The Steamboating Forum

Mike:
Awesome!!!
Thanks for sharing your story. Beautiful project. And my favorite hull color!
Looking forward to further reports.
And possibly even sharing a cruise together...
RussN

Hi Mike -

Very nice - glad to see you're making progress. It's going to be an really nice boat.

Since it was raining today, I spent much of the day actually working on Rainbow in my dad's barn, inspired by your call this morning. I really look forward to getting our new shop built so I can find the tools, weld, etc.

- Bart

Cracking job so far Mike! A real looker.

Ah, Mike, I recognize the lines ... Very well done, Sir.

SL Iona is coming along. I had hoped to show her this month in Mystic, but then they moved the Show. It was just as well: steaming and fitting white oak coaming cap takes longer than one thinks.

All the best,

Steve

And a thanks to you, Steve, for commissioning the design. I would probably be still struggling along with my old hull if I hadn't seen your first post on here.

My project has been, of course, just a fraction of the work that yours has been as I had a donor boat with essentially all of the machinery ready to go.

As of this morning my motor and engine mounts are finished and Scott and I are starting the seats and coamings. We are finally getting some warmer weather so the epoxy will happier.

Mike

Great job, sure you will enjoy this boat very well. Just for some inspiration, or should I say perspiration, here is the state of the Margaret S, just 5 days before the last steamboat meet of the season (2010). We got the hull finished (without deck), boiler, burners, engine, paddlewheels, their shafts and bearings, piping and feed pumps installed, all steaming and attended the meet.

Hi Mike

That is a beautiful boat. Looking forward to seeing it fully finished and ready to steam.

Regards

Pete

Looks great Mike! That layup method prior to cutting and building is an awesome method. I don't know why that isn't taught more. Did you have any flexibility issues with the sheets post-layup?

Not really. We did install temporary struts to hold the first set of sheets at the correct distance apart. When we added the sides it got a lot stiffer and as soon as the bulkheads were glassed in you could have dropped in the engineering plant and gone steaming. The decks made the boat into a very stiff structure.

Adding the box keel later saved us a lot of work. And added a lot more beam stiffness. Right now I can set the hull on one 2 x 4 board like a teeter totter in the shop and walk around in the hull with no creaking.

It's not that cheap. I spent $5K on plywood, glass and resin and other things to get a floating hull. And I'm spending more now. Priced Honduran Mahogany lately? I'm going to drop $200-300 on the coaming alone. Ask Steve for more horror stories. A used boat is a bargain most of the time.

The bare hull when I paused two years ago weighed around 800 lbs. I will likely sneak in under a ton due the small engine and only 400 lb. VFT boiler.

Mike

Honduran (proper) mahogany is bit eye-wateringly expensive, and not all of it's that good either. When I last needed some mahogany, my local timber yard said they'd got a lovely shipment of Sapele, and I might like to look at it. I did, and bought a fair bit. I wouldn't recommend Sapele though, without checking, both the colour and density: it varies between something very light coloured and with a density not much higher than balsa, through medium density wood with a nice dark red-brown colour, to very dark stuff, often very dense and with twisted grain, and looking more like Teak. Utile varies in much the same way, and again you need someone you can trust at the timber yard, and then to select your own baulks to re-saw.

Some of the Sapele I bought mentioned above got turned into book-cases, and a combination of time, wax polish and occasional sunlight has matured it into something indistinguishable from good mahogany. I have to admit luck was involved, but it did look nice in the sawn timber racks.