On March 6th 2015 I started the 38 Boatbuilding-Course at the BBA in Lyme Regis. The first 14 weeks we learned about working with wood, including different kinds of joints. Also working with GRP and last but not least we lofted the boats to be built. The process of lofting is to draw the lines of the boat on large sheets in scale 1:1 to get the true shape of the boat.
On June 22nd we started the real "Boat-Building". My partners at the beginning were Pete & Ross.
Erecting the moulds & laminating the stems
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| Ant and me - lofting and working with Auto-CAD |
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| Still happy with my moulds |
As it turned out, something went wrong with the cutting and we had to correct 8 of the 9 moulds.
The first practical work was building the ladder-frame, the base on which the moulds will be erected. It's name derives from it's shape reminding me of a ladder. While Pete & I worked on the frame Ross made templates of the moulds on tracing paper to correct them.
It took us two days to correct the moulds and to erect them. Erecting the moulds we did by drawing a centerline on the frame, which was the base to line up the stations (moulds) exactly. To get the moulds leveled & perpenticular we used a plumb and spirit level and finally we got a laser which made this work much easier. To know both methods is always useful.
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| Wednesday evening - the moulds are not yet lined up correctly, but you can already imagine the size of the boat |
Beside the setup of the moulds Ross & Pete prepared the lamination station with the irons to produce inner & outer stems (fore & aft). I decided to make the stems out of Sapele, due to its good durability. For the lamination process a template of the part to be laminated has to be made and according to this shape the irons are bolted on an OSB-board - covered with plastic or tape to avoid that the laminated wood sticks on this surface. The glueing itself has to be quickly done because the pot-time of the epoxy we used is approx. 30 min. So you need some guys to help put the glue as fast as possible onto the timber-strips, a lot of clamps and small taped wooden blocks well positioned in advance, to get the job done as fast as possible.
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| Laminating the bow outer stem |
The laminated wood has to cure approx. 10 hours. To get the stems ready for fitting on the moulds, you have to clean them (that means warming it up with a heating gun to scrape down the excess of epoxy) and plane them to the needed thickness.
At the end of the week all four stems were done!
Thursday the hog was crafted from three Iroko-boards, each of them scarfed to get the length we need for our 21,6 ft boat. To get the shape of the hog, we laminated the boards directly onto the moulds.
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| Lamination of the hog on moulds |
Friday we cleaned the hog and started to fit inner fore- and aftstem to the hog.
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| Cleaning the hog |
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| fitting inner aft stem to hog |
