Thread: Nice rowboat, nothing fancy.

Haven't done any more work on the boat the last few days, as I have been busy with other stuff. However, I did have a brainwave about the paint.

The cream colour was ok, and would be fine for a lot of things if you wanted them cream. I'm pretty good at visualising shapes and colours though, and could see the painted boat on land or in the water in my mind's eye. Cream wasn't going to cut it. Not really. So, I figured the cream wouldn't be heavily loaded with tint and would probably be able to accept some more. There's a limit to how much you can tint paint before it starts going funny, but I thought I'd have some latitude in this case. Since cream is basically yellow added to a white base, throwing in some blue and/or green tint seemed like it might work. The colour would be a bit of a lucky dip, but I figured it was worth a shot.

I rocked on down to the local Mitre 10 and had a bit of a chat with the young bloke in the paint section. After getting past the standard party line (nope, no can do tints to existing paint) by making it clear that I wasn't after a match to any standard colour and was prepared to take a bit of a chance, we looked into what tint was already in the existing paint (Dulux "Cambric"). Turned out to be a mix of deep yellow, yellow ochre and a touch of red and black. Makes sense, since this equates to mainly yellow plus a little bit of brown, which would give you cream if added to white. We then checked out a couple of standard colours that I liked, and figured out how much extra tint could be added to nudge the cream in that direction. Ended up going home with the maximum advisable amount of extra tint for 4 litres of paint, in mostly a malachite green with a little bit of blue thrown in. This cost me the princely sum of $10.

Once back home, I opened up the Cambric-tinted enamel and decanted 1 litre out to another container, leaving 2 litres in the original tin. The Cambric-tinted undercoat was a bit shy of 2 litres, so I topped that up with some white undercoat. After that I just dumped half the tint into the enamel and the other half into the undercoat, then mixed them up well. By pure luck, the colour turned out really good. It's sort of a light minty green and sort of a bit turquoise. Hard to accurately describe, but very pleasant to look at. Visualising the finished boat now looks a lot better, and since it's still a lightish colour it should still handle the sun well.

With 2 litres of undercoat and 2 litres of enamel top coat I have plenty for the job, and enough left over to stash away for touching up. The spare 1 litre of Cambric enamel, and the spare white undercoat, may get used for the interior of the bottom and garboards. I still haven't quite decided which colour I am going to use there, and will play it by ear once the outside is painted.

The Deks Olje arrived yesterday, so today it's time to do the rest of the final tarting up before slapping the oil on, which should happen on Wednesday. Good drying weather at the moment, so hopefully I'll get some paint on the thing at the weekend (the Deks needs a good three days before being ready for anything else).

I've attached two shots (sun and shade) of the colour the paint ended up. This is pretty accurate on my monitor. No guarantee about your monitor. Anyway, I find this colour very pleasant. I think the boat will look good in it.

Originally Posted by Sumbloak

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I've attached two shots (sun and shade) of the colour the paint ended up. This is pretty accurate on my monitor. No guarantee about your monitor. Anyway, I find this colour very pleasant. I think the boat will look good in it.

Sumbloak This is not meant for you specifically. I just hijacked your thread to raise an issue with a lot of wooden boat builders.

You guys build some special craft in natural timber and finish them off beautifully then you go and cover all the natural beauty of the timber with paint. I would have thought a clear finish would have given the same protection but left the colors of the natural timber still showing. Anyway it's really none of my business but I feel disappointed when I follow a build admiring the workmanship only to see it covered in paint.

Whitewood

Well it comes down to personal preference. Paint can look good too. Anyway, I'm not painting the whole thing because (no surprise here) I like looking at wood too.

What I am doing is painting the outside of bottom and the planking, and the inside of the bottom and the first plank up. The quandong plywood doesn't actually look all that great on the outside of the boat anyway, so painting it isn't going to be any great loss.

The paint on the inside of the bottom and first plank is mainly to get a more forgiving surface to deal with boots and grit and all that. Something I can touch up easily without worrying about dings and scratches. This is another advantage of painting the outside of the planking too, come to think of it. If it ever needs a bit of bog, it's not a problem.

Everything else will be oiled. That means the inside of the upper three planks each side, plus the frames, stringers, sheer clamps, gunwales, breasthook, quarter knees, transom (inside and out for the latter) and the thwarts and the footrest.

With the stringers and framing breaking it up, the planking looks better on the inside than it does on the outside. One face of the ply was also a bit better looking than the other, so I put that on the inside. All the other stuff is cedar or rosewood, so will look good with a natural finish.

So, the boat will still give the impression of being nice and woody. It just won't be woody absolutely everywhere. I think this is a good compromise for looks and practicality.

Re "protection": the best really is white paint. It's the coolest surface in the sun and has excellent UV resistance. Clear finishes are simply not as durable in our climate, and on horizontal surfaces can soak up a fair bit of heat. I'm using one anyway just for the hell of it, but my boat will usually be transported upside down, and will be stored under a large carport, and I deliberately chose a clear finish that is easy to touch up with minimal work. Varnish is just too much work for my liking, and I like the look of oil anyway.

It might sound strange on a woodworking forum but to my eye you can have too much timber in a boat.I think a painted finish accentuates the lines of a clinker hull much more effectively than a bright finish,with all the other benefits of better long term protection and ease of maintenance etc already mentioned.Varnish needs to be scrupulously maintained in our climate,especially over clearcoat epoxy,and I'd rather be using the boat.Deks is the way to go,easy,fast,durable and simple to repair,and the gloss one looks almost as good as varnish for a lot less effort if gloss is required-satin looks pretty good though.

Well, I'm still doing clean up. Found lots of ugly little bits I'd forgotten about.

Some of this was doing a bit of fairing of scarf joints on the outside, and fairing the stem and sternpost where the glass wrapped around them on the garboard. Obviously the really fine level fairing will be taken care of after the undercoat goes on. The bog was just to get it pretty close.

To do this I tried using Bote-Cote's gluing/filleting powder, as I figured this would work well for a stiff mix. I wanted it stiff since it would have to hang up the side of the stem and sternpost, and bogging something up then having it sag while curing overnight is never any fun at all. This was the first time I'd used this particular powder. I figured if it's made for filleting it should be nice and smooth, and capable of thickening up to where you can hang gobs of it off the ceiling.

Honestly, I'm not impressed with the stuff. I threw heaps in and it was still barely stiff enough, and still wanted to run of the edge of the board I was using to hold it when I wasn't looking. It's also very gritty. Frankly I can get a smoother and stiffer mix by starting with the Bote-Cote 1:1 wood glue and throwing in sanding dust. Yes, really. I've done that before, when I wanted some wood-coloured bog to fill some of my *ahem* "craftsmanship", and I know how well it works.

I've also used microballoons, many years ago. Those are a lot smoother too, and can be used to thicken up resin to the point where it will hang in massive great slabs up the side of a boat.

Short version: this powder may be good for some things, like fillets that will be taped anyway, but it's not all that flash if you just want to smooth some bits off.

Anyway it's on now, so I'll leave it overnight and see how much of a debacle I have waiting in the morning.

Did I mention I really do not like epoxy?

Had a bit of a thought this morning. I think it must have been subconsciously ticking over in my brain last might while I was asleep.

As mentioned, I really do not like epoxy. It has its uses, but for a boat like this it also has drawbacks. Do note that for some boats I would agree that going full epoxy everywhere is worth it, but for a boat like this I don't think it is. Sure, it's tough stuff, but I'm really not in to turning the exercise of building a small wooden boat into an exercise in working with lots of expensive, toxic, stinking and expensive goop that has a mind of its own and is determined to f#$! you up any way it can. Working with timber is generally so quick and easy and just plain fun. Working with epoxy is not.

Rather than relying on epoxy to save things, I'd rather improve my woodworking skills and various aspects of the building process. All things considered, I'd say this is quicker, cheaper, easier and far more satisfying. This means that epoxy's "advantages" like being very sticky, getting right into the grain, and being very hard to sand or otherwise clean up once cured, become a right PITA a lot of the time.

I quite like this clinker-with-stringers build method for one-off prototypes. It offers very good strength and stiffness for its weight, in much the same way that the old method of cold moulded over stringers did. I think the results look good. Since I'm not planning on epoxying or painting the inside, and am just merrily slapping oil everywhere, the stringers aren't much of a problem for finishing. They also hide the edge grain of the plywood planking, which looks like crap IMO if exposed. Boats like this can be easily inverted, so drainage isn't a concern either.

However, cleaning up the squeeze out when planking is difficult with all those planking clamps in the way. So the idea that occurred to me was to glue the stringers to the planks on the bench. IOW, fit the stringer to the frames, held temporarily with 16 mm panel pins or whatever. Fit both edges of the plank to the stringer and the previous plank, or the bottom, depending. Take plank and stringer off the boat, and glue the stringer to the plank on the bench. This means it can be done in such a way as to get perfect glue lines everywhere very easily, and with excellent access for cleaning up squeeze out immediately since there would be no need to have any of the clamping arrangement obstructing the glue line.

This should then give a stiffer plank for final fitting, which should span over the permanent frames quire nicely without requiring extra temporary intermediate frames. Bending and gluing this onto the permanent frames, stem and sternpost should be easy enough with scantlings this light. The lower edge could be temporarily fastened to the previous plank/string (or bottom, depending) with 10 mm staples, meaning no screwing around with stacks of clamps and clamping battens there either. This would mean unobstructed access to this glue line on the inside, so clean up there should be easy too.

Obviously things would want to be fitted accurately or you'd have fun and games when it came time to getting it stuck to the boat, but this shouldn't be that big a deal.

So I still haven't got the effing thing oiled and painted. This "finishing touches" stuff seems to go on forever.

However, as a break from sanding upside down and swearing at epoxy, I decided I needed something else to swear at. Boat is all very well, but it isn't going to row very well without oars. I can row it without paint, but I can't row it without oars. This means I need to make them.

So, had a bit of a rat around again. I think I have enough smallish bits of cedar to do them without cutting into any big chunks, so I'll give that a go first. The only catch is that when I rip it down it may move some, which may mean it's too bent for oar shafts. Some of the cedar I ripped for other things did move a bit, but since that was being bent anyway it didn't matter. Oars are different. Will have to see how it goes. If I have to rip more stock until I find something stable enough, I have enough to do that.

Anyway, shafts are pretty straightforward, so I got thinking about blades. I'm inclined to use one of the more modern shapes rather than Ye Olde Long Skinny Blades. I've made a set of Macon blades before (only oars I've ever made, come to think of it) but the modern asymmetric blades make more sense, for flat water at least. They come in a range of slightly different shapes, and of course every bugger's advertising department insists theirs is the best and the competition is no good. Personally I'm thinking there's probably not much in it if they are all rigged properly and heaved on by a suitable gorilla.

The flashest ones in the Concept2/Dreissgacker line are supposedly their Fat2 blades. Dreher have the EH shape as their latest and greatest, while their earlier Apex-Rex shape is a bit closer to the Fat2 in profile. The idea behind all of these is to reduce the length of the blade, make it deeper in the water, get extra lift at the catch, and reduce backwatering towards the end of the stroke. The odd looking shapes are how you get these results (can go into detail if anyone wants to know, or you can just read up on the Concept2 and Dreher websites). So, I figured it made sense to take the general principles behind these shapes and apply them to my own oars.

One point is that with a fixed seat recreational boat you have much shorter oars, and much more freeboard, compared to a scull. This means the angle of the oar shaft to the waterline is different (steeper), and that in turn means that if you keep the same blade shape and have it submerged to the same depth, your oar shaft ends up too far down on the blade. To make the thing balanced on the pull, you want the centreline of the oar shaft going through the centre of pressure of the blade. Having it too far down on the blade (below the centre of pressure) would mean the oar might be likely to roll on the pull, which would not be good.

This means that to get the oar shaft running through the right point, the blade shape for a scull needs to be adapted slightly to suit this boat. What I ended up doing was sort of a compromise between the Dreher EH and Apex-Rex shapes, tweaked a bit to get it looking right but maintaining similar blade area. This is probably going to be good enough that someone like me won't be able to pick the difference from a theoretically optimal blade. I'll just pretend it's perfect and learn to row harder.

Ok, so that's the profile shape figured out. Competition blades also have a slight cup over their height (not a lot) as well as the ubiquitous "spoon" in plan view. The vertical cupping is usually done so that the lower sections are almost flat, with a tightening curvature towards the top of the blade. This helps stop losses over the top of the blade, without making the catch and release more difficult. I figured I should copy this too. I thought about carving the blades from solid, and having a cross-grain strip laminated onto the tips to stop splitting. This is how I did the Macons years ago, but with the extra width of these blades and the curvature I wanted, I decided to try making compound curved plywood blades.

I happened to have just enough 1.6mm hoop pine marine plywood to get 6 blade blanks: three for each blade, with the face grain of the outer two layer running horizontally, and the face grain of the middle layer running vertically. Once glued up, this will give a 4.8mm thick blade in a balanced 9-ply . This should be stiff enough and strong enough without extra reinforcement, given the compound curvature, and is still quite light. So far I haven't made the actual bending forms, but I have done a quick proof-of-concept with wedges, etc and one blade, as shown in the pictures. The blade takes a fair curve in both directions, the layers sit well together, and the forces aren't too large for convenience. Seems like it'll work.

Was working with Surian cedar(Toona ciliata) today, and the smell suddenly reminded me of Spanish cedar (Cedrela odorata), which is something I haven't worked with (and therefore smelled) for probably a quarter of a century. I could literally smell the Spanish cedar again, just like I was back there working with it.

I know studies have shown smell is often strongly connected to memory, but the odd thing here is that I've been working with plenty of Surian lately but until today it never crossed my mind that it smells almost identical to Spanish cedar. Now that my brain has made the connection it seems totally obvious, and I'm wondering why it hadn't occurred to me before.

Anyway, I looked them both up on Wiki, and it turns out they are closely related to each other (both are Meliaceae) but not closely related to just about every other thing that gets called cedar (which are Pinaceae, Cupressaceae or various other odd ones). So there you go.

Anyway, today I ripped and dressed up some stock for the oar shafts. Making oars soon.

Thats interresting , any other similarities besides the smell??
Good to see the oars coming on,
keeping you out of mischief at least.

Yeah, they're quite similar in weight and colour and grain, at least for the denser pieces of Surian.

There are several South American trees that are closely related to Australian ones. For example, hoop pine (Araucaria cunninghamii) is closely related to Parana pine (Araucaria angustifolia). It's a leftover from when both continents were part of Gondwana.

Anyway, I ended up cutting the oar shafts from one of the big chunks of cedar. I thought about it some more and figured I wasn't using the big chunks for anything else at the moment anyway, and using them would save a bit of work, and if I used the small bits up now I'd be just as likely to want small bits later.

The timber did bend a bit when it came off the saw, but I'd cut it slightly oversize for width and was able to straighten it with a jointer. I'm leaving the two pieces standing on end for a couple of days, just to make sure any movement has settled down before I start shaping them.

So I finally got all the #&@%!^! sanding done. I even managed to enjoy a lot of it, which is weird.

I faired up the bottom and garboards, which were a bit rough due to "adventures" with the peel ply. Ended up sanding them down flat to 180 grit with a basic cork block for the flat panels, and a flexible block for the chine radii. Incidentally, I find fairing up radiused corners like chines works best if I roll the block around the corner on a shallow diagonal. This gives a very smooth and even result with little effort.

Anyway it all worked out well. No itching either, since I wasn't throwing dust all over the place with a power sander, and was cleaning up with a vacuum periodically. The glass itself was down pretty flat. It was mainly just excess resin in places causing fairness problems. Most of that is now sorted and I'll take the rest out when I sand the undercoat between coats. I easily have enough for four coats on the bottom and garboards, and two elsewhere, so may as well use it. I could have done more fairing before undercoating, but couldn't see the sense in sanding into the glass. My theory is if you're sanding glass, you might as well not put it on in the first place.

The topsides were already fair, apart from some very minor misalignment at some scarfs, so those just got a light bogging and sanding where necessary.

The other big news is the interior of the boat is now soaked in Deks Olje, and is looking rather spiffy if I do say so myself. Deks is fun and easy to put on, as long as you know when to ignore the instructions.

Yes, that's right, I deliberately went ahead and ignored some of the Sacred Deks Olje Instructions, thereby dooming the entire project along with Western civilisation itself.

The first bit I ignored was "avoid hot days". This is Australia, not Norway. We don't get a choice about avoiding hot days here. However, I was working in the shade, in the afternoon, and the sea breeze was up to take the edge off the heat.

The other bit I ignored was the bit about not using any sandpaper finer than 100 grit. The softer bits of Surian tend to be a bit "woolly" if sanded with grits as coarse as 100. To get them looking good, I had to go to 240 grit. The instructions say using finer grits may "clog the pores" of the timber. I can see how this may happen with some timbers, particularly if you are using a power sander. Norwegian boats are often built of very resinous heart pine, and if you were heating that up with a power sander and fine grit paper it may well do a good job of cooking up its own varnish. This would be bad for penetration of the Deks, so I can see why they have the warning.

However, I was hand sanding, so little or no heat, and was using non-resinous softwoods that have very good absorption anyway. Sanding these with fine grit won't clog anything. It'll just make them smoother. If there's a bit of dust in the pores, the oil will soak right through the dust anyway. Sure enough, when I threw the Deks on it soaked in just fine. Heaps of it. No problem.

This boat took about a litre and a half of Des #1, and the whole job took a bit over five hours. Most of it is just madly slapping on heaps of Deks everywhere as fast as possible, and repeating until it stays sitting on top. Once the oil is staying on the surface, it's just a matter of getting a rag and working around the boat until any excess is gone. The instructions say to wipe up excess with a rag dampened with #1, but by this stage I had plenty of it sitting in the bottom of the boat and on top of the stringers. Mopping this up did a very good job of dampening the rag.

In fact the first three rags ended up soaking wet by the time they had gone around the whole boat once. I was using them to spread the excess around evenly, as well as mopping it up. By the fifth rag I had a worked up a good surface, with no excess on top but well coated everywhere. This is what you want with Deks. Don't skimp. Once you start it's pretty full-on, and you just keep going until it's all done. The good bit is that it's easy and you don't have to worry about runs and brush marks. Just get a big brush and go crazy.

Anyway, some pix are attached of the nice oily look, and various details of the boat which I don't think have been posted before. Enjoy.

Next thing: painting.

The boat looks absolutely great. The workmanship looks great. The natural timber looks great. The finish looks great. You have many reasons to feel sustifyably proud of your achievement.

Whitewood

I have actually thought of doing a photo compendium of all the dodgey bits of workmanship. This might be useful for other amateur builders, if I included notes about what caused them and how I'd avoid them next time.

One thing you might notice if you look carefully is the stem head in the second picture. It's kind of pieced up from bits and bog. This is because I originally wasn't planning on having it protruding above the sheer. It was going to be chopped off and sit under the breasthook, giving a flush finish all the way to the end. I changed my mind after flipping the boat off the strongback, because it became obvious that having it sticking up a bit would look better. There was some "waste" length anyway that had been used to secure the upper end of the stem to the strongback, and I could see this was a good look.

So, that meant I had to take a bit of wood that had screw holes in it and was sized to fit inside the planking, then turn it into something presentable for public display. That required bogging said screw holes, and sticking extra bits of wood up the side. Also, I was lazy when I made the stem, and didn't cover the central plywood strip (mainly included to stop the thin stem splitting when building). Short version is that under close scrutiny it's a bit of a pig's breakfast.

However, it's well-proportioned and the overall effect is good. This pretty much sums up the whole thing. It aint perfect, but it's generally pretty damned good, and it's given me ideas about how to do things better next time.

At the moment what interests me is whether or not I can get it to meet my speed target. I have no concerns about the behaviour in other respects, as from experience I already have a good idea of how the boat will behave. The speed target is going to depend on how well Michlet does with estimating comparative resistance of varying designs of this type of boat. It can't go too far wrong in estimating viscous (skin friction) resistance, as that is pretty much a no brainer, but it's the residuary resistance (wave making and other bits) that gets tricky to calculate. Only way to find out how good it is is to get fit and row like hell.