 and go. Alright, it's now my pleasure to introduce building and sailing a 12-foot sailboat that Jeff Koslow here is going to be talking to us, so please welcome him to the tour-account stage. Thank you. So indeed, my name is Jeff Koslow. I am a software engineer by trade about 10 to 15 years into writing code. I realize that I just really like building lots of things, and so I started to do some woodworking and I started to just do lots of projects on the side. I didn't plan on saying this, but the reason that kind of made me get the boat was I was all into electric cars when the leaf first came out, right? I was like, I gotta build myself an electric car. So I bought an Audi TT with the sole purpose of ripping the engine out of it, mating on an electric engine to it, and welding up some battery boxes and putting everything together and building this, and then I realized that it was an $8,000 car and I was about to dump $25 grand into it for a battery pile, about $15 grand on the battery pile and $10 grand on the electronics for it, and I just couldn't do that. I just could not do that. I just, as a throwaway thing, I just couldn't do it. So I ended up selling that car and then I found myself going, I have no project. This is not me. I need a project. And I spotted this sailboat. So I fell in love with this little portly boat right here. You can actually see it down in Otter Cove down here. It's parked out there. I've been staying on it each night since, let's see, Wednesday night. I've been staying on it each night. The moorage here is not so great. So I'm getting wet every time I walk out to my boat. So this talk goes through, I've got like three or four different chapters. We'll see how much time I get towards the end. First of all, we'll just talk about how I built the boat. And then I want to talk about epoxy construction techniques because we're all builders and makers here. And so I want to talk about, epoxy is something that you can learn. You can do it yourself. It's really amazing to watch a little honey syrup-like sort of thing turn into a plastic that's waterproof plastic. And it's really fun to work with. So we're going to talk a little bit about the boat. First of all, the model name of the boat is called the Scamp. It's a small craft advisor magazine. Small craft advisor magazine is, yes, a magazine, still alive in 2018. They run out of Port Townsend by a guy named Josh. He's a great guy. He went out looking and he said, all right, I have some design considerations. I want to sell some plans and have some CNC cut plywood that somebody can make into a boat. But there's some requirements for it, right? Let's make this thing less than 12 feet long. That requirement comes from some lakes where like 11, 11 is, or 12 foot is like the highest boat you can make. I'm not sure that actually makes a lot of sense because if that lake is that small, then you really may not need a sailboat in that lake, but whatever. There's an eight foot, they wanted an eight foot sleeping space on it. And so from right here up until this is a, what's called a cutty cabin, from right here is about eight feet long. So I can, I can sleep, I sleep like a baby on my boat. Light and easy to build. This one's kind of peculiar to this. There's a mass box here. It's about three feet tall. So you step the mass down into that. And that means the mast is, has about three feet of guide on either side. So it can't fall over too far. So you don't need wire stays that complicates the rigging of the boat quite a bit. I guess I did say that. And then easy to sail. So these are the requirements. And Josh went out and he found this New Zealand, New Zealander by the name of John Wellsford. John Wellsford would fit in totally here. He, he claimed to me that he like, he's probably like 65, maybe even 70 years old, huffled coot. He claimed that he like failed out of high school, couldn't figure out what to do with his life, became a diesel mechanic. And then some years later on into his life, he started drawing and designing boats. And now he's kind of a semi-world famous designer. He's designed the navigator pathfinder and the scamp and a few other boats. Interesting fella. We got a picture of him later. So scamp number one was built in Port Townsend from his plans in 2011. That, that is a picture, you know, I thought when I downloaded this that that was a picture of scamp number one. It's not actually, but that doesn't matter. In 2014, I bought hole number 284. So that's the number that's printed on my sail out there. We traditionally on your sailboat, you put your whole number on your sailboat, or on your sail rather. That changes a little bit. I figure there are probably less than 200 of these on the planet right now. So been a very small kind of club with these people. And just like a community builds here, a community builds around the scamp, we have a yearly thing near Port Townsend where I get to go and spend a few more nights out of my boat in a couple of weeks. The other thing that's interesting about this is this is built from 12 four by eight sheets of plywood. And it's surprisingly thin. Six millimeter plywood is a quarter inch, just slightly larger than a quarter inch. Quarter inch is five point two millimeters. And then nine millimeter, which is very close to three eighths inch plywood. And that's really only on the sole on the very bottom of it. And part of the part of it, part of the reason why that can be so thin is the epoxy and the fiberglassing. And we'll get to that part later. Oh, there's also something interesting there, which is the the BS 1088 British standard 1088 is a standard for voidless plywood. You're all a little bit smarter now, you know that the British have a standard by which they can build their plywood voidless. I just found that really interesting. So here's the, if you're a CNC nerd, and I know there's a few of them out there, here's all the cut plans for all the 12 sheets that I have. You'll notice like, can you see this right here? You see some little kind of jiggly joints there. There's a few more here on some of these that are going to be the decks. Those are called finger joints. And I'm going to get back to those a little bit. Just kind of an interesting little thing to try to fit together all these pieces. So the design is a flat bottom boat. She's very wide at the beam. The beam is the measurement across the boat. She's very wide there. She's got a pram bow, which I didn't really get a good picture here, but you saw that earlier, the front, the pram front. The reason why that pram front is on there, I get this question a lot. If you're going to take, it's hard for me to do this with my hands and a microphone, but if you're going to take wood and you're going to bring it all up to a point, then you're kind of torturing that plywood, which is what I'm doing down here right now, but it's kind of at a lower level. And so you're doing, if you're torturing, if you're turning it this way and turning it this way, then you're going to have problems with it. So it's easier just to chop the front off and throw a piece of plywood on there. It's built with an egg carton design. Maybe we should call it like a beer container design, but it's where they slot together, you know, like the pieces of paper in your beer can slot together. The good news about that is that's very, very strong, right? It's hard to move laterally. It's hard to move sideways. It's hard to get any sort of shear on that. The bad news about that is when you're epoxying, you have to run what's called a fillet on each of those. And so that means a lot of epoxy and a lot of sanding. And we'll get to what a fillet is in a little while. I already said that I had eight foot of sleeping space, so there's an offset centerboard. Would you think centerboard would be in the center, but it's not. It's off to the side. As far as I can tell, it makes no difference to the sailing of it. Very lightweight and trailerable. I've been told that they weigh about 450 pounds. I don't have a scale that weighs 450 pounds, but I believe that. There's a water ballast in the bottom, and we already kind of discovered the mass box. The other thing that's interesting about it, if you're a sailboat nerd, is on the left-hand side there is most of the sailboats that you ever see. This is commonly called the Bermuda rig, or sometimes the Marconi rig. But it's this mainsail right here, which is very triangular, and it's attached to the mast and how it hauls it up to the top. And then you've got a head sail, often called a jib, or sometimes a genoa. And that kind of helps balance out and kind of gives you some steerage through the water. The balanced lug rig, oh, when you have this, you have, not only do you have adjustments for this sail right here, but you've got adjustments for this sail right here to bring it through the wind. There's also a disadvantage to that, which is if you, what's called jibe, where normally you turn and if the wind is coming this way, you try to turn your bow into the wind. But if you don't do that and you turn back this way, then the wind comes whipping across. And what happens is, this is called the boom right here, this boom will whip across from one side to the other. And if that smokes you in the head, you're either dead or in the water. And if you're in the water, you're probably dead. So you can raise them up high enough, but they can be very dangerous. So the balanced lug rig is, it's balanced because it's got a little bit of offset here on the front of the boat. And this is not a scamp diagram. This is just kind of a generic diagram. I think there's a little bit more space. The scamp has 100 square foot of sail space. And I think about 20 or 30 of it are in the front there. So you don't have nearly the jibe effect. It can still happen, but you don't hear nearly, it's not nearly as bad. Okay, so now we're getting into the construction of this. I wanted to show this and it might be a little bit hard to see. There's eight bulkheads starting right here. The bow is a bulkhead. There's one right here. And then there's one right here. And I have doors in mine. So you can actually get into this front space. There's one right here. And they call this the cutty cabin because you can sort of sit and just kind of hold yourself out of the weather there. And then there's one here that you can't see very well. And one in the back. And then the final one is the stern, the transom. So I've got some animation here. Check this out. So that's the centerboard slot, right? On the on the starboard side here. Yeah, on the starboard side, there's a centerboard slot. And then I tried to mark, here's the two linears, like we talked about that high strength eggshell egg carton design. Those are running there. And then I didn't draw, I didn't mark in green all of them, but those are all the bulkheads running the opposite direction. Okay. Now we start picture time. And so you're all victims now. I got your attention. And now you're going to have to sit through 600 pictures of slides. No, that's not true. I've only got about 10 or 15 slides here. And then we'll move on to the epoxy. So I just, I felt like this was a really interesting build to watch it turn from a pile of CNC cut plywood in here. This, by the way, this is called the building jig. It's to give you a nice, give you the, the correct rocker on the, on the bottom hull. So we had all these set up. And you can see this is my dad here. Did I say that I went and I lived in Port Townsend for two weeks in 2014 with my 18 year old son and my 68 year old dad at the time. It just so happens that I was right in the middle of age from them. And we lived in Port Townsend for two weeks and just built the hull up when I drove away. Well, you'll see a picture of what the boat look like when I drove out of Port Townsend. So you can see the linear here coming in. And you can see these bulkheads. We break these down in a minute, I think. Yeah. So here we are gluing, gluing everything down. The seat tops are on, but that we're gluing it down with weights. Those are buckets of bricks or boxes of bricks. And now we've got the stern on and we're starting to get some of the front. And we keep going with more of the bulkheads in the front there. And it starts to, but this one is interesting because we're starting to put the planks on. So this bottom plank is called the Garbird Plank. And then you just plank your way up, up the sides. Here we're putting on the gunnels, which are just reinforcers for the, for the, along the sides of the boat. And this is just a shot. It's really clear that you can see the eggshell design in there. And you can see that there's a lot of strength in putting this together. Okay. So there's what she looked like when I, when I towed her out of Port Townsend. I'm kind of proud of that picture because I, not everybody gets towed their boat to the backside of the center for marine wooden boats there. And so I was able to take this picture. And then a year later I was able to take a very similar picture. So you'll see that one in a little while. Okay. So again, I said picture time. I actually went through a ton of pictures that I had, and I had to make some choices here. This picture is the center board. And there's two interesting things about this, only one of which you can see. The first one you can see is I've stacked some tile in two buckets full of water, a bucket full of water, a five gallon bucket full of water weighs, what, about 40 pounds? Yeah. So I'm holding this down. I put epoxy in there. I glued it. You can see the clamps around the edge. This thing's not coming apart, right? The second interesting thing about this is that there's 22 pounds of lead in there. And I didn't even know this until I went to go build a boat, but you can just walk into a lead store and buy lead. They don't, I don't even remember how much it cost, but it wasn't very much. And they're like, and I, you know, I like walk in with gloves and the guys are like, looking at me and I'm like, I want to buy some lead. And they're like, yeah, okay, come with us. And we went in the back room and the guy lifted up a heavy sheet of lead and dropped it on a bandsaw, mew, chotted off. And I got a half inch sheet of lead weighing 24 pounds. I drove it home and essentially cemented or epoxied it into, into the centerboard. Just funny. Lead, lead czar us, I guess, maybe. The second interesting thing about this boat is that this is, since this is custom, I put in an electrical system. So this was a wiring diagram that I built up. If you're a real electrical engineer, then you could pick this apart, but it doesn't matter. I built this because I wanted to understand what it was that I was doing, and I'm not an electrical engineer by trade. So I put this together. The end result is that messy wiring up there, that messy wiring right there. And this is the really interesting part. This is essentially a, a cavitation mount trolling motor mounted upside down. It's got 55 pounds of thrust and I can't equate that to a horsepower rating. I don't know what that would be, probably like a quarter to two thirds of a horse or something. I don't know exactly. But it propels the boat pretty much at whole speed when I turn it on at about a third of the, third of the power of the motor. So I know a couple of years later, I actually installed a battery state of charge meter. Remember I was talking about electric cars, know a little bit about this. I installed a state of charge meter because I was, I was paranoid that I would turn on my motor and I would drive somewhere and then I would kill the motor out or kill the battery out. And then I would be stranded or stranded somewhere. So a state of charge meter was a nice insurance thing. Okay, there's, there's actually something interesting about the pictures on the left there. Anybody care to kind of look at those? Anybody here an electrical engineer or maybe an automotive engineer would probably notice us right away. All right. There's two buses here. There's a negative bus and a positive bus. It's a little bit easier to see here. This is a negative bus and a, there's no ground. I can't ground to the boat, right? It's all wood. Yeah. I can't ground to the boat. So I have to actually have a bus that leads all the way back to the, to the, and that's kind of why I made that wiring diagram because I couldn't just do it the one way I had to do. Okay. The other interesting thing is that I had to flip it over. So I had this thing in my garage. I had to flip it over so that I could do the fiberglassing. And this is, we'll talk a little bit about fiberglassing later. This is a shot of the fiberglass. That's a shot of me half, half flipped over. And then this is a shot when I was all done. I had to build these skigs. I actually burned out a jigsaw trying to build these skigs out of red oak, which is quite hard. The other interesting thing about it is that it's black. And the reason why I did that, we'll talk about epoxy additives. It's black because I added graphite powder, the same stuff you use to lubricate a lock when you, when you're about to go pick it, well, we all know what sort of conference this is. Maybe if you're just like, your key is broken in the lock or something and you need to get it out. That's, that's graphite powder. And the graphite powder adds a lot of a, a lot of abrasion resistance, right? It's kind of like carbon fiber in a way, but it's not, it's poor man's version of carbon fiber. But it does add some abrasion resistance. And that's a good thing for the bottom of boat to have. Here she is on the trailer. You can see the black quite well. This is before I started doing all the finishing work. I like this one. And the reason, again, I'm not trying to talk you through 600 pictures here, but I like this one because you can see where I was sanding it down, right? It's no longer that shiny black. So I had to sand it down before I painted it. And that's kind of what that results in. That's me painting on the boot stripe there. Now she's red. And here I rigged her in my garage, or rigged her in my front yard one sunny day in late May of, let's see, that would have been 2015. I had no idea what I was doing. I had never rigged a sailboat like this before. It took me forever. But when I finally got it, I was like, I'm an engineer, right? So I'm like, okay, I did that once. Let me do it again the second time exactly the same way. All right, that works. Right. And then I went out and did it on the water and I've learned some sense then, but that's the point is, yeah. Okay. The other, interesting thing, and this is the last one, is that summer I knew I was going to spend at least a few nights on her. And so I built myself a tent and I was terrible. I didn't know anything about sewing. I hadn't sewed in years. So I left a lot of these ragged edges and it looked bad. And I've got, I redid that then. So I redid it just this spring. I dragged out a sewing machine and I made some nice, nice tight cuts around here. And I installed little button snaps all over the boat so that I can sleep under that. And again, sleeping on it is really nice. I actually made two of these tents. One of them I made out of just duck cotton or duck canvas like this. The second one I made out of an old tarp because I was like paranoid that this would leak. You have to be very taught. The idea behind a duck canvas is that the cotton will swell and then once the water hits it will just run right off. But that means you have it really taught and tight. And I don't really have this all that tight. So that's the last of my pictures, I think. Oh, there you go. The bonus of me taking it on the Center for Wooden Boats in Port Townsend a year later. Okay. So this might be more interesting to a few more people is how to work with epoxy. I find epoxy fascinating to work with. Like I said earlier, you mix together a couple of liquids. Oh, most people think of epoxy. They think of the five-minute kind that comes in the syringes. You sort of stir it up and then you jam it onto something and hopefully it'll stick forever. And it doesn't. And it breaks at some inopportune time. When a boat builder thinks about epoxy, this is what they usually think of. There's a lot of brand names and they all compete against each other. I'm not endorsing these guys. They're pretty good. They're actually interesting. So the important bit that you need to know here. We already talked about this. It hardens to a plastic in four to six hours. It's a resin and a hardener. The ratios are usually by volume somewhere around one to two. The stuff that I use is a one to four volume on that. So usually the way you do this is you have little hand pumps that go in the jar. And they actually showed that. There they showed the little hand pumps there. It's really important because if you mix it up and you say one, two... Oh, shit, I forgot. Do I need one pump or two pumps of the hardener? So you alternate. Just little techniques, right? Epoxy guys really do this, really work this a lot. The other really, really interesting thing about epoxy is that it's exothermic. So as it's curing, it's putting out heat. However, it also cures with heat, right? This is not an oxygen thing. It's not a glue. It's not a water in the atmosphere or anything. There's a lot of ways that glues work. But this is purely a chemical reaction. It gives off heat and it cures faster with heat. So there's one really interesting thing. My son did this. He did like four pumps, right? One, two, three, four pumps. Actually one, one, two, two, three. And as we were... And he had to wait for a little while and he started... All of a sudden he kind of started going like this. And I was like, what's going on? And I grabbed the bag from him. A lot of times what you do is you mix it up because you mix it up with additives to make it thicker or harder or whatever. And I sort of squished it a little bit and I could feel a hard ball in the center. This is the concept of what do they say, nuclear bombs, like a critical mass, right? It hit a critical mass and the heat, because heat radiates in 360 degrees. So where's the hottest point exactly at the center? That part cured into a hard little ball and it started spreading out even further. And so he eventually had to take that mix and set it outside and just let it cool outside. And it boiled over a little bit and it made a huge mess. But I find that really fascinating, right? It cures by its own heat. So you have to work with it really carefully. And if it's a hot day, then you only have maybe 20 minutes of shelf time, if even that. As a matter of fact, you'll notice that on this page right here. Oh, you can't read that. It says fast hardener. A lot of times they have fast and slow, or maybe fast, medium, or slow hardener to mix with these. Quite often, it is used with fiberglass, which I was astounded to read, really truly is glass fiber that they spin, because it's very flexible. I have some down by the little boat project if you want to come down and take a look at it. Kevlar. Kevlar has an interesting properties of being able to spread out when a force hits it. It kind of spreads out, which makes it a nice bulletproof thing. Or carbon fiber, which is not good for bulletproof stuff. It is however good for abrasion resistance. It will just deflect the energy to the side. Well, actually, that kind of sounds like the same thing, doesn't it? But that's that. So we've been through some of these, I guess, the good and bad properties of an epoxy. They're flexible. It can crack under stress if you have a lot of it really, really thick. It can be a little bit brittle. It's very easy to work, although you do have limited shelf time, limited mix time, limited time with it, but when you get it, you can work with it. There's a little bit of VOC volatile organic compounds that come out of it, but it's not toxic. The first time I tried to work with it, I was prepared to put on a respirator. You do need a respirator, but not for that part. What you need the respirator for is sanding, because if you're sanding anything down, if you make runs or drips or anything like that, you really, really don't want that plastic in your lungs, especially if you've added additives to it. I guess we say that over here. Additives make it really versatile. We'll go through some of those additives. Oftentimes, it's stronger than wood. So a lot of people say that when you make the bond, the wood on either side is going to crack before the epoxy does. One thing that's never happened to me is skin allergies. Once you develop to skin allergy to some of this epoxy resin, you just can't work with it anymore. You don't want the sanding dust in your lungs. Sanding is really common and really boring. I mentioned those fillets earlier. You can spend a lot of time doing that. My wife was very angry with me for even having a tent in my garage where I kept the boat with all the sanding dust that came out of it. And then finally, it's rather expensive-ish. Certainly expensive enough that if you're building a boat with it that you don't want to sink, that you want to invest some money in it, but it's a tad on the expensive side. Versatile. We were talking about this. First of all, if you coat wood with it, it's a plastic, so it's a waterproof coating. Make sure you do it a couple, three times to make sure you get all through there. It can be used like a very, very strong glue. The usual additive for this is a silica dust, and that makes it very strong. It however, does add some brittleness to it, but it's a good strong glue. We already talked a little bit about the fillets. I have got a diagram for that. Let's think about this filler to hold fasteners, but not too brittle. If you have a really brittle, think about wood. You put a screw into wood, and it holds that screw in there, and you can't pull it back out. But if wood were more brittle, you could just pull it out, and then you've got a screw hole that you can't do anything else with. So there's some additives. Actually, wood flour is a great additive. Just sawdust, really fine sawdust. You add that, and now you've got a very powerful, or a very good substance that you can drive a screw into. Cavalera chyburn fiber. The brothers who invented that West system got into wind veins, the big ones that you see out in the prairies. They got into building those for a while, and so most of those are now built with the epoxy over carbon fiber. And then chemically wise, I find this one fascinating. The epoxy is hard within about four to six hours, but it's still chemically active for something on the order of 72 hours. So if you need to add a second coat on top of it, add it within 72 hours, and it'll just chemically bond to the other one because it's terrible if epoxy delaminates. You've got two layers, and it just pops off because it didn't have enough chemical bite to the other one. You can sand that, and you can get it to stick, but it's better just to do it within 72 hours. We talked about the mixing of the resin, and I guess I kind of went through these, let's see, chopped glass fiber, strong, terrible to sand, glass dust, like literally glass dust you can add in there. Never bothered to do that. Micro balloons, these little teeny balloons that have just a little teeny air pocket in them, so it expands the volume without adding a whole lot of, just expands the volume, and that makes it really easy to sand also. Some fairing mixture. Fairing is the process of taking a surface and making it nice and smooth, and so that's a sanding thing as well. Graphite, we already talked a little bit about the graphite. Silica powder, I've got that sum down below, strong brittle glue. We talked a little bit about this, the open time is how much time you have, and again I find this really fascinating. When we started working with epoxy, the guys were like, oh you got open time, you got set. It goes off, is that phenomenon where the center just gets too hot and all of a sudden it starts getting firming up. Green epoxy is not quite cured and very flexible, you can cut it with a knife if you want to, and then they have the whole vocabulary about consistency. Mix me up some peanut butter, or mix me up some honey, or mix me up something, and everybody will know what you're talking about. Okay, so I find this also really interesting. So this is, just think of this like in a plank, so a plank you're going to put on the side of the boat. Your C&C, your 4x8 C&C machine can't cut you a 12 foot piece of wood, you just can't do that. So how are you going to join together two pieces of wood to make a 12 foot plank from a 4 foot 8 plywood sheet? Well you could butt it together, you could take your epoxy right here, mix up some with some glue additive, shove it together, and then put fiberglass on the top and the bottom. It seems like a decently strong thing, and it is, but there's not a lot of glue in there, and so some people started to use scarf joints, and scarf joints are easy, you stack these on top of each other, you take a plane and you plane them down on the side, and then you've got the same angle and you can turn one over and put them together. You've got a lot of glue in there, so it's a nice strong bond. You put the fiberglass on top of it, it's probably not going to break, but it's a lot of work, and so I specifically wanted to call out, I mentioned those puzzle joints earlier, and I should have zoomed in on this just a little bit, but you can see a puzzle joint right here, and it's these fingers, I can't do it with my fingers, but they sort of interlock like that, and now you've eliminated, if you think about the surface area that's in that, you've eliminated the lack of surface area, right? You've got this curve that's all there and it's fit together, I think this is an area where CNC guys totally made this, because nobody before CNC machines would have cut these finger joints, nobody would have done that, but it's totally plausible with a CNC machine, and so nobody hardly uses scarf joints anymore in woodworking. See the puzzle joints? Okay, so I have a little demo boat build that I'm doing right down by the maker tent down there, stop by and watch me for a little while. What happens if you have to make a butt joint at an angle? So what I'm doing down there is I'm using a technique called stitch and glue, so I drilled some holes and I put some wires through the holes, and then I twist them off down here, and that binds it together real well, it's kind of loose in this picture, but it binds them together very well, and then what I do is I push those wires down as far as I can to kind of push them in there, and then I build a fillet over the top of that, and this is what I talked about earlier, the fillet goes all the way here, so you've got a lot of bonding strength on that wood right there, you've got a lot of bonding strength over here, it's very hard to shear it this way, it's very hard to shear it that way, it's very hard to bend it this way because you've got all this right there, makes sense, let's see, and then you go ahead and you fill that in with, I've just got some syringes down there, so you just go ahead and fill in that little gap there, by the way that takes a lot of sanding and smoothing over and things like that, and then finally you go ahead and lay your layer sheet of fiberglass tape over that, and you run that all along the whole joint, and now you've got a very very strong joint that's probably not going to crack on that, again you're probably going to crack the wood or you're going to break something else, okay we're coming to the end of this, so if you ever work with epoxy, I already mentioned, count your measured pumps, work quickly or your batch will go off on you, work cleanly, if you get lots of drips and things you're going to have to sand all those drips, and unfortunately wood is soft and epoxy is hard, so if you're sanding like this you're just going to like take off all the wood around the drip and maybe take a little bit more off the epoxy, so just be cautious with that, cabinet scrapers work really well if you're a woodworker, pre-coat wood with raw epoxy, you never just put additives or epoxy that has additives on it to the wood, because it doesn't sink well into the wood, so you want the wood to absorb as much as you can, so you pre-coat it, you can use a heat gun to heat up the epoxy if it's really really messy, and then you can scrape it with a like a paint scraper, for the same heat reason the heat with a heat gun later on it makes the epoxy much softer, and so don't paint epoxy black, because it'll absorb all the sunlight and then it'll soften itself up, it's the last one, oh we're a respirator when sanding, don't forget that part, okay chapter three sailing, this is sailing for engineers safety first, so this was a summer camp that some of the scamp nerds put on, and this guy here is John Wellsford the designer of the boat, and this guy here is my friend Howard, and if I have enough time we'll talk a little bit about Howard here, I'm going to try to wrap it up, this is cap size testing, right, so know how when your boat goes over that you can get back into it, and in this case it's pretty easy, you've got a centerboard on the other side, so you swim around, you grab the centerboard, you drag it down, it'll pop, the boat will pop right back up, and then what you have to do is get yourself get your body back into it, it's got fairly tall sides, so there's a lot of a lot of ways to do that, but essentially I've got a rope along the side that I can just put my feet on, sort of spread my legs a little bit, and then drop my drop my body over the over the gunnels, so safety first, and that's it, that's all right, safety first on this one, there's a lot of other sailing tips, but that's not really where we're going to go with this one, so this is, I don't really do anything, but if you go down to the maker stage, I've got a boat build going in progress down there, this was the four foot sheet, four by eight sheet of flywood that I cut this from, and you can sort of picture how there's one piece, one piece, one piece, one piece, one piece, and then two half pieces, you put them all together, I did all that part at home, I cut all those parts, because I knew I wasn't going to have power tools here, and I have power tools at home, so I cut all those pieces out and then and brought them here just like that, the only thing I had done previous to this was gluing these together, because I just didn't want to do that in the field, I just did it at home. Okay, it looks like we do have some time, so that friend of mine, Howard, so Howard was there, John Wellsford, the designer of the boat, flew up for this camp, as well as this guy named Howard Rice that I had never heard of, Howard in 1989, there's Howard right there on the left, John Wellsford is the designer of the guy on the right, in 1989, Howard Rice got in a 17-foot, he calls it a sailing canoe, we would probably call it a kayak here in the Pacific Northwest, it has a little bit more open cut, which makes it technically a canoe, but whatever, he got in that sailing canoe, and he went around Tierra del Fuego, right, South America, I've got a picture, yeah, so he was sailing, so you're kind of familiar with this, right, here's the Strait of Magellan where all the ships go through, and then they come back out this way, and they go up that way to get Tierra, unless they're going through the Panama Canal, so Howard did something that very very few humans on this planet have done, he went down into this national park down here, which there's a lot of shaking of heads, this is like incredibly dangerous, right, this is Tierra del Fuego, land of fire, it's windstorms galore, and all these little, actually let me zoom in one here, oops, there, so here, to give you a perspective, Punta Arenas was the town that he came out of for this latest venture, I don't know about his earlier one, and so I'm going to zoom in to about this area right here, so what Howard did was Howard was about 40 days out, 45 days out, and he was somewhere down, I've never been quite clear, but he was in one of these little bays down here, south of Isla Dawson, he was down in one of these little bays, and he got caught for three days in 80 to 90 mile per hour willowaws, and a willowaw, look at, you can see how they have got the little teeny bays there, you can think of it like fjords, right, they're very tall, but then the wind comes whipping down, and Howard got caught in those for three days before he could finally get himself out, and the boat actually capsized, and so Howard had to self-rescue himself, he got himself washed up on shore, his boat was over on the side, and luckily there were some fishermen nearby that he was able to get to with the radio, and they came and picked him up, he easily could have died, he's an amazing individual, but I guess I started this story by saying 1989, he sailed amongst all this stuff down here, and he did it for about three months, living on his own, as a matter of fact he said one of his goals of this latest trip was to go back, because he had buried some food or some supplies on one particular island, that he's dead certain are still there, because nobody ever goes out to this area, because it kills you, right, so nobody ever goes there, so the interesting thing about this whole story is not my friend Howard, well actually he's kind of an interesting guy, but the fact that he took the exact same boat that I have out here, and modified it slightly, what you'll notice is he put, this isn't the Bermuda rig that I talked about earlier, it's called a gaff rig, but it doesn't matter, he's got a jib on here and a gaff rig, and then this is called a y'all back here, and he chose that particular layout, but other than that the boat is pretty much exactly the same as mine, although he didn't have a motor, he had ores, that's all he had, it was ores and sail, and he spent, well his plan was to spend up to 90 days down there around the same area, so I think where I want to leave with that, and this is pretty much the end of the deck, and I'm happy to take questions, but kind of where I want to leave with that is a good design, John Wilsford has even said that of all his designs, of all his boats, the scamp design is what he feels is the best for the purpose that it was designed for, now his design was not to go sail around to Yerard El Fuego, but nonetheless he feels like it's a very good design boat for a 12-foot boat, which is what Howard liked about it, and so I think that's as an engineer, as a software dude, and things like that, I like to think about good solid time-tested designs, and this is not a boat that you would look at and say yeah that's a solid time-tested design, it doesn't look like a lot of other boats, she's kind of portly, you know it's kind of beanie, it's a small thin little boat, it's not something you're going to spend four nights on, oops, yeah it's just the design is if it's effective then it's effective, it may not be what you expect, but it's an effective design and it works, and I really do enjoy sailing my little boat, yeah, oh there's a picture of Howard in his boat, he named it the Southern Cross, you can tell he's a big fan of organization, he would make a good software engineer, he puts everything in its bin where it belongs, he knows that when he writes malloc he has to write free somewhere else, and he's got everything well designed out, these are his self-rescue slings right here along the side, so if he goes overboard he grabs one of those, does the same thing where he blops himself over, yeah he had to build a couple extra things, he had to build these spars out here on the bow and on the stern for his particular sailing rig, and so that's my friend Howard, he is alive, he did make it back, I saw him, when did I see him, I saw him in September last year, yeah so, and I haven't seen him since, but he's an interesting guy, okay so that's the end of my slide deck, when I was building the boat I have a blog, these guys have building supplies, this is the small craft advisor where I have the community of scamp players, gig harbor boats, if you're interested not in building a boat but having the same boat, gig harbor boats makes a fiberglass one, and then Howard's blog is down there, and I don't think he's updated his blog in a while, that's what I have, I'd love to take any questions or play my slide deck, I did have a whole bunch of pictures in here because I didn't know how good the internet was going to be, so, any questions? No, the center board is not asymmetrical in any way, it is, there's a design, again like the BS1088 thing, there's an organization called NACA, and I can't tell you what it stands for, but they're the guys who essentially bless every sort of foil design because essentially that's what it is, it's a foil, as it moves through the water it has lift properties like an airfoil, and so I do know that it's measured out to NACA, some sort of NACA curve that's well approved, but it's totally symmetric on both sides, as a matter of fact that's kind of interesting, you saw the picture of the of two halves being glued together, as far as I can tell those were two completely, I mean they just took the same same piece and made two of them on the CNC mill, that by the way was a lot more than nine millimeter plywood, that was, I don't think you're going to be able to get a view of it from here, yeah, you can see the ply, there's a ply there, a ply there, a ply there, a ply there, a ply there, a ply there, so it's very smooth like that, when I got it, C&Cs are good at a lot of things, but like making totally angled things, at least the ones that they had, so it was kind of rough, I just sanded it down a little bit, the rudder was the same way, I didn't put any pictures in here, but the rudder is exactly the same way, by the way I had to cut that 24 pound piece of lead into two pieces, and the guys at the lead shop were like, yeah just use your jigsaw, and then wash your hands afterwards, like, but I can't buy a house without licking the walls, or you know, worrying about lead based paint, and you're just telling me that I can, I can just cut it with my jigsaw and then wash my hands, I still don't really get that, but yeah, no, the foils are same way one side or the other, as far as I can tell it makes no difference to the sailing of it, any other? So the course with Howard and John Wellsford was about two grand, I think, for me to stay in Port Townsend, and to take that course. The kit itself cut from plywood was 2200 bucks, and that's actually not that expensive, because those sheets of BS1088 plywood, a 4x8 sheet at 6mm, last time I looked about 80 to 100 bucks, so there's 12 of them there, right, granted they're probably getting a little bit better discount at the CNC mill, so I didn't feel like that was a bad cost, and then my time, I never added it up fully, but I know that I have more than a thousand hours of building on it, I started to get manic on things like that, so like the last speaker here, right, you're thinking about, you had to step away from it the night before, and so you're gonna go back the next day, and I had a plan for everything I wanted to get done, it often went wrong, but at least I, you know, did something, I pretty much did something most nights and most weekends for a whole year to put it together, so a thousand hours in a year, yeah, yeah, so if you ever have a thousand spare hours on your hands, yeah, build a boat, what the hell, yeah, nothing else? Oh, one more, couple, what I did specifically was I came in here, dropped off some of my boat building supplies, and then drove down to Lieberhaven, and it's about a two and a half mile sail up here, so unfortunately I can only get to my boat when it's when it's low tide right now, unless I feel like getting wet, and getting wet at 10 o'clock before I go to bed or 11 or midnight or whatever, not really very appealing to me, so I'm actually gonna go out there tonight and sail back down tomorrow morning, and then I can then I can be here, because I haven't been able to party any night that I've been here, so I gotta fix that problem, yeah, so I'll do that tomorrow, the plan was to do that on Sunday, but that whole getting wet thing every evening is really not my bag, is there something else? Yes, I'm not familiar with the monocoque process, I know that you're using the structure of the materials to structure other materials around them, and I can't really give any insight into that, it kind of does in a way, a lot of that structure was in the egg shelling, but then it's interesting because the planks that stretched along each side, they really only had, I said there were eight bulkheads, they really only had eight attachment points at each one of those, and so you just put, and they didn't even make a big fillet on those or anything, you just sort of put them on there, attach them on there, this was interesting, when you attach them to that six millimeter plywood for the bulkheads, there's some new plastic nails on the market, you can either use a stainless steel nail, which will never rust, or you can use a plastic, but if however you hit a stainless steel nail with your plane, you have to go back and redo everything, or trying to sand a stainless steel nail is kind of ridiculous, so the new plastic nails, I did not use any of those plastic nails, but I'm very interested in trying some of those for various applications, so I can't really compare monocoque construction to this, but I have a feeling there's some similarities, yeah, all right, thank you.