First piece laminated

Glued up my first real piece of boat today, for the record it was one of the bottom laminations of the transom frame. Didn't go too bad, I pre-drilled the nail holes, then plastered the glue on and stuck it together and bashed the nails in. I ended up also clamping lightly as the ends seemed to have a bigger gap. I didn't quite get glue squirting out all the way around. So obviously I need to stick a bit more glue on. Pity to as I had some left over but once the nails were driven there was no going back.

I practiced the nailing on some scrap pieces and determined that a 2.5mm drill bit seemed to be the best. I tried to find a suggested size but the only thing I could find was that you need to Pre drill the full length of the nail. Anyway that seemed to go off without a hitch.

Glue trials, more frames and assembly

I have purchased some epoxy glue from EPG and decided to do some trials with it. So I glued two pieces together and left them for a week. I then beat the crap out of it with a rubber mallet. The wood broke in several places, but not the glue. I then tried the same thing with Gorolla glue, almost as good but eventually a part of the glue broke.

I have cut out several more frame pieces, and am closing in on completing that phase so for a change I decided to work on the transom, and started to cut out the notches for the bottom battens. Slipped with my newly sharpened chisel, and cut my finger, a nice clean cut so there was coupious amounts of blood. Sorted that out and finished the notches on one side. Will do the notches on the other side tomorrow and then glue the transom bottom laminations together.

I also played around with the hole sizes for Pre-drilling the nail holes. Determined that I need to buy a new set of drill bits.

More parts made and some decisions made

Made another 4 frame pieces today, and marked out some more ready for cutting.

Also made some decisions, I am going with Stainless bolts (the price was right - FREE !!!), the old saying "its not what you know, its who you know !!".

I have also decided to try epoxy products by EPG, a local manufacturer.  They do Epoxy, Epoxy Glue and timber penetrating products, so I'm planning on getting the smallest pack sizes of each and try them out.

Excitement is building, very close to starting to assemble the frames.

On the subject of Epoxy, there has been a couple of posts on the Glen-L forum regarding sentitivity to epoxy products, so I have decided that from the outset I will use Paper overalls, disposable gloves, safety glasses and a respiriatory whenever I use the stuff.  I have used epoxy from time to time before without any problems, but they have generally been for small jobs, with long intervals between exposure.

More timber and flatting boards with a power plane

I have almost exhausted my first lot of timber, I now have a reasonable pile of odd shaped pieces of timber.  So it was back to BBS timbers to get another couple of pieces.

For my first lot of timber I took it to a local cabinet maker and got royally ripped of getting him to put it through his jointer and give it all one good face.  So this time I cut my first piece and had a go at flatting it with a power plane (see links page for you-tube video on how to do this).  Guess what....it worked, and was extremely easy.  Admittedly this particular pieces wasn't in too bad a state to start with, and I have yet to put it through the thicknesser to see what the final product looks like, but so far so good. I was surprised at how little I had to take off, thankfully I had the planer set for a very shallow depth.

So currently I am about 2/3rds of the way through the cutting out of frame pieces, and hope to start glueing shortly.  Unfortunately I will be away for 3 of the next 4&1/2 weeks so not a lot is going to happen in the short term.

Decisions to make in the short term are


1. Stainless (316), Zinc plated or Galvanised bolts.  I don't think plated bolts would be up to the task.  Galv, well nothing wrong with them, just me being picky, so I am going to price up 316 stainless, and as long as its not a small fortune go that way.

2. Epoxy, now this ones a bit harder,  we have a distributor for 'West' products, but they are real pricey, there are some locally made products, that look OK, and are about half the price, so I am going to go and see them tomorrow and get some more info. From a support persepctive West would be good as there are plenty of people on the forum who use the stuff, but have to stick within a budget of sorts.