The Steamboating Forum

Well done that man. Do you sleep?
Daniel

Not as much as i should.

Lionel

Have you considered just glass & epoxy coating, with wood showing through the epoxy on the outside of the hull? The wood is beautiful, and you can always paint it later if you wish.

One advantage of clear epoxy beyond the great looks on a well made hull is the opportunity to see if there is any water intrusion into the wood. On my boat I eventually painted the hull outside (it is not a beautiful strip-planked hull like yours), but have left the entire hull interior clear epoxy coated, so I can see if there are any water intrusion issues.

Yes I did consider leaving the hull with a wood grain finish on the outside. But I like the look of paint on the outside and bright work on the inside. Although I have decided to go with mahogany wood grain on the curved transom. I did go to some trouble to get the strip planking reasonably neat as a practice run for the second boat, just in case I change my mind and make the second boat with a full wood finish all over. Yes, I am making two, I purchased enough material for 2 boats from the beginning, and that is why I went to the trouble of making a good building jig. The second boat will be powered with an engine of my own design.

Lionel

Looking good Lionell,

I would definitely go with paint vs varnish. I seen a similar hull varnished and to me anyways, it didn't look right. Carvell planked (I know it isn't, but that's what they typically are or were)boats are generally wider planks with fewer endjoints and with all the different grain picking up the sunlight and short pieces, it just didn't look right to me. Maybe it was all my time living in a house with a hardwood oak floor ?

With the round bilges, she will be a little tender, but very seaworthy.

-Ron

Yes, I went for the most efficient hull design of this width that I could find, it was drawn by John King in the UK. Tender it will be, I have placed the engine and boiler as low a practicable in the design and I will be building in hard points to allow for the fitment of bilge keels if necessary. I don't really want to add to the wetted surface area by adding the bilge keels, so fingers crossed I won't need them.

Pressing work matters kept me busy for the last few weeks but I am back onto my launch build again. The Transom is curved 100mm across 1000mm and I laminated it out of 3 layers of 1/4 ply on a bench jig, that was reasonably easy. Now that the planking is finished I wanted to laminate one more layer of very hard 1/4 ply over the transom to cap off the end of the planks and provide durable corner edges on the transom. I did not want to use any fasteners as I intend to leave the transom bright, this proved to be quite a challenge. Vacuum bagging would be the only way to do it and I had real trouble getting the bag film to seal sufficiently. My first tow attempts ended in failure and I had to clean all of the epoxy off everything, not fun. On the last attempt I used my daughters Play Dough to seal the vacuum film, it worked a treat. The edges of the transom were beveled at 45Deg and filled with epoxy and a tough filler to create a stronger corner with better resistance to the glass cloth being scratched though on the corners and allowing water to get to the wood underneath.

For better pictures go here https://www.facebook.com/pg/steam.launch/photos/?tab=album&album_id=1941489189512966

Finally starting to look like if may float.

Lionell,

Doing a fine job on it, looks good. Keeping it nice and flat will make fairing the surface a lot easier. Those hulls look nice varnished inside with boiler and engine and place.

-Ron

Great work you are doing, nice to see such a piece of art.

Do I see what I have always called "Table Scraps" off to the side in one of your pictures? Whenever I build something large out of wood, I usually glue the scraps together to make a table top, be it a hardwood flooring job, or boat building planking, etc.