Sailboat Fever. It's like the herpes of recreation.
 

It never really goes away; it lies dormant, sometimes you forget about it until it comes back and fucks with you.

Maybe that's a bad analogy, but I did catch the gift that keeps on giving from a girl who was an honest to god sailmaker, but I had boat fever long before that.

I'll come back to the origins of my sailboat fever later but the most recent case was brought on by buying a book for the mm at the recommendation of my local brick and mortar book-pusher. (The first one's not free, but spend a hundred bucks and get ten bucks off your next purchase)

It's one of the Arthur Ransome Swallows and Amazons series, Swallowdale. For those who are neither Brits nor Kelly McDonald fans, it's about a bunch of kids having a summer vacation on a lake and there's small sailboats. One of the families' dads is a sea captain and his kudos get all nautical with it.

I'm on my phone so I'll cap it there for now and I'll upload pictures if I can, until I get fed up with the phone or Tapatalk, whichever happens first.

Here goes picture one.




Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Well that went well. Not. The app crashed when I tried to add a photo. I was smart and saved my draft first.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Terminal Boatitus Symptoms

Engines that appear to be maintained by Tiffany's...upholstery that costs more than a house...wood finishes to put Louis XIV to shame; yes, these patients have among the most serious, full blown, advanced symptoms of mer de boatitus or simply boatitus, not that there's anything wrong with that happy.
Skol! Craig L

Ok fuck Tapatalk and this phone

This is off to a great start!

Freakin tapatalk.

ha ha ha. This is what I put up with. Most likely when you post pics I won't see those either. Jimbo turned me on to Messenger for my pics and it really is much easier for me. I read the posts and have a good time. Some post with their phones and I can see those pictures. Oh well somes better than none.https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/201...f6ca547aa2.jpgI will leave you a feel good picture.



tarheel

I tried putting the links in as images, sprinkled throughout the relevant text but shit wasn't working for me today. So, the images are all in a lump.
http://imgur.com/aNDJiBi
http://imgur.com/eK6ncRi
http://imgur.com/L0BPXlI
http://imgur.com/dMMdgao
http://imgur.com/33ZUPPP
http://imgur.com/jLkPiSY
http://imgur.com/gQQ1JKJ
http://imgur.com/cvVtCzR
http://imgur.com/OKBy1vB
http://imgur.com/aOOf7d3
http://imgur.com/Af2kKFI
The last boat I built (with/for a friend) was in 1995. During that time I got a bunch of sailing related books. One in particular has a bunch of lines drawings with tables of offsets for traditional and historic boats of small size. The boat I built was a 16' Cape Cod Catboat. It was as massive AF and weighed at least a ton. It had 7/8 cypress planks on 1-1/2" oak ribs, a 5" wide keel made of oak. I'll post photos of that later.

Any way it was built like a brick shithouse and I thought it might be nicer to have a manageable boat that could launch from a beach and could sail or row. I preferred a sailing boat that could be rowed in a pinch rather than a rowing boat that you could throw a sail on.

The Chapelle book had several working boats that fit this bill, 3/8" planking on 1" ribs, 3"x4" keel, open with no deck, gaff rig. I put it on the back of my mind, but at one point carved a solid model of this Bermuda sloop because I liked the looks of it, but it isn't something I'd like to build full scale. I love how over-canvassed it is. So I made this thing and tried sailing it, but being solid the balance was off. I had to hollow out the inside and put in ballast. I didn't bother at the time. I am repainting it and sticking it on a display stand. Done.

I also thought about (and built a cardboard model of) a plywood "tack and tape" sailboat by Payson. 4 sheets of 1/4" marine ply, some fiberglass and varnish and you are good to go. Very nice, agile boats, that are not beautiful but not hideous either. I'm still debating, when I have time and money, which to build. The most likely to be completed and probably far cheaper to build would be the plywood one. Practical, not romantic.

That is still years off and I really need to reign in projects, especially big projects, until my house is fully sided. The addition I started 8 years ago has lost most of its tar paper and gives my lot a distinctly Appalachian feel in contrast to my neighbors neat as a pin houses and yards.

So, I am dicking around with making a 1:6 model in my spare time. I've gotten a far as lofting the lines for the model. Basically, you plot the offsets (measurements taken from the centerline and the baseline) to the size you intend to build - full scale or in my case 1:6. You do this because you need top check that all the dots are in the right places and the numbers in the table were accurately recorded. So you make a bunch of dots and then connect them using a flexible batten as a guide for your pencil. It is important that the line be fair, sometimes the points have to move a bit and sometimes they are out and out wrong.

To help hold the battens in place you can get one of your kids to draw the pencil line or hold the batten but sometimes that doesn't work out 100%. Enter "ducks" Lead weights that are laid out along the points of the curved line you want to scribe, the batten being wrapped around them. For lofting a big boat, the ducks can weigh several pounds and are probably iron. The ones I am making are 2 pounds of lead each.

Commercial ducks sometimes have a bent wire coming out of them, picture an angler fish, the bent wire is set at the point on the line, one duck for every point on the curve. They cost a stupid amount of money, like $45 each or something. Maybe they are bronze, but even still. who's got $500-$900 to shell out for crap like that? Not a boatbuilder that's for sure. Whatevs.

Since I want to make this fast and quick, fucking with casting a wire in place is out of the question, too fiddly. Drilling one in after the fact is out too because it would just spin, so I designed my ducks to have curved sides and one curved end, the other end coming to a point.

More later

Very nice!

When I did my plywood kayak years ago, I wished I had ducks. I just drove a brad at the point and used a spring clamp to hold the batten there. The spring clamps ended up making it hard to get the curve fair. I wished I had like 6 hands to hold things in place while I drew the line. somehow I muddled through.

Boat.

B ust
O ut
A nother
T housand

Yeah, and my kayak lives in my backyard. There is a river about 5 miles from me where I could paddle it, but it just never happens. It has seen about as much time on the water as it took to build it. :(

Well, you've broken even at least!

Wouldn't a fold-boat be easier to cruise the nude beaches?
But I guess it's better for the lady bathers to admire your cute dinghy. :haha:

The, ahem, cockpit needs enough room to pick up passengers...

Apparently you have to post video on youtube as well.

That must have cost a small fortune. The thing to remember is that every time you add a foot to the lenght of a boat, it's not being added to the tiny skinny part in the front, it's being added to the biggest, widest part in the middle.

That's why my boat is two feet long, 1/6 the length of the original. It satisfies my cravings and I can build it out of scraps from the burn bin.