Randy's Boat Shop

On the Second Day of Boat Building…   The transom template has been cut out but I made a mistake on one of the cuts and put the saw on the wrong side of the line. That little mistake resulted in the transom being off by 1/8 inch. Out came the biscuit joiner so I could glue the cutoff back on so I could then cut it off again only on the correct side of the line. Little mistakes take so long to fix. Error Avoidance is a process where errors are avoided my making doing the right thing easy and doing the wrong thing hard. After I mark out the transom I use colored pencil, pink in this case, to make where to make the cuts. The idea is not to cut drafting lines by mistake. The process has worked perfectly on the four molds and only one mistake on the transom.

I borrowed a John Henry planer-scarffer attachment and planner to cut the scarfs for the 6 mm plywood in which four sheets of 4 x 8 plywood will be joined end to end to make two sheets of 4 x 16 plywood. Actually the joined sheets will be 15 feet 10 inches but that is close to 16 feet. I made some test cuts with the scarffer and after a few tries it worked ok. I see that I still need to refine my setup to get better scarfs. I also epoxied the test cuts so I could do destructive testing to see strong the joint will be.

One of the changes from Sam Devlin’s plans is to replace bulkhead #4 with a laminated frame. I was planning on cutting the frame from White Oak but when I went to my wood pile I could only find Red Oak which is not used for boat building. I managed to find some off cuts of Khaya, an African mahogany to use instead. The building of the jig, cutting of the strips 1/8 inch thick took one evening and I epoxied the frame the next morning. I ran out of 3 inch deck screws so my wood blocks to hold the frame down did not work as well as I would have like. The strips were 15/16 thick but when I am done the frame may be only 11/16 thick instead of the 3/4 inch thickness that I was aiming for. We will see what the thickness is when I clean up the frame.

On the first day of boat building… I made the molds for the Candlefish 13 build; finally after months of planning the build has finally started. I snagged some molds from a fellow RiversWest member who was going to throw them out. The plan was to use them from jigs or something since they were made from 1/2 inch MDF. The Candlefish 13 is a smaller board so I was able to cut the old molds down to what I needed.

The Candlefish 13 as designed is 13 feet 4 inches. Mine will be a candlefish 14 at 13 feet 10 inches by increasing the bulkhead spacing by 4%; the beam is not changing. I am also replacing the plywood bulkhead #4 with a laminated frame made from Mahogany; in the same method used by Joel White in is Nutshell and Shellback designs. The plans have plywood frames as part of the bulkhead and those will be replace with Alaskan Yellow Cedar.

Tomorrow I hope to start cutting the bulkheads and transom.  I will most likely make a pattern for the transom to make is easier to cut out and check the dimension.  It is so easy to make a mistake so I am checking my measurements twice.