5 Day Boat Build || DIY Boat Build

this video was sponsored by bespoke post hey welcome to another video this one gets a little crazy i'm not gonna lie my friend michael ohm from olmfabs he's on youtube somewhere up in there anyways he showed up on my shop he was only going to be here for five days and we wanted to build something so naturally we did what any two woodworkers would do in the span of five days we decided to build a boat start to finish zero plans zero forethought just a blurry picture we found on a google image search so yeah this is one of those videos where it could be a horrible terrible disaster but you're just gonna have to watch and find out so enjoy the video follow along and remember we're not boat builders we're just making this up as we go along so don't be too hard on us all right okay roll the little flying moth thing in the jig [Music] white snow red sky reach up for so so high blue eyes tonight [Music] meet my friend michael alm he's terrible with those super dramatic intros but he is a great woodworker and has an awesome channel you should check it out this is the direction we're going yeah cafe racer no cafe cocktail cocktail cocktail boat racer okay so tomorrow's the sixth yeah so i think our goal for tomorrow should be to cut out all of our internal ribs this seems like it's going to be way better now because we can just use full stock there will be zero scarfing zero laminating try and get everything out of the 4x8 yeah there'll be a lot more like tinkering and figuring out angles but it's all out of just stock pieces of plywood well that was it literally the only conversation we had before we started building this boat we had zero plans all we had was a blurry image we found on google image search and we decided to get going the first thing we had to do was determine the size and shape we wanted our boat to be so we got two pieces of scrap quarter inch white oak ply and we just clamped them on top of my workbenches yeah that kind of looks like a boat once we had the general shape we wanted we took some measurements for the length i hopped in there to get the total height i mean we do have to fit inside this thing and we took one more look at the google image search see this picture here yeah that's the closest thing to plans we have to build this entire boat while we were on the internet i also hopped on amazon and i bought the only outboard motor that could get delivered within two days run a bit of a time crunch so it's the only thing we could get a whopping 3.6 horsepower fun check what you never heard of a fun check outboard motor before yeah me neither we'll just have to pray that it works with our general shape laid out we started taking measurements for each one of our individual ribs i didn't know if this is the right thing to do or not but it seemed like a good place to start and we got this glorious looking plan here showing us the total measurement for all six of our ribs as well as our transom with our measurements nailed down we took down our plywood little bendy mold thing and it was time to get cutting to build this entire project we're using marine grade akuma ply tiger ply to be exact tiger ply is a new brand of plywood they specialize in a kume marine grade and their stuff is awesome they use phenolic resin to glue all of their laminated sheets together so it stands up great to moisture and all of their individual layers inside the ply is a full veneer meaning no voids no gaps no fillers this plywood was wonderfully donated by the hardwood center which is a local establishment near me if you live in the willamette valley or anywhere in oregon for that matter i highly suggest you look them up and buy their plywood they are great the first thing we wanted to do was cut all of our ribs into individual pieces now we wanted to give them a little curve on the top so i hammered in a few nails and we used those same pieces a quarter inch ply to trace out an arc on the top of our first rib it's actually our transom then i took a little piece of quarter inch and i went over to the band saw and i rounded over the edge we're going to use this as a template to give each side of our rib a nice little curve as well then i took that little template back over to our piece of three quarter inch akume ply and i used it to trace a nice curved line on both sides of our first piece like i said this is going to be the transom and then we'll just start cutting out ribs working our way from the back to the front i don't know if this is right but it's the way we're going to do it after we got the size and shape traced onto the plywood i let michael cut it out with the jigsaw mostly because if it's messed up then i can blame him and i don't have to take the fall for anything but i did help by hosing the whole thing down with some compressed air so he could follow his line nice and easily with our transom piece cut out i pulled out the track saw cut a fresh clean sharp straight edge on the ply and then it was time to repeat the process all over again we've got six ribs plus the transom so we're gonna need seven support pieces with the transom cutout we decided to use it to roughly trace the shape and arc of our next piece of course we have to bring it in each piece to get a little smaller and smaller as we go a fun little tip i learned from mike in doing this is that if you score your line with a razor blade before you cut it with a jigsaw it pretty much eliminates all tear out so i let him keep cutting things out the jigsaw and i was hard at work on more of the planning facilitating aspect of the build but each time he got a piece cut out i was right behind him with the track saw to cut a nice straight edge now all of our ribs will get smaller and smaller in height as well but we decided to leave them all the same height to start with so that we could lay them out on the table and get all of our curves figured out before we cut them down somewhere along the road we decided there just wasn't enough of a curve on the top of the boat so we added a bit more of a curve to our first transom piece then using that piece as a template we matched that curve on all of the remaining pieces as we went just sticking the transom down with a little double-sided tape and running it through the router table with a top bearing mounted up cut down cut flush trim bit thingamabob and we just kept doing this over and over again until all of our rib pieces were cut to size and had a nice curve on the top that was matchy matchy next we had to figure out a way to lay out all of our ribs in the proper orientation so we grabbed another piece of scrap quarter inch white oak ply and we clamped it to my work surface then we took a chalk line and put a center line right down the middle of that piece of quarter inch ply next we just took a bunch of scrap blocks and using some ca glue and the accelerator spray we glued a block on either side of our ribs note we did not glue these blocks to the ribs we glued them to the quarter inch ply just to hold our ribs in place this would allow us to put our ribs in and out of this little handy jig as we needed and they were all lined up perfectly and evenly spaced next we had to start figuring out the overall curve of our vessel so in order to do this we just took some scrap pieces a quarter inch stock that were nice and bendy and decided just attack them on the outside of our ribs with a 23 gauge brad nailer this way we could pull them off when we needed and it wouldn't scar up the ribs too bad so i tacked one side on and then tacked the other side on when we got to the front we realized we had to trim down our little pieces of scraps so they would meet nice and uniform at the front so i did this quick and easy with a little japanese pole saw then we just taped them together to hold them in place in tacking this little bendy piece on we quickly realized that each one of our ribs was going to have to be cut at a unique bevel to match the angle that our side panels would line up on the side of the rib man that was a confusing way to say that but hopefully you get the picture so in order to match this bevel i just did it with my good old eyeball and a ruler trying to match the same angle of that tact on scrap piece of quarter inch material once we had all of our angles figured out we pulled our scrap piece of quarter inch bendy wood off and made sure to remove all those 23 gauge brad nails then to cut that bevel i decided the quickest easiest way to do this would be just to run it through the table saw we had a flat referencing surface on either side so i just altered the blade to match that bevel and i ran it through on each side until we had a nice angled bevel that would match up with our side panels so i just went slow changing the angle for each rib as i went and then we plopped them back into our jig and tacked our little reference bendy piece in place the angles all lined up and that bendy piece was flush with the side of each rib next we had to determine where to cut our next angle on each rib as you can see we bent another piece of scrap wood onto the outside just to kind of figure out the overall shape that we were looking for with this boat once we had a shape that we liked i went through with a pencil and i marked on each one of the ribs where we needed to cut it down towards the bottom of the boat i don't really know if this is how you're supposed to build a boat but you do what you gotta do when you're building a boat in five days once all those lines were marked we pulled off all of our little reference strips removed all of our 23 gauge nails so that we wouldn't trip the breaker on the saw stop and then i used a ruler to trace out exactly the shape that each rib would now need to be this is where things got a little tricky because just like the sides of those ribs the bottom angle also needed a unique bevel so that it would match the panels that we will eventually put onto the outside of the boat so to cut this bevel i just simply use some double-sided tape and a large piece of plywood i tape each piece onto the larger piece of plywood that could ride against the fence on the table saw and i'd adjust the blade accordingly to get that unique bevel onto each unique rip it took a while to maneuver all the pieces on and off of my scrap piece of ply but it was a nice safe way to get a uniform bevel onto each individual rib and in no time we had all the ribs done the next morning we had to figure out a way to hook all the ribs together and lock them in place so after a lot of conversation and a little standing and staring we decided the best thing to do would be to make a half-lapped spine on the top and bottom of the boat that would connect all the rib pieces so i pulled out my router and track and i cut the first lap in our half lap joint on the top and bottom of each individual rib just using a three quarter inch bit and the spine will hopefully be made out of three quarter inch ply so i went slow i took my time and i cut all of those laps while i did that mike traced out the internal part of each rib that we will be cutting out we're going to remove a lot of material here to lose some weight and hopefully make a space inside the boat that we can slide our little feet once we had all the half laps cut on the bottom see the boat's upside down on the table right now so that's why i'm saying the bottom even though it looks like the top anyways we took a large scrap piece of three quarter inch ply and we slid it in place now you can clearly see it fits fine in the back but not the front so we're gonna have to do a little transformation to this piece in order to get it to sit down in all of those half laps the way we did this was simple math we took a tape measure and we measured up from the top of each rib and we just followed that arc along and taped a little bendy piece of scrap wood as we went that gave us the overall shape we needed then we traced that shape onto the piece of three-quarter inch ply and i cut out that arc with a jigsaw making sure to leave enough room for us to cut corresponding laps in this piece that would slip into our half lap once the shape was cut we slid it back into place just to make sure that we were on the right track and wouldn't you know it fit almost perfect on the very first try i say almost perfect because it didn't quite fit perfect it did need just a little bit of adjustment so mike kept tracing out the internal parts of the ribs while i cut it down a little bit more then we test fit the whole thing one more time and yes you're ready for it boom goes the dynamite it slid in exactly where it needed to be so with that piece in the correct location we added a few spacer blocks in between each rib so that it would be spaced uniformly from bow to stern then with our spacer blocks in place all we had to do was take a straight edge and transfer the line from our rib onto that little spine thing we made and cut our corresponding half laps now this piece was so small i didn't feel comfortable using the router and the track so i just cut out these laps the old fashioned way with the jigsaw i went slow and in no time i had all the laps cut out and it was time to fit it for the final time to make sure it all slid down where it needed to go and because we're amazing five day boat builders with crazy good skills it slid in perfectly actually it's because we're extremely lucky there's a lot of things in this build that just happened to work out when they probably shouldn't have so kudos to us for our ridiculous good luck this video was sponsored by bespoke post now bespoke post is a monthly subscription service that well they send you awesome stuff every month i've been a member for a while and the stuff they keep sending it's just great one of my last boxes i got this sweet damascus steel knife that i use all the time for stabbing packages and opening mail but you could also use it to whittle yourself a walking stick and in the last box i got this sweet mini wooden keg that is very handy for using to age your own liquor you basically pour clear grain alcohol in here let it sit as long as you want and it comes out brown and delicious but i just got some new boxes from them let's open them up and see what's inside this is the terra box it comes with all sorts of things for the outdoorsman you get a bar of base light grooming detox scrub smells amazing ooh and a bird call but the coolest thing in this box is the ultimate tool this thing is sweet it can dig it can cut it can carve it can open bottles i'm going to use this thing out in the garden and it's going to be super handy you can use it for things like cutting off ripe tomatoes digging up weeds whacking down stalks of rhubarb it is a very handy ultimate tool the other box i got and possibly my favorite box to date is the dram box if you like cocktails if you like drinking this is the box for you you get a set of jumbo ice balls if you've watched any of my cocktail videos you know how important good ice is so this is an awesome one they're little molds that you can make perfectly round spears of ice so your drink doesn't get too watery too soon it comes with some cocktail recipes a book whiskey the field guide which i've read and is fantastic you get a few rocks glasses and some traditional old-fashioned cocktail syrup the awesome thing about these boxes is that there's around 70 worth of merchandise in each box but you only pay 45 a month and you only really pay what you want every month before they send out the box they'll send you a preview of what's inside and you can decide to get the box you can swap it out for other stuff you can skip that month altogether at absolutely no cost so it's super customizable so if you want to sign up and if you want 20 off your first box use the coupon code moth20 at checkout or you can go to bspk.me moth20 and get 20 off your first box so while i tinkered a little bit more with our spine just to cut it to the perfect shape mike started cutting out all the internal parts of the ribs like i mentioned this is going to lose quite a bit of weight which we want for the boat as well as give us an internal void to hopefully slide our feet into and make it possible to sit in this thing it looked something like this sure this would have been much easier with a cnc but we ain't got time for no cnc we're building a boat in five days people and as he did that i built a second spine for the top of the boat remember the boat's flipped upside down so right now the top is the bottom and the bottom is the top [Music] that's really good that's ridiculous that never happens it's like let's take that on i mean you can almost glue that up right there you really can see my head through i cut that with the ginseng well i was obviously very pleased with myself now having the bottom rib and the top rib done mike cleaned up all of our internal cutouts with a round over bit just so we wouldn't get any splinters in our ankles while he did that i had the annoying task of cutting out all of our chime notches in every corner of our rib now i learned from my past boat building experience that the chinese are support pieces that sit on each corner of your rib and give you a surface area to attach your side pieces to now each one of these also had a unique angle so cutting them by hand just seemed like the best thing to do speaking of surface area to attach plywood to we made this spine out of three quarter inch material and there was going to be a seam right down the middle and three quarters of an inch just isn't that much surface area to attach plywood to so we decided to add a half inch piece on either side of that spine to bring the overall thickness to an inch and three quarters this was super easy we just cut a bunch of scrap pieces a half inch of kume plywood and using some total boat thixo pre-thickened epoxy we slapped them on there and tacked them in place until the epoxy dried we purposely made these extra large overhanging on the top and bottom because we knew we could use that pre-made spine in the middle as a template to clean them up over on the router table so once we had all of our external each side brace pieces whatever you want to call them slapped on there with epoxy it looks something like this then we took them over to the router table and using that same flush cut up cut down cut bit we just use that internal spine as our template and cleaned the entire thing up on both sides and for what felt like the 28th time we re-inserted that spine back in between all of our ribs just to double check that it would fit the way it needs to before we glue the whole thing together and what do you know it fits great and i think although i don't know because we don't know what we're doing i think we're ready to start gluing this whole rib system together to glue it together we're using total boats thixo epoxy this was a huge lifesaver because we didn't have to mix a bunch of epoxy and cups it just comes in a tube like caulking so we squeeze it out it mixes together in the tip and it's the quick cure so it hardens in like an hour versus eight hours or something of traditional epoxy so we just started squirting it in every individual joint and plopping things together as you can see mike there is measuring the distance from the table to the corner of each rib as we go to make sure that everything is nice and even and there isn't some sort of twist as we work our way down towards the bow of the boat once we get one piece in place we plop it in and then we added some clamps onto our jig to hold it nice and secure while we worked on the rest of the boat once we got everything glued into our top rib well then we moved on to the bottom rib remember the top is the bottom and the bottom is the top because the whole thing's flipped over i don't know if i've said that yet i just i want to make sure you guys are aware because i don't want you to think i'm saying something weird because i'm saying the top when we're really working anyways you get it we put our bottom rib in place [Music] after gluing our bottom spine into all of our ribs we added a little more of that thixo epoxy to the end and just using a few stainless steel fasteners we screwed it right to the transom stainless steel is great for boats because it won't rust or discolor over time with all of our ribs and spines glued up it was time to start inserting our shines now on my other boat i used hardwood for the shines but this boat has such a drastic spin and twist and curve to it i wasn't confident we could get hardwood to bend without using steam and we obviously don't have time for that with a five day boat build so our solution was to make each chine out of two pieces of half inch akume ply and put one piece in and then basically just laminate another piece on top i was confident this would be plenty strong because you're basically making a giant one inch by one inch glue lamb piece for your chime so that's got to be pretty darn solid so after inserting a little thixo into each one of those chain notches i just tacked it in place with a 16 gauge staple gun that's right staples and just wait because you're going to see a lot of staples used in the building of this boat after stapling one piece in glued to each one of those ribs we spread out a thick coating of the thixo epoxy on the outside of our first piece and i stapled in the second piece i was just adding staples into each one of those ribs so that it was held nice and secure but then we came back through with a few of the rockler bandy clamps and we clamped them on to all the places that didn't have staples you know just for good measure to make sure everything was pulled together nice and tight while we waited for that thickened epoxy to dry then after doing one side we flipped over to the other side and did the exact same thing because when it comes to building a boat what you do on one side you must also do to the other side it's just kind of the way things go so we smeared some more epoxy and we stapled the whole thing together and if you thought that was it for the chinese well you are mistaken because there's chinese in the bottom of the boat and there's shines in the top of the boat so after doing the bottom we switched to the top shines remember the top is the bottom and the bottom is the top because the boats flipped upside down i'm sure you guys are really sick of me talking about that by this point but anyways we did the exact same thing we did on the bottom to the top a little thickened epoxy and a lot of staples and boom we had some glue laminated one-inch thick shines on all of our seams followed up with those handy dandy bandy clamps we called it quits after that for the night and we came out the following morning our epoxy was good and dry and we started removing all of the clamps we were both pretty excited because this was going to be the first time that we could actually pick this thing up and see how well it's held together and what do you know it is nice and solid and surprisingly very very light i would guess it maybe weighed 20 pounds at this point there's just not a whole lot of material there once we cut out all the interior part of each one of those ribs so with our chinese glued in place it was time to start shaping it a little bit more now at this point all of our chinese just kind of come to a point at the end but they're not hooked together so i had to figure out a way to tie all of the chinese at the bow of the boat into one solid piece so i found this piece of solid stock i think it's honestly black walnut but it was a nice thick square so i figured what the heck why not use it and i cut it into this little wedge over on the table saw then using a multi-tool and a hand saw i cut back the front piece of plywood on the bow of the boat then i took my little pre-cut solid walnut wedge thing and i added a dado to the back of it so it could slide perfectly over that front piece of plywood and give us a surface to glue all of those front shines to and then sand flush into a nice point it looked something like this and yes again we are using more thixo epoxy from total boat i'm not gonna lie pretty much the entire boat is held together with just fixo epoxy but this stuff is crazy strong and dries really hard so i think we're in good hands after gooping up that front piece with a crazy amount of thickened epoxy i slid it in place now all we had to do was figure out a way to clamp this together and tell all of that epoxy dried enter michael with a crazy amount of tuck tape tuck tape is like ducting tape that's usually used for ducting and things like that but it's been made very popular in the last few years for working with epoxy because it will not stick to cured epoxy so you can put it on let the epoxy cure and then just pull it off while we waited for the glue to dry mike started sanding down the entire frame getting things nice and flush and next we had to figure out our cockpit now we purposely designed this in a way that we would have to cut the cockpit out after the fact we figured that would be the strongest and simplest way to get everything glued up initially so then we started trying to lay out the cockpit and the only thing that made sense was to measure mike's arms to try and make sure there was enough room inside there to hold a steering wheel well it turns out mike's got an enormous wingspan and that wasn't going to work so we just picked a random dimension and decided to go with it we kind of went back and forth on the best way to cut these ribs out and finally decided just a hand saw nice and slow was probably going to be the easiest most accurate way so i just worked my way from rib to rib and very carefully cut two of our six ribs out on the top to give us a nice space to make a little seating area cockpit captain's pad whatever you want to call it all that really matters is that there is enough room for a human being to climb in sit down and steer the vessel so of course the only way to determine this was to climb in sit down and imagine what it would be like to well steer the vessel yeah [Music] yep after my rigorous scientific experiments i determined that this cockpit would be plenty big for a human being to sit down and steer such a vessel so we started cutting some plywood to brace our cockpit area we added a piece of quarter inch ply extending front to back on either side and then we remembered that we had to add a piece to the transom to make it a little thicker this was so that it would be thick enough to hook our outboard motor onto but this worked out great because we were able to cut a little notch into that transom piece that allowed our support pieces to slide into and be held nice and secure i just cut this little notch quick and easy with the jigsaw and our pieces fit exactly as they should we then lubed up that back transom support piece with a crazy amount of thickened epoxy and spread it out with putty knives then just clamped it on tacked it a few places with staples to hold it until the glue dries and cleaned up the back with a flush cut bit quick and easy boat goes breezy that one was not my best work i apologize but anywho with our transom glued up and waiting for it to dry we started hooking in the support brace pieces for our cockpit just with thickened epoxy and you guessed it some staples i mean the staples are kind of beside the point they're really just to hold the pieces in place until that epoxy dries up like i said we're literally holding this entire thing together with epoxy but i think it'll work what do we know while we waited for that to dry we got a special package in the mail from west marine we got online and we ordered a steering wheel kit now supposedly everything in this box will allow us to retrofit our outboard motor to hook into a steering wheel so that we can be faced forward and steer and not have to turn around and hold on to the little arm that comes off the outboard so we needed a dashboard on which to mount our steering column so we traced out a shape that we thought looked good and i cut it out real quick over on the bandsaw remembering that we don't have time for really fancy details because we're trying to build a flipping boat in five days so once we got a shape that looked somewhat like a dashboard and we're sure that it fit in place the way that it should i pulled it back out and i drilled out the holes that would allow us to mount our steering column there was a template that came with the steering column on a little piece of paper so i just traced it out and drilled the holes over on the drill press and then yeah just in case you were wondering we glued it in place with some more thickened epoxy and a staple gun because that's how you roll when you're building a boat in five freaking days at this point our entire frame rib assembly was pretty darn close to being done there was just a little cleanup work so mike hit it with a sander while i hit it with the block plane and we cleaned up the entire top the best we could just so that all of our seams were nice and smooth and had a good transition when we were done with the top we flipped the entire thing over and started working on the bottom it's going to get confusing again because we're going to flip it over and the top is going to be the bottom and the bottom is going to be the top but i promise i'm not going to bore you with all those details i'm just assuming that this little clip right here is enough to show you that now wait for it yep jason you're super strong the top is once again the bottom and the bottom is once again the top you got that all right ready and go now out of all the sanding we had to do on this vessel the bottom was probably the trickiest because not only did we have to sand the chines we had to sand them at an angle to match each rib which means we kind of had to alter our sanding angle in a twisting pattern as we went along from the bow to the stern but i pulled out the rotex with a little 40 grit sandpaper and made quick work of it is this the right way to build a boat probably not but i'm tired of guessing what the right way is we're just trying to get this done in five days when i got to the bow i just used a pole saw to cut off the last remaining chunk of that stock bow piece i put on and then grabbed the rotex once again and smoothed it all out we were just trying to get a nice smooth transition from bow to stern on which to eventually lay our plywood top and bottom pieces and in no time we had a beautiful skeleton framework rib thing of a boat but whatever we had it was looking like something and it wasn't bad for only two and a half days work now obviously we don't have enough time to show you the rest of this build so you have to come back next week for part two yeah i know that was a lot of work and that was only like two and a half days so come back next week for the continuation of this series part two where hopefully we can finish this flipping thing and get it in the water and let me tell you we do get it in the water and it's pretty nuts so you're not going to want to miss that one subscribe down below hit that little ding notification bell and that will alert you when the next video comes out you can also check out the video description for links to products plans well not plans for this boat because we made it up as we went along but there are plans to some of my more thought out pieces of furniture in that video description there's also a link to patreon if you want to support my page over there and get to watch all these videos early and don't forget to check out michael alms youtube page where he's also putting out a video of this exact same project so if you want a different point of view or maybe the true side of the story go over to his page and watch that video alright until next time you

Channel: Bourbon Moth Woodworking

Views: 136,613

Rating: 4.9579015 out of 5

Keywords: 5 Day Boat Build, DIY Boat Build, how to build a boat, plywood boat, wooden boat, boat build, wooden boat build, boat building, how to, diy boat, build a boat, drift boat, boat plans, wooden boat building, how to make a plywood boat, building a boat, how to make a boat, im building a boat, wooden drift boat, cocktail boat, boat building wood, plywood boat plans, wooden boat plans, wood boat plans, easy boat plans, wood boat building, tiny boat nation, easy wood boat

Id: qL42mx58ISM

Length: 38min 7sec (2287 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 20 2021