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Re: Honey, have you finished fixing Elude yet? 1937 35' Cruiser

Posted: Thu Nov 29, 2018 1:28 pm
by robertpaul
On page 6 of this thread, I repaired the corners of the windshield frames and prepared them for re-assembly. Over the last couple of days I have finally put them together and it seems that it worked out ok. I had a can of Pettit Seam Compound that I acquired around 1992, and it worked great as bedding for the glass in the frame. When I popped the lid, it filled the room with the aroma of boat materials of the past. It was perfect. So here are the pics of the process and a toast to never throwing good stuff out.

Re: Honey, have you finished fixing Elude yet? 1937 35' Cruiser

Posted: Sun Dec 02, 2018 10:50 am
by robertpaul
Now that both windshields are assembled, all that remains is to clean them up and re-finish. However, I wanted to check to make sure that the two are at least close to being identical before I do anymore. I will test fit them on the boat (which is 400kms away) but for now I just positioned them face to face (as they are not square) to see how close I came to matching them. So either they both fit, or they both don't!

Re: Honey, have you finished fixing Elude yet? 1937 35' Cruiser

Posted: Sun Dec 09, 2018 8:49 pm
by robertpaul
Now that the windshields are done, I have turned my attention to repairing transom planks. The transom consists of five planks, almost 9' long for the top one, and just over 8' at the bottom. They are 3/4" thick and over 10" wide. Of the five, the second and third from the top are originals, and possibly the top one as well. I won't know that until I pull some fasteners. At this time I have the third plank at home and it is in very fine condition except for the ends where it was fastened to the cheeks. The cheeks themselves are ok (white oak), as the rot really got into the mahogany. The following pictures show the details and what I am dealing with. Fortunately the deterioration is limited to the very ends of the plank. My plan at this point is to cut off the offending end and then scarf in new material. I would like to recycle some of the excellent mahogany I have from the original bottom planks but this would require laminating and planing for thickness, and scarfing two pieces side by side to obtain the width. Not difficult but it will leave a visible line lengthwise. The vertical seam is unavoidable no matter what I do. Using the original material means that the grain will be identical, as well as hardness. Other than DRM, I am not sure I can come up with material similar enough to the original to blend nicely. I am very open to suggestions. You will see from the pictures why this plank is going back to where it was. I really like using the originals where I can.

Re: Honey, have you finished fixing Elude yet? 1937 35' Cruiser

Posted: Mon Dec 10, 2018 8:22 am
by joanroy
I replaced the bottom third of my transom. The top section was repaired prior to my ownership. What they did was cut back the plank ends to the first frame, repaired the corner frames, and fitted vertical mahogany dutchmen the same length and width on both sides. Sanded in, stained and varnished, it looks great. Yes, you can tell it’s a repair, but a really nicely done repair. It was a way to save most of the original plank and not have to go through the trouble of removing, bending and fitting new. The dutchmen are probably about six inches wide and eighteen inches or so long and well above the water line. There’s nothing wrong with a well fitted and fastened repair.

Re: Honey, have you finished fixing Elude yet? 1937 35' Cruiser

Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2018 1:27 pm
by robertpaul
I went to my stash of original bottom planks and quickly found one that looked to be a likely candidate for re-use. None of the bottom planks are as wide nor as thick as the transom planks so I will have do some laminating. However, I cut a length of the best part (about 6') and trimmed off a few inches from the end to get rid of the butt block fastener holes. I passed it through the planer a bunch of times, taking off only a minimum amount each time. It is cold and the rollers on the planer won't grip well enough to move the plank through if I try to take off too much at one pass. The material is a hard as nails. Here are a few more pics.

Re: Honey, have you finished fixing Elude yet? 1937 35' Cruiser

Posted: Fri Dec 14, 2018 4:25 pm
by robertpaul
I am in the final stages of fabricating the blank that I will scarf into the stbd end of the transom plank (see previous posts). After laminating, I squared them up with my mitre saw. Then I selected the sides that best matched grain, and where the grain might help hide the horizontal scarf joint. The next steps are to cut down the width of the blank to near the width of the transom plank. I will leave it a bit proud on both edges because I might need to fiddle with gluing up the final scarf. Before I cut the scarf in the plank and the blank, I must plane the blank down to 3/4" to match the plank. Currently the blank is around 1 1/8" thick. I would have liked to make a deeper scarf for what I did today, but I decided it was better to get a nice machine cut even if only 45degrees. It will be miles above the waterline anyway.

Re: Honey, have you finished fixing Elude yet? 1937 35' Cruiser

Posted: Fri Dec 14, 2018 5:35 pm
by joanroy
Gotta love the way that old growth mahogany comes back to life out of the plane. That’s good wood!

Re: Honey, have you finished fixing Elude yet? 1937 35' Cruiser

Posted: Sat Dec 15, 2018 5:15 pm
by robertpaul
Yes, JR, it is lovely stuff. I ran the new blank through the planer several times just now. It still needs to lose about 5/16" to get to the proper thickness, but it is dark and cold so I will continue tomorrow. Although the glue line is starting to disappear I expect it will still be visible in the end with some squinting. Once down to the proper thickness I will drill out and plug the few holes with wood from the same plank. The holes have some epoxy glue in them that squeezed out during the lamination process. After that I will make the scarfs in the original plank and this piece. That will be a fussy business because I would like at least a four inch overlap, which means cutting the scarfs by hand.

Re: Honey, have you finished fixing Elude yet? 1937 35' Cruiser

Posted: Fri Dec 21, 2018 10:30 pm
by robertpaul
Over the last couple of days I have been at the boat. It was cool in the building, hovering near 1c. It is fine for wood working, although I can't use paints or adhesives. I have lots of to do over the winter preparing the bottom for final caulking (gapping and filling where the sealant did not fully flood the gaps during assembly) and I want to finish the topside planking so that it can be final assembled in the spring and painted. Yesterday I used my Bosch 2632 hand plane to finally take down the new chines (22' on each side) where they were proud of the bottom. Almost an inch proud! To my shock and surprise the plane zipped through the job very quickly with no major errors on my part. The chines are still about 1/16th proud, but I will finish that off with a hand plane and ro sander. Here are some pics of the pre and post operation. I also did a thorough vacuuming of the inside of the hull/bilge, and inspected for where I may have missed frames with fasteners. My final count was 5 screws just alongside some frames. I will fix but I am quite pleased that I only missed 5 out of 3500 or so.

Re: Honey, have you finished fixing Elude yet? 1937 35' Cruiser

Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2019 3:46 pm
by robertpaul
Meanwhile, back at the ranch..... I have been working on repairing the ends of the transom plank shown in the posts above. I am using re-cycled bottom planking for the job. So far I have scarfed the recycled material onto the stbd end, and it seems to have gone ok. The grains match well with just initial sanding to smooth the joint a bit. I would have liked the seam to be less conspicuous, but after staining it may be less visible. For the port end I have routed down to the bottom of the rot and pieced in the first repair. When the epoxy glue for that has cured, I will rout the area flush and laminate a much larger piece to finish it off. I will not do anything else to it until the spring when I can fit it on the boat and do the final finishing.

Re: Honey, have you finished fixing Elude yet? 1937 35' Cruiser

Posted: Sun Jan 06, 2019 4:48 pm
by robertpaul
Second piece glued into place at the port end of this original plank. I ran the grain at 90degrees to the original plank to mitigate splitting at the end on the outside. Being lazy, it also made it easier to fabricate a single piece to span the width of the plank. I still have some very minor repairs to make on the inside edges of the plank, but the small areas of rot only penetrate about 3/8" at the most. You can see what I mean in the pictures below. Maybe three or four small spots in all.

Re: Honey, have you finished fixing Elude yet? 1937 35' Cruiser

Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2019 2:14 pm
by robertpaul
Clamps off and some clean-up. I have done a bit of sanding to remove the epoxy glue squeeze-out and, in retrospect, next time I will tape over the fastener holes to minimize how much escapes. It will make clean-up easier. I will do the final shaping after the plank is re-installed. I still have to clean up a few parts of the edge along the length of the plank, but preliminary work with a chisel shows good wood after 1/4", so that will be easy. I suppose I could just clean out the soft stuff and paint the new edge since it will not show. That leaves 1/2" of thickness in these spots. Plenty strong but the space may act as a water trap behind the frame/batten. I will fix it. So ends the the excruciating detail on this little piece of repair work.

Re: Honey, have you finished fixing Elude yet? 1937 35' Cruiser

Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2019 7:30 pm
by robertpaul
Just when you thought I wouldn't try everyone's patience with itty bitty repairs to an original plank, I will do that by showing how I repaired the edge today. Tomorrow I will remove the clamps and clean it all up. Like it or not, I will share that as well. It's winter and we are all itching for wooden boat stuff anyway.

Re: Honey, have you finished fixing Elude yet? 1937 35' Cruiser

Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2019 11:20 pm
by jfrprops
keep it up...much enjoy your progress reports, John in Va

Re: Honey, have you finished fixing Elude yet? 1937 35' Cruiser

Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2019 11:25 pm
by robertpaul
Thanks John. Here are a couple of pictures of the finished repair. I still have a little bit of hand sanding to do on the top edge, but it is square and near done. I have a few more spots to fill in a similar manner, as well as a crack in the plank where the metal step was located. I think over the thousands of times our family and the ones who preceded us stepped up from a swim, the plank cracked a bit. I will repair it by laminating a piece of mahogany across the grain on this inside of the plank.