I mentioned winning the 2011 Bodega Bay Fisherman's Festival Wooden Boat Challenge, and for some reason missed last year. Which is a shame, because last year's competition was awesome, and we trained with a group of high school guys who built a boat that floated and got around the course, and, of course, we won it. Though not without effort, there was a team that build a 20+’ outrigger canoe, as they were building we were thinking “there’s no way they’re going to turn that”, and when they got past they buoy they just scooted around and paddled the boat the other way.

Anyway, a little refresher: 2 sheets of 3/8” x 4’ x 8’ plywood, 12 pieces of 1” x 2” x 8’ lumber, 2 pieces of 2” x 2” x 8’ lumber, 2 lbs of 1” or 1¼” deck screws, lb of 1” nails, 1 roll of duct tape, 3 tubes of caulking, 25’ of poly rope, 1 piece of poly sheeting (9’ x 10’).

3 hours, hand tools and battery powered drill drivers only, you can add decorative elements (paint, sculpture and decoration which doesn’t impact the boat), and then you race.

This year, we’ve been warned that if we do the same thing next year there’ll be arbitrary handicaps applied after the fact. So we have to think about some way to really jazz it up. I’m also thinking I should write up a page of “everything we know about quickly building a fast boat out of construction grade ply”.

But at some point I was hanging around Alembic and they had an amazing instrument on the wall that had the planets inlaid in to the fret board. It may have been Planet of the Bass. This was inspiring because unlike some of their inlays I could actually imagine myself doing this, but there were a few things there that weren’t simple circles or rectangles. Unlike some of their more dramatic inlays.

So last time I was at a Sonoma County Woodworker Association meeting, I got into a conversation about inlays, and heard “oh, yeah, you just lay your piece on the board, scribe around it, and use a small router”...

Well, that sounded easy. On Saturday, Charlene and I were bouncing around and hit a bead shop. There was a $.75 brass butterfly there, I thought that was worth six bits to try out, so I brought it home, dropped it on a piece of Walnut, scribed around it with a wallboard(!) knife (should have used an X-Acto), tossed a 3/32” bit in the OF 1010, and…

Well, that’s not perfect, but it’s kinda cool. Meanwhile, Charlene was playing with her technique on the bandsaw, trying to slice pieces off of some wormy Redwood we’d picked up off of a road widening project nearby. So I looked at her, and she looked at me, and I looked at her slices, and she looked at my inlay practice, and she grabbed a scrap of Koa, and after a few minutes between the router with the 3/32” bit to cut the outline and a little work on the milling machine to hog out the inside, she grabbed the linseed oil and we had a trivet/hotpad like thingy:

Clearly there’s a lot left to learn here, but I think the major take-aways are: Use a small bit, don’t try to cut more than 1/8” or so into the host material (the Redwood/Koa inlay was 1/4”, and that was harder to control), cut deep enough in your scribe around the outside that you can clean up with a knife or chisel, and be prepared to do a little cyanoacrylate/sawdust filling, but for some projects this is a doable thing…

Now to hit a rock shop, I think there are some geode and turquoise slices that could end up embedded…

Daniel came back for another visit and said “yeah, it sounds really off at the 12th fret”. With visions of “oh, crap, we have to mill off that fret and move it” we started playing with things, and discovered that the bridge was in the wrong place. The bridge had individually adjustable string positions, so we moved them, and got a sound that was okay, but the bridge was also really too high.

So I chucked it up in the milling machine, milled it down a bit, then tried to clamp it at an angle to put a bevel back in some of the pieces, and of course that caused the whole thing to flip out of the clamps and be munged by the bit and… yeah, it was ugly.

With no place to buy a replacement bridge open yet on a Sunday morning, we decided to make our own, out of purpleheart and some strip brass I had around, and lo and behold it let us put it in exactly the right place, and sounded awesome! What’s better, there’s enough room in the frets and vibrato in Daniel’s playing style that the micro-adjustment didn’t matter, he was playing with the sound all the time anyway.

Then we went out and built another bridge, being a little more careful with the brass filing this time, and did a few other tweaks, and declared it done!

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Daniel wanted to get back to his friends pretty badly, so last night we got the electronics installed (with some pain), and broke a string stringing it up, and there’s a lot of tweaking left to be done, but it was playable:

Need to lower the bridge, file the edges of the frets a little better, verify that we’ve got the electronics properly installed because the volume knob was doing less than we expected, and spend some time tuning, tweaking the bridge head position and possibly even filing the sides of the frets, but it’s mostly there.

And at 6:40 this morning, in the rain, he caught the bus back home.

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The finish is still a bit soft, and if it were up to me we’d spend another week adding a layer, sanding it off, adding a layer, and so forth, but we’re not there. So last night we installed the frets, the nuts for the bridge hardware, and the tuning machines.

Hopefully tonight we’ll carve another nut (I made one already, we lost it in my shop), finish the adjustments for the pickups, put the final screws in the tuning machines, and string this sucker up!

Sunday morning Daniel was off partying with friends in San Francisco. I went out to the shop and did a bunch of shaping, and then Charlene and I went over to Tall Toad Music and, with the help of the very friendly staff there, dug through the basement ‘til we found a case that looked like it’d handle the long neck and angled peghead fairly well.

Yesterday, I dropped by Friedman's on the way home and picked up a couple of different stains that we thought would make the quilting in the maple pop just a little bit. We laid out a couple of samples on all 5 of the woods we were going to be playing with, chose the best compromise, and with a deep breath we applied it:

Probably should have double-checked his sanding, but I think it’ll all work out okay in the end…

Next up: Many coats of rub-on polyurethane. We’re going with poly rather than varnish because it’s a finish that we can do a reasonable job with at home, and because I like rubbed finishes.

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Since the last time, we un-clamped the body from the glue-up, flipped it over, routed the back of the through-neck flat, and then cut out the body

There’s the guitar cut-out with the truss rod set in place.

The new fret board was cut with the Festool MFS jig and a 1/8” bit, after which we took the corners out of the diamonds with a chisel:

Then this morning I cut the fret slots and put a coat of finish on the fretboard. I was amazed at how much the hard and oily Comatillo we used for this pass sucked up the polyurethane. And then we laid it out to see what it looked like, and after an afternoon of cutting out cavities and holes in all the right places, glued the fretboard to the neck.

On the router table, cleaned up the face of the peghead and finished the rest of the truss rod routing, and drilled the hole through the neck for the electronics (totally stoked, I drilled the diagonal by hand and managed to hit with my ¼” pilot hole dead on, then worked up to ½” total).

Then with a deep breath and a few carefully placed Dominos, glued the sucker up. Daniel is way stoked.

I asked him to head out to the shop, double-check the measurements on our first peghead, and cut it out. Through a variety of mess-ups (my casualness in drawing out the cut lines, his casualness in following them, neither of us double-checking that layout) we ended up with a peghead that had the neck portion cut too narrow.

We drew up and clamped up a new peghead, which had geometry different from the old one because of transcription error. And actually, that was just fine because yesterday the next package of hardware arrived, and the tuning machine spacing we'd laid out wasn't going to work anyway.

It all worked out okay, but it took a while to get there.

We did manage to get the truss rod groove routed on the router table, and finish the rest of the body glue-ups, using Dominos for alignment.

Next up: Rout the peghead junction flat, finish the truss rod groove through that, and, with a little clean-up of glue and drilling the electronics channel through the neck, assemble the thing!

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He came to visit just as we were finishing up building our workshop, helped out a bit on that, and I made some noises about how if he wanted a really cool guitar he should come down and hang out for a couple of weeks and build one.

A week ago he called my bluff. So he arrived, and he spent a few days searching the web for templates and hardware, and after a while we settled on some drawings we found of a 1950s Les Paul as a starting place. He marked up those a bit, drew a different peg board headstock, changed the shape of the horn on the bottom. We then dug through my wood stash, and ended up deciding to go with a through neck laminated of Walnut and Maple, with a body composed of quilted Maple over a center of Mahogany, with a Pao Ferro fingerboard that I’d snagged out of the seconds pile at Luthier's Mercantile last time the local woodworking group had a meeting there. With a little bit of Purpleheart I had lying around for trim.

Taking a deep breath, I pulled out my credit card and clicked “Buy” on the brass hardware he wanted, and we went out to the shop and started to get to work. First up, using the jig saw to make a template:

The second template came out better, though we had a lesson in router bit management that meant that as we were testing that template we dinged the crap out of it. Fixed it with putty. Daniel started to see possibilities. Then we drew out the neck on a piece of wood, and I went off to work while he cut the neck. Mostly. He got the Walnut right, but because of various issues in wood management it took three tries to get the maple blank. Measure once, cut twice.

Neck clamped and glued, we used a couple of bearing bits on the router to machine the top flat, and clean things up.

Then he had enough router experience to go off and do the body cavities:

While he was distracted with that, it was time for me to do some learning. I got to work gluing up a Maple and Purpleheart assembly for the neck pips and experimenting with building an inlay system, so that he could route the neck inlays and we could then work on sanding and fitting the inlaid pips. And carefully, ever so gingerly, cut the fret notches

Then he went inside for lunch, and I snuck over to the planer and smoothed and sanded the whole thing, wandered into the kitchen and surprised him with it. I think this was the moment where we went from “we’re building a guitar” to “we’re building a freakin’ awesome guitar, dude!”. And with that we went back out into the shop and drilled out some switch cavities, and did the first glue-up on the lower body part.

Today hopefully when I get home he'll have cut out the pegboard headstock and we can start with the neck shaping!

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One of those things is my roll-around clamp rack.

Charlene mentioned that what we really needed was something that retracted into the ceiling. I thought about it a bit, and eventually realized that we had the electric winch left over from the mechanism I built to lift the dirt to the roof. So last night I grabbed a couple of 2×4s and a few other scraps and prototyped a clamp rack that folds into the ceiling.

First test last night:

More pictures at my personal blog.

There’s some racking in the frame that I should address a bit, and I’m thinking that I should rig the winch so that it pulls the top from the back rather than having the cable in the way, but I think this has promise as a way to keep the clamps out of the way…

The sail needs a lot of reconfiguration. We eventually got something that worked better than in this picture, although it’s got quite a weather helm in that setup. I think we’ll end up going to a fairly traditional lateen rig shortly.

The sloped transom makes the rudder funky, I’ll probably build something to put the rudder gudgeons in a more vertical line, and I think I need a better rudder pintel system than ¼-20 bolts with nylon lockwasher’s on ‘em.

But as a way to spend a pleasant afternoon on a lake, watching the heron feed and the geese paddle around followed by their little ones? Yeah, kinda hard to beat.

Construction started: Memorial Day weekend. 4 weeks later we’re sailing. There’s lots I’ll do different next time, but I’m kinda pleased.

Every year Petaluma’s various small craft river users band together to have a “Day on the River” celebration, in which there is much paddling of various small boats up and down our little stretch of tidal slough that extends the San Francisco Bay, so Charlene and I took one of the boat building competition practice boats out and paddled it for a ways:

This weekend was all about fiberglass. We’d dropped the hull, and thought we hadn’t done any damage but found a bit of a dimple, it turns out ¼” plywood doesn’t take dings very well, so we decided to fiberglass the seams. After much back-and-forth on seeing if we could scrounge some free polyurethane resin from friends or whether to spring for the epoxy, and how much to apply, we decided to go with epoxy, and tape on the seams (in order to keep the hull lighther). So we glassed the seams, took all the spare epoxy resin and smoothed it all over the boat (before I realized there was more stuff we really should have glassed, oh well). And then we test fit the mast and cut out the sail:

I need to get another piece of redwood to make a piece down the center of the bottom, partially to support the bottom a little better, and partially to hold the skeg in place. I’ve got pieces cut for the rudder and lee board that need a little shaping, and I need to come up with a better rudder hinge because I don’t like the epoxied webbing method that the plans show, so I may just spring for the actual hardware.

But progress marches on!

Charlene and I started construction on the hull this weekend, in luan and redwood. We think we’re building a fairly robust hull, but we are going to glass the seams, and we’ll probably end up building a few extra ribs to brace the bottom a little more robustly.

We got the sides cut and fitted, and the bottom glued on but not yet trimmed. There’ll be a bunch of scraping to remove squeeze out, because we want to varnish or oil the inside, but the hull is starting to come together.

An amazing day out at the end of April in Bodega Bay here in Sonoma County in Northern California, I highly recommend coming out for it, either as a contestant (and this two-year winner is thinking about ways to approach the competition with more whimsy and attempt to wow the crowd, which will probably lead to a schism in our team, if anyone’s interested in going my way, or anyone wants to work with our other team mainstay who’s a long-time yacht and furniture builder and who has a lot to teach on going for more speed) or as a spectator. A few of my favorites:

In order: A kayak whose paddler rolled in competition, Craig’s origami folded sailboat (pushing cheap plywood construction to new levels), a long outrigger boat that was serious competition in the speed category, the high school student team we trained with, that didn’t manage to build what we’d hoped they would, but still made it around the course, and our boat.

More pictures at my personal site of this year's competition, and last year's competition.

On the other hand, you could blame the Bodega Bay Fish Fest Wooden Boat Challenge, which I got roped in to last year because the Sonoma County Woodworker's Association sponsored a team, we won, and this year Tom Segura and I worked with a team of teenagers who managed to compete and get around the course without sinking (with only a little input from us), and we won again, with a boat that was twice as long as last year.

At any rate, my sweety Charlene came to this year’s boat building challenge to watch us compete. Last weekend we managed to sneak away from our other obligations for a few hours, and as we sat on the edge of the water in Santa Rosa's Spring Lake Park, watching people hang out in their small boats, and she said “I want to learn how to sail”.

Us being us, rather than spend $500 on a used Sunfish, we’re going to build one.

The criteria are: Big enough to carry two people. Sailable. Light enough to car-top. Small enough to store behind the workshop. A little bit eye-catching, in a good way.

My first thought was to build a Sunfish/Sailfish knock-off. My uncle built one when he was a kid, that I sailed extensively when I was a kid, and it was a lot of fun. There are various plans out there, if you look hard enough you can find a pirated version of the original Sailfish plans that I could stretch the beam on to make it more Sunfish-like, there’s also the Moonfish 14 and plans for the Stevenson Projects Mini-Cup are on-line, but that form-factor is also a committed and wet experience.

We decided we really wanted more of a sedate float around and picnic on the water sort of experience. After much digging, we think we’re settling on some variant of David Beede's Summer Breeze. It’s quite similar to the boats we’ve built for competition (including practice boats, I’ve now built a whole lot of those, with hand tools, in a few hours each), the big difference will be that I’ll use ¼” ply (probably just luan), add a chine log, and spend some real time on gunwales rather than just adding material where the CDX is cracking. So if I can clear space to do other things at the same time, this will be a few days of build time, with the days coming in only because I need to let glue and paint dry, rather than throwing it in the water unfinished and wet.

I want to stay cheap and fast on this, so I’m thinking luan plywood, and cedar or redwood for the other parts, cheap and light, but a few steps past fir in terms of durability. Yes, I do have some massaranduba and ipe in my wood stash, and it would look absolutely gorgeous, but the boat would be heavy.

So I’ve spent two evenings re-drawing the plans from Simplicity Boat's simplified Summer Breeze build notes and various other sources around the web, including the Duckworks Magazine — Summer Breeze page, the Flickr set of jerrycashmanoz's Summer Breeze build, with a centerboard and a decked bow, and a Woodenboat.com thread with lots of good stuff.

I was a bit concerned about the lee-board, and was thinking about reworking it for a daggerboard, but after seeing a video of a Summer Breeze sailing decided that with the right reinforcement the lee board arrangement should work nicely.

I’m starting to plot the whole build out, fitting it around the various other projects I want to move through my shop (and finish with my house), and I’ll keep track here.

However, my electrical inspection is today. The rainy season has come. And I can do things in my shop.

My sweety Charlene asked me to put together a progress report, a look back at what we’ve done since July when I broke my rib digging out the foundation and had to put the whole thing on hold until October, when I started in earnest. My Dad flew out to help in November, and again this January, my friend Alan and his kids helped, and, of course, Charlene carried her part of our partnership during the construction.

So, we started by digging out the foundation trenches:

Then I built forms and laid and tied the rebar:

I hired my neighbor Loren, who’s a landscaping contractor, to do the pour and concrete finishing for me. I think this was a good move. Even though I’ve put a floor over the concrete, I’d have never gotten that nice a finish on the slab, and there’s a whole lot of experience that goes in to the process. Now that I’ve seen it done (and participated in it a little), I might tackle aspects of it myself, but this project has also beat quite a bit of the “do it myself” aspect of building out of me:

My Dad came out from Ohio to visit, and he and I put together a pair of walls, and then said “huh, how are we going to get this up?”. Luckily, my friend Alan came over and pretty much lifted the things into place by himself. Wasn’t the first time he saved me a whole lot of time on this project. And his daughter helped assemble the other two walls, and by the end of the day we were putting on sheathing.

Setting the window headers

Wall sheathing on

Before the wall sheathing got inspected, my Dad left. I had to do a little correction on that, and then Charlene and I put up the fire break drywall. Any wall within 5’ of the property line needs to be a 1 hour firewall, I believe my design gives me a 2 hour firewall, but we decided that if we’re going to do the wall and a foot of the adjoining walls, we may as well do the whole thing. So I lifted a whole bunch of 5/8” Type X into place:

Charlene helped me apply the housewrap. The furring strips there stay in place, as they provide space between the siding and the wall for a drainage plane. This provides wind and shock wave resistance, it also makes the space that much more energy efficient (all of which are bad justifications for a design element, given our climate, but everything worth doing is worth doing to excess).

Siding. Prefinished HardiPlank.

And now we’re inside, on the electrical. 6 GFCI circuits around the walls, 2 in the ceiling, plus 3 220v circuits. And as a condition of the electrical permit, the city made me put in heating and made me make the building California Title 24 compliant. Turns out the cheapest easiest way to put in heating was a heat pump, so I have heating and cooling in my shop.

Siding up, and the preliminary door on.

The roof is a living roof, so it’s a fairly complex assembly. Here you can see the Enkadrain layer (over several
layers of insulation, rubber and plastic), with the grating to hold the dirt on.

Insulation inside, Charlene and a few college student houseguests who came by to crash on our floor in the Bay Area over winter break helped a lot:

Electrical trench dug. The electrical service is 100A buried in 1¼” conduit.

Wallboard up and spackle on

And wall textured and painted

And now I’m organizing inside.

I’ve been super busy the last two months, doing carpentry, building a workshop with a living roof in my back yard. The complete series on my personal site, or at HomeRefurbers.

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