Boat Repair, Restoration, Building
Anything about building or repairing a hull.
At some point, if you’re going to build a boat, you’re going to have to put some holes in it. It just doesn’t seem natural at first. But it gets easier the more you do it. Best to get it right the first time though. Continue reading “Boring the Shaft Hole”
The final topsides plank is fit and glued in place. Huzzah! It took a long time to get here because I elected to vacuum bag each plank individually. I wanted the tightest seams I could get. And in order to do that, you need to know the plank you’re fitting against isn’t going to move, even slightly. Without locator screws, which you can use in traditional boat building, you don’t know things will go back together exactly as they did during the dry fit. The topsides gets a lot of scrutiny on any boat–perhaps not as much as the deck, but it’s what people notice first. Continue reading “Final Topsides Plank and a Patch”
Eventually all boats leak. And with a rivetted aluminum boat, a likely culprit is the rivets. The working of the hull from various stresses that happen during use eventually takes its toll and starts to “wallow out” the rivet holes that were so nice and tight when the boat was new. Continue reading “Fixing Leaky Rivets on an Aluminum Boat”
Having re-established the shape of the hull for the 1958 HiLiner, it’s time to flip the boat over so I can get to the outside of the bottom and remove the rotten spots and fix the leaks. When I was in boat school, we assembled all the students in the school and manhandled the 22 ft. boat we were building to turn it over. I think we had about 50 people to turn that boat over. This contraption I have now allowed two men to flip this boat. Continue reading “Flipping the HiLiner”
After three layers of 1/8″ planking, it’s time to fair the hull. In some builds, particularly those with a painted hull, you might wait until after the final layer is on. But with only 3/16″ thickness in the final layer of mahogany, you can see how it’s advantageous to get the hull nice and fair before it goes on. Sanding through the mahogany to get a hump out would be disastrous. Continue reading “Fairing the Hull Before the Final Layer”
After my last post, I had a few questions about how to handle the joint where pieces like the chine cross the frames. The chine, battens and sheer clamp are notched into all the frames. The notches are pre-cut at 90 degrees to the face of the frames. But in certain areas, particularly forward of say, frame 4, these pieces cross the frames at an angle that is increasingly far from 90 degrees. Ultimately, these pieces (chine, battens, sheer clamp) all need to be securely fastened to the frames. A little old edge like the corner between the face and the thickness of a frame hardly makes for good construction. So what to do? Continue reading “Bevelling the frames”