Shaping the daggerboard, rudder design dilemma

Today and yesterday I spend predominantly tackling my nemesis, the daggerboard and it's subsequent shaping.  For some reason I have held a slight amount of apprehensiveness towards working the rudder and the daggerboard, I don't know why, but I get the sneaky suspicion that they don't like me, and I don't like them, and we're going to fight.  Meanwhile, my Goat Island Skiff languishes in the garage waiting for a rudder, waiting for gudgeons, waiting for the rear seat to be glued down, etc etc etc, as I suspiciously eye the squared off blanks that will be my blades.  See the previous post to view the blanks.

A disclaimer:  You will notice SUN in these pics.  The garage doors are OPEN for the first time months!  It hit 50 F. deg. here at the homestead, the first time in months and months.  I worked without a hat or jacket!  It was nice indeed.  

First, using the template included in the plans I kind of traced the shape of the foil onto the blank.  I roughed it, because I would use the template later to match the shape correctly.  Then, the first pass on the plane down the trailing edge side... and away we went.  Remember that the trailing and leading edges are cherry, a hardwood.  I sharpened my planes before this project and also during when I would swap sides.  It made my life much, much easier.

 

As time progressed, I slowly worked inward, taking off the wood and feeling the idea of the shape rather than mechanically proceeding.  It's kind of difficult to explain, but I knew the shape I was going for and went for it, with checks to the rough outline to keep me true.

 

As the planing progress, I would check my jig for appropriate foil shape.  Here, I have achieved the desired shape, OOF!

 

Now, I will be the first to tell you that the entire blade doesn't necessarily have this nice of a fit the entire time.  It is, however, close enough for this amateur! We all build to our own goals.  The foil shape I got is very even, nice, and for all purposes close enough without whacking out a giant mistake and having to start over... something I definitely do not want to do since the cedar in these blanks cost me a pretty penny indeed.

The blades were notched on the trailing edge per the plans.  On retrospect,  I could have probably left them how they were because it just made for a more complicated shaping project.  I wanted to keep the shape of the foil through the transition to the end of the blade, and therefor got this kind of neat compound curve (see below).  It worked, but it almost didn't, and for a few moments I thought I had taken off too much and really screwed myself.  Also, this is a good spot to let the reader know about the trailing edge width.  It's supposed to be squared off, but I didn't know how wide.  A quick journey over to my compatriot in CA gave me the answer.  He had finished his blade to 3/8", mine was 1/4".  Apparently, it's supposed to go to about 1-2mm, or a 1/16".  HA HA HA  Sorry, I got mine down to 1/8" and I'm very very pleased with that.  Again, I don't want to risk breaking through the back of the board, I'm looking for durability, and the alignment of the centerboard trunk with the hull will make more difference than the 1/8" I'm off.  I'm not saying you can't go to 1/16", I just didn't want to.

The leading edge was next.  I took off a 45 deg. edge first, and then added subsequent degrees from there, until I got a nice rounded leading edge.  It worked out very well, and with a sharp plane, the work was precise and enjoyable.

 

I still have to sand everything down, cut off the top, and get things nice and smooth, but the blank is now shaped and I have a daggerboard worthy of some sort of aero-hydro-dynamic performance.  It's not perfect, but I'm happy with it.

 

Next up is the rudder.  This is important because I'm waiting on several other issues until I finish the rudder.  First and foremost is answering the question if I'm going to go with Storer's design on the rudderbox.  I am not a fan of it.  First:  The rudder is never permanently attached to it, it slides up and down the box with no rear, bungee cords hold it in place  I don't like bungee cords, the degrade in UV and salt, and I'm not interested in having to replace parts like this.  Second and most importantly, the box and the tiller are permanently attached, which means I can't remove the tiller without removing the rudder and the box from the transom (now I have to put them somewhere-- think sleeping aboard).  I could design some sort of device that folds the tiller up, but then it gets in the way of a theoretical boom tent or something else, or it comes crashing down in the middle of the night on my head.  No thanks.  Give me a tiller that dismounts from the box, so I can throw it on the floor.  Third, with a permanently attached tiller-to-box, I will either have to enlarge the hole in the transom to use the pintles and gudgeons I want to use, or use Storer's suggestion which is two gudgeons on top of each other with a pin running between all them.  I have spent more than enough time struggling with rudders and bizarre attachments that I know, in waves, with current, with wind, it's going to be a total pain in the ass trying to thread a needle through a million holes (of course the rudder wouldn't be attached which might make it easier).

Anyway, call me a curmudgeon, but I'm not a fan of the back-less, bungee cord, permanent tiller design.  I may have to come up with something else.

Rudder and daggerboard ready to be shaped, mast lumber!

Today was a surprisingly uneventful day in the my personal Goat Island Skiff world.  I've been stumbling around lately trying to get traction on a number of projects, some held up by other projects that needed to be completed.  Two large steps forward happened today.

First:  I wandered into Goose Bay Lumber haphazardly and found 4 pieces of 20' x1x4 finished Douglas Fir boards.  All of them were straight, maybe three knots in the bunch, and relatively nice straight grain to boot.  Just four, all four were good, I grabbed them.  These will be my mast that powers my vessel.  I had them cut to 15' 8", since the mast is just a smidge over 15' 6" tall, this gives me an inch of "oof" space.  Also, they had a 15" planer, I had my daggerboard, and we fed it into the mouth of the machine.  It spit it out a little thinner, and nice and smooth on one side.  The planer was not a precision machine, and while I can lose 0.75mm, I'd rather do that by hand than take out a huge chunk or something.  But it helped.

Second:  I called my bro-in-law and he was home, with his 13" planer.  I strapped my mast bits onto the roof of my sedan in a fashion that screamed "I will impale the person in front of me if you rear-end me" and roared up the interstate to the second planer.  In short order I planed my rudder down to the requisite 22mm and it came out amazing.  Then, away I planed my mast stock down to the 1/2" it needs to be.  Back on the roof with a little less mass and a little more wobbliness and back to my garage where I trimmed the trailing edge of my blades and got them ready for shaping.

 

Here's my mast stock. Hmmmm Hmmm delicious stock.

 

So I need to shape the rudder, to make the rudder box, so I can install the rudder hardware to the boat, so I can finally glue down the rear seat.  Then, daggerboard so I can glue down the centercase.  Then, make the mast, make some spars, and then I can start finishing my boat.  One day, one step, at a time.

Knees closer up, rear seat inspection hatches

So earlier this month I neglected to show some closer up pictures of the knees and the breasthook.  Here they are.  You may notice that I chose to not stylize the knees in any fashion, as other Goat Island Skiff's do.  I am a big fan of straight lines, utilitarianism, and functionality.  (Also WPA artwork and air travel posters from the early 20th century, for very much the same reasons.)  Curvy knees and breasthooks are nice, but I don't think they deliver the straightforwardness I enjoy in design.  Obviously, this is personal preference.  Curvy knees can look fantastic.  The stem in the bow will be cleaned up at some point, maybe a small cover.

Today I also added the locations of my inspections ports.  I have chosen an 8" Beckson screw-in inspection port for easy ingress and egress of larger items.  The smaller 6" port is for access to the rudder gudgeon fittings.  It is off-center due to the seat cleat that runs down the middle of the compartment from BH4 to the transom.  This could have been circumnavigated had I thought about it beforehand, but I didn't, so this is what I get.  Not the end of the world.

Finally, a quick look on how I glued the knees in place:  Two tape covered shims held in place by clamps for vertical support, and the clamp just to weight it up against the side of the hull.  Not too much weight is needed, because the knee could slide up, also, if it's beveled correctly it won't slide down.

A quick note on oars and boatbuilding

Building this Goat Island Skiff has been quite the up and down. There have been days of boredom when I stared at her and couldn't get started, days of excitement when she came together, days of satisfaction when I see my cumulative efforts, and of course, those days of agony over how to fix something or worse, "did I do that right? Because now it's too late..."

Oar building, however, has been phenomenally exciting, a shaft of light onto my project. To shape with my hands the object of manual propulsion for my beautiful boat brought a feeling of overwhelming satisfaction. Not only could I see immediate results, but I could easily see where I could make improvements on future oars. Nice. When I looked up from the first oar, and saw that, dammit, I just made an oar, and then saw my boat sitting on her buckets... well, it was definitely a "holy s**t!" moment, for sure.

I think during a build it gets easy to see the trees-- the small projects, the small problems, the next step. In that process the big picture of a boat sitting in the garage ready to go sailing gets overshadowed. The oars brought the forest back into focus. My boat is not a series of problems and tasks and items to be completed. My boat is a she, a vessel designed and built to carry me over the water and to those distant shores of my summer dreams. When I look down at the oar in my hand that just yesterday was a pine plank, and I look up and see the boat, my boat... well then the smile is very broad and I am happy.

So go build an oar. If you're on the fence on whether or not to build a boat or not, get some plans for an oar and build one.

Then build another.

Then build your boat.

Then go sailing. Go rowing. Smile!

Michalak (simple oar plans in this book)

Storer (free oar plans)

Oar Prototype #1

I lost power and internet for a bit during the big blow the other day, and never posted pictures of the oar. The following day I decided to shape the oar up. Using my plane, block plane, random obit sander, chisel, and wishing that I had a spokeshave, I went to work. In about three hours I got the below product. As you may notice, there is a kink where the blade meets the loom. Also, I screwed up the shaping a bit.



I mean, for a first oar done in three hours, not bad.

The blade is kinked to the loom most likely because each measurement station was taken off the edge of the board as opposed to off a theoretically straight line connecting the two ends. So if there was any deviation in the way the board has been originally cut (most likely) then the oar would reflect that in waviness-- and that's what happened. My next oar measurements will be based off a straight line down the board.

Second, I started shaping the oar without squaring it first. This would have been an easy endeavor, however I was excited to get started and planed the thing into an oval. If I had made sure all 4 sides were square, it would have been a circle.

The grip is also oval, I think it might be rough on the hands. I should not have cut it out in the blanks, and shaped it at a block, that way I could have made it a circle with a 1 1/4" diameter as opposed to the 1" it is now (a little small for me).

In the end, an easy plan, a nice looking oar, it's light, and with the pine was easy to shape.

Prototype #2 is in the works. This too, will probably be a scrapper because I already cut out the grip and then realized the advantages of cutting it out when the blank was glued up.