that it'll prove oil- and filth- resistant enough to contain the mess.

[pez_leon]

Attachment 75313
I made the sail in white terylene, what paint to use and this is the result.

I get such a kick out of this boat and sail, Frank. She's a beauty.

[pez_leon]

All that was left was a pleasant hour banging in grommets and eyelets under close supervision.



The sail is done! (Le Seil is still very, very far from done).

I purchased some 500d cordura for the sail bag. I have an idea for assembly that might make it more useful out on the water. I'll keep you all posted.

[pez_leon]

I'm marking out the centerboard and have come up with questions:

1) The centerboard includes multiple cutouts. My instinct is to bore all these holes before shaping, while the centerboard is still square in section. Is that right?

2) As per the plans I'll bore a 14mm hole for the pivot. My plan is to initially overbore, fill with thickened epoxy, and then bore the 14mm hole. If I bore it initially at 1" I get about 5mm of solid epoxy around the pivot. Is that about right?

3) The plans call for attaching a stainless eye bolt as an anchor point for the centerboard pennant. (The eye bolt serves to create a solid loop on the trailing edge of the board, not too far from the pivot point The bore for this bolt would be along the fore-aft axis of the boat. A perpendicular cutout in the board allows tightening a nut). I wonder if, given the strength of modern cordage, I could just use a loop of spectra here instead. I would still bore a hole into the trailing edge of the board. I'd probably connect this to one side of the board via a perpendicular access hole. Later I'd tie a short loop of spectra with a figure 8 stopper and poke it through the hole to make my attachment point (or possibly just reeve the centerboard pennant through this hole, with a stopper knot on the end). All of this would be initially over bored, filled, and later drilled at the desired dimension. What am I missing?

4) I am very keen to have an effective hold on the bottom of the centerboard. The plan calls for a cutout slot near the leading edge around 8 mm wide and about 40 mm long. I'm considering just making this a deep groove on each side so as to preserve hydrodynamics. Do you think you cold grab a groove as well as you could grab a long slot?

Thanks,

James

[John Meachen]

I don't understand the notion of a slot near the leading edge of the centreboard.For efficiency a smooth and unbroken surface ought to be the solution.Could you post a sketch?

[pez_leon]

John, thanks for asking. Here's the idea:


What you're seeing is a roughed out centerboard with all relevant marks. Leading edge at top of frame. The pivot is shown at upper left at the intersection of three lines. The circle scribed at right will be drilled out and replaced with lead to weight the bottom of the board. At the top right is a long slot marked in blue. (I think blue- I am very colorblind). The plans call for this to be cut out as a slot. I believe the idea is to create a hand hold to extend the centerboard in the event of a capsize.
I suppose there's a tension here between a smooth and unbroken efficient surface and board that can be easily extended under difficult circumstances.

[pez_leon]

Up first was a deep cleaning. Before my kids were born, my one car garage workshop was a temple. I never stoped worked until it was swept, blown out, and tidy, so that I could always get straight to work the next day. My children eventually made it very clear that I would never get anything done in the shop by holding myself to this standard. I now stop work the instant I'm yelled for and accept the accumulation of mess. I do love the catharsis of a good cleanout, and now was a perfect time, with all my milling done and days of shaving-making ahead of me.

Then I roughed out my centerboard and rudder on the ash blanks I laid up back in June. The full-scale templates provided make this very easy.


After roughing out I found that the blanks just won't stay true: the rudder is cupping slightly, and the centerboard has a strong 1/8" of twist. I should have known better. Even my wishful verbage at the time of assembly called the timber "wonky". When I look at the end grain I wonder what I was thinking.




My current centerboard, in its fickle whimsey, has haunted several otherwise perfect nights of boat camping. Most recently it contrived to stick hard on a bight of a reefing line. I had to haul as hard as I could on the redirected fourfold purchase of my boom vang to free it. A major goal for this build is a reliable centerboard. So, I'm going to resign the ash to the compost bin and return to making blanks.
This time I've got some Western Red Cedar milled for and gifted to me by a relation up in the foothills. There is an embarrassment of riches, a literal truckload of this, under a tarp out back of my house. Most is landscaping grade but some of the 8/4 X 10" stock is clear enough that I can pick out prime staves.



I know it's soft, but I figure an extra layer of fiberglass will make up for that. It feels good to be going back and getting this right. And if these blanks don't stay flat enough, I'll just go to plywood.

[pez_leon]

While I'm milling I'll also make the blanks for the fore and aft transom. Years ago, I picked up some wide 8/4 cherry. I had the idea that this one would make a dining table someday, but it's too big for the space in our current house and also somehow too short for the dining table we'll eventually want. Instead the plan is to rip out and resaw the nearly quarter-sawn bits.

[pez_leon]

Astute viewers will have noticed that Vivier's full-scale template for the rudder includes a cross-section. I transferred that to plywood, approximated the leading edge with a right-sized drill bit and (after taking the picture shown below) cut along the line to make my template.


For comparison: in the very helpful discussion of foils earlier in this thread, many suggested making the shape equivalent to NACA 0012 but with flat sides - that is, take the leading and trailing ends of the thicker profile and apply them to this thinner board. Based on airfoiltools.com, the resulting section would look like this:


(Here I've cropped the top of the section to show what it would look like on a flat-sided, thinner board. The bottom line shows the full section).

Close enough for me!

James

[John Meachen]

Thanks for explaining the slot.I understand it's purpose and being honest,regret that you need to add lead to your board.I still find it a perverse thing to do and it contributes very little to stability.Back in the late 1940's Jack Holt came up with a much better solution for keeping a centreboard in place.I would guess that more than 40 thousand boats make use of the system he contrived.

[pez_leon]

.I understand it's purpose and being honest,regret that you need to add lead to your board.

John, I'll bite on this. As someone who constantly struggles not to re-think, re-engineer, and ultimately worsen the work of more capable people, I have been planning to build the boat exactly as drawn. In this project every time I've considered straying I have eventually realized that what seemed to be a chance to improve the design for my use was really just my own misunderstanding. Still, I am toying with the idea of keeping the board unweighted.
The plans call around 500 ml of lead, resulting in a mass around 5 kg. I think the sole purpose of this lead is to sink the board. I think that I could accomplish the same either by:

1) Using a centerboard control rod, like a Lilistone design, obr /> 2) Adding a downhaul pennant to the CB. Like the lifting pennant, this line would emerge from the centerboard case cap.

What would you all do? Anyone want to advocate for the weighted board?

[WI-Tom]

I have a weighted board in my Alaska, and have used the rigid rod in my brother's Ross Lillistone's Phoenix III. Neither method is a deal breaker. A rigid handle gives you more to work with if you ever need to free a stuck board. A weighted board's handle can stick up pretty far if you want the board only partly down.

If I were to re-do mine, I would add more weight, though. I'm not sure how much I ended up with, but I think more would be better--it would hold the board more vertical. Not a flaw of the design, but rather of my execution.

Tom

[John Meachen]

My preferred system for keeping a board in place is basically the system that Jack Holt came out with in the late 1940's for the GP14.The GP stands for General Purpose and forumite Art Haberland sails one.The principle is that a short piece of rubber hose is compressed by bolts to flatten the section and thus press against the sides of the case.Its cheap and adjustable and won't thump back into the case should you invert during a capsize.Another benefit is that you don't have to drag the weight of the lead that isn't there back up the ramp at the end of the day.

Selection_001.jpg

The dark area is what you haven't got and for the designed shape a downhaul and uphaul,led through sheaves to the inside of the boat and thence to cleats would work.For the downhaul,a CL257 Clamcleat would be a good thing.It would also be a good idea not to round the edges in the area,so that the rope has less opportunity to find a way to get jammed.

Selection_002.jpg

One other thing I have advocated before and will do so again is using a sensible pivot system.We did have a few fellows here a while back who were under the misapprehension that a rigid pivot was required and would go to great lengths to try for such an outcome.I find a bolt works well if there is a rubber washer on either end next to the wood.What you don't need is a bolt crushing the two sides of the case together as it is not hard to split the case side away from the logs.To prevent this you need a plastic bush that is a fairly tight fit between the sides and which will accept the compression loads.by doing so you are allowing both sides to contribute to the support.The hole for the bush can be quite slack so the wood doesn't swell and develop a split.

[WI-Tom]

I like a blind pin rather than a bolt for the pivot. Drill oversize, fill with epoxy, then re-drill for the correct size for the pin. A plywood (or whatever) cap, bedded and screwed on each side of the centerboard case keeps the pin contained. No way to overtighten, because there is nothing to tighten in the first place. And pivot point above the waterline if possible.

Tom

[timo4352]

I can vouch for John's rubber hose setup. Works great in my gunning dory, where I did not want to add weight.
Mine is simpler with screws squishing the hose instead of bolts. Still works OK.

[pez_leon]

Many thanks to John, Tom, and Timo4352 for your thoughts on centerboards. I appreciate you taking the time to spell it out for me. I'll think them all over.
WRT the pivot the plans call for the blind pin described by Tom, and I'm inclined to go with it.

[pez_leon]

New centerboard/rudder panel partially glued. The full width panel doesn't fit through my thicknesser, so I'll wait to glue the last (center) joint until I've brought each half to final dimensions. I am much more confident in this panel than I was in the ash one that gave me trouble.


Resawing 45 mm cherry stock down to 20 mm boards asked for a degree of accuracy I wasn't sure my band saw could provide. I ran higher tension than I have before, crossed fingers, held breath, and made sacrificial offerings. Came out just great. Here's the boards that will make the aft transom:



Future aft transom

BONUS PRAM CONTENT: How many sail-and-oar designs give you two transoms for the price of one?

Future fore transom

[pez_leon]

[pez_leon]

That's more like it. The new centerboard and rudder blanks are flat as could be.

I have yet to shape the profile on the real things. I fiddled around with some scrap as a warm up. Here's an approximation of what the trailing edge will look like:


That black paracord is there to reinforce the otherwise very delicate edge. I read the idea somewhere on this forum, I think from Ben Fuller. It sits in a groove made with an ancestral Record 50c:

[dsimonson]

Nice work! I assume the paracord will be saturated in epoxy, then, once set, the trailing edge will be thinned to it's final dimension? Cool trick!All the best,Dale

[pez_leon]

Dale, the plan is indeed to saturate the cord in epoxy. To be honest I'm not quite sure where I'm going after that. The plans call for a squared off edge, about 7 mm wide, with sharp corners. I think the idea is to keep the edge somewhat robust. (While this is the trailing edge, strength still matters if the board gets stuck and I have to hammer on it via a hole in the centerboard case top). Somewhere I also picked up the idea that sharp edges help with "vortex shedding", but for all I know that was just a dream I had.
So at the moment my thought is to build square corners around the cord using thickened epoxy. We'll see how that shakes out.
I got a kick out of your 14' Gartside website. Looks like a beautiful lake for sailing.

James

[pez_leon]

I'm working out the holes in both foils. Most are the usual: overbore, fill with epoxy, and drill to final dimensions, and I would have been done long ago if I didn't get into a tangent with the rudder.
The rudder foil pivots in the rudder head. Vivier calls for a 40 mm bearing built into the rudder head passing through a corresponding 42 mm hole in the rudder. He mentions that the dimensions are not critical and suggests making the bearing out of copper or PVC pipe filled with epoxy.
I had some leftover HDPE in the shop, so I turned the bearing out of that:





I had to make about six of these before I got the dimensions I wanted. Evidently I just can't get enough of dispersing tiny chips of plastic all over my shop.

Here's a test run for the hole in the rudder that will ride on the bearing you see above. I overbored to 5 cm (2" forstner bit) and poured epoxy around a waxed 42 mm plug wrapped in a few layers of 6 oz glass. We'll see tonight if the plug pops nicely out.



All this was based on an article and drawings credited to Captain James R. Watson at epoxyworks.com



So at this point I've put a few hours into making a system that is probably both softer and rougher than the suggested copper pipe system. This is what happens when I work when the hardware stores are closed.

[John Meachen]

At the very least you have avoided even the remotest hint of electrolytic action by using plastic.I'd say you have a better solution although I am a little surprised by the size of the hole you needed.

[dsimonson]

Dale, ...I got a kick out of your 14' Gartside website. Looks like a beautiful lake for sailing.

Yes, Cowichan Lake is a 26-mile long body of water that gets some nice weather for a few months before summer and then really hot for a week or two and then rains feet of water for the rest of the year. The eastern end, closest to civilization and where our family property is located, is getting very busy with jet skis and wake boarders these days, it's starting to look like a millionaires playground, but it is wonderful fresh, clear water set in a west coast rainforest. And when those hot-weather thermals set in, it's sailing paradise!

(By the way, we're pretty sensitive to heat here, so when I say really hot I'm talking high 70's, pushing 80 in the deep shade, and way too hot to even think. Just way too hot. Haha!!)

Cheers,
Dale

[pez_leon]

Shaping the rudder - great fun.

[pez_leon]

First, the bearing setup I tested above works very well. I'm quite pleased.

The paracord spine reinforcing the trailing edge of my rudder went in nicely:


And set up well:


I experimented with using rope to reinforce / shape the leading edge (where it would be most useful) but wasn't satisfied with my ability to meet the intended profile, so I stuck to the easily-shaped wood. Now I'm fiberglassing and feeling like I have no idea what I'm doing. On advice from the source at epoxyworks linked above, I'm going to try to get most of the foil glassed with a single sheet folded over the leading edge. In a dry layout this worked well everywhere except the bottom of the rudder, so I'm doing that part first with a bias-cut strip. I wet this out a few inches from the perimeter, leaving a margin of dry fabric that I'll cut away when the epoxy starts to kick.

[pez_leon]

Lots of work at work, and lots of landscaping work around the house. Very little progress on Le Seil. About the only thing I've done in the shop in the last few weeks is to install an impulse-purchased Hovarter quick-release leg vise screw. Along with the chain leg hardware I already had this adds up to a presto-chango handy-dandy gadget and a half.



I am itching to get back to work on the foils. The bottom edge of the rudder has a few voids between fiberglass cloth and wood that need ejections of epoxy. The centerboard is not yet shaped. I can report with complete satisfaction that even in this very incomplete state, the boat is continuing to fulfill its main function of giving me something to think about as I fall asleep.

[pez_leon]

I've been deliberating about hiring out the cutting of this boat's components via CNC. I already have the full-scale mylar templates and have used them to get out some parts. I'm sure I could keep this up, but it would take an awful long time, and I want to be respectful of my family's needs for our shared space. When a few builders chimed in over on Wayne's thread to report how happy they were with CNC cutting, I decided I'd go for it.
For the purpose of documentation, the estimates I've gotten for machine time seem to fall around 60 to 75 minutes per sheet. This boat and building jig comprise 14 sheets. That'll be 13 for me because I'm making all the parts on one sheet out of solid timber (centerboard, rudder, fore and aft transoms). I post this so that others might avoid the catch-22 I found myself in earlier, when I wanted to know the price of the cutting before I bought the CNC files from the designer, and the cabinet shops needed the CNC files to provide me with a bid.
One thing that's helped me decide to go with CNC is working on the transoms. I've used the full-scale mylar tempates to get them out and rough shape them and, while I've had a lot of fun with this part of the project, I can also report that I'm not fast with this. With the CNC router doing the cutting I'm cautiously hopeful I'll be assembling the hull this summer. Left to do it myself I can easily see needing another 6 to 12 months.

Here's the fore transom, cut out of cherry:



If I end up finishing this bright it'll be one of the few varnished bits of the boat. I like having the option! I do wish those epoxy glue lines were a bit less obvious.

James

[pez_leon]

I'm back! It's been a long year without much progress on this boat. I've recently been able to get back into it.

First, weighting the centerboard. The plans call for poured lead and I was ready to go that way. I had even visited a local scrapyard and purchased lead ignots in the shape of ears of corn. (One does wonder what our ancestors did with lead in the shape of food).
The skeptical looks on the faces of my family when they heard "melting lead" convinced me to instead pot lead bbs into epoxy. Changing tacks like this after having already bought the material to do it the simple way fits nicely with my doing everything on this boat at least twice.
Spheres supposedly pack with something like 68% efficiency, meaning that my potted lead insert will be not much better than 70% as dense as poured lead (the epoxy will add some mass and thus contribute some density). That means I'll need to increase the specified volume by 1/0.7 or 1.42 times. This corresponds to a cutout radius about 25% greater than specified. I made the hole, screwed some packing-tape covered ply over the bottom, and laid a thin layer of microballoon-thickened epoxy to plug any leaks and make for easier fairing later.



The hole took a bit less lead then I expected - next time I'd increase the radius - but the additional mass of epoxy brings the total insert out to roughly the right mass.





I could not resist adding a bit too much epoxy, just to make cleanup harder.

[pez_leon]

For reference, potting 3.8 kg of lead shot required about 0.3 kg of epoxy.

Now I'll finish glassing the boards and maybe get a coat of paint on them before stashing them away to await the rest of the build - tentatively scheduled to start in earnest this summer.

Next up is the mast and yard. I just bought a noble plank of sitka spruce and am scratching my head as to how to best go about it. The plans call for a mast made from three laminated layers, with a sizable cutout taken from most of the middle layer to make a hollow. However this would be very wasteful because my stock is exactly half of the specified mast diameter (so I'd be planing half of it away to get down to the 1/3rd thickness of each laminate). I'm torn between:

*Laminating the mast out of two layers. I could route the center out of each one (making it look almost like an open hot dog bun) to get the same final shape called for in the plans.
*Making a "proper" birdsmouth mast.

I am tempted to just go with the simpler option, but I wonder if it's sound. I haven't seen many (any?) two-part mast glueups. Any advice?

[nrs5000]

Good to se you back at it!

Bud McIntosh’s book describes hollowing mast stock by kerfing out half blanks to depth with a circular saw then removing the waste. The how to build articles for the Herreshoff Biscayne 14 I built describe building the hollow mast from quarter blanks. I ended up doing birdsmouth, there was much less waste.

[stromborg]

Welcome back to the shop!

For a wee mast like this one, I'd be sorely tempted to just glue it up solid from two pieces of stock and call it good. Going to the effort of hollowing it out feels like a lot of squeezing for not much juice.

[pez_leon]

Good to se you back at it!

Bud McIntosh’s book describes hollowing mast stock by kerfing out half blanks to depth with a circular saw then removing the waste.

That's the winner. I cut my half blanks today. I wished I had a better, longer batten for laying out the taper of the mast. It's a subtle thing, probably not that important, but I think I could do it better next time.

A question for the crowd: If I deviate slightly from the designer's scantlings, I can get the yard out of the stock I've already purchased. The specified yard is 60 mm diameter at the widest point. My stock is 50 mm thick, so I'd be about 18% thinner in one axis. I think I'd orient this so that it the yard was thinnest in the fore-aft plane because I imagine the yard will experience the greatest loads in the vertical. The wood is top quality Sitka spruce with nary a blemish, nearly ideal grain. How much could one centimeter matter? Would you do this?

Thanks,

James