Building the Catalina Wherry - Part 41- Copper and brass hole liners

hey folks mark from Nomad boat building welcome back to building the Catalina wary today we're going to start messing around with grommets okay we're going to do um we're going to do grommets through the transom and through the stem uh Joe wants to be able to put a uh a line through two holes in the transom here to create sort of a loop or a bridal on the back end he can use this for a bunch of different things um he can use it for boarding the boat if he's overboard you can make it long enough that you can actually get your foot into it like a like a stirrup to get yourself up and over the stern he could use it to attach a a sea anchor or drogue for riding uh riding out a storm and keeping his bow to the U to the waves which is awfully useful or you could even just be using it to lock the boat to something you know run a cable lock through these things now when I use the term grommets what I'm really referring to are copper or brass liners that we install in a hole in a boat uh usually the stem or the transom but you could do them anywhere I've done them in quarter knees for instance and the purpose of them is to provide a protective lining to that hole you could just drill a hole and pass a rope through it and use it as you will but you have to keep maintaining that hole that and by that I mean you have to keep painting it and it's a good place for rot to start because it's easy for moisture to sit in there especially if you've got a damp rope sitting in that hole all the time so the copper or brass liner makes a nice smoother hole that you can pass that rope through and it means that you don't have to make maintain it in any way and it it's a really a nice Classy Touch now you could certainly just paint out that hole with epoxy you'd have to give it a few coats and then there's a bunch of sanding to do and I've certainly done that but frankly I think it takes more time than a little bit of time it takes to put the Copper Brass liner in there now with that said let's get right back to the job we're going to do two different kinds of grommets we're going to do one at the bow through the stem and then we're going to do on through the transom here and because these are basically holes in the boat we want to keep them as small as possible and I would do them out of/ inch copper pipe but um it's just a bit too small for the line that Joe likes to use he wants to use half inch line and um so we need to go up to like 5/8 of an inch so the only thing I've got that'll work for that is this uh brass Plumbing nipple um now this stuff is heavy walled so I can't do my normal grommeting job because of the heavy wall on it so what we're going to do is we're just going to bore holes through this we're going to glue this in place and just have them flush to the surface of the wood and we'll just do a little um counter sync just into the the edge of this so that it's softened up a little bit so we'll start up by drilling some holes I already did my pilot holes using a block of wood to help keep my pilot drill Square to the surface so the block Wood obviously I use the drill press to create a nice square hole through the block of wood and then that's just a guide for freehand Drilling with that pilot hole in there now I've got something that can guide my forcer bit nicely now an E8 of an inch pilot hole is a little on the large side for guiding a forer bit so we're just going to be very careful to try and keep this forcer bit square and aligned with that hole and we're going to drill from both sides so if this hole isn't perfect in the center it's not the end of the world okay well that's not great uh you know the irony is this was doing better up until I was worried about what the camera was seeing and then I drifted off anyhow this is going to be filled with epoxy so it's not the end of the world just want to make sure that this is a good fit okay so we're going to try and open up those holes just a little bit to make this pass through a little smoother and then we're going to uh we'll cut this to the length and have it ready to get it ready to glue in okay so I'm going to do I've kind of sanded out these holes a little bit so we got a nice easy fit and I've marked this piece of nipple at the midpoint so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to uh use some tape here to mark it where I want to cut it to length I'll leave it just a hair air long soz I need some room for saw curf so there's the one side I I'm what I'm going to do is I'm going to chop the ends off and then chop it off in the middle because it's just easier to hang on to these longer a longer piece there and cutting the ends off so there's the one side and I'll just do the other side the same way round things difficult to cut let's see if we can find a safer way to do that okay well one of those needs some squaring up and trimming down all right figure this out not a smooth result this cutter definitely is dull I think sharpened her up gave her another pass I was looking much better all right let's go see how that fits on the boat let's see yep those are just be perfectly flush the way they are so I like that that'll work well do a little counter sync on the hole itself so it epoxy fills around the edge then after it's glued in we'll just do a little counter sink inside the the pipe so that that's a softened Edge and that'll that'll come out real nice okay now we can ready to glue that one in for we want to do a a pain line through the back of the stem and um Joe wants me to not go through the stem itself what I'm going to do is I'm going to put some blocking back here uh just to beef this up and then we're can run the line straight through it and and it's going to be a tube running basically halfway through the stem halfway through the blocking so that a rope can get passed through and you want are going to put it down here at the third plank so it's closer to the water line it's for riding at anchor and it'll it'll work pretty good like that with very few exceptions the path to getting any part built for a boat usually starts with pattern making in this case we're just going to use a little plywood L to create a plane that is perpendicular to the stem face and on top of that we'll just build a little pattern using a glue gun and some scraps this is going to give us the width of our stem face and it's going to give us the relative angles of our planks that's all we really need to get started now we may need to make a second pattern that lands below that plank lap because our part's going to span the lap but we'll just start with taking the first one laying it onto some stock and transferring those angles onto it we'll use our bevel gauge to pick up an angle off of that and then we'll go over to the band saw and start cutting now fitting aart like this is going to be fussy so there'll be a lot of back and forth which I'm not going to go into right here but whenever I'm in doubt as to what kind of a shape apart will have I'll often do a rough one just using any old piece of junk line around the shop and usually the process of doing that rough fitting is going to make the final fitting of a proper part that much easier okay here we got some blocking that's just going to help prevent a hole from being in this front of the boat here um so we're going to pass a tube through the inside of this so it's it's going to land about halfway in there halfway through the stem it's a bit chunkier than would like it to be but doesn't look terrible too terrible I would have preferred to have the stem just be deeper I think and just go right through the stem itself move the hole forward but Joe Joe wants a more substantial bearing on that uh the anchoring line that he wants to put through there so quite realized what Joe wanted at first and um so originally I had just like these cheek pieces and I was going to put the hole through here and I said aren't you know isn't this thing us usually a leaker for you and he's like oh well and I didn't realize he he had meant for me to box it right in with a solid chunk of wood anyhow um so we'll glue that in and we'll drill the hole afterwards all right um fill the hole for the gramet or at least get a pilot hole in there um going to check what my grommet size is going to be I don't remember off hand what it is but uh the pilot hole is consistent just something like an eighth of an inch is fine so I want to try and hit the back of the stem there sort of joint between the stem and that blocking put to the inside we're going to do it in the third plank so just picking up this uh stem depth here just describe it on here both sides and now I just want to eyeball the center of this plank I can measure obviously we got here two and 3/4 38 okay so old schools I would do this just try and pick up level and come down go about halfway and do the same from the other side try pick up the angle in there we'll see if I can rockar this thing right out the other holes I don't know not right on the money but not too far off not too far off landed just a hair low let's see if we can correct that coming the other way oh that one came down low nope the first one was better first one was better this the this this isn't really a big deal cuz it pretty much still lands I can try and tweak the the finished hole a bit better but it's a pretty good start let's see see if I can tease that hole up a little bit aha there we go we got it so twist bits are kind of um they have a bad habit of sort of deflecting off things sometimes and I find the Spade bits little shop made Spade bits tend to drive a little straighter the one I was using there is pretty floppy so it didn't give me the best results usually have a heavier one that usually Nails it every time but uh that was pretty darn close but I've managed to sort of using the twist bit once that hole is in there I can kind of lean on it a little bit and get it to sort of bore its way through so now we got a nice straight line running right through our action the ones that went astray not a big deal they'll uh we won't they won't throw us off when we bore our finished hole will come from both sides anyway following that upper one so that's great right on the money all right now for the really nervous making hole this one about halfway there this makes me nervous these things are so aggressive ah just broke out a big chip of veneer on the front we shall fix we shall fix okay so that guy is gonna slip through there that's going to be nice nice skook hold on that don't want to lose that it's hard to do a nice job of this stuff sometimes really hard that's super messy around here thankfully it's going to be all painted so I'm getting upset about it but I'm certainly annoyed by it it's like one more thing you got to fix now right there we go all right okay so this one what we want to do is we need to cut this off at a weird angle and uh we're going to be flaring the ends for something like that all right so go to the bandel we'll cut that off clean it up we have to anneal it we need to try and chamfer out this corner a little bit so it so it mushes itself in there fix up these chunks before we glue it in all right oh there's a few jobs to do okay let's see that's the orientation think that's about right that's now looks pretty good I think we're just going to do a little bit of cleanup on this I want to just basically leave it long and after we put it into the boat it's going to get all peened over so that it conforms to the hole okay so I don't even know exactly how I want to make this happen I'm going to try and flare this tube into the hole okay that's filled with the goo that's filled with the goo so we'll just take off all that excess goo first I think I went and popped my little cylinder in the wrong way of course yeah darn it uh so let's see how do I want to do this out of the way out the way I think what I want you to do Kate is just hold that there like that do that the hammer just the hammer okay I'm going to try this guy swi switch it around you take that one and put it in there no you stay on the side s that in the hole okay I need to be able to hit the back of it keep it in there out stay there ready back way m not working the way it should I think I didn't anneal this enough that's what's happened here normally this goes much much smoother I obviously screwed up on the kneeling portion of the job so uh I'm having to sort of get a lot more aggressive with the pening and I'm having to get in there with the ballpen hammer and really kind of stretch that copper around the edge of the hole usually I get it stretched out very nicely just using the irons and using the ball end of a ball pin to sort of get it started and I just didn't want to move this time h I went a little too big I think little too long so I'm having a really hard time getting this to stretch not too bad I've done better but considering the fight it was putting up i' say this looks pretty good all right well we got her in there that was a bit of a fight usually I get it in much easier than that I think uh I left the flange just a little too long and I guess I just didn't anal it enough I thought I had it analed better than I did but I but I guess I didn't my torch that I'm was using is not putting up the flame that it usually does and um I guess my light was was bad I thought I had it properly knel but the just the way it was fighting me suggest to me that it wasn't but anyway it's in now uh looks pretty good I can't complain certainly you know it's a nice uh it's a nice big easy hole to find especially if you're in the boat and you're just grappling for it and certainly you could put a nice big Hefty anchor line through that and be able to sleep soundly at night so that's a good thing and that's the important thing isn't it all right now that those liners are in I could move on to doing the breast Hooks and in whales however I've got one other job that I want to do it's quite out of the ordinary so I hope you'll join me again next time to watch that now that those copper liners are in I can put in the breast Hooks and in whales however there's one more job I'd like to tackle first and it's quite out of the ordinary so we'll cover that in the next episode now if you enjoyed this little bit about the liners I did a much more detailed job of explaining how the process in my Bushi Dory Series so you can check out that video right here and until next time don't get your pole stuck in a hole catch you later folks