Deadwood; a Different Approach.

As I have said previously, we are renting whilst we have a new workshop built -with attached house- and so I am only fabricating the pieces to be made before building the jig.

One of the subsequent benefits of only doing pre-jig items is that I have amply time to peruse the plans before venturing into each piece.

And once again, those who have gone before me have shown some of the difficulties, this time with the deadwood.

I don’t have a bandsaw (as I don’t want to move a few 100kg of machine to the new workshop), and even if I did, looking at other blogs, the deadwood doesn’t seem to lend itself to easy bandsawing.

And so with the dread of having to handsaw the final shape of what is a very hefty piece of timber, I sought a different approach.

So I pondered the plans some more.

It is apparent that a lot of trimming of the complete deadwood could be avoided if the laminates were shaped closer to the finished shape before the big glue up.

JBs plans show the half-sections for every second laminate, so I transferred these onto the planks and cut them out before epoxing the stack.

As soon as I laid them out it was apparent that I was saving a lots of good Celery Top Pine. Enough in fact, that I had two planks left over; which later, were sufficient for the Stern Post

1 Deadwood Layout 

I used 1 inch planks as they were easier to obtain and consequently had to start by laminating them together.

2 Deadwood 1st epoxy

Having laminate them together, I then set about cutting them to the half breadths from the FSPs

As the half-breadths for only every second piece is shown on the FSPs, I cut every second plank to the half-breadth of the one above; the larger one. The result is apparent in the following picture.

3 Deadwood dry fit

As you can now see, there was going to be very little wood to remove after glue up.

Unlike the approach of gluing up the whole unshaped planks.

Additionally, the steps between the planks mark the points to which the glued up block needs be planed, as shown below with the blue arrows marking the points to give the final shape. i.e. the red line.

In fact it took no time at all to plane of the steps and sand the whole to the finish shape.

3a Deadwood planing datums

This method also makes it simple to check you have everything covered before the dreaded epoxy is applied and that the stack is the required shape.

4 Deadwood layout check

Another advantage of this method is that you have the gentle curve of the sides right from the beginning with out having to produce it with a bandsaw or hand saw at a later stage.

As the following two pics show there was not much material to remove to have the sides looking fair.

6 Deadwood sides rough

7 Deadwood sides dressed

Having shaped the sides I roughed out the faces for the keel and lead keel with a handsaw.

8 Deadwood rough sawing bottom

The stern post was then fabricated from the left over celery top pine and epoxied onto the deadwood.

9 Deadwood & Stern Post Epoxy

Taking a clue from other blogs - notable Jeff Patrick and Paul Embla - I plan to make a template of the stern post, deadwood and keel and use it to shape the lead keel mould. Particularly as the plans for the keel mould show a straight face where is meets the keel and clearly this needs to be curved.

14 Deadwood & Stern post 3/4F

12 Deadwood & Stern post Side

Transom Cheeks.

This post covers work done in July before Edith and I headed to Europe for a break. 

The transom was marked out and cut to shape using a jig saw on the curves and a handsaw on the straights, just shy of the line.

As one of my transom Huon Pine planks was the FSP thickness of the transom plus the transom cheeks, I did not require transom cheeks on the lower board & and only thinner ones on the upper plank. 

The splines seemed to work out well, with a gap for the epoxy resin as deemed require. As is the pils. 

My younger son, Martin, and I then opened the armoury, selected the best weapons and set about the bevelling. 

We left quite an amour of wood to be removed when the transom is on the jig; to ensure the planks will meet it fair.
As the lower section is one piece, with no cheeks, we had to re-interpret the drawing of the section where the keel meets the transom. With both Martin and me visualising and debating the drawings into the final 3D shape, I think we got it right. 

Transom epoxy joins complete

Thanks to all those who gave me feedback after the near disaster, joining the two transom planks, the last remaining piece, to complete the transom blank, went smoothly.
This time I only thickened the epoxy to a ketchup consistency and was able to push the spline in by hand. The pieces then went together with little pressure on the clamps.
Lots of squeeze out. I cleaned the squeeze out from the aft face with a putty knife and then gave it a wipe with a rag dampened with acetone.
A gentle wind on the clamp then gave a whisper of squeeze out, ensuring there will be no gap in the join.
This time I don't need a single malt. But I deserved one.
Cheers to all who gave me advice.
Pete.

Epoxying the Transom

Well, this was nearly a disaster.

I had dry-joined the planks numerous times to ensure that the join was close to perfect.

The splines were a little tight, so I did a couple of fine runs with a plane until they were a slip fit. Then, as advised by JB and West Systems, I planed a little more off the back of the splines to leave room for the required epoxy bed.

But thinning the splines down from a tight fit allowed the two planks to come together with one just proud of the other. However, I found with judicious placing of wedges, clamps and heavy straight edges, everything came back flush.

So I donned the biological warfare gear again and mixed the epoxy. I had watched my fibre-glass-boat-renovating son mix the epoxy for the laminated stems and so imitating Tim’s technique, all went well. You taught me well Tim.

With a brush I wetted out the spline groove and faces. 

I then added the filler and saw dust to the epoxy to get a good peanut butter viscosity. I found a putty knife easy to get the epoxy into the spline grooves. A test run showed that I didn’t get complete squeeze out, so I removed the splines and added more epoxy. A lot more. Squeeze out is good, so I’m told. I then refitted the splines into the groove, but found I could only push them a little way into the groove by hand, (because you can’t have to much epoxy) but never mind the clamps would pull the planks together and there would be fabulous squeeze out.

So with the two planks pushed together flat on the bench I started winding up my new Veritas Surface Clamps. Well, the planks just would not go together. This was when I realised that verities surface clamps are for holding pieces on the bench while you work on them. Not for clamping transoms. Wind as hard as I could, there was still a 2-3mm gap between the planks. But there was no need to panic, as the epoxy wouldn’t go off for another 20 minutes. Not enough time to rush out and buy some decent clamps, the ones I discounted as not being needed.

Fiddling and winding, the epoxy slowly, very slowly, oozed out of the end of the splines and a mist from between the faces. More clamping and then . . . the two planks started to pop up off the bench at the join. This was looking like a disaster in the making and I could see myself having to saw the joint section off my precious Huon and start again.

But then I noticed that as the planks rose, the epoxy started to find an escape route between them and I could wind the clamps in a little more. So I Clamped a section of aluminium square tube across the planks, spaced so that it would stop them rising more than about one cm, and wound the clamps in until the planks rose to just touched the aluminium square tube. I then clamped the aluminium square tube down to push the planks back flat on the bench. The surface clamps held. The tremendous leverage applied by the aluminium square tube pushed the planks down and they slowly came together . . . with a huge squeeze out from the end of the splines. Yes. I did put a lot of epoxy in there.

Repeating the procedure I finally had the planks snugged up tight.

A couple of more bits of square tube across the planks ensured the result would be a nice flat transom.

The rest was a breeze, watching the squeeze, which got me thinking about the advice, “do not over tighten the clamps, so as to leave some epoxy on the faces.” But if you leave a bed on epoxy on the faces, you you will have a gap and not a flush tight join. Hmmmm.

So I adopted the rationale that the space I left around the splines for the epoxy would do the ‘adhesive’ job and the thin epoxy between the visible face edges was only cosmetic.

I think I need a single malt.

Transom FSP overlay

Ooops.
I overlooked posting the FSP Overlay.

Transom Continues . . . slowly

World’s thickest transom.

Having spent half my retirement funds on the Huon for the transom, I have been reading and re-reading the plans, sleeping on it and re-reading again. I can’t afford to get this wrong.

In order to ensure that my transom blank was large enough for the job, I had the FSP scanned and printed on transparent paper. I then flipped the transparent copy, laid it on the transom FSP and traced the Starboard section, giving me a FSP of the whole Transom. see pic.

As luck would have it, a sharp, fellow Somes builder spied my last blog entry and kindly emailed me, pointing out that my 38mm plank was the same thickness as the design Transom plus Transom Cheeks. Quite insightful, as he is an inches man from the Good Ole . . .

“Leave your plank thickness as it is Pete, and dispense with the cheeks.” he suggested.

So having mulled over that one for a couple of weeks, I decide it was a good idea. The reason I had to mull over it was that it means the inside face of my transom is going to be further forward than on the plans and I needed to work out if that could be accommodated. Conflicts as the engineers say! With some fiddling, I think it can. I’ll need to move the transom support forward on the jig, route out for the Transom Knee and do a fiddle where the Keel meets the Transom.

The good side is that the forward face of my transom will lie on the line of the forward face of the transom cheeks, so I will only need to mark the Transom with that set of lines and the rear face lines.

July 9th. Routing the Transom Joins.

Having managed to get the transom planks flat and sanded smooth, I played around with the two planks to find the most attractive faces and decide which way they looked best together. It was a bit of a compromise, as there is so much birds-eye and marbling in them. But there was an obvious pair of faces that matched. They did come out of the same log.

I then gave the faces a coat of varnish in the hope of protecting them from any epoxy squeeze out. I did this before routing the edges so any varnish dribbles on the edges will be removed by the router before epoxying them together.

To ensure the planks met well, I set up a routing jig as per JB’s advice and took a mm off both planks. What a brilliant technique.

JB's Routing Jig.

However, the boards did not sit together well and I diagnosed the problem was due to my bench having developed a warp . . . despite having flattened it with my router a couple of years ago. Obviously the bench timber is still drying. The wood is Murray Valley Pine (commonly called Cypress Pine, which is a ludicrous names as Cupressaceae [Cypress family] are different to the Pinaceae [Pine family]. It can’t be both!)

So I made up a sled and set about flattening the bench again. Starting at one end, with the router just skimming the surface, I found the router taking of 3mm in the centre reducing to zero at the other end. You can see the cutout in the pic below.

Routing Sled for bench flattening

Now it’s flat. What a difference. And the planks meet with hardly a visible line.

Routed Join. It's there somewhere.

13th July Splining the Transom Joins.

My gorgeous Veritas Plough plane, which I bought to cut the spine dados, arrived. I practiced cutting dados on a piece of pine. It took a while to get the technique right, but the real break through was adding a relatively large piece of 10mm ply to the fence to give a much deeper face.

I then bit the bullet and started on the Huon. All went very well, largely, I suspect because the Huon is so much easier to work then pine.

Veritas Plough Plan cutting dado for spline

Having cut the 3/8” grooves 6mm deep (The plane came with imperial size blades. Come on America, it’s time to change gears), I ran a piece of Celery Top Pine through the thicknesser and made a batch of splines.

How delighted I was when I slid in the splines, pulled the planks together and found the splines took the slight bend in the planks out and the faces came together almost invisibly.

Beer O’Clock.

Transom. Splined but not glued.

Transom Spline

Now for the Epoxy.

Huon for Transom.

The Huon boards, (two) for the transom have arrived.
They were slightly dished, and as they are 380mm wide, they won't go through my thicknesser.
So with a slab of beer in hand (under arm actually), I repaired to the local timber yard and they kindly ran it through their thicknesser, with the computer dialled up to 38mm.
What a great thicknesser. I need one of those in my workshop.

Huon Plank for transom.

Then I attacked them with my belt sander, gently actually, then the orbital sander.
At this stage, faint rays of light under a straight edge showed they were no longer dead flat.
I went looking for a longboard at the local hardware, but could find nothing over 300mm. So I just bought a roll of 240 and 600 grit and went home to make my longboard.
Looking around for a suitable piece of material, I spied my #9 Stanley hand plane. Perfect.
I soon had the sand paper fitted . . . after removing the blade.
This has to be the perfect sanding board. The weight is just right and the bed dead flat.

That's a #9 Stanley, which gives you an idea of the plank size.

Surprisingly, an hour of easy sanding had the slab flat and very smooth with 600 grit.

In fact it went so eel,l I might get some 1200 grit to finish it off.

#9 Sanding board.

Huon Pine, God's gift to boat builders.

Jeff,

Yes,I plan to do the boat predominantly in Huon pine.

It is a delight to work. Planes, saws and drills superbly.

It lends itself to very easy steam bending.

It’s strength and density is similar to Mahogany, but at the same time has extremely high durability.

However, supply of Huon is very limited and the cost astronomical.

Huon pine is extremely slow growing and following 150 years of harvesting, standing timber is now protected.

Plantation growth is, of course, inconceivable.

Regarding your query, I doubt if I could find a couple of planks big enough to do the coamings and if I did the cost would be around $450 for the pair.

It would also probably look better in a dark (red?) contrasting timber.

Pete.

Growth rate

The 2” x 2” piece of Huon I used for my Somes Sound tiller contains 101 growth rings in 70mm (less than 3”).

Recent samples taken from a 25cm (10”) diameter, dead Huon log at Mt Read, Tasmania contained over 1,000 annual growth rings.

All the Huon that is available is solely from stockpiles and that recovered from fallen trees and sells for $16,000 per cubic metre; approx. US$400 per cubic foot.

So I need to be selective as to where I will use it.

2" x 2" Huon used for Tiller 101 years of growth rings.

Distribution.

Huon pine is only found in rugged South West Tasmania.

The extent of remaining stands is estimated at a mere 10,500 ha.

Pollen samples from lake cores show that Huon was widespread across Victoria and Tasmania half a million years ago.

Dendrochronology.

Trevor Bird from CSIRO Forest Products Division, Hobart, a dendrochronologist, has taken a core sample from a living Huon pine, dubbed BHP (Big Huon Pine) and dated it somewhere between 2500 and 3000 years old.

Sub-fossil logs

Dr Mike Barbetti of Sydney University, Dr. Ed Cook (Columbia University) & Mike Peterson, Senior Forester with Forestry Tasmania, have found buried sub-fossil logs, carbon dated 38,000 years in which the wood is still solid and the growth rings are still visible.

The incredible resilience of Huon pine to decay is due to the oil, methyl, eugenol which protects the wood from insect and anaerobic decay when buried, such that it will remain solid for tens of thousands of years.

Managing Huon pine.

For the last fifteen years the target limit for harvesting has been 500 cubic metres per annum. However, the average in this period has been about half that limit.

There is also a stockpile of timber cut from the flooding of Lake Gordon.

The two resources will provide sustainable volumes for the next 50-60 years.

Characteristics.

Class 1 (refer to AS 1604). Extremely high durability.

Density 550kg.m³

Huon pine is very easily worked, may be highly polished and is a very good bending timber.

Cuts cleanly and accurately with low feeding force. 

Surfaces very smooth and lustrous.

Huon Slab 314 years old 32cm radius.

Huon Pine for Transom

I have found (and bought) two fabulous Huon Pine planks for the Transom.
The planks measure;
     1580 mm long x 370 mm wide x 38 mm thick and
     1670 mm long x 340 mm wide x 32 mm thick,
and will enough to do the whole Transom

I will need to reduce the thickness, but besides the fact that they won't fit through my 300mm thinesser, I could't be so criminal as to turn so much Huon into saw dust. So need to find someone with a large enough bandsaw to re-saw them.
I am considering simply re-sawing the 38mm plank down to the 32mm of the thinner plank and accepting a thicker transom the JB's plans. I can't see this as a problem; my rudder will simply be 7mm further back than the plans.
But opinions are welcomed and invited.

I plan to spline the planks so I have ordered a Veritas Plow Plane.

Pete.

Reading Plans and locating Part references.

I seem to spend as much time looking for references to particular parts as I do trying to extract the information from the plans.

John's plans are excellent, particularly the reference numbers for each part. All the info is there, once you find it.

So in order to reduce 'searching' time, I have made up a spreadsheet showing each Part and ALL the references to it. At least the one's that I could find.
Anyone who would like an Excel copy can email me and I shall email it in return.
Here's a tiff of page One.

Pete.

Pete's Somes Sound Parts List.

Inner & Outer Stem.

Inner Stem.

I was fortunate to be given, generously by fellow woodworker Paul, sufficient Celery Top Pine for the Inner stem.

My son Tim was down from the Philippines for christmas and so was on hand to assist with the stem, which was a blessing, as Tim has lot’s of experience with epoxy from restoring his GRP fishing dinghy, (family skeleton) in particular with making ‘peanut butter’ grade thickened epoxy.

Firstly, we sawed the Celery Top into 4mm laminates with a hand held circular saw (no bandsaw. Yet?) and then put them through the ‘thinesser’ and simply continue making laminates until we had a sufficient stack of them.

We set up the ‘Brooks’ adjustable jig and did a dry bend. It looked good to the inexperienced eye.

Inner Stem Dry Fit.

Donning biological warfare clothing we mixed the epoxy. John said, ‘use lots and squeeze it out’. We used one litre and squeezed half of it out.

Inner Stem Glue up.

And it worked. We did not overbend the jig and on releasing the clamps there was zero spring back.

We fed it through the thinesser to bring it down to the required width. The outside face was then marked and planed off with my fabulous new Veritas® NX60 Premium Block Plane. What a machine. The Porsche of planes. (still no bandsaw).

The same was used to plane the bevel to take the planks.

Inner Stem Shaping.

 

Chuffed with success, we then started on the Outer Stem.
I had settled on Spotted Gum (hard as nails) for the outer stem as in would protect the boat against imprudent running ashore.
Now to find out how workable it was.
We prepared the laminates as per the Inner Stem and then tried a dry fit. It certainly took more effort to bend the Spotted Gum and the Celery Top. Even so I decided not to over bend it as any 'under-bending' could be sorted out when screwing it to the Outer Stem.
When taking the outer stem off the ‘inner stem mould’, it did spring 10mm at each end.

Inner & Outer Stem 

Australian timbers for boat building.

In building a Somes Sound in Australia the first thing to establish is what available timbers are suitable equivalents to timbers specified by John Brooks in his Somes Sound plans. That is, equivalents of oak, mahogany, Douglas fir, spruce and Sapele Ply etc.

God bless the Internet.

Finding Oz timbers suitable for boat building was not difficult, as there are plenty.

But which to use as a substitute for each specified American timber took a lot more research.

Hardness.

The first thing I discovered was that the hardest North American timber is less than half as hard as many Australian timbers. I thought of Oak (with a Janka hardness of around 6.0 kNewton) as a hardwood, until I found that Australian Spotted Gum has a Janka of 11.9 kNewton. Double the hardness of Oak. Not only that, but is is highly resistant to rot. But it’s bloody heavy and barely floats, even when dried.

Workability, steam bending ability, & stiffness

Then I had to consider work ability, steam bending ability, stiffness and appearance for bright work timbers.

One excellent guide was had by checking which timbers professional Australian boat builders used for various parts of their boats.

So the list grew to include Spotted Gum, Huon Pine, Celery Top Pine, King Billy pine, Hoop pine, Hoop pine marine ply and African Mahogany, which is plantation grown in the Northern Territory in Tropical Australia.

Huon Pine.

Of course Huon Pine is gold. God’s gift to boat builders.

Huon is splendid to work and emits a gorgeous aroma and takes on a golden shine when varnished. Some pieces have the appearance of marbled salmon and others feature contrasting birdseye.

Rot resistance. Buried Huon logs have been dug up and carbon dated at 38,000 years old.(No not 3,800yrs, 38,000yrs). One 25cm diameter log was found to contained 1,000 years of annual growth rings. This extraordinary slow growth rate has led to total logging ban. So any Huon available is from dead logs salvage from deep in the rugged Tasmanian forests or Huon cut prior to flooding of rivers by dams for hydroelectricity. This Huon is stockpiled and allocated, by the Forestry Commission, to millers for sale in limited amounts each year

Hence the price of $16,000 per cubic metre . . . . or more.

So regardless of the price, obtaining Huon ought to be treated as a privileged entitlement and only used where it’s truly golden beauty can be displayed and enjoyed for years.

For me,it will be used for the Tiller, and hopefully, if sufficient size planks can be obtained, the Transom and Coaming.

Celery Top Pine.

Celery Top to is extremely slow growing and also has a logging ban placed on it, and so only available in limited amounts.

Model Yacht.

Tim & I became divert from the Somes Sound when we decided to restore a model yacht I gave him 30 years ago. It was worth the effort.

I have now completed the tiller in Huon pine.
Steamed easily, followed by slowly, slowly carving out the shape.

Aussies are blessed with God's gift to boat builders. Huon Pine.
The 2" x 2" blank of Huon I started with had 100 rings of growth across it.
What a privilege to be able to work such beauty.

Stambox as per JBs suggestion.

Roughing out with my new Veritas Porsche GT3 plane.

Tiller and my Homebrew Irish Stout