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.

Building a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory -- Day 7

This was a very full day of work without much dramatic photographic evidence to show for it.

First thing in the morning, I went out to the garage and started inspecting and tightening the stitches we put into the hull yesterday. Then I found some straight sticks of lumber to lay crosswise in order to check the hull for any undesired twist. It came out perfectly.

About 9:30 our friends Terry and Kathy came over so that Terry could help me flip the boat over bottom-side-up.

After we visited for a while, I got back to work by laying out the spars and the rails so that I could glue them together in case I had some extra glue later on in the day. I also spent a happy hour or so cutting another 25 PVC clamps so that I would have 60+ clamps on hand when it comes time to glue on the rails.

Finally, I got down to mixing up pastry bags of thickened epoxy glue. With the first bag I glued the lowermost hull panel to the bottom. I used the remnant of that bag to glue together the spars and parts of the rails.

After lunch I mixed three sequential pastry bags and glued all the hull panels on the starboard side of the boat as well as part of one panel on the port side. I should be able to finish up tomorrow morning. This whole pastry bag business is very nerve-wracking. I don't have steady hands in the best of circumstances (and would have made the world's worst surgeon), but this job really got to me. I've used fiberglass often enough in the past to know what a mess it can be to clean up. Trying to drip a bead of fiberglass into all these narrow cracks studded with lots of sharp copper wires always trying to rip the bag or snag my Latex gloves or slice my tender flesh (and make me bleed all over the expensive Okoume plywood) put me into a trembling terror. As a result my bead wandered way too much.

I did get the job done and subsequently resigned myself to the laborious task of cleaning up all the drips. The outcome is probably going to be fine.

After dinner Sue and I both went into the garage to snip all the wire stitches that I have already glued so that we could pull them while they were still tacky and clean up the little gobs of still-sticky epoxy that tended to gather around the stitches. My theory is that the stitches are no longer necessary as long as I allow sufficient time for these "welds" to harden before flipping the boat over again. Time will tell.

Building a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory -- Day 6

This is the day when the Dory started to look like a Dory. I went to town in the morning, but in the afternoon Sue and I spent three hours stitching on the rest of the hull panels. I had to wrestle with the fitting of the transom and drill a few new holes for the stitches, but to my untutored eye everything is turning out quite well.

Tomorrow I will need to tighten many of the stitches and then find a way to flip the boat so that I can begin spot gluing the hull panels between stitches. That will firm up the hull, allowing me to flip it again and fiberglass the interior of the hull.

If I have to kill time before I can recruit a helper to flip the boat, I still need to glue up the rails, the spars, the daggerboard, and the rudder.

Looking at the Dory from the bow

Looking at the Dory from the transom

Closer view of the bow

Closer view of the transom

Building a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory - Day 5

Last night I told Sue that she would soon have to join me as a boat builder for a day or two. She was eager to start! (The alternative was that she would have to work toward her goal of riding 100 miles a week on her bike.) So in the morning while she went to town, I sanded the thwarts and cleaned up all rabbets and splotches on the hull panels. Then I cleaned off the flatbed trailer and dragged it outside to make room in the garage for the two saw horses that will hold the boat during the rest of the construction.

We got down to work in mid-afternoon and started to wire on the first hull panels and the bulkheads. It was a touchy and somewhat challenging business -- especially the final task of fitting in the transom. But now it is starting to look like a boat. By tomorrow afternoon it should start looking like a Northeaster Dory.

Building a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory -- Day 4

This morning I spent a couple of hours cleaning up the hull panels I glued yesterday and then preparing for the afternoon by attaching rails to the flatbed so that I could later glue and clamp the thwarts.

After lunch it took another couple of hours to glue and clamp the 4th hull panel as well as the thwarts.

We're now ready to begin assembling the hull whenever Sue and I find a few hours that we can both devote to the task. First, though, I have to at least trace onto cardboard the outlines of the bulkheads so that it is later easier to cut the exact shapes of the foam flotation blocks that will be glued under the thwarts.

And while I await Sue's leisure, I still have a number of other steps I can usefully complete -- gluing the rails, the spars, the rudder, and the daggerboard, as well as beginning to shape the mast.

Building a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory -- Day 3

Surprisingly about half of my boat-building time has been spent getting ready to work on the boat -- unpacking parts, moving things around, preparing the flatbed trailer, finding plastic, cutting clamps, etc. 

The first hull panels glued together nicely. This morning I removed the clamps and used the new orbital sander to sand the joints smooth. It came close to using up one piece of 80-grit sandpaper so I am definitely going to want some 10-sheet or 20-sheet packets. Then I had to prepare a cardboard covered place on the floor big enough to store the panels for a couple of days. After that I set up panels 2 and 3 for gluing, as well as the mast. 

Tomorrow I will still have to glue panel 4 and I can certainly do the thwarts and perhaps the spars and the rails. I think that’s all the use I’ll have for the flatbed trailer. By Tuesday or Wednesday, I’ll be ready to wire together the hull

Building a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory -- Day 2

Last spring I finally got motivated to fix some relatively minor (but long term) leaks in the roof of the garage and one section of the cabin. This required me to tear off a bunch of shingles, pry up and replace some significant areas of rotten plywood decking, and then re-shingle it all. I saved the old plywood because, while parts of it were rotten, larger parts of it might still be useful in other projects.

Today I put that decking to use in building my boat. My task today was to begin gluing together the Dory's hull panels. These Okoume panels are cut from 4 x 8 sheets of plywood and then glued together to lengths of almost 18' in the case of the Northeaster Dory. The best way to glue them together is to lay them out on a large plywood table. I have an old flatbed trailer with spaced 2 x 4s that I use for hauling firewood. It was easy enough to take the relatively solid parts of the old roof decking and screw them down onto the trailer. This gave me my "table" and allowed me to clamp the joints in the Okoume panels by putting a piece of 1" lumber across each joint and screwing it down to the "table." In this way I was able to lay up the hull's bottom and its first row of "lapstrake boards."

Tomorrow I hope to glue together the rest of the lapstrake panels and perhaps also the thwarts, the spars, and/or the mast.

Building a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory -- Day 1

Yesterday the five boxes containing the parts for our Northeaster Dory finally arrived in a big Ryder truck. It was a long wait since the kit did not ship immediately from the company, and then along the way one of the shipping companies handling the boxes went out of business. For a couple of anxious days the boat seemed to have been lost at land (rather than lost at sea) in Little Rock. But eventually things got sorted out, and the boxes arrived in reasonably good condition.

I spent the afternoon unpacking the boxes, somewhat daunted by the number and variety of parts.

Most of this is additional supplies -- not part of the kit

Perhaps the most valuable thing in the entire shipment is the 179 page instruction book -- which is included as part of the kit but is a real bargain for more adventurous builders at only $99 (along with full sized plans). I spent the evening reading the book and then the morning rereading it.

This afternoon I got down to work. First I cut about 30 clamps from 4" PVC pipe based on a construction tip from the Chesapeake Light Craft web site.

I actually should have cut an additional 30 clamps since I could have used a few more in gluing up the bulkheads pictured below. The biggest problem in the task (as was pointed out in the instruction book) is that the pieces tend to slide around as glue is squeezed out by the clamps, necessitating some finicky efforts to align them again. I wasn't able to align them all perfectly, but I do think they will be good enough.

All in all I think it was a successful first day of Dory building, but I'll know more when I examine the bulkheads after they have dried.