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Any interest in a Catspaw build? Also featuring rabbits.


cracked_ribs

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19 hours ago, Drew said:

Rip sawing that length by hand requires grit and determination. Keep up the posts, I love your sense of humor and look forward to seeing this little catspaw afloat!

 

I'm on day 18 and running out of patience myself, actually.  But I'll keep going for the same reason that I'll rip stuff by hand: I'm about as hard headed as a granite statue.

 

17 hours ago, Pete McCrary said:

Pete McCrary here.  Yes, I'm very much interested in your Catspaw build.  I just received the B & B kit for a Two Paw 7 -- and will start a build on this forum just as soon and I complete the inventory of the kit parts.  My Two Paw 7 will be the tender for my CS20.3.


Well, I'm HOPING that my build will be useful for other prospective builders, at the very least to show that you can build a boat even if you live in an apartment, and you have a lot more will than skill, and you have noise or financial constraints that really limit your use of power tools...it's still totally doable and I encourage people to do it just to see the product of their own hands.  There's something fundamentally rewarding in the act of doing, making, or creating, with which I think most people in modern industrial society don't get much experience.  To build a boat is deeply satisfying, as many or most here must know.  There's no comparison between the feeling of spending five hundred dollars on a cheap boat, and spending five hundred dollars on supplies and then countless hours of labour to create one.  I'd take the build any day.

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19 hours ago, Drew said:

Rip sawing that length by hand requires grit and determination. Keep up the posts, I love your sense of humor and look forward to seeing this little catspaw afloat!

 

I'm on day 18 and running out of patience myself, actually.  But I'll keep going for the same reason that I'll rip stuff by hand: I'm about as hard headed as a granite statue.

 

18 hours ago, Pete McCrary said:

Pete McCrary here.  Yes, I'm very much interested in your Catspaw build.  I just received the B & B kit for a Two Paw 7 -- and will start a build on this forum just as soon and I complete the inventory of the kit parts.  My Two Paw 7 will be the tender for my CS20.3.


Well, I'm HOPING that my build will be useful for other prospective builders, at the very least to show that you can build a boat even if you live in an apartment, and you have a lot more will than skill, and you have noise or financial constraints that really limit your use of power tools...it's still totally doable and I encourage people to do it just to see the product of their own hands.  There's something fundamentally rewarding in the act of doing, making, or creating, with which I think most people in modern industrial society don't get much experience.  To build a boat is deeply satisfying, as many or most here must know.  There's no comparison between the feeling of spending five hundred dollars on a cheap boat, and spending five hundred dollars on supplies and then countless hours of labour to create one.  I'd take the build any day.

 

 

 

 

 

Today was a bit stupid work-wise but I still accomplished a couple of things: the deadwood and keel are ready to go on, although I'm leaving them until later because they'll make the boat sit funny upright. Plane shavings everywhere again.

The exterior is now fully slathered in epoxy, so it needs some fairing once dry. But it should be plenty waterproof. Note shininess of entire boat now:

[IMG]

Also the rabbits really like the overhead shelter vibe.

And I started laying epoxy on the bulkheads and seats..

[IMG]

I would like to leave the seats bright. We'll see how that goes.

Oh, and I decided to get some meranti for the rear knees. I had some pine 1x6 already leaning up in a corner so initially I cut the knees out of that, but then I decided I wanted the option of leaving the rears bright. The fronts I intend to cover in a slight modification of the design - I would like to very slightly enclose the bow because exiting the Fraser in 25-30kt westerlies on an full outgoing flood has left me totally paranoid and crazy and open bows freak me out now. So my plan is to make a very small deck which transitions to a backrest for the bow seat, that is also a couple of inches of coaming. Yes, I realize this is fairly crazy. However, my old beater dinghy (as mentioned in post one) got ripped off the roof of my boat while I plunged through waves at Sand Heads and now when I look forward at completely exposed hulls I get totally creeped out.

So that's another thing I did tonight: I cut out the rear knees, and slopped epoxy on them.

Tomorrow I have to run down over the border and pick up fibreglass tape because my local guy had nothing useful. When I get home, I want to glurp (technical shipwright term for experts like me) some more epoxy on the small parts but I'm heading to my cabin Thursday or Friday and need to do laundry first, so I may not get much else done. My wife is at a conference on communicable diseases all day so I'm holding down the fort and feeding the rabbits...but then on the other hand, she's not home until late so nobody expects me to be present for dinner, either. So...we'll see.

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What did the dung beetle say to the bunny?

 

Hey, Buddy, spare a few of those ready rolls?

 

Welcome to the Builds Boats In The House Club. I have done nine, although six of those were sof kayaks, so hardly count. They make almost no dust, and there are no epoxy globules. Hehe.

 

This is one of the coolest threads, ever. 

 

Peace,

Hrairoo ;)

 

edited to add: hard headed like a granite statue is funny. My good friend is a retired DI, and he is full of funnyisms such as that.

My favorite (family friendly version; he has some that will peel paint) is “harder than woodpecker lips”. Harhar.

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Well, back from the island...not much going on yet, just mixed up some pretty thin epoxy/wood flour and went around filling little spots around the gunnels.

But I did take a picture of our closed off "away for the weekend" rabbit run, now with Eagleshield.

[IMG]

 

 

Sure wished I had it done and ready to go for this trip...would have been nice to row compared to paddling the old beater.  I have been threatening to set this one for fishing and leave a bunch of the woodwork bright, thereby justifying the name "The Classy Hooker", and then painting "The Cheap Oar" on the old one's stern.  

 

But I probably won't do that.  

 

I did really want to take it fishing, though.  I went through a bunch of my books on drift fishing and mooching over the weekend...really think this might be a nice mooching boat just on oars, trailing a plug-cut herring and a weight, maybe.  Of course, the good fishing spots are about a pass away from my place, so it's be a bit of a sail and you'd really need to time the tides.  But at the right times I think it'd be good.

 


You know, I knew a guy from NZ who used the same "woodpecker lips" expression.  Very...animated.

 

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That is in fact a treadle machine and it does work although I need to replace the drive belt.

 

Probably do the sails on it and just the other day I decided I wanted an eisenglass curtain for the big boat so it'll be getting some use before it gets relocated to the cabin.  We're off grid up there so a treadle machine makes some sense.  I am not all that handy with it but my wife is very capable, although she prefers to knit and crochet.  But I expect that when we get to the sail stage, yeah, the old Singer will be stepping up.

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Lovely. My friend’s mom (who is 70 plus years old...) has always sewn on her grandmother’s machine, since she was married and moved away from home. It sewed all her clothes as a girl, including her wedding dress. Hard to believe the service that machine has given. Dozens of amazing Halloween costumes were born on that thing. :)

 

They are lovely to sew with, really, though I’m ham fisted, at best.

 

Peace,

Robert

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Mostly been catching up with work since I got back to Vancouver but I managed to get a few hours in today.  Slightly annoying setback: I guess there was a glue void really close to the centre brace where I epoxied the gunwales to the hull; I woke up the other morning and the rubrail was broken in two right over the centre frame. 
 
So I cut about three feet of rubrail out, planed the surface down, cut six or eight inch scarfs into the rubrail and glued in a new section.  Also taped all the inside seams which I didn't get the chance to do before I left for the cabin.
 
Tomorrow I'll mostly be working again but I might try to get the inside surfaces fully encapsulated.  Then it'll be bulkheads, seats, and not really any way to avoid fairing, so hopefully the weather cooperates a bit.
 
Test fitting:
 
[IMG] 
 
And glued.
 
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Worked all day and about to start work again now, but managed to sneak in a couple of hours before dinner.  The patch is in on the rubrail.  It creates a couple of extremely subtle flat spots which I think I can remove with careful planing, filling, and sanding.  Very annoying though.  Anyway...
[IMG] 
 
 
Also getting the rear seat bulkhead arranged.  I honestly can't remember if the plans call for the cleats or not but I think it'll just be easier this way.  And the only way to find out if they're in the plans would be to read them, and that's CRAZY.
 
[IMG] 
 
Also featured in pic 1: a common drink at the Cracked Ribs city dwelling, the Popeye Michelada.  The recipe goes like this:
 
Pint glass rimmed with bacon salt
1 lime
2 dashes worcestershire
1 tsp chili powder
3 tbsp sriracha
1 Modelo
fill with clamato
 
I created this variant myself, but it wasn't until tonight that I named it the Popeye Michelada.  To get the full effect, you take the sriracha out of the fridge and set it on the counter next to the stove where your wife is making dinner.  Then you get the rest of the ingredients together, and when you are about to put the sriracha in, you shake it up and then get distracted by something and open it right in front of one of your eyes.  The temperature change will have pressurized the bottle and blast sriracha sauce into your eye, thereby giving you a distinctive, one-eyed glare.  Sailor-grade swearing is optional but recommended.
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19 hours ago, Drew said:

This drink of yours sounds like it could also be used as paint remover and/or to clean up bunny droppings off hardwood floors!!

Yeah, it's not really for the faint of heart.  I feel like if I mixed in an ounce of Everclear, it'd be almost the perfect cocktail.

 

Headway continues to be made. Front and rear bulkheads in. Interior solidly glurped with epoxy. Old beater Samsung phone takes pictures that are possibly even worse than the newer LG. One day I'll blow money on a phone. Or, more realistically, buy plywood and glue again.

[IMG]

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There's not much to report tonight; I got the last coat of epoxy on the interior and sawed up the wood for the permanent centre frame.  I have been slopping epoxy on the parts for the centre seat/daggerboard trunk and I can probably start thinking about assembling more on the weekend, although it's getting to be crunch time at work and I won't have much time to do fun stuff.
 
Parts getting slopped:
 
[IMG] 
 
Boat interior during the process of slopping on goop.  The tape joints are not actually starved, they just look that way as the result of some kind of surface albedo thing. I hate flash photography.
 
[IMG] 
 
Ensloppination complete.
 
[IMG] 
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[IMG] 
 
Incremental gains...plywood gussets for the centre frame cut out.  Centre seat mocked up.  Almost done glueing parts together.  Started fairing the interior just a little, taking down the high spots from runs here and there.  Stern seat has a pretty good curve to it so I'm weighing it down to flatten it a bit.

Need to tape the bulkheads in place but probably won't get to that right away.  Need to assemble the centre frame; will probably glue it up in place with saran wrap etc between the frame and the hull so I can keep it free until the fairing is done.  Need to think about the bow seat a little; it has to incorporate a mast collar so that'll take some effort.  I guess there's no point in just listing everything left to do...I'm only half done at this point and have been at every stage so far and expect to be half done at every subsequent stage as well.  Don't even want to imply a planned launch date yet.
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Really should not have spent any time on it today but got a couple of hours in anyway.  Just cutting some stuff to size and mocking up stuff for later.
 
[IMG] 
 
[IMG] 
 
The bump in the bow seat is the really roughly sized mast collar.  It's not shaped or anything, I just hacked it out so I could get the seat sized correctly.
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  • 3 weeks later...
Well, back to work on the plywood piranha.  I work two jobs, one of which is cyclical in nature, so for two weeks I didn't touch the thing because I was barely sleeping, let alone boat building.  But as of Sunday I am clear again for a few weeks, and the boat is again getting attention.
 
There's not much to show, I guess, because all of the changes are pretty tiny.  I added another coat of epoxy inside, and it's about as waterproof as I think it's going to get now.  I've been slathering glue on all the various trim bits; they're getting pretty close.  I got sick of looking at that one rubrail that cracked which I then repaired, so Sunday afternoon I ripped it off and replaced it.  What else...I got the permanent centre frame parts cut out, although I think I'm going to trim the plywood gussets down some.  I roughed in the "deck" bits from plywood scrap; you can get a sense of where that'll go.  I think the only other thing is that I got the daggerboard trunk partly figured out.  Other than that it's just been coats of glue.
 
[IMG] 
 
 
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