Fairing the Hull / next steps (Wooden Boat Rebuild / EP95)

[Music] hi my name's leo and i'm a boat builder and a sailor and i'm on a mission to rebuild and restore this 111 year old classic sailing yacht tallyho last week we finished fitting the hull planks so this week we have to start fairing them we're going to talk about how and why we fare the hull at this stage and i'm also going to talk about some of my plans for the next stages of the work on the boat [Music] so why do we need to fare the hull of a boat well to put it very simply the outside surface of the planking is not smooth or fair those are two different things by the way something can be smooth and yet not fair fairness is sort of like smoothness but zoomed out on a bigger scale and it's basically something being a constant curve or a gradually changing curve with no sort of flat spots or bumps that look out of place to the eye now it needs to be smooth and fair because although it may look alright now once it's got paint on it it's going to look really rough it's going to look really bad but also the fairer the boat is the better hydrodynamics it's going to have and the faster it's going to go through the water [Music] [Music] me [Music] so we're doing a pretty thorough preliminary fairing of the entire haul we're probably doing about 80 percent of our overall faring process and a big reason for that is so we can start corking the boat a smoother haul is going to make it a lot easier to roll cotton into those seams some people will notice we haven't bunged yet so all the fastener holes are still opened up if any of our planks are real thick or we had any high spots in the hall that we had to take a lot more material off of to smooth it out some of those fasteners are going to start being a little bit too shallow so we'll probably address those problem fasteners whether they need to get set a little deeper or screws might get pulled out and re-drilled so they go in a little bit deeper to get a proper bung on top once those bungs are in and the boat's corked up there's going to be a little bit more fairing to do so that corking might push planks around a little bit all the bungs will have to be shaved and sanded and and then do a secondary fairing and then hopefully get some paint on the boat um probably do a primer coat and which will really tell us uh how fair the hall actually is we'll be able to see any major in discrepancies in it um and so most of that will probably get sanded off um in a secondary fairing process to get get get any more highs and lumps off off the hall [Music] do [Music] [Music] i'm making bungs bungs are lovely little pieces of wood that'll go in all the holes in the planks and cover up the fasteners how many do you have to make hmm well we had to do like 4 000 rivets so 4 000. i think i was able to do about a thousand per day yo i got i got eight keys of bungs [Music] how many bungs could a bung boy bang if a bung boy could bung bongs four thousand bingo we are making angelique bungs okay cool i guess i'm gonna make some more bungs [Music] so [Music] so why are we faring the boat now rather than doing it later say for instance after we've moved it right now we have really nice tight seams i am expecting the planks to shrink up a little bit more so we can expect probably to see little gaps forming between the planks but i want to reduce as much as possible the amount that the planks shrink and the rate at which they shrink and so to do that the goal is basically to coat the planks on the inside and the outside of the boat to seal them up so that less moisture is escaping from the timber i'm not going to be uh painting the boat makita green or teal and renaming it makita despite my april fool's social media post which made a few people angry but um it's going to be it's going to be an off-white as it was originally of course but anyway to paint the boat obviously it doesn't make sense to paint it and then fare it and then paint it again so what we're doing is we're fairing the hull we're going to cork the hole we're going to put the bungs in we're going to do some more fairing and then we'll start painting it we'll probably even do a little bit more fairing as we're painting it but we're pretty much going to get the outside of the hull as finished as we can as soon as we can we're also going to seal up the inside of the hull too now i also want to get the boat corked as soon as possible partly because i don't want the timber to be shrunk too much and the gaps to be too big when it's corked and then it to be over tight when the wood takes up again but mostly because uh it adds a lot of strength to the hull and i want that strength to be there for when we move the boat [Music] [Music] fairing really sucks a lot it doesn't suck it's not it's just not the most it's really not the most fun job kind of start losing your mind with uh you're constantly feeling and making sure there's no humps and then if you go too far you make a low spot or a flat and then you got to kind of fix everything around that to bring it all together and then you you might think you're done in one spot and really like oh that's real nice and then start working this way but go back to that one spot and you go wait no it feels like there's a little hump there what the hell so anyway it's a little nerve wracking but it's not bad it's looking really good both sides leo's side it's looking good my side is looking okay um [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so uh for the past couple days i have been working on spoke shaving and rounding off these corners of these frames here um it starts off with a like an eighth inch quarter inch chamfer and then i'll soften the edges of that's created by those chamfers with some sandpaper just a really really light pass just to smooth it all over so we considered using a router but there were a couple issues that came in the way with that as you can see there's a lot of rivets in the way and having a guide on the router to make sure that everything was staying consistent would be really difficult on top of the fact with that the frames are have a slightly different angle as you go throughout the boat but since the frames also have a uh natural kind of organic and handmade look to them finishing them by hand just makes sense and it looks right but it's fun right it is actually quite fun it really is really nice to see like especially as you look down the boat and see like rounded edges and then straight edges and they just slowly it's becoming real [Music] uh i'm it's feeling good i'm feeling okay um so uh it's a slog for sure obviously a few important things with fairing right so we all some of your planks that you put on might be a little thicker than others because those are the easy ones to tackle you just mow them down with a planer so they're pretty flush with the ones around them but then as you get to a smoother finish uh with uh after power planing and then various different sanding devices whether it's a grinder with a sanding disc on it or a big i'm using a big sander polisher like an eight inch um you start taking all the highs down and it's a lot of uh back and forth and a lot of uh you know oh i took that hump out but then there's one next to it now which means maybe i went too far right here and and then if you had a say a low spot and everything else around it was a little high then uh you kind of have to work that whole zone to bring it all together so it's definitely a mental challenge and uh yeah kind of physical and a physical challenge it is like it's really hard on your body um you're you're in all kinds of positions uh you set up the staging as best you can but uh often your planer or sanders over your head um yeah i'll be happy when it's over i know that get onto the glamorous work corking bunging and quirking [Music] so although fairing isn't much to look at it's actually surprisingly demanding and difficult pete and i have both done quite a bit of fairing but neither of us have ever fed from scratch a newly planked up hull and every sort of older shipwright that i talked to about it uh sort of rolled their eyes and said oh have fun with that now it starts out very easy and very satisfying as you first start planing off the planks which are obviously high but the further you get along and the smoother the hull gets the harder it becomes to actually continue faring it's actually very like the lofting process in some ways in that it's kind of circular you're sort of constantly going around adjusting making things a little bit better and a little bit better but every adjustment you make affects sort of the rest of the object and so um you may think that you're finished in one area or getting closer and then and then you might go to a next area and have to do a little bit there and it'll affect the previous area and you'll have to go back and work on that more so you're kind of just going round and round in this spiral slowly dialing everything in and it's such a big area to keep track of that it can sort of start driving you a little bit crazy [Music] now there's lots of different methods of fairing of course lots of different tools traditionally shipwrights would use an ads in some places but probably mostly a sort of selection of hand planes mostly wooden boat planes probably with a sort of variety of different curves on their wooden soles to fit in with the curves of the boat these days we are blessed with power tools which can save us a lot of time and also sometimes get us into trouble because they can be too effective at times but they do mean that this is a job that can be done by two ship rights rather than by a team of eight shipwrights which is probably how it would have been done back in the day but even these days there's a wide variety of of different tools that are used it's pretty common to start off with power planes but from there everyone's got their own methods a lot of people still use hand planes of various sorts you can also use grinders big grinders little grinders belt sanders orbital sanders there's a whole range of tools you can use and of course like anything on a wooden boat it can't be perfect you just got to get it to a good enough standard and knowing what that standard is is a big part of the skill of being a boat [Music] builder [Music] so [Music] all right so we have reached the end of our initial fairing before caulking so now we're going to cook the boat we're going to reset any fasteners that need doing we're going to bung all the holes and then we're going to get into the finer fairing and painting now like i said before there's a lot of different ways to fare a boat i know that some shipwrights would uh frown at the use of an orbital sander when fairing but actually the fentanyl rotax that we're using is incredibly aggressive we're really using it more like a grinder just taking down the very high spots still working on the rough stages of fairing after the corking when we get onto the finer stages of fairing we'll be using long boards we'll be doing it by hand and we'll be able to get the boat to a much finer standard of fairness before then though we have a lot of caulking to look forward to and uh we've actually got some guys some very experienced caucus coming up from port townsend to help out so that should really speed things along and should make a great video too so until then though thanks a lot for watching and a massive thank you to everyone who has donated or otherwise supported the project it makes a huge difference and it means that i'm able to make and edit these videos so i really really appreciate it i'll see you next time cheers [Music] you

Channel: Sampson Boat Co

Views: 346,041

Rating: 4.9785538 out of 5

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Id: tZ0xVJi1T2c

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 10 2021