Evolving 'Polly Wee'

[Chris Waite]

And I always thought cycling was so simple.  I’ve never had so many punctures in my life as I have since I’ve been cycling to work.  It’s part-time, only three mornings a week and in total that amounts to about seventeen miles, so with ninety weeks to go, minus some ten weeks holiday and take off perhaps another twenty for those non-droughted rainy days, when I still need a shred of authority.  Who, residing at Her Majesty’s pleasure, would be impressed by a half drowned quack reading them their medical horoscope?  So say sixty weeks, which comes out to about a thousand miles.

This means that my, both relatively new, rear Schwalbe Marathon and similarly Kevlar reinforced front something else, should only just be worn in by the time I quit this lark.  As for stopping at the side of the road to grapple un-belevered with an airless and grubby tyre; the road is a relatively flat and straight and the traffic bowls along at a merry pace, so he who hesitates is toast.  The verges are narrow, lined with hawthorn and bramble and apart from being naturally scruffy and full of last year’s spiky hedge trimmings, they are littered with explosively dead badgers, bits of bunny, Coke cans and Big Mac wrappers.

The idea of crouching down to listen to, sniff or even eyeball escaping air, I could just about manage in the silence of a deserted indoor velodrome.  On a busy B road in the rush-hour, with a brisk January Nor’ Easter whipping over the Arun valley, not a cat in hell’s chance.  No; the tyres and I will take our chances standing up and keeping rolling, even if I have to push the damn thing a couple of miles and I have.

Anyway, boats….

It has been a tedious couple of weeks but I now have more layers on my crackly hull than even Anders recommended.  Apart from the epoxied sheet generally and over a spare bit of glass mat itself over the area of the crack(s) inside, the hull now has two staggered layers of woven glass epoxied over the flat bottom and running up over the turn of the forefoot, also a short way up the run aft.  This then has THE Bed Linen on top of that:



Finally three coats of well behaved Epifanes white two-part polyurethane from chine to chine – very shiny and demonstrates admirably that even the youngest can develop a tad of the cellulites:  



Fear not, it looks much better when not viewed against an open garage door and anyway, it will be underneath and nobody will be any the wiser – much:

 

Then this morning I opened up a large two-pot of Jotun polyurethane HB in Gorgeous Grey 38, described as having a satin finish and comes from SML:

http://www.smlmarinepaints.co.uk/topcoats/two-pack/hardtop-hb

This stuff is magnificent; it seems to have a new, less volatile solvent and with a tad more on the roller it would have covered in one coat.  As far as I can tell, it is cheaper than any of the others and exceptionally well behaved, with the caveat that it should still not be fiddled with after a few decent roller strokes.  How hard wearing is yet to be revealed, but one more coat tomorrow and Wednesday for me to undertake a smidge of Continuing Medical Education, or whatever it’s called this week, then in the great scheme of things I really will roll her upright, but here is a sneak preview:



A warship would be proud, a warship would

CW    

[Paul H (admin)]

Jolly good progress Chris.  HB is good stuff indeed, I used HB (high build) primer and also got great coverage and it filled in the minor scratches.

So is this another of your super efficient designs with just a handful of sawdust wasted out of 3 sheets?

What were the material costs and will there be a mark 2?

-Paul

[Paul H (admin)]

Regarding the awfully depressing sound of cracking wood - one could take the lines off Polly Wee and stuff the numbers into the Hulls program.

Hulls could recreate the chines and flat bottom accurately, but add extra planks forward to spread the curvature and reduce strain. It sounds like you had a tad amount of double curvature which plywood spends its whole life fighting to the death.

MilliBee has a similar bow foot profile but use 2 planks which I think could have been persuaded to blend into a flat bottom midships. So still 4 planks but the bottom 2 planks would have a slot or V cut at a strategic place.
Enigma/Illusion did a similar trick in the one piece 9mm floor, a thin V cuts in about 18in to 24in, enough to produce 2 "ears" that stitch together to form a curved V leading into the bow.

ttfn
Paul

PS only 12 years, 4 months, 12 days till I join you on the retirement cruise

[Jeremy]

adminHBBR wrote

PS only 12 years, 4 months, 12 days till I join you on the retirement cruise

I can recommend it, it's been 1 year, 6 months and 3 days since I retired at the ripe old age of 58...............

[Ratcatcherjohn]

Good morning Paul 
Way off topic I know but a bit of "Dutch Uncle":-   Don`t wish your time away, as you get older it goes quickly enough!!  I had some of the best years of my career in the last 13 years (but I did have a big change of direction).  Sorry to see that you chopped up the boat, she would have made me a nice "Cold Frame/ Planter" if I had known you needed the space !!  Thats where TBA is heading somewhen.            John

---

Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2012 00:19:10 -0700
From: [hidden email]
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: Evolving 'Polly Wee'

adminHBBR wrote

PS only 12 years, 4 months, 12 days till I join you on the retirement cruise

I can recommend it, it's been 1 year, 6 months and 3 days since I retired at the ripe old age of 58...............

---

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NAML

[Paul H (admin)]

Ratcatcherjohn wrote

Good morning Paul  
Way off topic I know but a bit of "Dutch Uncle":-   Don`t wish your time away, as you get older it goes quickly enough!!  I had some of the best years of my career in the last 13 years (but I did have a big change of direction).  Sorry to see that you chopped up the boat, she would have made me a nice "Cold Frame/ Planter" if I had known you needed the space !!  Thats where TBA is heading somewhen.            John

Jeremy wrote

I can recommend it, it's been 1 year, 6 months and 3 days since I retired at the ripe old age of 58...............

Hopefully "Osbourne, Osbourne Granny Taxer" will keep his hands off the state pension, which should kick-in at 66 (76 if he got his own way). Company pension kicks in at 65, sooner if I took a reduction, but I may be able to wind down to a 4-day week in a year or two, maybe less if it were not for the 300% overnight inflation in youngest's University fees.

So the plan is phased retirement; as a Los Angeles taxi-driver once told me "I can buy anything except time".

cheers
Paul

[Jeremy]

adminHBBR wrote

So the plan is phased retirement; as a Los Angeles taxi-driver once told me "I can buy anything except time".

Sounds a good plan.  I was lucky in many ways, as I was paid my full pension when I took early retirement, but the downside was that I had no time to prepare for it - it was 6 weeks from being made an offer I couldn't refuse (out of the blue, pretty much) to retirement.  With hindsight a phased retirement would have been better, but the offer I was made had a very limited validity period as the pension rules were about to change (to my detriment).  That taxi driver was spot on, BTW.

Anyway, Polly Wee is looking good, although, without wishing to be rude, I might suggest that she is a little buxom to have "wee" in her name................

[Port-Na-Storm]

Maybe its not that sort of Wee?................

[Jeremy]

Port-Na-Storm wrote

Maybe its not that sort of Wee?................

Ah......!  Of course, it's a not-so-subtle reference to the function of her ballast-dumping  cloaca in her nether regions............

[Port-Na-Storm]

No Jeremy I meant more like in the French Vernacular, Wee Wee, Yes oh Yes.

Anyway she isn't really so Buxom. Like many ladies she has a pinched in waist, in order to better navigate  her bollards, which accentuates her fullness elsewhere.  Still looks great in nothing more than a bed-sheet though.

 

[Chris Adeney]

Pauls' coment about lack of waste made me look at the strip plank in my canoe. I think that at least 3/4 of the rough sawn planks I started with are now in the waste bin ! A lot of hard work for not much but in the end, but the result looks quite nice.

Chris A

PS Part retirement is a good idea and gives more time for boat building.

[Timmo]

I've long since concluded that wooden boat building is fundamentally a process of taking big pieces of wood, turning 90% of it into wood shavings and sawdust then trying to make something that floats out of the bits that are left!

Tim.

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Chris Adeney [via UK HBBR Forum]" <[hidden email]>

Pauls' coment about lack of waste made me look at the strip plank in my canoe. I think that at least 3/4 of the rough sawn planks I started with are now in the waste bin ! 

[Chris Waite]

Well hope springs enormous; I turned her upright again yesterday afternoon and to me, the result could be worse:

 
 

But verily, hold thy horses young Paulie; costs? We’re still only just past the hull stage and even now I haven’t a clue – it would depend on what grade and thickness of ply wood you choose, how much epoxy, glassfibre and bedding and you waste sheathing and other such.  What you see is about three and a half sheets worth of 6 mm. and the rest is in odd bits.  It will also need a sheet of 4 mm. for the decking, another of 9 (?12) mm for the sole, thwart and aft sheets.  And that still doesn’t include the centreboard and rudder, or any of the strengthy-length battens and stuff.  Then I’ll probably use most of the 15 kg. of epoxy I ordered, to say nothing of all that two-pot paint.

Fittings, spars, sail, cordage and so it goes.

Then the next thing, what’s all this about a Mark II?  I already did a double take with this one, why should I want to go round again?  The wood crackling stage is now frozen in time, well epoxy anyway and it’s no good you going on about “stuffing the numbers” into your ‘Hulls’ program.  I am a pre-electrolyte so the shape is deliberately sufficiently simple that it can be cut straight out of the ply and stitched up, specifically to avoid all those nasty little binary complications. There’ll be no stuffing of numbers in this garage.

Anyway, how can you make a Mark II out of something as nebulous as a Premise; it would be like trying to rule lines on a cloud.  Principles, My Boy, principles -  flat bottom, flared sides, softened chines forward and as a long a waterline as doesn’t grate on your aesthetics; after that, the world is your oyster, or hull in this case.

It’s the thought that counts

CW

Oh and Jeremy, buxom in parts to be sure, but think – a whole sea-going, garage-fitting home in eleven foot six and a waterline beam of perhaps thiry-nine inches and that’s probably nearly as shorter and narrower than a skinny West Mersea Duck Punt, though I can’t be certain, as I can’t find a simple list of dimensions anywhere.

[Jeremy]

TBH Chris she looks a lot better out in the open.  There's certainly a lot of volume in that hull.  I'm looking forward to seeing how the water ballast works out, as with a hull that deep I think it should make a big difference, assuming you can get enough water on board.

Jeremy

PS:  The West Mersea Duck Punt is 4.73 m LOA and 0.9 m beam (more or less 15 ft 6 ins x 3 ft).  The hull takes nine 1.2m x 0.6 m sheets of 10mm underfloor heating foam.........

[Anders]

Its good to see the photos outside with some more distance. The lines can be seen now.
I like it. Its a sweet little tubby. Very charming in its own very personal way. Best of all, it looks like a comfortable and capable hull that´ll take you most places. That deep forfoot and some wight in the hull makes me think that she´ll have a good "real" boaty feel when sailing in a bit of chop. Looking forward to seing more.  

[Paul H (admin)]

Well done Chris she looks lovely - Tit Willow with a haircut

How tall is she?  

Top Secret idea: to move a clone on her side, along the side of our house (only 4 feet clearance) meaning she could be built in the garden. But the 2 boat limit means the Mirror becomes firewood.

-Paul

[Port-Na-Storm]

Coming along very nicely Cee Dubbs.

I know your mind will have been working overtime, thinking of all those design tasks that lie head.

Lockers and hatches, side benches and beds, decks and coamings.

It'll be good to see it all coming together.

Yummy.

[Chris Waite]

'S funny, I thought I had posted this last night; must've been the wrong button, or the wrong website, or the wrong universe....

Ah Grum, how well you know me!  In my head, there is an untidy heap of approximately constructed corners, but things are looking up, or down in this case, yesterday I actually made and installed a mast foot.  I would show you the photographs, but I am not about to advertise my ineptitude with epoxy filler, so you'll have to wait till it's cleaned off.

Back to the drawing board; it occurs to me Hull-stuffer Hadley, you skilful binary boffin, that you should bring a tape measure and your Aye-aye-Pad, or whatever this season’s magic slate is, to the Thames Raid and you can have more digits for your program than would fit into Bletchley Park, never mind Beale.  How tall is she?  Well it was meant to be thirty-six inches from her bottom line to her top notch, but like Winnie the Pooh’s poetry, I believe in letting things come; I’ve just measured her and our Polly Wee comes to thirty-seven and a half.  I'm pretty sure she bounced a bit when the building frame flew apart.

Oops, the Minister of the Interior has issued new marching orders, so I must away

Back soon

Th’ Old Quack  CW

[Anders]

Dear mister.
The correct meassurement is from inside bottom to top of gunnels amidships.
(What is a top notch anyways)

[BrianP]

Ross Lillistone has written a very good piece about panel development for S+T hulls here

http://rosslillistonewoodenboat.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/low-powered-planing-hull-lessons-learnt.html

Well worth reading.

Brian