cprinos

Sweet looking boat and it sounds like you had some fun sailing for launch day. Great job!

Neil, What part of Mass are you? There are several CS17/20 owners in New England (based on what I've seen in the forum threads here), and Graham keeps up a list too, so if you email him he can probably get you connected to go sailing. My [from plans] CS17 is in the early-build stage (about ready to fillet & tape the seams)-- if you get the kit, you'll have that thing 3D in no time. I'll have to remember to save some vacation time at end of October next year for the 2012 messabout. Not sure I can have my boat ready by then, but who knows? For those that go to this year's event, please post lots of pictures! Chris

Thanks John. I traded some email with Graham on this too and he basically said the same thing. I have to trim the forward bulkhead a tiny bit to get it to it's lines and will get the transom fitted as well, and after that as long as the panels look fair I'm not going to sweat any differences on the center frame.

Well I rechecked dimensions of the temp center frame and the bottom panels and everything seems ok. I can't really check to see what the bottom panel width is supposed to be precisely at the center frame location because that is not indicated on the plans. I suppose there's some variance possible at that point depending on the lofting batten. Rereading the plans, I saw that it was advised to screw the temp bulkhead to the bottom panels before wrapping the sides and I didn't do that obviously. Also the hull assembly sheet shows a diagram indicating the sides resting on top of the bottom panel with an inset of maybe a 1/2" or so. RIght now my sides are right at the edge of the bottom panels, so that could account for a bit of the discrepancy as well. I will probably take a step back and loosen things up so that I can get the bottom of the temp frame secured to the bottom panels and then restitch everything with the side panels a touch more inboard. This is going to eat up a good chunk of time since the wires are breaking pretty easily from fatigue if I adjust them too much, and reaching under the hull at this point is a pain, but I want to try to get this part as correct as possible. This is probably my least favorite aspect of stitch 'n glue construction, where the hull is in shape, but still sort of loosey-goosey and you have to watch out for twist and assymetry.

Inwales are in (clamped for now, and not shown in the picture above obviously). Aft bulkhead fits very well. I have not cut the transom yet but the "opening" seems to match measurements and I can't imagine it could be too different given how close the aft bulkhead is. I'll recheck the bottom panel width at the bulkhead when I get home tonight.

Question for you guys: After stitching all the seams, the keel is still about an inch or so low at the (projected) bottom of the temporary center bulkhead. I'm just supporting the hull at two positions (forward bulkhead and aft bulkhead) to allow the rocker to form naturally, but how much should I worry about tweaking for a tight fit on that temporary bulkhead? I have no big gaps in any of the panel seams, nothing more than 1/8" and most areas are touching edge to edge. The picture in post #30 is pre-stitch, but the gap is similar, I don't have a more recent photo at the moment.

Also, I'm pretty sure it's a rule that you can't mention just completing a workshop/boathouse without posting pictures of aforementioned structure

Let us know what questions you have. I just started a cs17, the belhavem is probably very similar in the early stages. First time I did a stitch and glue boat I found Sam Devlin's book on stitch and glue boatbuilding to be super helpful. If you've just been doing traditional builds and are not real familiar with epoxy, the west systems web site has some good info for using epoxy (applies no matter the brand you are using)

Forgot to mention...before unfolding I forgot to add the reinforcing pads at the end of the glass tape that some people have found to help keep the butterfly from breaking. As it happened, that wasn't necessary. The butterfly held perfectly, no creaking or cracking.

Well, you guys know what comes next. Buh-bye to Flatland. Now I've got some more stitching and tweaking to do on the hull. I'll dry fit the inwales to to help with the shape. This is the part where it becomes hard to walk past the garage door without peeking in and "checking" on my boat.

When I built my kayak I remember making a little spacer jig to ensure that the stitch holes were evenly spaced. On the back side of this little piece of wood is a block recessed 5/16", so it keeps the depth from the edge consistent too. I let the butterfly sit for a couple of nights, my garage is inching below 70 at night, but i'm still using SLOW hardener. After I unscrewed the top ply and took off the release film, this is how the butterfly looked. The other side came out almost perfectly smooth, but even the side you see here won't need too much fairing. I also trimmed and faired the rest of the bow, trying to get a nice looking bow profile.

Thanks Lombard, glad I could feed the boatbuilding addiction. Here's some more.... I layered & stacked the sides and bottom panels to set up for the butterfly. I started to clamp them, but ended up just putting a small scrap of ply on top and screwing right through the panels to hold them in place.

Did you ever get the rudder/tiller details, or do you still need them?

To locate the seat stringers, I had to transfer the stringer position from the first lofted side panel to the mirror image and use a batten to mark the curve. For this part I got a hand from my 12 year old daughter. My kayak was done before she was born, so it's taken me a while to get around to my second boat, but I've wanted a sailboat for a long time, so it's nice to finally get started on it. The seat stringers were positioned on the side panels, set in thickened epoxy, and fastened with drywall screws every 6 inches. This was a bit messy because the stringer has to be positioned along a curve and I got epoxy all over the panels until I was able to screw down enough of the stringer to hold the curve. I did make sure to clean that up so I wouldn't have to scrape & sand the drips afterward. I'll take the screws out when the epoxy is cured. The forward portion of the stringers is supposed to taper down to 1/8" -- I did that before putting the stringers in place. That's all for now. Butterfly taping is next, and a few hours of garage-cleaning this past weekend has cleared enough room (I think) to proceed with the rest of the build so it's all-ahead full.

Just to catch up a bit on the photos, here's some stuff from the past week. Bottom panels were cut, trimmed and beveled. In the first photo below, you can see the tell-tale "double scarf" on the port panel that was a result of me misreading the aft bulkhead location for the panel-join. With the extra scarf, all is well. Next I needed seat stringers. It seemed silly to waste a batch of epoxy on two scarfs for the stringers, so I also ripped and scarfed a couple of lengths of fir for the inwales. This should have been a fairly quick affair but I somehow measured by 12:1 scarfs wrong and had to recut. I lost a bit of stock length in the process but still had enough (barely) for the stringers and inwales.

Thanks Joe, the sequence you describe makes sense and I remember reading a post at some point where Graham was describing exactly what you mention about the inwales playing a key role in setting up the shape. I got the seat stringers on tonight, so I'm slowly closing in on the butterfly stage.

Finished up the bottom panels, beveled the inside edges, and then scarfed up the seat stringers and also the inwales since I was already ripping fir. Once those cure, I'll put the seat stringers in place on the side panels and then tackle the butterfly. QUESTION: As I was making the inwales, I realized it's not clear when to install them. The plans show that bulkheads are pre-notched for the seat stringers, but there aren't notches for the inwales. Do you stitch (not glue) in the bulkheads first, then try to fit the inwales, or do you do the inwales before the bulkheads? On my kayak the inwales were put on the side panels before the stitch-up of the hull, but I haven't seen anyone doing that for the CS hulls.

Numbering the 36" stations is a good idea. I did annotate the lines for the three bulkhead positions right on the plywood, that helped from getting them mixed up with the other station lines. I was so worried about messing those up I must have checked the offset points 10 times before going ahead and laying down the pencil line. So far all the measurements on the plans seem to be on the mark, I didn't have to do much fiddling with the battens to get the lines fair.

After lofting the cutout lines on the full panel, I went at it with jigsaw and block plane, just like the bulkheads. Yay! side panels! (The bow is uncut, that doesn't get done until after the butterfly is joined so the bow can be faired in one piece with the bottom panels) Bottom panels are next on the hit parade, and then I really, really need to clear space in my garage because I still don't have room for butterfly wings or a 3D hull. I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.

Now is a good time to fess up to one thing I goofed up on my way to full panels. Here's an excerpt from the bottom panel layout showing the fore and aft ends: Note that in the diagram the circled dotted line on the right indicates a boundary between the forward 6mm panel and the middle 9mm panel. The circled dotted line on the left indicates the aft bulkhead position. I thought it also showed the panel boundary between the aft and middle portions of the 9mm bottom. WELL IT DOESN'T. What I did is make my aft cutout just 23 1/8, so I ended up with a piece too short. I fixed it by adding another piece (and costing me another scarf) at the end. The bad news is the 9mm stuff is the most expensive to make a mistake in, but the good news is that there is plenty of left over 9mm ply, so I didn't have to get another sheet. Another change I made, since I only got 6 sheets of 6mm to start, was to alter the cutout layout a bit and I got two "side aft" pieces on a sheet that only showed one. In the pic below, the gold piece is the one I added: This was a close cut, there is not a ton of room from the "bottom forward piece". In the picture below you can see the side aft piece and how much room I had from the bottom forward cutout. I had about an inch to spare. There should have been a couple of more inches but I rough cut the bottom forward first and got lucky I left myself enough room for the side aft

Back in the garage, with my long batten all done and rough hull panels waiting for lofting, I laid out the grid points and started connecting the dots.

While the scarfs were in process, I ripped some of the clear douglas fir to make a batten for lofting. I made one about 23' long (required a couple of scarfs in this as well) and then used the factory edges of my panels to make sure the glued up batten was as straight as possible. It's kind of goofy that I had to shorten the fir and then rescarf for the longer piece, but my major woodworking equipment is in my basement workshop, which is big but only has bulkhead access, so I ripped down there and did glue up in the garage. I was able to use the workshop to start on bulkheads however. For those, I lofted those with the help of a smaller thin batten and soon had the aft bulkhead and forward bulkhead complete. Cuts were made with a jig saw close to the line and then trimed with a block plane. Last up was the temporary center frame. Time for a bulkhead family portrait: Missing is the transom. I have some alternate plans for that. Stay tuned

I hope that any of you in the path of Irene today are now safe & dry. We got wind and enough rain to flood the basement, but nothing threatening. Ok, time for some more updates. The matter with the pumps turned out to be one of the "B" pumps missing a restraining collar, so Carla was kind enough to send me one of the little buggers and I was good to go (actually that didn't hold me up as I didn't need the Fast right away). I set up a little epoxy station with all the goodies. Resin & two flavors of hardener on top, cups, brushes and mixins in the middle and a container underneath with the extra resin. I stuck a thermometer right in back of the pumps as well. I got the resin & fiberglass from B&B, they had great prices. Some of the other stuff I didn't have already I got from Chesapeake Light Craft. One of those items was something called "cell-o-fill" which is a replacement for colloidal silica that is supposed to be safer for your lungs (I wear a respirator around all this stuff anyway) and can thicken with half the volume. I stuck with the silica for my initial scarfs, but then started using cell-o-fill to glue up some battens and it seems like pretty good stuff. It definately requires less to thicken epoxy than cabosil, but not quite half as much, maybe 2/3. With panel scarfs done, I laid them out for gluing. The scarfs got a coating of straight epoxy to saturate the grain, then I thickened up some with cabosil and coated one side of the scarf. The panels were then positioned with barrier plastic and a "brick wall" clamp. I was worried about alignment, so I didn't try doing multiple panels stacked one on top of another all at once. As a result, I had to spread the scarf glue ups out over the course of a week. The "Slow" hardener is pretty slow, with local temps in 70-80 range in my garage it was taking 18-24 hours for a solid cure.

Sweet! I like the paint scheme and it's great to see a cockpit full of young sailors. Thanks for not including naked-old-liveaboard-guy.

main sheet detail (this are from the rigging plans sheet dated 1-2-06)....