TIPS Season 3: The V-Bottom Skiff - Second layer of bottom planking

here comes the second layer of planking and really see how fast we're gonna go we are temporarily fastening them down it's uh there's many reasons for that and uh it works out really well much easier than the first layer like i had said and uh it's really fun we make sure that we have enough boards prepared so that we'll run out of glue that way we don't waste a bunch of glue and it's not going off on us so we mix it in a relatively small batch and then spread it out and nail them down pretty easy to do they've already been fit we're going to go over the fasteners and why we use them and all the different advantages of doing it and different things like that we're trying to do it in a production fashion here it's not like we're building a production boat but the process itself from one end of the boat has to be addressed in some sort of production fashion because you can't run all over the place and you can see that my duty doesn't change too much as i go along i'm just standing in one spot you know and that's the way it was designed the process was designed never mind you know the boat itself but the movements really and the staging and all those kind of things have to tend to be able to do this quickly because the glue is trying to go off and you're trying to beat it so you know that's what we're doing we're over here at the mixing table and we're gonna mix 24 ounces of total boat high performance two to one epoxy we're gonna pour in 16 ounces of resin and we're going to be careful we don't get much over the line there and then we're going to pour in another eight ounces of hardness and that's the right mix 24 ounces is the right amount for us we can put down quite a few planks in front of us and then we beat it up really aggressively and then we're going to pour a little bit off into another container and we're going to thin it we're putting in about 10 alcohol in this mix right here that's just an estimate but you know about 10 and you mix it up you're gonna mix it in quite a bit because it doesn't want to first get going but once it mixes then uh you know you can test it pick up your stick and let it drip off the end of the stick and just kind of get an idea as to what it looks like as compared to what it looked like before you thinned it and that is to paint the back side of the flanking and then what's left in our mixing container we're going to actually thicken and then we're going to use that in front of us as we're laying the plank in and with the thickener i'm kind of careful how much i put in there because you know i want to put some in and get it mixed up and then take a look at it and it's probably not going to be enough i don't want to put too much because it will get too thick too quick and i won't be able to use it properly it'll be a struggle on the boat and everything else and it does impede it from going off properly if you get too much in there so you know i get it just about right i'll test it a couple of times and make sure it's what i'm looking for and then off i go with it well i'm back up standing on the boat here and we're coating out the back side of the planking that we're gonna put down you know i'm coating the end grain on the very end where it butts up to the keel and i'm coating the whole surface but uh i've stopped here for a second i'm gonna dump out all my thickened glue onto the boat and spread it out so that it doesn't create heat in the cup you know because in the cup if i leave it in there it's gonna heat up and go off when i spread it out like that it keeps it nice and cool and i'm able to use it for quite some time so we're just going to spread that around a little tiny bit and go back to these planks we're using the thinned epoxy on the back of these planks and it's pretty interesting because you put a coat on the whole plank and then you just kind of kick around a little tiny bit maybe five minutes and look at them and you can see that it's soaked in in some spots and in other spots not so much it's kind of the nature of the wood itself some of it's a little bit more porous than others so in places we'll just kind of go back over it a little bit and make sure it's on the end grain where it's at the keel that's pretty much it we're not too concerned about getting it on the edges because it's a little bit too much work right now and i don't have to do that i can do that later when i'm laying the plank so once we get all of that plank and coated out with the thinned epoxy we're going to move into laying them down now you know i've got my reservoir of thickened epoxy in front of me and i'm spreading it on the edges of the plank that's in place it's very easy and quick to do because i don't have to hold on to that plank it's just laying there it's so simple and you'll probably notice i haven't gone back to the container not once which really makes it easy because otherwise you're just handling too many things i've got one hand on my trowel and one hand on the wood and i just keep moving this layer of planking that i'm putting down right now really is the core in a cord construction you know not only is it a core it's also a structural element because it has strength and it has pliability it's just got everything wood's got all kinds of different advantages and on this boat it's certainly an advantage the trowel that i'm using is really dictating how much material i'm getting down there you know underneath the plank and i cut the teeth in the trowel myself with a razor knife because as you spread it it starts wearing the teeth off the trowel on the fiberglass or even wood anything in front of it because it's kind of soft so you know once you do about 14 planks or maybe a little bit more i'll just kind of re-cut the teeth in the trowel a little bit because you don't want to have too much glue down there and you don't want not enough and the trouble takes care of that right before i lay the plank i make sure that i trowel the glue 90 degrees from the other plank and there's a couple of reasons for that i'm trying to make sure i get the right thickness without wiping the edge off that i just made sure i've covered what happens is you've got all those slots in the glue going 90 degrees so when you put the piece down you put it down up near the other piece first and then force it down and it kind of blows the air out from underneath it we're getting near the end of the gluing right here now i'm going to crowd these planks right up tight against each other with the claw hammer and just hold them down with my hand and then take a pilot drill this is a 3 30 seconds drill it's under the size of the nail that i'm going to use i'll drill a couple pilot holes and then you can see the nails that i use are duplex nails and i've got a nut and a washer on it because the head of the nail would go down through the washer without that nut and the nut spreads the load out on top of the washer and the washer spreads the load out on top of the wood unlike a tapered screw head that might have a tendency to split the wood these don't they just hold it down nice and tight and now you're getting a look at how i'm fastening them down right here now that i've got all the planks crowded right up against each other nice and tight and the glue is coming up the seams already i can drill every hole so i just take my pilot drill and just blast off right now i'm drilling holes into the runner halfway between the china and the keel and i'm staggering them back and forth on each side of that black line you can see the line out in front of us there and i've mocked them onto the boards when i fit the boards or when i pick them up one or the other and uh make sure that i don't miss that runner that was the point of that then we're gonna do the same thing along the chime we're gonna drill two holes in each plank so you know a bunch of pilot holes and then we can get man now you may never have seen anything quite like this and i've really never done it exactly like this before but you know people have been using duplex nails for years to temporarily fasten things like forms and all kinds of different things but this is a little different temporarily fastening the nail planks down has huge advantages because we can't split the planks we get a little pilot hole it's quick and easy you know if i were drilling a hole for a screw it would be quite a bit different and they'd have to crawl up there to drive the screws and i'd have glue all over everything all over the tools everything this system was designed so that you could stay out of the glue and get it done quickly and have it do exactly what you want it to do and that is to hold the planks down tight there's nothing to it removing them all over again i'll show you all about that stuff but it's so fast nailing them down the glue's drying you know everything about this plays to our advantage right here i can go back real quickly over the nails one time afterwards and give them one more hit drive them down a little bit tighter you can see the glue just squeezing out from underneath it now this system might look a little bit laborous but it's really not you know it's very simple to do and it's surprising how many fasteners you can put in that fast this is saving me massive amounts of time labor and it's doing the job the way i want it done it's spreading the load pulling them back out everything i'll show you how to do all that stuff and believe me it takes up no time whatsoever this is rapid this is a rapid system to get done what we need to have done [Music] [Music] well now you know what it takes to get that second layer down over the fiberglass it's it's a little easier actually than putting the first layer down because you've got a pallet in front of you to put the glue on so that works out pretty nice and uh you know it's coming along pretty nicely uh you know there's a few other things i wanted to show you right now because it's convenient and i'm going to be talking about all kinds of different stuff later how you take these nails out without bending them because we just want to reuse them and different things like that it's not real important but we've been able to get away with that and different things like that but here's something for you right here now remember when i was cutting the bevels on the chine area on the ends of the sole planking and on the keel and then i put the stringer in and cut the bevels on that well all the time i did that i never had the piece that i was using for a gauge straight across the boat like that i had it on a little bit of an angle forward at the keel like that and what happens is it makes the bottom of the boat a little bit rounded if you put this piece straight across you can see it it's got like a rocker in it this way see that and yet if i put it down this way it's straight so the idea of that was to get great contact halfway between where we're nailing it so it's over a little tiniest little bit of a radius in between there and in between there and i believe that helps make the glue contact a lot better and then i go around and bang on it with a hammer so that i make sure it gets glue contact everywhere that's been done with coal molding boats i mean when you cold mold they hammer all the laminates after they staple them on to make sure they get contact so we're doing that too so this is a pretty neat little trick i wanted to be very conservative and have it be very close to straight right straight across and one of the reasons was because that works out with trusses and uh the other thing is is that it makes the glue contact work out really nicely so that's what we've done a little bit different just a little bit more information i am up forward on the port side at this point and uh we're just finishing up this uh ashcroft plank and up here the second layer uh 3 8 inch cedar planking over top of the fiberglass and this is the area right here where i said from here to here right in here i have to fit them on both ends that's the only place every place else was you know uh push right up to there fit it hang over and cut it off well now i'm fitting these right from here i guess it was here in here from here to here i got two left to go like that so these are the trickiest ones to fit but there's nothing really hard about it you know you just have to trim it until it fits that's what you have to do so there's one down what i'm going to do is pin that one right down and then so now we're going to take our next plank and we're going to fit that i'm going to show you how i'm going to do it up here on the bench these planks would fit against each other absolutely perfectly because they've been jointed and they're straight but when you put them on the boat with this little curvature for some reason they don't fit exactly right so you got like a little bit of a rocking in here it's a barren in here and you get a little space at the top and if you pull it tight at the top you get a space at the bottom so i'm gonna take a little bit out of this board the way i'm going to do it is i'm going to flip it right over right there i'm not going to take it anywhere and i'm going to use the boat as a shoe and then i'm going to try it one more time i'll probably have to try a couple of quick ones but it's still rocking a little bit i'm going to have to take a little bit more out of it right in here and that's reasonable but i'm going to do a little bit more i want to make sure that it fits perfectly i've got it fit up at the top already and the cable's gonna hold that corner right down for me caleb nice and tight oh yeah it fits right up there nice so my next move here is to just take a pencil and mock it right here i can't really trace it underneath the angle is too sharp so i'm just going to mark it on the top like that and i'm going to connect these two lines up now i'm making this first cut at 90 degrees but it does need a little angle on it so i just tip the saber saw over the edge of the plank and maybe just whip it off on a 15 degree angle or something like that along those lines i just don't want to cut too much off of it all right well first test fit at the chain here it needs to be a tiny bit shorter so we'll just take it out droop it over a nail here like that now that fits just right so now i'm just going to tack it down on both ends and uh i'm tacking it on the forward or the after edge up forward and the forward edge down the bottom so that it will kind of twist it in place so i can fit the next one alongside of it and keep going well the process is a little different up forward maybe a little bit more challenging because as you fit the planks you have to nail each one down temporarily to fit the next one up against it you can't just pack 10 of them against each other they've got too much twist in them so i'm going to nail them on the side of the board that wants to lift up and i'm going to use the same temporary fasteners but i'm not going to drive them all the way down i don't have to hold the plank down perfectly tight what i want it to be is low enough so that the next plank i fit up against it will lay up against it i still have some holding power in that oak underneath it because later on i'm going to be using that same hole again to temporarily fasten the plank down when i glue it it's hangover and cut off just like it was back half but in reverse it's fit up against the side plank and then hung over the stem and cut off you know because it doesn't have a rabbeted stem it's going to have a cap afterwards so that's why we had to temporarily fasten each plank before we fastened it down and glued it so this is a great time right here because all these planks have already been fit and now we know how well it's going to work out before we glue it down we just got to glue it down and nail it down really nice and just make sure we do a nice neat job the next thing for us to do is to putty all the holes screw it all down all kinds of different things we're going to show you but we're building up to putting our next layer of fiberglass on here we're going to put two layers of fiberglass over the boat the 1708 cloth it's a little stiff around the corners i'm going to show you some new tricks that you probably haven't seen before or maybe anybody else you know things i just kind of invented for this boat itself and we're going to get away with some of that stuff and it's just a ball this is fun for me because i've anticipated doing this boat for years and years i couldn't be having a better time than this you

Channel: Tips from a Shipwright

Views: 68,030

Rating: 4.974813 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, tools, educational, marine, wood, shipwright, artisan, craftsman, boat builder, sailboat, skiff

Id: 0Tcm8OVnd_U

Length: 18min 52sec (1132 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021