Glassing the sides

This weekend I started on the Beavertail's side panels. My neighbor, Bob, has built several boats and was kind enough to help me out with my first attempt at fiberglassing - it was great to have some help this first time round!



Earlier in the week I'd cut out the sides and cleaned up the scarf joints, but like I mentioned earlier there was a raised ridge right over both side scarfs. I planed them down to get them relatively flat and then we mixed up a bit of epoxy with phenolic added to spread over the joint and smooth it out - that landed up working out pretty well. At this point it was a case of pre-cutting the fabric and starting with the epoxy. We did it in approximately 2 or 3" sections and it worked really well. I'd been a bit concerned about starting in the morning when the temps were still kinda low (high 50s?). As expected, there was some gassing out and bubble formation but these were easily solved by squeegeeing across the bubbles as they formed (I was doing this for a long time, though, so it's not a hands-off approach).




Once both panels were covered, I quit for the day. Sunday morning I had to sand a few bubbles down and then started on the first flow coat. I was surprised at how bubbles were still forming at this time - again, though, temperatures were far from ideal. I'm going to have to do some more sanding before doing the next coat. It was also interesting how difficult it was to get an even coating - I have some areas that are pretty smooth while others still show the weave. At this point I'm not too concerned though as I've got several more coats to get it nice and even.

Unfortunately this will all have to wait a while as other committments put boat building on hold for the next few weeks.

Creating the scarfs

After a lot of indecision I decided to go with 1/4" sides and a 1/2" bottom. Edensaw in Port Townsend had both in Okoume 1088 marine ply and I figured the additional venner thickness made sense if I was going to try for a bright finish (more on that later).

My sides and bottom needed to be 16' long but the longest plywood I was able to find was 10'. This meant an introduction to plywood scarfing. I looked around and saw that West Systems had a scarfing attachment for $50. Well, hell, I can save $50! So I decided to do the scarfs by hand. If time is money, this wasn't a good investment! I was doing 12:1 scarfs and on my 1/2" bottom, this equated to over 5" of joint x 2. Needless to say it look a while!

I started using a power sander but couldn't deal with all the dust. Eventually I found that using a sharp plane was way more efficient and less dusty and went reasonably quickly. In terms of technique, I was helped a ton by this overview of Plywood Scarfing, using scrap pieces of plywood to create reference angles.








At the end of the process, and after glueing the panels, it turned out I had a bit of a raised "ridge" right on the scarf - I must not have planed it down enough. I'd been planning a bright finish, but this on top of various other considerations has made me change my mind. I'll plane down the ridge some and fare it out later on with epoxy to make the sides nice and flat. The decision to abandon the bright finish is actually a relief - no more being paranoid about marking the sides and matching filet colors! Next boat, once I've got some experience, I can do the bright finish...

A word of caution. When gluing the scarfs one lays plastic on the work surface to prevent the panel from sticking to the table. Be careful not to let the plastic get sucked up into the joint. This happened on my bottom planel and I only realized after everything had cured. I was able to pull it out and inject more epoxy - because it was only a small bit of plastic I think the joint will be ok.

A note on the plywood: the Okoume is a dream to work with. With sharp hand tools, this stuff cuts really nicely and looks great.

Starting out

I've been wanting a drift boat since starting fly fishing a year ago. I was tempted for a while by a raft, for a while by nice shiny commercial drift boats. Those suckers are expensive, though and I didn't have the cash to plunk down all at once. After digging around, I realized that making my own, while not inexpensive, would get me the boat that I wanted and would be a blast to build as well! Also, I could spread the cost over the life of the project, hopefully making it less daunting. I've got some woodworking experience and really enjoy creating stuff in the shop so this looked like a good project.

I did a ton of reading up online and in the end decided to go with plans from Montana Riverboats for the "Beavertail" fly fishing boat. A big epoxy order, and a bunch of plywood later, I was on my way!

I've found inspiration in other people's boat building experiences, so I thought I'd share my progress online. Hopefully this will help as a reference for others building their first boats. You can learn from what I'm sure will be a bunch of my mistakes!

Here's another boat building blog I've been following: Building a Custom Drift Boat