The Starling Project - Part 22

 

I made cardboard patterns to assist with the cutting of the plywood deck panels. I used the same  strategy for these deck panels as I have done for the hull panels and found it worked well. I cut the plywood using a handheld electric jigsaw.

Here are the newly cut deck panels that I have made slightly oversize. When they are glued and nailed in place I will trim them with a wood plane. The challenge will be to make a clean and accurate join between the bow and stern panels and to keep the plywood unmarked so that I will have a nice clean deck to varnish, rather than a deck that I have to paint to hide all the mistakes!

The Starling Project - Part 21

Today I had some much needed help from my brother Tony who held the cockpit floor battens in place while I fastened them from beneath the hull with brass wood screws. To do this I had to lie on the concrete floor and drill pilot holes with the electric drill, then drive the screws home manually with a screw driver - a very cold job until I got a couple of layers of cardboard to lie on to keep the the cold at bay.

Renovating a boat is a very good metaphor for life in general. Nothing ever goes exactly as you have planned it. I am only 90% satisfied with this little job as inevitably some things went wrong. But 90% is a reasonable percentage. A couple of times when I was building my yacht 'Mariner' I had to completely rip the work out and start again.

The next job is to put the plywood deck on.

The Starling Project - Part 20

I have cut four battens to length for  the cockpit floor. These  battens will serve two purposes. First they will provide foot grip on what would otherwise be a flat slippery cockpit sole and second they will strengthen the 6mm plywood cockpit floor.

As I planed and sanded these battens I found, yet again, the usefulness of this 'WorkMate' bench to hold small woodworking jobs.

The next step is to install these battens permanently on the cockpit floor with glue and screws.

TAKING A BREAK

Sometimes old sea dogs just need to take a break.

The Starling Project - Part 19

Here I have glued and cramped in another mast support, cut to fit between the deck king plank and the keel. There is an identical support on the forward side of the bulkhead (right in the photo).

Two battens port and starboard to support joins in the plywood side panels in the stern quarters have been glued in.

Wooden reinforcing blocks have been glued port and starboard to screw the mast rigging chain plates to. This pair of reinforcing blocks are the originals that I have salvaged from the old hull plywood. 

The green tape is used to mask off the tops of the deck frames where the glue will need to adhere to when the deck plywood is put on.

Today I undercoated the whole interior of the hull. This is something that had not been done in the original build of the boat and contributed to the rotting of the plywood with the ingress of fresh water. I am pleased with the way the work is going to date. The next job is to glue and screw in four wooden cockpit reinforcing / foot grip slats.

The Starling Project - Part 18

It's not that I really needed any encouragement, but when I stumbled on this video of a Starling Dinghy sailing on Wellington Harbour I was encouraged indeed. Roll on launching day.

Starling Project - Part 17

If you look closely you will see two wood planes trying hard to hide in the cockpit - they are pretty modest and don't want a lot of applause or recognition for the sterling job they have done helping me to plane the sheerline and the cockpit panel sides - "After all," they said, "Planing is not a big deal, it's what we do."

The next job I will do is glue in the internal chainplate blocks and a couple of backing pieces each side at joins in the topside panels. I will then paint out the whole inside of the boat with undercoat paint. This will give protection from wood rot  to the plywood if for some reason fresh water gets inside the boat. I will also glue in another mast step support under the main king plank.

She looks sweet and tidy with her sheer line planed and getting very near the stage where the deck goes on.

Sitting the boat in its beach trolley is a good easy way of keeping it from moving around as I work on it. When she is upside down I use wedges and cramps to keep her stable on the saw horses. But despite these restraints the constant pressure of planing and sanding has seen the boat creep around the carport from one end to the other.

I am still undecided as to whether to fiberglass the hull. One option is to glass the keel center line and the bow and chines with fiberglass tape to protect these more vulnerable areas and then just paint the hull either with ordinary one pot paint or a two pot epoxy paint system. I shall be giving it a lot of thought as I complete the other little jobs that are required before turning her back upside down for the hull completion.

The Starling Project - Part 16

 FROM THIS ...............

 

..................... TO THIS. 

Today I glued and nailed the port plywood panel on. This gave me the illusion that I was about half way through the rebuild. Of course I am half way if I am only counting nailing and screwing the plywood on. But I am only about a third of the way through if I include fiberglassing, filling, painting, attaching hardware, varnishing etc etc. Having said that I do feel buoyed up by the fact that the bottom of the hull now has the plywood on. The next job is to fill all the screw and nail holes with 'Epifill; then fiberglass and fair the hull.  

The Starling Project - Part 15

The first of the side panels was glued and nailed on today. It was a more difficult job than the bottom panels because I had to hold, bend and manipulate a G - cramp without letting go of the panel. So it was all strategically placed knees and hands while I attempted to get a few furtive stabilising whacks with a hammer and nails.

Except for the smallest wood plane at the bottom of the picture (which is used for cross grain planing) I have recently completed full restoration work on these planes. Now they are coming into their own planing, trimming and finishing the boats stringers and plywood panels. The top plane which is the longest one really showed its usefulness today when I was planing the excess off the long overlapping plywood panels. Tomorrow I will put the last side panel on and fill all the countersunk screws and gripfast nails with 'Epifill'. Then she will be ready for sheathing in fiberglass before being turned upright for the deck to go on.

The Starling Project - Part 14

Let me tell you about a typical Whangarei weather scenario. The forecast was for a day of strong winds from the North East with heavy rain. In the morning as I began work on the boat it rained hard and blew like hell. In fact it blew so hard the Starling was getting wet from the deluge that began to stream into the carport. So I went to work and put up a tarpaulin to keep the rain at bay --- Yep, that's right, the minute I put up the tarp (nearly falling off the wooden sawhorses, hammer in hand, mouth full of nails) the rain stopped and the sun came out. Great! If there is one thing about Northland, you don't have to wait long for the sun!

Two bottom plywood planks are now glued and fastened onto the frames with screws and 'holdfast' nails. Again I had to fiddle around with a wood plane to get things to fit as snugly as possible.

 Thank goodness for gap filling glue is all I can say LOL !

The Starling Project - Part 13

The first bottom plank goes on. Despite my careful cutting of the cardboard pattern for the plywood planks,  I still had to fiddle around a bit especially along the line of the keel where I had to plane the correct angle onto the face of the ply. Fastening over 100 screws manually with a screwdriver sorely tested my two year out, post-op physical fitness in the chest area. No problems so far.

Taking on a project and actually building or repairing something is a good antidote to over zealous fantasies about what one might like to get involved in. Tomorrow, on goes the opposite bottom plank; that's if the cold, stormy cold front that's traveling up the length of New Zealand doesn't intervene making the carport uninhabitable - I badly need a decent workshop shipmates, sooner rather than later.

The Starling Project - Part 12

Work is now well underway. Two new cockpit sides have been cut, glued, fitted, nailed and filled.

I made up and glued in a couple of transom backing blocks to through bolt the rudder gudgeons to.

The first of the two bottom panels are now being fitted after having been cut out with an electric jig-saw. Plywood is easy to cut with a jigsaw and planes easily with a sharp wood plane. These bottom panels will be screwed down along the line of the keel and along the line of the chines. So far, so good.

The Starling Project - Part 11

Here I have placed on a large sheet of plywood the fairly rudimentary cardboard patterns of the plywood planks whose shapes I obtained by placing the cardboard on the yachts framing and tracing the shapes. The shapes are all a little bit oversize. I will trim any excess off once they have been glued and nailed to the hull.

A start has been made! The first cockpit panel is now glued and nailed in place. This stage is all reasonably easy and pleasant work. I think there is a boat building tradition where when the last plank (The 'shutter plank')  is screwed and nailed the boat builder (s) celebrate with a keg of beer. Can't wait!

The Starling Project - Part 10

CRAMPING - MY STYLE

There have been a number of little jobs to do before the "planking" or should that be "plywooding" ? begins. Here at the bow (above) I have glued and screwed some backing pieces so that when the new bottom plank butts up  against the forward bow piece there is a something to glue and screw to. I have used some 'G' cramps in conjunction with wooden packing blocks to hold it all in place while the glue dries.

Because there was already an existing backing block  glued on, my new block altered all the levels so I had to glue on a couple of short pieces of wood to level things up. The only pieces of wood I had available that were exactly the correct thickness were two old broken pieces of an imperial measurement 'yard' long rule. When cut to the correct lengths, they fitted perfectly.

Here the shapes of the new plywood planks have been transferred from the cardboard patterns that I created, onto the plywood. When the work is completed there will be very little left from three sheets of plywood.

__________________________ SIMPLY SAILING _________________________

If a man must be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most. A small sailing craft is not only beautiful, it is seductive and full of strange promise and the hint of trouble. If it happens to be an auxiliary cruising boat, it is without question the most compact and ingenious arrangement for living ever devised by the restless mind of man--a home that is stable without being stationary, shaped less like a box than like a fish or a girl, and in which the homeowner can remove his daily affairs as far from shore as he has the nerve to take them, close hauled or running free--parlor, bedroom, and bath, suspended and alive.
~E. B. White

The Starling Project - Part 9

It hasn't escaped my notice that there is a bit of a connection between the major operation I am doing on this boat and what happened to me less than two years ago - Major bloody surgery. Like a surgeon I am removing the outer covering so that I can get to the heart of the matter.

As I removed the very last pieces of plywood from my little boat I felt she looked a little forlorn and skeletal with the autumn wind blowing through her bones. As I beavered away planing the last of the plywood from the boats stringers and feeling sorry for the fragile little wooden armature that I was working on some words of Battery Sergeant Major Tudor Bryn 'Shut up' Williams played by Windsor Davies from the sitcom IT AIN'T HALF HOT MUM came to mind. I stopped still, momentarily, "Quite right" I said to myself and just got on with it.

These words got quite a lot of use at the time this comedy series was shown on television in New Zealand and people would repeat them in what they thought was a suitable context  ----- Play the utube video now if you haven't already.
                                
IT AIN'T HALF HOT MUM was a British sitcom about the adventures of a Royal Artillery Concert Party, broadcast between 1974 and 1981, and written by Jimmy Perry and David Croft, the creators of DAD'S ARMY. It was set in British India and Burma, towards the end of the Second World War.

The Starling Project - Part 8

As I was pulling off all the old plywood I removed all the old fastenings. This left some big areas that required filling, especially where the fastenings were screws, with lesser filling required for any nail holes.

The white gunk on the frames is where I have filled with 'Epifill' a product so expensive I asked the guy in the chandlers if there were crushed up gold bars inside the can. He laughed and said that this product, that was once made by 'Epiglass' is now made and marketed by 'International Paints' who are losing a lot of market share because of the price of its products. I am not surprised by that at all.

'Epifill' is the filler product - 'Epiglue' (photo below) is the glue product - The can sizes are the same. I bought this 'Epiglue' for the next stage in this process which is gluing on the new plywood.

The bottom can is the glue. The top can is the hardener. You mix it in a 2:1 ratio. The total weight of the combined mixture is 385 grams. It costs $69.99 (They don't price it at $70 because they think we are so bloody thick we might not actually notice their oh so very clever and cunning marketing strategy - doh! doh! doh! - God give me strength! )

In the photograph (below) one sheet of this plywood cost me $60 - ( NOT $59.99 - THEY, at least have a bit of class ) - Which I consider reasonable value for money as it's top grade marine plywood with the wooden veneers glued with top grade waterproof marine glue.

Yes shipmates, that's right, you are onto it - How the fuck can you produce a large sheet of top grade marine plywood using top grade marine glue, EVEN IF the glue is bought at a bulk 'Trade' 50% discounted price of $35  - ( Whoops, whoops, whoops, sorry the price to the plywood manufacturers of 'International' glue would be a much cheaper $34.99 ).

How can they produce that plywood for that price? Well they probably use some of the other excellent high quality glue products such as resorcinol glues or West System glues where you get 50 - 100 times the volume of product for half the price of these International products.

I know what glue I will be purchasing next time round ........... And if this little post comes within the definition of a cathartic bloody RANT - then so be it!

__________________________ MARCEL KALMA _________________________

"Geometry Triptych" - Acrylic on Canvas 1020 mm high x 2450 mm wide

 

Marcel Kalma 

http://www.artbureau.co.nz/virtualcurator.php?seekType=3&artistCodeToShow=marckalm
 

Marcel Kalma currently teaches art on Auckland's North Shore. He is also a practicing Yoga Instructor. He uses glazing of oil paint as a way of building up translucent layers of texture and colour. Often these layers are within boarded areas or geometrical shapes. His works are oil on board or canvas. Finding a balance and harmony in relation to space and proportion is sought. Forms have been constructed through intuition rather than by any formulae or scientific structure. 
Marcel studied art at Manukau Institute of Technology and Elam School of Art.
"I think of my works as landscapes that verge on abstraction. They are not somewhere we recognise but may evoke a sense of place. Are we leaving somewhere behind or about to go forward to somewhere new? Equally they may evoke a mood or emotional state. Colours and mark making often associate us with past experiences. I plan to create works that may encourage contemplation. Influenced by the Old Masters technique of glazing, these works are layered in oils. Each layer must dry before the next is applied. This means decisions in the process of painting are not preplanned but created in the moment. Through colour, transparency and mark making I endeavour to create works both aesthetically pleasing and thought provoking."

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_________________________ MACHAPUCHARE _________________________

 

Matthieu Ricard  -    Buddhist monk, photographer and author

http://matthieuricard.org 

Machapuchare, "Fish Tail" (22943 feet') in the Annapurna Range, Nepal (March 2015)  

Sumner Road (Evans Pass), Christchurch 4K UHD Drone's View 2015

This interesting video was sent to me by my brother Christopher.

When we were growing up in Christchurch New Zealand we often used to ride this road on our bicycles. From the top of Evans Pass it was a very fast free wheeling ride of madness down into the port of Lyttleton. It gives me grimacing spine chilling goosebumps to think now of how dangerous it all was - But we never worried about any of that because up to our late teens or our first self inflicted near death experience (whatever comes first) these are the years of immortality.

Since the Christchurch earthquakes this road has been closed - and abandoned. It's now a road of memories.

Interestingly, apart from walking the only way to travel down this road now is on a bicycle.