Globe Mini 5.80 Hull 113

 So, it's been a while.  Lots of painting before this, but I'll fill in those posts as soon as I can get to them. This one is more important and could actually have some info that's useful for us 5.80 guys and gals. DISCLAIMER: This is a description of MY thought process and MY results.  Your results may vary.  Please don't copy my thoughts, designs, processes or mistakes without engaging your own brain and deciding if it will work for you.  I take no responsibility if your boat falls out of the sky into the water, onto the hard or onto someone's head.  I will disavow any knowledge of your sources or process if something bad happens.  This message will self destruct after reading. I'm working on an internal lifting harness.  They're really nice to have, and my boat will be dry stored on a trailer in a yard.  Our club requires an internal lifting harness, conceivably because people do dumb stuff with slings.   These things include ha...

Well, hello there.  I've been dormant (again) for a bit, but I've finally got another quick post together. I didn't make Portugal, as you can tell by me posting right about now.  If I was in Portugal, I'd be slinging masts around, mounting stuff, loading the boat, and going for trial sails to get ready to depart on 31 October.  As my boat's not done and shipping containers into or out of the US right now is just plain not possible (LA port is full, 80 freighters offshore waiting to be offloaded, no containers to be had, shipping handlers/organizers have no idea of what problem to solve, how to solve it, or when it can be solved). As such, I'm just getting to weighing my constructed hull.  This is without any equipment; only required wood is included.  I turned up at (drum roll please...) That's kilograms, friends and neighbors.  The basically bare hull weighs about 1083 lbs.  With all of the equipment (batteries, mast, sails, paint, fairing, keel, life...

Okay, so it wasn't like giving birth.  But it's been a long time coming.  We really didn't know if it was going to be difficult, how it was going to be difficult, and how it could all go horribly wrong.  THAT'S just like kids, right? Caution: Long post.  This is one of the few subjects about building boats that I have some prior and pretty intimate knowledge of.  Read at the risk of extreme (hopefully not terminal) boredom. We needed to build the keel halves.  If you can find a big chunk of lead, you could conceiveably machine it.  Finding that chunk is hard, so you don't hear much about machining lead.  Mostly, since lead has a pretty low melting point, you hear about casting lead.  In bullets, in all kinds of non-load bearing weights, they're usually cast lead.  Since these bulbs/half bulbs will be bolted to a steel fin that will take the load of the keel bulbs, and the keel bulbs just have to keep themselves from falling apart, we'll ...

Once all of the plywood skins are attached, there's a bunch of filling of cracks, gaps, and screw holes to do.  Then sanding, sanding, sanding in prep for fiberglass taping and putting down final fiberglass. Once the wood itself is rounded enough to allow fiberglass tape to comply with the curve, it's time to apply the fiberglass tape.  It's not all that hard.  Cut off an appropriate length of tape, trim it to allow it to go around corners where necessary.  Then put down some unthinned epoxy a little wider than the tape, and squish the tape into the epoxy.  Then use a little additional epoxy with a brush to secure the tape and squeeze the air bubbles out.  Rinse and repeat.  We got 300g/ m 2 tape with our kits, so we need to apply two layers.  The prints call for two layers of 600g/ m 2 tape (one layer of 100mm wide tape, and another layer of 150mm wide tape).  This means that we need two layers of 300 x 100mm tape, and two layers of 150mm ta...

  Next up is epoxying and screwing down the plywood inner bottom.  It's not a complex process.  Put the plywood over the hull structure in the right spot, draw pencil lines around all of the stringers and ring frames. Predrill screw holes through the ply into all of the stringers and ring frames.  Remove the plywood to a bench. Brush full strength (unthickened) epoxy on the ply.  Then brush thickened epoxy on all of the touching stringers and ring frames.  Carefully replace the ply in the right spot, and start putting screws into stringers and ring frames.  Once it's fully screwed down, crawl under and wipe up all of the epoxy that squeezes out, either with a radiused tool or with a square corner.  The inner bottom is the easiest, so have fun. Now for the topsides of the hull.  It's also pretty easy.  It is kind of installing an in an "average" way, so that there's a minimum of material to remove, and there are no gaps to fill in.  ...

Here is where it's good to spend some time thinking about how deck hardware gets placed and where backer plates should be.  The hardest to get to were going to be where the aft cleats are and where the running backstays are mounted.  It was easy to get to them before the rest of the ply was in, so I put them in now. I'll put some more up in the bow where the bow cleats will go, but those will be easy to get to once the deck is on, so I'll leave them for later.  I'll put some in where the daggerboards go as well.  As long as I put them in before the cockpit floor, seats, seat backs, and floor sides go in, they'll be easy too.

 So, Hull 79  helped me out  shaping and glassing the skeg. Follow the link, and you can see how he shaped and glassed it. When the skeleton (the welded bolting arrangement for the skeg) was made, I made an aluminum bar with the proper spacing for the bolts.  I assembled the bolts into the bar with nuts.  Then the horizontal connecting bar was held against the bolt heads, and it was all welded together. When the skeleton was welded together, it was time to eposy it into the skeg.  I used the same aluminum bar to set it into the hollowed out skeg carefully and centered. Slightly funny, slightly scary story...  I mixed up lots of epoxy, with lots of thickener to fill the skeg and support the skeleton.  I was advised against doing it in one shot, but I tried anyway.  Not a good idea.  I placed the skeleton, poured in the epoxy and thought, "Great.  Job done."  Well, about 10 minutes later, I look over and the thing is smoking/offg...

 Another case of weird perception.  I haven't posted a blog in a long time because I didn't feel like I was making enough progress to write about.  Looking back, however, is showing me that I've been making good progress.  It's hard to see on a day to day basis, but over a longer period of time, it's actually been moving.  As a result, this will be a longer catch-up post, and I'll try to be better in the future and post roughly weekly. Then it was time for the long, tedious process of putting in epoxy fillets and cleaning them up by sanding.  The fillets are thickened epoxy, applied with popcicle sticks and/or tongue depressors.  It's a messy process, and takes some practice to avoid spending your life removing excess epoxy.  Once the epoxy kicks, the fillets need to be cleaned up.  To some extent, they can be sanded with a cartridge roll, which is a piece of rolled up sandpaper with a hole in the middle.  The roll is assembled onto a ma...

So, in the interest of thinking about something else, I've been spending some time on paint schemes and things like that.  We (my lovely wife and I) sat down last Saturday night, each with the requisite cocktail, and made some sketches.  What do you think?  Think you can do better?  Here's the link to the blank line drawing that Hull 79 gave me (link on Hull 79's page).   Link Here Our ideas... The last is a really bad representation of what I was intending.  I didn't have the right colors, but  here's  a link to what I was intending. The side of the cabin where the lower window is will need to be some bright (probably florescent) color (safety yellow, orange, pink, green).  All boats will be required to carry their hull number (113 for me) on each side of the bow in large numbers as well. Share your ideas with me.  I'd like to see what other people think.

 So, I guess this is like all projects.  You work and work and work doing small, seemingly inconsequential stuff, and then all in a couple of hours, it seems to make a huge jump ahead.  After a bunch of prep of rings by sanding and epoxy coating and fitting and installing hatches (people and inspection), we finally hung the rings on the strongback. I haven't hung the stem yet because it needs some shaping.  Once that's done, it's just about putting in a bunch of epoxy fillets to hold everything together.  Then it's on to installing and shaping stringers.

Turns out that there's a ton left to do on the frame rings/bulkheads.  They're in the right shape, but to make them waterproof, I'll be putting at least a full coat and maybe two of epoxy all over.  A couple of the frames will have waterproof hatches and/or inspection ports.  The inspection ports need small backing rings, and the big hatches need backing frames.  The round holes in the frame above access the areas behind the cockpit seats.  That frame creates the back of the cabin house/front of the cockpit, so those ports will be accessed from inside the cabin.  Since it's way easier to cut them out and apply the backers before they're installed, I'm doing that.   On the subject of stringers, we spent last Saturday buying, planing and ripping up stringers.  We decided on 2x8x 12' prime kiln dried Douglas Fir studs.  This helps us avoid most of the bad knots.  The kiln dried part keeps us from having to wait months for the wood to d...

 There's not a lot to report right now.  Work is definitely happening (a lot in fact), but not a lot to show. Bit #1 The ring frames are assembled, epoxied, filled, and mostly sanded.  They pretty much look the same as they have for a while.  I still have some parts to rout, sand and otherwise finish, but they're pretty much done. Bit #2 The most interesting part to see right now is the strongback.  We've slightly rearranged the shop to make for a little more room now that many of the parts are assembled together.  They are larger, but they generally take up less "volume" so we needed to restack everything and place the strongbacks where they're going to be throughout assembly.  I was thinking I'd put wheels on mine.  I was also going to put height adjusters on mine to account for unevenness of the floor.  After some thought, I decided I'd just shim it around so it sits evenly and relatively flat on the floor.  I used a sharpie and drew ...