Rowing and Sailing a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory

The first ten days of December have been delightfully warm, and we have put our new Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory in the water a number of times. Here is the track of our course as Sue and I did a 6-mile tandem row on the lake:

Our fastest sustained pace was about 3.9 mph, but I'm sure we were often going much faster. On a previous solo row/sail I was able to sustain 4.1 mph and I know that tandem rowing is easier and faster:

The zigzag lines out into the center of the lake and across the cove are tracks of my route under sail, but the day was close to being a drifter, and I really didn't feel that I had gotten a feel for how the Dory would work under sail.

Yesterday my chance to test the boat under sail came. By 2 in the afternoon there were sustained winds of 15 mph and gusts into the 20's. The open water was showing small whitecaps. It was not, in fact, wise weather for a December sail in an open boat, but the cove is fairly small and the temperature was over 60. I decided that I could give the boat a good test sail within the cove and would always be close to shore if I were knocked down. 

The boat sails very well -- both stable and speedy. I zipped back and forth across the cove, both close-hauled and on reaches. The only difficulty I had was in bringing the boat about. It is so light that it's easily brought to a halt and pushed into irons as one heads into the wind. I came about successfully about half the time and went into irons about the same amount. I'll be able to master the trick of sustaining forward momentum, but yesterday was just too windy (and hence risky) to practice for long. Before hauling out, however, I did try several broad reaches and jibes. I was pleased with the boat speed and really delighted with its stability as one jibed.

This is going to be one great boat for rowing and sailing!

Astronomy Day

We are blessed with very dark skies in this part of the Ozarks, but my own acreage has grown up with trees and I've been too lazy to find a perfect site for observational astronomy. As a result my telescopes have languished with only light use in the past few years, but day before yesterday I resolved to begin changing all that.

For one thing there was a rare daytime occultation of Venus by the thin crescent Moon. I set up my 4-inch refractor in the yard and struggled for a good, long time with the challenge of trying to find the dim crescent in the bright daytime sky. But eventually I was crowned with success and snapped the following photos with my cell phone held up to the lens of the telescope.

Later that night my friend Gordon came over for a crash course in basic observational astronomy. We set up my 8-inch reflector in a nearby field and struggled a bit with navigation through the night sky. (I'm sadly out-of-practice and I also need to spend a couple of hours improving the set-up and aim of the 50 mm finder scope). By late evening, however, Orion was well up in the sky and yielded spectacular views of its famous nebula and its showy double stars. And just as we were packing up Gemini was rising and the meteors of the up-coming shower peak were sporadically streaking overhead. 

One rarely gets such warm temperatures with such clear skies in December.

Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory -- Launching the "Susan Lee"

Today was the big day, the first launch of our CLC Northeaster Dory, the "Susan Lee." Everything went extremely well. The boat rows like a dream; it coasts along almost effortlessly at 3 - 3.5 mph. As a tandem rowboat, it is no trouble at all to get it up to 4.5 mph.

Sue was a little nervous about sailing it in December, but I was pretty confident and was delighted at the ease with which I could step the mast while out on the water. The light breeze was just what I wanted for a first sail. The boat moves well and points well. Coming about was a bit of a challenge in the light wind, but I quickly got the hang of that, too.

I still have a fair amount of finishing work to do on the boat, but it will only become more beautiful as I sand it even smoother and apply the varnish. The varnishing must wait for warmer weather, so in the meantime I intend to enjoy my gorgeous boat just the way it is!

Easily launched without even getting the wheel hubs wet!

Nautical me

Skimming the water

Standing and Stepping

Sailing Reflections

Building a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory -- Odds and Ends

The Northeaster Dory is a carefully thought-out and well-designed kit, but you really do need to build every part of it, and some of the inconspicuous things are remarkably time-consuming.

For instance, flotation. Nobody likes to think about capsizing their boat, but suppose it happens? This is a wooden boat so it would float -- even when swamped -- but with all the fiberglass it would float very low in the water. So blocks of flotation are necessary to displace enough water to get the gunwales up enough to allow you to begin bailing the boat. But where can the flotation go? The only option in an open boat like this one is to tuck it neatly under the thwarts. And how do you make neat, inconspicuous foam blocks to tuck under the thwarts? You go to your local Home Depot and pick up a couple of 4' x 8' sheets of pink or blue 3/4" foam insulation (thicker if you can find it). Then you cut it into 6"-wide strips, glue five strips together to make a block 4 1/4" thick, trace the shape of the bulkhead onto the block, cut it out, sand it smooth, give it several coats of fiberglass, spray paint it matte-black, and glue it to the underside of one of the thwarts. Repeat five more times!

A flotation block -- glued and clamped 

The daggerboard, too, is a bit of a job. Like everything else, it comes in the kit as a bunch of bits and pieces. The basic shape is there . . . but the pieces must be glued together. And then the real shaping begins. All of the rough edges (now made rock-hard by the epoxy glue) must be sanded smooth, including the awkward inside of the handle. To make the daggerboard hydrodynamic, it is shaped a bit like a wing -- bullet-shaped on the leading edge and blade-shaped on the trailing edge. And then it, too, needs several coats of epoxy.

The daggerboard -- glued, but still rough

The daggerboard -- shaped, faired, and sanded

At this point the boat was essentially complete, but the interior had only two coats of epoxy and felt a little like sandpaper when you ran your hand over it. So my next task was to sand it all very smooth (without ever sanding through the epoxy to the plywood beneath. Then I needed to deal with the vagaries of November weather. I waited for a warm 60-ish day to apply the epoxy, but epoxy takes at least 24-hours to harden and it was going to get into the low 40's at night -- a temperature that can bring the curing process to a halt. So we picked up some shop lights in town and bought some of the few 100-watt incandescent bulbs remaining on the market. This allowed me to rig up a gentle heat-lamp system to keep the boat warm at light. (Such loving, tender care I give!)

A Dory -- heated and tucked-in for the night

Of course, it wouldn't do to have a boat so beautiful dragged to the water on the rusty old flatbed trailer I use for hauling trash and firewood. No, such a lovely boat needs its own all-aluminum trailer (which probably could have been silver-plated for the price I paid!). And, of course, the trailer just had to arrive on the UPS truck as a kit! It took two full days to assemble, and the sparse, baffling instructions led to some under-the-breath muttering and renewed appreciation for the truly wonderful instruction book for the Dory itself.

Trailex parts

Trailex assembled

The finish work of sanding and varnishing all parts of the boat will undoubtedly take time and possibly much of the winter (since I need 60-degree days for varnishing), but the boat is now ready to be used. Yesterday afternoon I was working in the open garage on some fiddly little task when the FedEx truck pulled up. As the driver got out, he exclaimed, "You're building a boat! . . . Wow! It's beautiful! . . . How many of these have you made?"

I took a certain quiet pride in confessing that it was my very first wooden boat.

Building A Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory -- Oars, part 2

Oar Blade

Making a set of oars for the Dory has been the most ambitious wood-working element of the entire project. I have been working from the general set of plans I mentioned in my last post about oars, but I have freely adapted those plans based on the lumber available to me in my local Home Depot. In making these oars I am taking a calculated risk, but the costs are not high: a few dollars for lumber and a lot of time for construction.

As I mentioned earlier, the shafts of the oars are formed from #1 pine 2x2's. Here is a picture showing how I planned to shape the handles:

Oar handles

If you look closely at that picture, you can see that I have already attached and begun to shape the wooden jackets that serve as counterweights. Here is a picture of those counterweights at an earlier stage, showing just how rough they were in the beginning:

Counterweights

In a previous post I showed how I clamped these oars together and created the rough, rectangular shapes that I would have to hew to shape with my new spokeshave. After a lot of shaving and sanding, I was able to shape the first oar to look like this:

Shaped Oar

This was just the first of the two oars and it wasn't really finished. The two wings of the blade were attached by only a bit of thickened epoxy, and in places I could see right through the crack. Were I to row hard with such oars, I'd be likely to break off the attachments. So my next task was to create sizable fillets along both sides of these connections. I also needed to save some weight by thinning the blade and the neck of the loom. And, of course, I needed to make the second oar.

All of that has now happened. Both oars are ready for a final light sanding and then some epoxy followed by varnish. I'm still not sure they won't break with hard use, but I'm confident enough to push onward.

Finished Oars

If you zoom way in on the oars in the photo, you can see the fillets and the fairly thin shape of the blades. I think I'll still bore a hole into the center of the handles so that I can insert some heavy sinkers and improve the balance of the oars. They are not perfect, but they should be fairly attractive and very useful.

Update 2/16/2022 I've now used the oars for aver seven years and they are still as good as new. I did insert lead sinkers into holes bored into the handles and the balance is good. The oars are totally suitable and still look like new.

Building a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory -- A Boat that Would Float!

I have been working very hard on my Dory for the past few days, and I now have a boat that would definitely float! The exterior has three coats of fiberglass and is relatively smooth. The interior has only two coats and needs a thorough (smooth) sanding before I apply the third coat, but even as it is, it is a nice boat. The thwarts are covered with fiberglass in varying amounts. The foam flotation blocks have all been cut, glued, smoothed, sanded, and fiberglassed with a first coat; they will fit snugly under the thwarts and help out a little if I ever capsize the boat while under sail. The daggerboard trunk is nearly ready for installation as is the mast step. Those will be frightening elements to install since both require drilling holes in the bottom . . .and the daggerboard well also requires cutting the opening for the daggerboard. The rudder is coated with fiberglass, but still needs a lot of sanding and some more fiberglass. Only the daggerboard and the oars are still at relatively early stages -- though both are at least recognizably under construction.

The end is not yet in sight, of course. Only now am I near the stage of adding the finish coats of varnish and paint. That process will require sanding and painting, sanding and painting, sanding and painting . . . . You get the idea. But maybe the boat can still take a little dip in the lake before Christmas.

Building a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory -- Making Oars

What good is a rowboat without oars? But it turns out that oars in the lengths I need are fairly expensive and perhaps not as good as homemade oars. What I need are two sets of 8’-foot oars. They should be lightweight and relatively easy to make. Most boat builders seem to lean toward oars based on Pete Culler’s designs, and the best web page I could find on making such oars is Don Kurylko’s discussion of his boat project (though you have to scroll way down to see the oars):

http://forum.woodenboat.com/showthread.php?123343-More-photos-of-Don-Kurylko-s-new-boat/page16

For design purposes, the relevant sketch is this one:

I went to the local Home Depot and picked up enough good wood for a trial set of oars. I got lucky and found perfect #1 lumber -- 2 2x2x8 pieces and 1 1x4x8 piece. One 2x2 is used for the core of each oar. The 1x4 is used for both the blades and for the counterweights above the looms, according to the plan in the two drawings below:

Pattern for the Oar Blades

A 5' section of 1x4 is ripped down the middle, giving you two 1 x 1 3/4 planks. Each of these is then sawn on the diagonal, starting at the 2' mark and crossing to the 3' mark. This gives 4 blade pieces that will be glued to each side of the 2x2s.

The "counterweights" are just additional wood that will be in a "jacket" around each 2x2 above the pivot point of the oars. First, I cut off a 34 1/2" section from the remnant of the 1x4x8. Then I ripped it to create one 1 x 1 3/8 plank and one 1 x 2 1/8 plank, as indicated in the pattern below:

Pattern for the Oar Counterweights

The next step was tricky since I needed to rip the thickness of each of these one-inch boards (actually 3/4") in half to create two 3/8" boards. I did that by lightly clamping these 3/4" boards between a couple of sticks of 2" scrap lumber. That gave me a board wide enough so that I could rest the shoe of my circular saw flat while I ripped it in half. These 3/8" boards are not, of course, perfectly dimensioned, but I'll be shaving them down with my plane and my spokeshave anyway.

Finally I screwed some temporary rails onto my plywood-decked flat-bed trailer so that I could clamp the blade pieces to the shafts, as shown here:

With the clamps removed, I have a clunky set of wooden oars, ready to be jacketed and then gradually shaved and sanded into shape. Only time will tell if they work.

Building a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory --Fiberglassing the Hull

It has been almost two weeks since I posted an update on building the Dory. I have taken a little time off, but most days I do put in several hours of work. First, I sanded the entire bottom of the boat and all side panels, before recruiting Sue to help me put the fiberglass cloth on the bottom and lowest side panel. That was a little nerve-wracking because of the almost inevitable drips, spills, and sags, but on the whole it went well. 

The next day I spent the morning carefully sanding the entire bottom of the boat again with both 80-grit and 120-grit sandpaper. I also did quite a bit of hand sanding, trying to get everything reasonably smooth. By mid-afternoon I was ready to appply first full coat of fiberglass. As suggested in the manual, I used a roller to spread a very thin coat of fiberglass. As a result there was no problem with drips, but I’m not absolutely positive about having covered every inch of wood. The roller does leave little bubbles so I used a foam brush to tip them out. To my eye the coat looked smooth -- though one could still see the places beneath this coat where previous drips and smears had been. The boat looked quite acceptable from about 10 - 15 feet, and I wanted it to look much better by the time I finished the third coat. My plan was to sand with 100-grit paper between the second and the third coats.  

After applying the second coat of epoxy covering the entire bottom of the hull, I was a bit concerned that the surface was not very smooth. Bits of dust turned into hard fiberglass speckles and in places even the grain of the plywood itself absorbed fiberglass and stood on end almost like specks of sand. I decided to give this a few days to dry and then proceed with a thorough sanding, but I was beginning to doubt that I would ever get to a smooth mirror finish. From a distance the hull looked just fine, but it felt like sandpaper to rub your hand across it.

Fiberglass takes about five days to harden fully and be ready for a thorough sanding. In the interim I plugged away on other pieces -- the skeg, the rudder, the daggerboard, the mast step, the daggerboard well, the mast, and the spars. Attaching the skeg required having Sue hold it centered and square, while I drilled holes from the bottom. It was then glued and strengthened with fillets. Despite our best efforts, there seemed to be a slight curve when sighting along the skeg from the stern toward the bow, so I had to fix that with some aggressive work with the belt sander. 

The rudder, too, was a challenge. Shaping it was not too difficult as it just requires bullet curves on its edges. But the the yoke was a problem. It took some sanding, rasping, and chiseling to get it to fit, and then a small shim to make it snug. I propped it up and put a coat of fiberglass on as much as I could, And then I made my mistake. Instead of waiting for that fiberglass to dry, I went right on to mix thickened glue for the sturdy fillets that hold it together. Unfortunately the fiberglass under the fillets was very slippery and fashioning the fillets turned into a big mess. Patience and perseverance prevailed, and eventually I ended up with adequate fillets.

Daggerboard well, rudder, and mast step

The mast and spars have been thoroughly sanded and are almost ready for varnish. (I still need to drill holes in them.) And I am nearly ready to glue together the mast foot and the daggerboard well. 

The thwarts were first glued together and then sanded smooth on the pretty side (which will be up). I bought a spokeshave and gradually learned how to use it while creating the chamfers on the edges of the thwarts. The spokeshave creates long curlicues of shavings . . . ideal for "little Orphan Annie" curls on a corn doll!

Spokeshave and Thwart

Fiberglassed thwarts

With the fiberglass on the bottom fully dry I was ready for sanding. First I spent a couple of hours using the paint scraper to scrape all the rough spots and drips on the bottom. I created some pretty good piles of fiberglass in this process, but it did make the hull much smoother. Unfortunately, the scraping also put a few minor scratches all the way into the fiberglass cloth.

A full day of sanding using both the orbital sander and hand sanding was necessary to smooth everything to my satisfaction (though I did sand all the way down to bare wood in a few spots). Then I spent about a hour sweeping and vacuuming the garage to get rid of dust -- clouds and billows of dust!

Finally, I was ready to apply the first of (I think) two thin coats of finish fiberglass. I used a chip brush to slather on the fiberglass, a paint roller to spread it into a thin coat, and the chip brush once again to smooth out the bubbles. It was a painstaking and slow process, but the end result is a very satisfactory fiberglass coat. In most places it is mirror smooth, marred only by occasional specks of dust and one unfortunate fly. I think the finish is smooth enough that I tempted to leave the bottom of the boat "bright." It's that good! (At least to my untutored and uncritical eye!)

Fiberglassed Hull

Close-up of the fly in the fiberglass

CLC Northeaster Dory, Bottom Finishing 1

Now that the major hull construction is complete, progress on the boat will proceed more slowly. There will be sanding. And more sanding. And much more sanding. There isn't much point in daily updates, but I will try to record milestones. Among those is my new look . . . Darth Vader Jeff --

Fiberglass dust is a toxic respiratory irritant so I have invested in a high-quality respirator to try to protect my lungs. Wet fiberglass is a skin irritant, which seems to cause a rash a lot like Poison Ivy, so I am also being very careful to wear gloves and long-sleeved shirts, whether painting or sanding. And all this dust is, of course, apt to wreak havoc on the final coats of varnish, so I am sweeping the garage regularly--wearing my Darth Vader mask while I do so.

Today, I started sanding the bottom of the hull. My first goal was to mark all the places where I thought I should add a bit more fiberglass to fill the lap seams to the very top for as smooth a finished look as possible. There weren't so very many, but I decided to mix up about 10 ounces of thickened goop, figuring that I could quickly fill the seams and then use the rest to glue up the rudder and perhaps the daggerboard. But as I worked I made a dim-witted mistake.

After topping off the seams, I decided to spend fifteen minutes or so smoothing them before going on to the rudder. I set my pastry bag aside and went to work. When I came back to it, the bag was actually steaming and very hot to touch! When fiberglass starts to cure, it generates heat, and the heat accelerates the curing. So I ended up with an over-sized, lop-sided softball in a bag. You can see my little treasure sitting next to the rudder (which I glued together with a new batch of thickened fiberglass). Even an hour later the fiberglass on the boat's seams was still soft and malleable, while the "softball" had become a rock! I should have glued the rudder together first . . . and then gone back to smoothing seams. Live and learn.

Building a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory -- Day 16

This was a fairly long day of serious wood shaping. In the morning I worked on the mast again. Yesterday I had gotten it fairly smooth, but the edges were all sharp. Today I put about a 3/8" round over on each of the four edges. This required getting my plane sharp enough to do the bulk of the work. Then I used the orbital sander to smooth everything out nicely. I'll still need to sand it with medium and fine grit sandpaper before finishing it with a few coats of varnish. As you'll see in the picture below, the top 1 1/2" of the mast does not have chamfered edges and is squared off. This area needs to be a bit larger (and stronger) because I'll be drilling a hole in it for the halyard.

After lunch I took all of the clamps off the rails. Then I used a saber saw to cut the rails at the bow and create a rough rounding. Similarly I used my Japanese saw to slice off the rails at the stern and again created a rough rounding with the saber saw.

Now it was time to start making the rails look pretty. The belt sander created its usual dust storm but gradually smoothed off the tops of the rails and removed the occasional patches of fiberglass glue. Rounding the sharp edge on the tops of the rails took a good bit of work. First I put a chamfer on the edges with the plane. Then I used the belt sander to round them a little. And finally I finished up by hand with a wood rasp. The rails now only need a bit of finish work with the orbital sander before they can be coated with fiberglass.

The almost-finished top of the mast
resting on the almost-finished rails

The other end of the mast

Close-up of a section of the rail

Building a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory -- Days 14 and 15

Yesterday was a cycling day, but I did work hard on the second spar, planing it into shape and then sanding it with 80-grit paper. It doesn't sound like much, but I had done such a poor job of cutting the basic shape with my circular saw that those simple tasks took much of the morning. Still, I do have a suitable spar at this point!

This morning I first worked on the mast. In this case my circular saw trimming was fairly accurate, but there were still some rough spots and saw marks. I first tried to use the plane to smooth them out. No luck. (I need to figure out how to "tune up" my plane.) So I then went after them with the belt sander using 80-grit paper. It took a long time and created a huge dust storm, but in the end I had a suitable first pass at a mast.

After lunch Sue and I spent a couple of hours gluing on the second set of rails and then cleaning up as much slop as possible. This completes the major components of the hull. From now on I'll be adding the secondary features (thwarts, mast step, daggerboard well, oar locks, etc.) and trying to create a smoothly sanded and beautiful boat.

Building a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory -- Days 11, 12, and 13

Day before yesterday was a big day of work on the boat. First thing in the morning Sue and I added the fillets at the bow, the stern, and all the bulkheads as well as the joint between the bottom and the first hull panel. After lunch we carefully smoothed the fillets using denatured alcohol and used squeegees to clean up as much of the stray thickened epoxy as possible. Then we laid the fiberglass cloth inside the hull and smoothed out all the creases and bubbles. Finally, we spread on a thin coating of fiberglass to wet out the cloth and make it adhere to the hull.

I finished up at about 4:30 by gluing in the breasthook at the bow. Then I celebrated by going down to the lake for a long swim. The water temperature is still quite agreeable.

Late in the evening I came back out to the garage and used a box cutter to trim the fiberglass and peel off the blue painter's tape. There are a few minor drips and runs in this first coat of fiberglass, but on the whole it came out very well.

Yesterday was a day of relatively light work on the boat. First thing in the morning I clipped the remaining wires in the bow, stern, and bulkheads as close to the hull as possible. Inside the boat those wires are entombed in fiberglass, and the little pointy bits on the outside will soon also be covered by fiberglass.

Then I took a long bike ride before starting to shape the transom late in the day. I used a Japanese saw to trim the overhanging hull panels as close to the transom as possible. Then I shaved away the remnant with a coarse rasp. The manual says to use a sharp plane to do this, but I couldn't make that work. After rasping the panels close to the boat, I finished up with 80-grit sandpaper. I still have to hit this area again with some smoother sandpaper, but it's definitely looking much better.

Here is a closeup of the glue in one of the lap joints of the transom. As you can see, the glue penetrated all the way into the joint between the panels. This is one of the features that makes this very light-weight boat so strong. The boat is bottom-up right now, so you have to mentally flip the picture over to imagine how the glue penetrated down into the lap. Most of the other lap joints are tighter than this one, but the glue still penetrated just as deeply.

Today, was a fairly long day of work (though there was time to go kayaking on the lake in the afternoon). First thing in the morning, I cleaned up all the surplus glue on the scarfs of the rails. Next I recruited Sue to help me as we attached the first layer of rails to both sides of the hull. It takes an impressive number of PVC clamps to do this . . . and then it takes an impressive amount of diligence to clean up all the surplus glue that comes oozing out of the clamped joints.

Every day the boat looks stronger and more useful, but every day of slopping on fiberglass glue makes it seem more daunting and more difficult to turn this into the beautiful boat I'd like it to be!

Building a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory -- Day 10

Today I barely worked on the boat at all. In the morning I took a 41-mile bike ride. That was followed by a leisurely lunch, so it wasn't until mid-afternoon that I got down to work at all. Tomorrow is going to be a big day of adding fillets and fiberglass to the interior, a task that required some considerable study in advance. Then I cut out the last stitches connecting the bottom to the first hull panel. After that I took very careful measurements for each patch of interior fiberglass cloth, and Sue help me cut all the material. Finally, I diligently cleaned the interior of all fiberglass and wood chips and taped the line along the connection between the first and second hull panels.

Everything should be set for a big day of work tomorrow.

Building a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory -- Day 9

My primitive vice holding the spar in position 

Today I worked one of the spars and the mast. Since I don't have a worktable with a vice, my first task was to dream up a clamping system using my saw horses. My solution was to attach a pair of wooden blocks spaced 2 3/4" apart to each saw horse. As you can see in the picture above, these blocks allow me to use shims to "clamp" things like the mast and spars securely in position. Using my circular saw, my rasp, my block plane, and my orbital sander, I was able to complete one spar. . . . Well, it's not really complete since I only sanded it with 80-grit sandpaper. I still need to use some fiberglass glue to repair one small flaw in the scarf joint and then I can finish the job with 100-grit and 220-grit sandpaper.

After that I clamped the 2 1/2 x 2 1/2 mast blank onto my makeshift work table and generated a huge dust storm as I trimmed it down to the rough shape of the mast. At one point the circular saw must have twisted a little on its shoe and a trimmed a bit too deeply, but fortunately I saved the "shim" from that section of the mast so that I can glue on the required sliver of wood. My error wasn't bad enough to affect the structural strength of the mast, but it would be a cosmetic blotch without a bit of repair.

A person with a power plane and a router could probably crack out the spars and mast in relatively short order. I don't want to fill up the garage with more tools and I also find it fairly satisfying to work with basic hand tools as much as possible in building a boat that will move across the water by equally archaic means.

Building a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory -- Day 8

This has been another day with a lot of work and relatively little visible progress.

In the morning I mixed up two bags of fiberglass thickened with Cell-o-Fill to try to finish gluing and filling the laps on the port side of the boat. I was concerned that I wouldn't have enough Cell-o-Fill powder to finish the task (and several others) so I wrote an urgent email to Chesapeake Light Craft to ask if it would be suitable to substitute wood flour for the Cell-o-Fill. Within an hour I got a positive reply from John Harris, the owner of the company, saying that he uses both thickeners more-or-less interchangeably. I was please by the rapid response. Everything about this kit is well-designed,
and there is plenty of support for home builders. That leads to a satisfying experience and a successful project.

With the help of of third bag of fiberglass / Cell-o-Fill, I finished filling up all the laps so that the hull is now glued together. The goal is to fill the laps to the very brim -- both because that will produce a stronger joint and because after sanding it should also be prettier. The manual suggests that you avoid getting glue on the stitches so that they will be easier to pull after it dries, but I was not skillful enough to do that and perhaps my glue a little too runny. I went ahead and put glue right over the stitches. But to avoid having to deal with "glued in" stitches, I waited a few hours for the glue to get tacky and then crawled beneath the boat to clip all the stitches in the hull panels (not the bulkheads, bow, or stern). This allowed me to pull the wires before they were entombed for life.

With the remnant of mixed glue I also finished the the rails and attached the rudder cheeks and the dagger-board handles.

Since it was too rainy for a bike ride in the afternoon, I went on to use the templates for the mast and the spars to trace the relevant outlines on my glued-up sailing lumber. As an experiment I then used my hand-held circular saw to cut out the spars. I did a pretty ragged job of it, but I was still able to use my hand plane to shape one end of a perfectly satisfactory spar. I followed the advice of John Harris and went to work aggressively. I prefer light spars and trust his recommendation to err on the side of light spars rather than suffer with heavy ones.

Shaping spars with a hand-held circular saw and an old plane is going to be a challenge, but I can already see that I can produce results that will satisfy me. The spars I can carve might not meet professional standards, but they will be attractive and useful.

It's only when you complete a task for the first time that you begin to understand the various pitfalls. The beauty of the Northeaster Dory comes in part from the curves of its lines -- particularly the curve of the sheer. But these curves mean that the boat cannot possibly sit level on the saw horses when it is upside down. Thickened glue -- if it is at all runny -- will tend to run down toward the bow and stern (and drip onto the floor). But if the glue is too thick it won't penetrate deeply enough into the laps to provide strong joints and perhaps won't even settle into smooth seams. Even though in hindsight I may have mixed my glue a little too thin, it did not drip through to the inside of the boat in more than a couple of spots. But the thin mixture did make it harder for me to get the laps filled to the top and to avoid getting glue on the stitches. You win some; you lose some. It's the final product that matters.