15) At last

At last a positive step forward. The painting of the inside of the hull is finished, and the mast support (forward thwart) is in place and the is glue hardening overnight. I couldn't resist taking a pic with the mast in place - looks something like a proper boat at last. I'll post details of the fixing of the thwart later; but for now, in the words of the execrable Maggie, "Rejoice!"

14) Blog rescue

In case you're wondering, this Blog did something funny to the dates for each article when I tried to organise a second theme - everything so far appears to have been published today (May 8th). Not true - the first article was on 22nd April, and they've appeared every one or two days since. They should now be in the right order, and I've numbered them to avoid any future confusion (on my part).

13) VE Day - and the paint starts to go on.

The preparation of the inside of the hull for painting has been three days (admittedly fairly short days) of temptation and frustration: frustration at not being able to get on faster because of the amount of scraping, sanding and making good to be done; temptation to simply slap some paint on to hide the defective surface and pretend everything was all right. But now, finally, the first coat’s on and, although I didn’t manage to remove all the blemishes with scraper, wet-and-dry paper and filler, it looks more like a boat and less like a camouflaged bath tub now.



The trouble has been that curse of the painter and decorator - poor preparation in the past, paint slapped on over a previous layer of gloss with no sanding. It lasts for a year or two, then starts to flake off the unkeyed surface. But the problem is that it doesn’t flake off uniformly - you end up picking at bits of it with a penknife blade or even fingernails. Then you have to sand the layer underneath, which should have been done last time, to give the new paint something to key to. On Lugg there were three layers of paint like this, all of them flaking. In the words of Terry Pratchett’s Witches - bugrit!

Now that the new paint’s on the inside of the hull I can see the few little places where I didn’t manage to get all the old loose paint off - they really weren’t visible on the tatty, multicoloured surface. Still, it’ll be an easier job to tackle them now, before the second coat of Danboline Bilge Paint goes on tomorrow.



Speaking of which, what a good investment that stuff is. I know of no paint that lasts so well under boaty abuse. When I had Fram I painted the bilges with Danboline and it was the only coating which was still intact 7 years later - despite being half-submerged in bilge water for much of the time. The bloke who bought Fram from me just left it sitting on its mooring for 7 or 8 years and did no maintenance. The varnish and the paint on the topsides and deck were in a sorry state, but the submerged Danboline was still OK. (I’ll have to tell the story of Fram’s new owners some time - it’s a salutary tale.) So use Danboline - accept no substitute. Can I have that sponsorship now please, International Paints?

12) Wheezing but happy

Yesterday I dodged the showers and prepared the inside of the hull for repair and painting. (If all this is familiar to you then skip the next four paragraphs.)

Explanation - when a small GRP dinghy is popped out of its mould the outside shows the same high standard of finish as you see on any yacht or motor cruiser; but the inside is as rough as a badger’s bum. A yacht has a set of GRP internal mouldings which means that you see the same smooth shiny gelcoat finish inside and out, but a dinghy like Lugg - because it’s small, relatively cheap, and has to be kept light - has no internal mouldings. The inside of the hull is just the rippled surface of the Polyester resin over the rough chopped strand mat. This is usually painted so that it feels OK to the touch, but no real attempt is made to achieve a smooth finish - it would take too long and cost too much.

So Lugg’s insides were rough - not just because of the production process, but because he’s been repaired a number of times over the years in various places on the hull, and each time it added to the irregularity of the inside surface. First I sanded as much of the existing paint as practicable, with a power sander where possible, but also by hand; then I levelled the bigger irregularities in the surfaces with Polyester filler and sanded that to a reasonable finish. Finally I had to repair the joint between the centre-board case and the hull as I mentioned in a previous article.

Having cut glassfibre chopped strand mat to suitable sizes, I mixed some polyester resin and painted the surfaces to be repaired with it fairly generously. (You have to work quite fast once you’ve mixed the resin because it hardens in about 20 minutes.) Then I laid the shaped mat into the wet resin and stippled more resin into the surface until it was completely saturated. I worked around both sides of the plate case with an initial layer which was local to the damage, then laid another layer over the whole area of the join on each side. I worked about two inches up the plate case and about six inches on the horizontal hull surface. This picture shows the mat and resin laid up in the hull - it’s a reddish colour, although the light wasn’t good for the photo.



Finally I skimmed the whole lot with a thin coat of filler to make the repair look like the rest of the hull and sanded it smooth. This photo shows the grey filler being sanded and a bracing strut in place to hold the plate case vertical while the resin hardened (it was leaning slightly to the starboard side).



You can see the sanded surface of the (grey) original paint in these shots. Tomorrow - all being well - it’ll change to dark red when I put the new paint on.

Using polyester resin is always dodgy - the fumes can make you ill - so I did the lay-up in the open air. I still ended up wheezing. Mind you, when I was teaching in Sussex a colleague and I made a GRP kayak in a workshop in one week after school hours. It was winter and cold, so we kept the windows closed. I was laid up with styrene poisoning from the fumes for about a week afterwards. I won’t do that again!

11) It's in the family

Just a brief note to record that James (eldest son) has bought himself a dinghy down in Brighton (actually he bought it from someone in Swindon a week ago, but I keep forgetting to mention it.) It's a vintage National Twelve racing dinghy which he got for a ridiculously small amount of money, and I'm jealous. I'll post a pic soon.

10) Rainy day

Nothing done today because the weather just wasn’t good enough. The temperature must be close to 10 degrees Celsius colder than it has been for the past few days, and it’s been alternately drizzling and raining hard all day. As I’m using the power sander to strip and key the inside of the hull there is a huge amount of dust swirling about - so I’m not going to do that in the garage because a) I’ll be breathing it in and b) it’ll get into everything in the garage, including all the stuff stored in there - and I’m not going to try it outside because I’m using mains electricity, and although we’ve got trip fuses I don’t like depending on them.

So today I went to our local hardware store - Malcolm’s - and bought a new cheap folding workbench (made in China, £20). I need this because I’ve used my old bench to bolt my cheap circular saw to (made in China, £40). This I bought to rip timber down to small sections to bend easily for laminating; it’s been a great success although it’s obviously not very heavy duty. But do we make anything in this country any more? I think most of the tools and most of the electronic stuff I’ve bought lately has come from China. China makes most of what both B&Q and Ikea sell, I know. I wonder what the balance of payments between Europe and China is like.

Anyway, now I’m waiting on the weather to carry on repairing and painting the inside of the hull. The forecast promised better tomorrow - but then they didn’t get today right!

Which reminds me of a wonderful story from some book or article I’ve read lately. The weather forecasters on a Pacific Island were congratulating themselves on getting the forecast right 80% of the time - until someone pointed out that if they just said each morning “it will be hot and sunny today” they’d have been right 85% of the time. (Anyone who knows where this came from please remind me.)

9) Two steps forward and one step back . . .

Starting to strip off the paint from the inside of the hull yesterday I noticed that the centre-board casing will need a bit of reinforcement where it joins the hull. When the boat was built (by a fairly unsophisticated builder in a pretty crude way) the hull moulding had a slit put in it along the keel for the centre board, and then the centre board case was just glued on above the slit with glass fibre and polyester resin forming a continuous L-section join all round, as in the diagrammatic cross-section.

But polyester resin is not as good a glue as epoxy and, over the years, the join has started to break down. Now, before I paint the bilges again, I’ll have to renew the joint between centre board case and hull with glass cloth and resin. Another trip to Norwich, I suppose!

Meanwhile, here’s a list of jobs done and still to do:

1) remove and discard fendering around the hull (done)
2) separate hull and deck, discard deck after measuring (done)
3) make new gunwale - spacers, inner and outer (done)
4) repair stem, make and fit new stemhead (done)
5) make and fit new rubbing strip and capping to gunwale
6) make new sternpost and fit (done)
7) cut holes and fit buoyancy tank screw hatches
8) design make and fit thwart and rowlock support beams (done)
9) design, make and fit thwart
10) design make and fit mast support thwart
11) design, make and fit aft thwart to top of buoyancy tank
12) prepare and paint inside of hull
13) reinforce hull to centre board case joint
14) fair off and paint outside of hull
15) fit rubbing hardwood strips to bilge runners and keel
16) fit deck hardware, rudder hangings etc
17) acquire new sail
18) fit mast and sailing gear

That’s it so far, but in the spirit of this article I bet there’ll be more to come!

8) Slow progress

Slow because it rained a little this morning, and then I had to mow the lawn and cut down an old bullace (wild plum) tree. Then, after lunch, the sun came out and I was able to get on with Lugg's nose.

You may wonder why he's called Lugg; apart from the fact that he's a lugsail dinghy, Lugg is a character in the Albert Campion novels by Margery Allingham published in the first half of the last century. He's Campion's manservant, a semi-reformed thug with a heart of gold. He's reliable, solid, and not really built for speed. If Campion could be seen as a rather tippy racing yacht then Lugg is a sturdy, steady, safe lugsail dinghy. But a bit of a bruiser. Here's a description of him from 'Look To The Lady': ". . . . a mountail of a man with the largest and most lugubrious face . . . . his great muscular arms were bare to the elbow. For the rest, his head was bald, and the bone of his nose had sustained an irreparable injury."

My Lugg's nose had sustained a pretty awful injury if you remember. Here's a reminder of what I found when I started to take him apart:



So today I continued rebuilding his nose. Oh alright, the stem. I used chopped strand mat and polyester resin to start with, then finished off with body filler. Here's his new profile:



Having done that (and it needs a final touch of filler and more sanding) I started on the seat and rowlock supports. Here's the port side one clamped up and glueing:



My current thinking is that I'll brace the seat (thwart) with hanging knees from these supports. I'll try to include a diagram tomorrow. Hope the sun shines.

7) An unpleasant surprise and some photos

It’s been an interesting afternoon. The stem fairing was going quite well until I saw what I thought was a loose bit of paint about two inches along from the stem. I put my thumbnail under it and a big lump of filler came away from the “plank” and the stem. One of those hurried Saturday boatyard repairs - they’d bodged the filler in on top of greasy dirt and green algae without even roughening the surface of the GRP. There was no adhesion at all. I had to fill it with a mix of chopped mat and resin, then fair it with more filler when that had gone off. Now, last week it was so cold that the epoxy glue (setting time 3 hours) was taking 12 to 24 hours to go off. Today, with temperatures in the low twenties celsius, the bloody filler was going off in about five minutes. There was no time to get a finish - just bosh it in and sand when hard. And that’s despite only using about a quarter of the catalyst recommended. (Car body repairers will know what I’m talking about.) Here’s a picture of another bodged repair I found - when I raked out the loose filler this hole was about half an inch deep in a quarter inch thick hull. Yes, they’d filled it on the outside and whapped some chopped mat and resin on the inside. It’s looking better now, I promise.



So loads of sanding tomorrow. Never mind, it’s going to be a good day for weather again. In between the filling and sanding I managed to make a new stern post/rudder mounting and glue and screw it in place on the transom. Here’s a photo of the old and new mountings side by side.



Don’t know what’s been chewing the old one, but the new one’s oak, and epoxy coated, so any wood eating worms are going to have blunt teeth, I hope. Here's a shot of the new stern rudder mounting in place on the transom.



Also, while I’m posting, here are some old photos I’ve dug out. The top two show my first boat “Fram”, a seventeen foot marine ply sailing boat with two berths and a gunter rig; the design was called a Lysander, a favourite for home boatbuilders in the sixties and seventies. The first is anchored off Brighton, the second is in Shoreham Harbour.





The next two show “Two Brothers”, my 22 foot clinker sailing cruiser, a Kestrel class, built in Essex about 1964. The first is moored up in front of Horning Sailing Club in 1998, the second is snugged down for the winter on my mooring near Horning. I had Fram from 1976 to 1979, and then Two Brothers from 1979 until 2001.





The final photo shows a magical moment from the Three Rivers Race, an event held every year in June on the Norfolk Broads. This was the 1998 race, and I was on rescue boat duty at Thurne Mouth for the 24 hours of the race. I woke up at 4.30 in the morning in the Dory, looked up, and saw this. No wind, the moon in the west, and the sun just coming up behind me. One of the visual memories I’ll carry with me to the end.

6) Wax on, wax off

There’s a sort of Zen about doing these jobs on this little boat. When I had the “Two Brothers”, my 22 foot clinker sailing cruiser, I seemed to spend all the time doing desperate remedial work. The idea that it should be laid up for a few months while it was thoroughly sorted never entered my head; it had to be ready to sail when I wanted it (on one occasion on Boxing Day, I remember). So the maintenance was always rushed, always crucial and always present. A bit like keeping an old car running if it’s your only means of transport - except that the need to keep the boat going was only in my head.

But the work on the little dinghy is interesting - everything is a problem to be thought through instead of a disaster to be averted, and there’s no rush (except my desire to see it on the water before the summer’s gone; well, before the summer starts really). So I do a bit, make a coffee, have a think, do a bit more, make a note or a sketch, feed the chickens, do a bit more, walk the dog, and so on. I’m enjoying it so much that I’m thinking about the next boat already. Ray Mears’ programme on BBC last night (canoeing down a Canadian river) made me think it would be good to have a Canadian canoe; but then I’ve just seen some plans and an article about a 19 foot double-ended open boat, yawl-rigged, suitable for camp-cruising (another one from the Salle quiz - “Carry On Camp Cruising”) which I’m thinking about. Don’t know where I’d keep it, but it really looks nice. I’ll try to post some pictures later. Now back to fairing the stem.