TIPS Season 3: The V-Bottom Skiff - Building the Transom

lou how's it going oh good good he goes there's a cold up there i said oh it's terrible he goes what's the temperature i go 10 degrees he goes i got to get off the phone he can't even talk to me if it's 10 degrees up here never mind come up here just cracked me up man oh i've made a paper pattern of the transom that we're going to build here out of some rosin paper and some blue tape and i've transferred the dimensions from the model here onto that pattern and i've i'm going to use a scale rule here to show you that this transom is six feet across from china to china at this level it's got six inches of dead rise at that point and uh it's six feet nine inches across from uh at the gunnels and it's about three foot four inches tall so we've transferred these dimensions onto that pattern and now i'm just going to show you quickly the pattern i i had to use a pattern so that i could lay it out on each layer to get these layers all cut the same size and i'm going to move that back now this is right here you're looking at the very inside layer of the transom and obviously it's in layers and there's six layers here now the thing i would like to show you is the layers the inside and the outside layer are going to go straight across perfectly straight across the boat but you can see that the inside layers have got a little bit of a bias-ness to them and then i'm going to remove another layer and you can see that the next layer down is angled in the other direction so what you've got is your two cover layers the outside layer and the inside layer going straight across and the four inside layers being on diagonals so it's not like you've got it 90 degrees to itself like plywood but it does have a little biasedness to it it creates a much more rigidity in this direction but certainly all the grain is traveling straight across so that creates a rigidity across the thing and that's exactly what we're looking for now just this these layers are white oak it's well seasoned for gluing and some of it's a little corded and then some slabs on it gives a little bit of a character look so that it doesn't just get generic and just be cortisone all the way across the idea now the first thing to do when vacuum bagging something like this is to lay down the sheet of plastic because you wouldn't want to try to vacuum bag right down to the plywood it just wouldn't work out not that air would go straight up through the plywood but it could get around the edges easier so the plastic makes it so you can fold it over and all that you'll see that in a little bit here now we're going to lay down some release fabric and as far as i'm concerned it's not really just a release cloth it distributes air throughout the whole surface so that the plastic isn't up against what you're trying to glue down so we're flipping the first layer on to the release fabric like so right here now we want to get the thing in the middle to the table really we wouldn't want it off to one side so we're just kind of looking to see we don't want to push them up against each other because we're going to pick them up individually and glue them this is the teak decking systems fitting epoxy and it's a one to one mix so you just dig in get a nice big flap on there on there and um like so oh it's a sticker now you just put two flaps out there about equal size how's that look about even looks even to me so now we're just gonna force it together here it's into it popping yeah bubbles popping in it you could have held the time mixing that in a pot so i'm using a stick to mix but my technique is totally different i'm pushing at the glue not pulling at it i just keep pushing it towards the middle of the pallet and then maybe stirring it up a tiny bit and doing the same thing over and over until the two are entirely mixed together before we start now i would spread it out on the pallet a little bit because i don't want it to create heat because the more heat it creates the faster you gotta go and you've got five layers of glue here so you know you spread it out and you start picking it up and troweling it onto the surface and tooth troweling it because if you don't tooth trowel it you get a different amount of glue in every spot you can't do that you have to use a tooth throw when you're spreading it we're using a tooth trowel now and we're spreading glue on the very edges this is the first thing that we have to do and this kind of accounts for why we put the boards kind of a little bit of a distance apart so that we could spread glue on the edges and then just pull the piece over to the glue you know if we wanted to lift a piece we could do it because we have those spaces but that's not necessary i'm just putting a little bit of glue on the last piece here and put it in place so we make sure we get a little glue in the seams just don't want them to be dry the vacuum would probably suck it into those seams anyhow but i'm just making certain here that looks pretty good we'll put that in place so we put a box lamp on each end and the reason is some of the boards have like a tiny edge set in them maybe only a sixteenth of an inch or something like that but we do have to pull them together two hands on the spreader here and it gets exactly the same amount of glue on it everywhere and that's exactly what we're trying to do and that this is getting so much glue that we're only going to put it on one surface you see if you do two layers you'd have glue coming out your ears okay so we've clamped up the first layer with a bar clamp here just to crowd them up really tightly and um we've got glue in between the layers and now what i'm going to do is just so that they were sprung a little tiny bit when we crowded it up with the clamps just crowd the ends together and i'm gonna take a staple gun and drive two staples that was bad try this i'm gonna take a staple gun and drive two staples in the end here to keep it crowded then i should be able to take the bar clamp off and see no movement at all like that how's that now we're going to repeat the process it's six layers like i said it's quite a bit of work we have to mix in between every time because we couldn't mix enough glue to do it all at once it would it would go off on us we'd have to spread it all over the place so this is the way to go right here it's a little bit precarious having to do this mixing in between but we're getting away with a pretty nice thing now this is like i said uh a process it's a process i haven't done before really any vacuum bag and i decided to do it because i didn't want it to be a boarded transom just like a skiff because sometimes even if the lumber is a little bit green they'll open up a little tiny bit and people ask me questions about it but with this one it's not going to open up swell or contract to do anything like that and like i said it's ultimately strong we're going to hang some horsepower on this transom right here well we're just about halfway through gluing these laminates up to build this transom and i'd just like to show you a little bit here the um the each laminate is laid a little bit biased to the other laminate so they're not all straight across that gives you a little bit of diagonal support but we didn't want to make it like plywood with the layers going 90 degrees to the first layer so that basically one layer is laid on the angle of the top of the transom then the next layer is laid on the other angle i think you can see in here that plankton lines going this way here and this this layer is laid by us to that how's that we're going to clamp each layer as we go we had cut the layers exactly the same size so the clamp won't foul on the layer beneath it and it works out really well i'm going to try to get them across this way we're just about to set the last piece in place here before we start putting the bag and material over it and that's it now you can see that we've taped these two pieces up with some packaging tape because we're going to allow these to be taken off afterwards and there's going to be a slot in there for the keel you can see the layers slide right into position as i tighten the clamp up let me have a little bit more now i'm just taking that very sharp edge off that top layer so it doesn't cut the bag in any way just the corners off now it's an inch too long so all of these staples and everything we put on the end here is all going to get cut right off yeah it doesn't matter if it's overlapping or anything all right we're going to fold it all over now i'm just gonna put little spots of glue just because you can't tape this layer the tape won't stick to it so what i'm doing is putting a little spots of glue so that i can keep this paper towed over there nice and tight yeah like that last there you go after i folded up the edges on the first release claw right and glued it down with a little glue then we're going to put another layer of release cloth over the top of it and then a breather cloth on top of that hair let's stay there then i fold over the first layer right over the top of the whole thing and i'm going to use some two-sided tape in the corners i have to work with that quite a bit because i'll make like one fold and then put some tape or i might make a fold and then unfold it to decide to put some tape in between so i've got tape in between all the layers as best as i know how to do it the next step is to run one layer of that double-sided tape all the way around now that we've got the corners all sealed up this is the next thing to do we'll get that done all the way around and then we're going to lay a piece of plastic right over the top of the whole thing and then push the plastic down against the double-edged tape just seal it up all the way around trim it a little bit around the edges so we don't have too much excess i'm cutting it off right at the edge of the tape so we can if we had to tape over it you get a piece of packaging tape on both surfaces you know what i'm saying like right there you should theoretically you've got a leak right here but it might plug itself you know what i mean oh yeah yeah hump or blow okay good this is an adjustment 25 minus 25 pounds per square inch don't know how the adjustment works but okay all right now we're going to cut a hole in the top layer of plastic and we're going to slip a hose in there a vacuum hose we're going to seal that all up with that double-edged tape because we don't want that leaking either and then we're going to go all the way around the edge looking for what we might think of possibly because it's kind of hard to hear a vacuum leak but uh we're going to do the best we can to make sure it's all sealed up properly and what we're looking for here is 15 pounds of vacuum per square inch that would be one atmosphere really and that's enough to clamp it right down really tight real tight we would have to put a clamp on every square inch to retain this type of pressure so we're sucking the volume of air out of the bag right now and we're down to probably five or six pounds of vacuum at this point and it's going to come up to 15 pounds of vacuum per square inch that's one atmosphere and uh what it means it's putting 15 pounds of pressure for every square inch of surface area that you see here it also puts 15 pounds of pressure per square inch around the edges which applies a pressure in this direction to crowd the boards together nice and tight and of course it's going to suck all the volume of air out of the glue lines and everything else and some of the glue up through the seams and it is going to be so tight that um when we remove that bag tomorrow it's going to be on there overnight but when we remove it this thing is going to be one solid piece of wood so we've removed the vacuum bagging material and taken it up off off the floor and put it up on a couple of sawhorses here and i just like to say to you again that this is six layers of about 7 16 inch white oak vacuum bag together this layer that you see right here is straight across the transom the next layer down's got a little bias to it like that very little next one's got a little bias to it like that so what's happening is you got kind of a crisscross effect in here but in effect all the grain is going across there's no grain in here i haven't put any layers in here that go vertical so all of it is a thwart ships but it's slightly angled to each other so it creates a tremendous strength and not an ability to resist splitting and that's what that's all about that's why i've done it and i like it this is going to be the inside i like to see the appearance of it looking like its boards and not just disappear and you can see that this is a little bit of quartered grain in here a little bit of slab sword grain in here so it changes its character as it goes down and uh it's about six feet across at the chinese and about 30 inches tall so the next thing i'd like to do is just give you a quick visual on what this thing is going to look like with a finish on it and this is just some denatured alcohol how's that look all right so now we're at the starboard side of the transom and i like i say i've cut this off but i've only cut about a quarter of an inch of it off just to get rid of the staples and give it a quick look and i'm going to cut another inch of it off but you can see now how tight the laminates are to each other and like i said this laminate is cortisone here right and then you've got slab sawn section so it's a mix of corded and slabbed which gives it a nice string so you can see how tight it is here on the starboard into the transom on most of the laminates and uh there is a little tiniest bit of space up in here but that's because of the nibbing where it came out of the planer so what's going to happen is we cut another inch of it off and the entire thing will look exactly like this just as tight as can possibly be and here it is again this is some slab sawn material right in here and this is quarter-sawn material slabs on corded so you've got a mix of slabs on and quarter sawn gives it a nice appearance and i think it just adds to the strength well here is our transom for the 23 footer set up right here on the proper angle the whole setup has been figured out already we've got a couple of molds to put up but this transom is what we're concerned about it is really built it's solid it's heavy man and strong and that's the idea we want it to be really strong because it can it's going to be holding some horsepower it's an outboard-powered boat it'll be cut out like this for an outboard motor whether or not it's got a 25-inch shaft or a 20-inch shaft wheel it's probably going to have a 25-inch shaft so you know it's uh it's quite a piece right there the whole boat is really going to be fun for us we're in a new spot right now to build it and uh it's just been something we've been looking forward to so i wanted to show you this tool again here this tool we asked people about what they might call it and what people thought it was and we got tremendous response on it was really something else a lot of people called it a spud which is for strip and bach but a spud to me is quite a bit narrower than this and it's got like a little hooked end on it for kind of continuing around the bark when you're peeling them so it's not a spud bob gould was the first guy that came up with the proper name for it as far as i'm concerned it's a shipbuilder's slice is what it is a a slick is narrower and a slice it's made for different purposes it's heavy so you can use it with momentum kind of like an ads and you can also push it to slice things you know to pass things down so you know it's uh it's quite a tool i use it quite a bit and uh it's fun it's fun to have i can't remember exactly where i got it but i'm glad i did so people came up with a million different names for it's incredible i i can hardly believe it so you know that's uh that's what we've done with that but back to our 23 footer next week we're going to steal some more measurements from the model to make the first two molds that we have to make are the only two moles and get those set up and maybe get the stem set up as well we have to set up a staging around it so we can work at this height because we're going to be putting the sole across the two chains first so it's going to be pretty interesting it's going to be built a lot differently than any boat that i've ever built uh it's going to incorporate some different things that we used to do in skiffs the old man's method and hangover and cut off all those kinds of things will happen on this boat right here so we're pretty happy about it and we're ready to go you

Channel: Tips from a Shipwright

Views: 64,538

Rating: 4.9598894 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, tools, educational, marine, wood, shipwright, artisan, craftsman, boat builder, sailboat, skiff, epoxy, vacuumbagging, laminted, wooden, transom

Id: Nr0eE1nPb9Y

Length: 18min 22sec (1102 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020