Gluing in the Inwales

Time to glue in the Inwales this was a lot harder than I had first imagined. The Inwale is 16ft long and very thin so it bends and wobbles all over the place. On side is covered with sticky epoxy that you want to avoid touching with your hands and you certainly don’t want it on your cloths. Now you have to bend it to the inside curve of the hull and clamp it in to place. I started a one end and clamped every 40cm or so and slowly worked my way to the other end of the boat. Then I went back and put more clamps on so that everything was held in place firmly while it dried. The blue tape under the inwale is to try and catch the epoxy as it squezzed out. this helped a lot although i had to keep going back to clean up the drips that extended pased the tape. Better to clean it up now rather than have to sand it off latter. As you can see it used a lot of clamps, more than 30 in fact, and although it did not use every clamp I had it certainly was most of them so I could only do one side at a time.

All Clamped Up

The Fix

Question:- Now how to fix the crack in the inwale.
Answer:- Walk away and leave it for a week. Come back to it when the mind and body have calmed down a bit.

First of all I had to cut a new piece of wood to join in. Fortunately for me the break happened close to the end so the new piece only had to be about 700mm long. Then I cut a scarf joint on the old and the new piece to epoxy them together. I use a backing board to make sure that everything lined up. Without the backing board, the exopy acted like a bit of a lubricant and slid all over the place. As you can see there were lots of clamps to hold everything in place for such a short join.

The next day the clamps came off and the clean-up began. It cleaned up quite well and it is hard to see where the join is. When the boat is finished it will be hidden under the deck where it can’t be seen anyway. I refitted the inwale back in to the boat and all is well again. The area where the fix is does not quite bend as much as the wood on the other side on the deck but it is hard to see it if you are not looking for it.

All Fixed

All Clamped Up

OH BUGGER

While dry fitting one of the inwales there was a nasty crack. A closer inspection revealed that a knot in the wood that I thought was only small went almost right through. With all of the bending to try and make the inwales fit nice and snuggle inside the boat was too much and it let go. More than a few swear words were uttered I can assure you.

The Gunwales



Dry fitting the Inwales

Now it is time to make the Inwales & the Outwales. These are the rails that run the full length of the boat on the inside and the outside. They give the very thin piece of plywood a lot of strength. They are easy to make, I simply cut them on the table saw out of a 1” X 8” X 16’ board of mahogany. I found a couple of knots but I will place them in a position that will hide them and hopefully they will not affect the strength of the wood too much.

For the outwales, I ran over them with a 1\4” round over bit in my router to take the edge off them. The inwales were not rounded over as I still have to fit the seat doubler (bracket) to them. Next the process of fitting them in to the boat, I worked with the natural bend in the wood and started fit the inwales. Then I found an error…… I had cut out the notch in the bulkheads ¾” X 3/3” and the inwales are ¾” X 1” so I had to cut it an extra ¼” deeper. This would be easy if I could lay it on the bench but it is already epoxied in place so it was rather tricky. I spent about 30minutes on each notch but I was happy with them all when I finished.

The ends of the inwales have to be cut on a complex angle so that they match up nicely at the front of the boat this also meant lots of filing and sanding to get the fit just right. But I was very happy with the result in the end.

Dry fitting the Outwales on the Sasafrass 16

Stopping the leaks!

Using 150 stiches to hold the boat together during construction meant drilling 300 holes in the hull, not ideal if you want your boat to float. So now I needed to fill every hole in to make sure that the boat did not leak.

I turned the boat over to start the filling from the inside only to find that some of the epoxy had leaked through the seams and needed to be cleaned up. I gave the hole inside of the hull a sand to clean up the leaks and get it ready for filling the holes.

All of the holes filled in on the hull.
I hope the dots all disapear later.

I did not want to have the grey epoxy fill in the holes as I did not think this would look that great so I made a jar of wood flour by sanding a piece of pine for ten minutes with my belt sander and collecting all of the dust. The idea was that I would use the wood flour (saw dust) to mix with the epoxy and use that to fill the holes. I had noticed that the epoxy made the wood a darker colour when it soaked in. My hope was that the pine being a lighter colour than the ply wood, would mean by the time everything dried it would be a pretty close match. That was the plan any way. However the wood flour did not mix in to the epoxy very well. Everything started off well and it appeared to mix in all right but as I was putting the mixture on to the boat a lot of the fibers from the wood stuck out and it looked terrible. I stuck with it and filled all of the holes but I am still not sure how it will turn out.

Once the epoxy had dried I sanded everything back and was left with a poker dot pattern on the inside of the hull. I think the darker patches are where the epoxy has soaked in to the plywood. Hopefully when I epoxy the inside of the hull these will all disappear.