Building the Catalina Wherry - Part 29 - Sawn frames Pt. 2

Welcome back to Nomad Boatbuilding. I'm Mark Rutten and today I'm building the Catalina Wherry. We're going to pick up where we left off last week framing this boat. So when you're just... Here we go. Here we are the next day and you can see how much glue I got left over here. It's not too much. So my two shots was the right estimate. It's always hard to judge, you know, and it takes time to get the feel for it. So when you're just new to building, I would encourage you to lean towards mixing up less epoxy rather than more because the more epoxy you mix up, of course, the faster the pot kicks off because it's just more volume. It's exothermic, so it produces heat as it cures and the more heat that goes into it, the faster it cures. So it's a double-edged sword. It's easy enough to mix up a new batch quickly, especially if you use like my method where you use the mixing wand on a drill that really speeds things up a lot. Keep some spoons directly in your filler containers as another way to sort of speed up things a little tiny bit. And I've even thought about making bins with my fillers in there so that I just have the lid to lift off and get the stuff out as opposed to peeling the lids off those little cans. I just haven't gotten around to spending the time to do that. So anyway, we'll just have a look at our parts here. They've worked out pretty good. Nice little bit of squeeze out on the back side, so that's good. The front side is clean enough, so we'll give those a light sanding. But I'm not going to even deal with any sanding, I think, until after I've laminated the faces onto them because I want to keep these as fat as possible. I'm already on the lean side and so there's going to be a little more squeeze out and such when we put the laminations on there. And I'll clean it all up in one fell swoop when I'm done. So that all worked out very, very nicely. Must be good and solid. And truth be known, if I had just made these deeper, I could probably get away with just leaving it like this. Because I think despite the fact that we've got these sort of shorter grained joints here, we've got these pieces that tie it all together and it all gets glued to the planking itself. So these things all get kind of sandwiched in. Just the same, I'm sort of committed to putting that extra layer on there, so I think we'll go ahead and do that anyway. I've already got the material for laminating that up cut up already. It's just leftovers from when I was doing the stem and things like that. So I don't have to really do a lot of work in order to make the material to add that lamination. So what I'm going to do now is just go over these guys with the patterns and then we're going to start marking the patterns out onto the stock. So let's see, I got number two here. So what I was going to do is I was going to stack these together for the marking and cutting. So we'll put these together and I'll think I'll nail them together. I wish my polymer nails are just a little on the light side for going through these full three quarter inch thicknesses, unfortunately. Because it sure would be nice to be able to use those, but I'll just have to use a brad, pop a brad into the waist areas that'll get cut off last and that should be fine. Like so, and you know orient one edge or the other or neither. I guess I don't even know where my waist is going to be on this. I'll pop it up in that corner. So there we go, that'll be enough. And you could use double-sided tape here too, that's another option, but it's easy enough to peel these out of here. So if I line that up there and I'm going to just sort of scoop this down. When you cut frames to sort of fall into the plank laps, we call that joggling. I don't want like gaps in behind it. So there we go, there's my plank lines laid out on there. I need one of my little sticks. I've made up these little spacer sticks that are basically marking what the depth of my frame is going to be and I'm going to do it off the locations at the inside of the lap faces I think. I kind of feel like I should have sort of dedicate like one specific lap to being as consistent as possible because I know there will probably be some variation in here depending on the lay of the planks. Like I can't hit all these marks necessarily, or can I? Let's see what happens if I try and do that. We want to try and find sort of like the happy medium, right? The line that sort of creates the best representation of this shape. I think I'll let it taper out a little more towards the stern here. Whoops, what happened there? Maybe I should get a softer batten. This one's ash, it's a little bit a little bit resilient. Okay, so that seems all right. You can see my little filler didn't even make it into there. Another option is just letting it swell out to be a little heftier towards midships, which is not a terrible idea. Oh man, I think I gotta think about this for a bit. Some pondering required. All right, I've come up with a little bit of a plan. So I've got my frame here and I've given myself a little spacer at the top end here. This is the frame head, and this is the same depth I've given it over here. A little bit of room for a nail, and this is where my shear mark is basically landing on this point, and that's just to give me a little bit of wiggle room. Just weight that down and give myself just a, at some point, whatever pattern lands near the edge, I give myself an eighth of an inch of wiggle room. I know when I compare the side, the planking from side to side, it's not a hundred percent accurate. I mean, that's expected. It never is. Notice my pencil here, because I got it flattened on one side, I can use it to project this line through the haunch here, through the little lap joggle. It looks like, if anything, I have to just sort of, I think like one plank is just sitting a bit different than the rest, and if I knock that one protrusion back, it all should joggle into place. So I'll just draw those out, draw that out. Okay, get rid of that, and then basically at the one, two, the third lap down, I'm giving myself a little extra depth here. I'll throw that at the fourth as well. Go back to the same frame spacing down here at the, at the bottom. I can't quite decide what I need to do here at the sort of the foot. I've normally been giving myself like, um, the same distance. It's like two and an eighth, basically comes to the end of this stock. I'm sort of limited by that, and I'm not sure how I want to shape these feet. I think they're just going to come along and round off, but I need enough room for a scupper. I haven't marked that on any of them, or not a scupper, a limber hole. So scuppers are holes through the bulwarks of a boat set right at deck level that allows any water that lands on the deck to flow freely off of the boat. Limbers are holes created in any structural members inside the boat that would otherwise obstruct water from flowing freely down to the center line, where a bilge pump can pick it up, or where you might have a drain for use in storage. Now we usually put limbers in floors where they interact with a keel, and we'll often put them in bulkheads where they might land on horizontal surfaces like seats and things like that, and you want that water to flow through. But sometimes we'll even use limbers and framing members in lap strike boats where the frames interact with the laps. In this particular boat, our laps are very, very small. It doesn't make sense to put limbers in this framing, but if I were to do a boat with heavier planks, say half inch thick planks, where those laps are quite pronounced, it might make sense to leave a little gap at each lap that allows water to pass through. Otherwise, dirt tends to collect in the corners where that framing interacts with the lap. So I'm just throwing these ones on just for visual reference to sort of make sure it all looks like it's about the same as the first ones. Okay, pop a nail in up here, pop one in down here as a control point. I made a little red cedar batten, just a little less owly. Red cedar's still quite very stiff despite being soft. So that's a major control point right there. That's one that we're sort of favoring. We'll swing this one out. Okay, so we're just adding like a quarter inch extra sort of around the turn of the bilge. Now there's going to be a thwart riser landing somewhere in here. So hopefully they're landing, they're coming up at about the same depth throughout the length of the bud, or at least they'll hopefully they'll all sort of jive up there. Worst case scenario is I might have to notch some of the frames just to allow that thwart riser to sit in evenly and spring itself into place properly. I'm not too concerned about that. Mostly that looks pretty good. And after this next layer is on, we'll, you know, it'll get like a round over at the toe here. Then the last thing we've got to do is add a little limber hole. And I don't know exactly what that's going to be. You don't want to make them too small, probably like an inch and a quarter or something like that maybe. Diameter, usually we'll try and center it like on that heel. So a little bit of it is on the planking, a little bit of it is on the floor. We want that big enough that it's really easy to clean out and get paint in there. Before I do any other cutting, I might actually drill for my limber holes first, because you can use a Forstner bit here, set up a jig on the drill press to keep everything located, and just carefully bore those out, because it's easier to do that now than to try and tackle it later on. Now for a quick cleanup of these curved surfaces. I need to make sure they're nice and fair so when I bend my laminations in there, there aren't any great unsightly gaps that need to fill with adhesive. For fairing them out, I've got this small piece of high-density polyethylene with some sandpaper glued on there. It works like a very small longboard and does a good job of fairing out these tight inside curves. These frames will be painted, so a small gap like you see there will fill with glue and that'll be acceptable. All right, I'm just getting all these frames laminated up now. So I got one more to do. No, I've got two more to do, I guess. So the table's getting pretty ganky, but for the most part it's working out pretty good. I'm using the Total Boat low viscosity epoxy for this. I've got some stir sticks lying on the bench here to act as sort of a little standoff, just to make sure that my laminations span both edges of the of the frames, and we're using a polyethylene backing batten here to help spread the load and prevent clamp pad marring. These are all feeling much more substantial now that they've got a little extra meat on them. I was a little worried about them feeling a bit light. Clamps, more clamps. I swear, you know, no matter how many clamps you got, there's always like one size that you suddenly wish you had more of that you don't have. Right now it's these sort of smaller F-body clamps I kind of wish I had more of. Not that the other clamps aren't doing the job just fine, but you know, it's a question of convenience and just awkwardness. All right, that one's done. Okay, so here's how it's been working. Here's our frame to go in. I'm just checking my joint to see if I need to put a little epoxy on there. When I was cleaning these off, I tended to be a little overzealous, and there's a few where that sort of the face of the joint was a bit void. It had a bit of a void. So first thing I'm doing is just grabbing whatever squeeze out is lying right here on the bench and dropping it onto the face of the frame here just to wet it out. And I'm not doing any cleanup on these things at all after I've got all the clamps on. I'm just going to leave it alone. Just be a slightly uglier cleanup job. I think I'll just leave it for a few days and I'll set up sort of a work table and go at it with the belt sander to knock them all down, I think. Something like that. I don't know. You know me. I'll change my mind. I'm almost guaranteed I'll come up with some other idea. I wish I'd done something different the first time around. Okay, now I take my laminations here. So I've got the face that remains proud down. The other one's up. Get the fixo going with the brush on the end. So there's a smooth side on these laminations and a rough side. So the... because I just gave them one pass through the thickness planer to even them all up. So I'm just being a little bit drier on my wet out with the smooth side and a little wetter on the other one. Okay, so there's one. Slide it around a bit. Okay, another one. Slide it around a little. My last coat. All right, flop that down. Make sure there's a tongue depressor underneath. Drop that on top. Backing battens here. That's good. That looks good. Use these first. Here we go. Some of the trusty 4-inch record c-clamps. These things, I'm so glad I bought these things when I did and I didn't pay much for them. I think they were going for like five bucks a piece or something like that. Way back when, 30-some-odd years ago, when I just started snapping them up. And so did my brother. My brother has since stopped really doing much woodworking so I got all of his clamps too. There we go. Just making sure I'm protruding everywhere. Yep, that looks good. Here we go. Last two. The sneaky s-shaped ones. Pop those apart. A couple of nails to get out of this one. If you're wondering why I didn't make these frames out of material that was twice as thick, do all the joinery and laminations onto them and then rip them apart later, it's because someone walked into my workshop with a bunch of yellow cedar for sale. It was three-quarter inches thick. Just the right price and just the right amount. So that's what I went with. This paper's getting so sticky it wants to bunch up into the joint as I squeeze on it here. That's why it's fighting me a little. There we go. You should always have a little block on hand when you're laminating stuff up to deal with just such a thing when you gotta kind of level out your laminations. Okay, all right. I think that will do it. Give this guy a little shwackable back here, though, a little bit. That's better. Always check your backside. Just because it looks good on one side doesn't mean it's good on both. Okay, last one. That is it. We are done. This paper is a total mess, so I'll just leave that alone. Done with this guy. That comes out. That gets corked back up. Get back in there. Now the mop down of all the tools. Make sure that I'm done before I peel my gloves. Yep, I'm good. So there we go, folks. We have our frames rough cut. We've reinforced them with laminations. When we come back, we're going to clean those up and we're going to install them in the boat. I want to remind you that these videos are supported by viewers like you through Patreon. This week, I want to thank Christopher Smith for joining me on Patreon, and I want to invite more of you to join me, too. So if you want to follow the link up in the corner or down in the description, join me on Patreon. I would really, really appreciate that. Until next week, folks. We'll see you later. Go get your hands dirty. I'm going to go get mine dirty for sure. A little sticky, too, probably. That sounds gross. I meant with epoxy. Ciao for now.