Jimmy’s Boat

Many years ago, like mid eighties, I built a boat but it was a stitch and glue boat. But it was one of the coolest things I ever did because when it rolled off the trailer, 15 ft fishing boat into Lake Minnetonka and I stood up in it and then sat in it and it floated and didn't take water. It's, it's exciting. It's exciting. So you're building a boat right now. A rowboat. Crazy cool design. It looks like it would roll like a dream. So tell us about, I don't know, why are you doing that? And then tell us about the boat that design the, you know, sometimes we have insecurities as woodworkers and we like to challenge ourselves. And they always say building a boat is a, an extreme test of your skills. A few curves. Yeah, a few curves, compound curves, nothing square. Um There is no square spots on the boat and if you could navigate Chine, the chine of the boat. Oh, really? I didn't know that. I mean, I heard that it's on the canoe like I'm because I'm doing a cedar strip canoe right now. So coming around the corner was coming over the chine. Yeah. And I, I built a cedar strip canoe as well from Bear mountain boats. I follow a set of plans and now this set of plans I'm following is also Bear mountain boats. It's called the Rice Lake Skiff. The first boat I did was the uh it's the ranger is a 15 ft ranger, was it? That was the model name. And unlike my stitch and glue, this is like laps straight construction. What's your, how are you coming together? Very similar, very similar, just like the cedar strip canoe. Although this time around, I was only given the plan, I wasn't given any material. I recycled my old deck boards or old dug fur deck boards. So I processed all the wood into one by quarter inch strips and then each glue up against the mold amid a AC NC mold based on the, the station design and plans. And I laid out the first strip on both sides and then every strip thereafter has to fit snugly against it as much as possible. And I, yeah, no, everything's just flat to flat. So you happen to have this tool here hanging on the wall. It's a wonderful thing. And that is so that the next board could fit against it flat. It basically makes everything 90 90 90. Because as you come up and over the curve things start to open up, they don't act exactly the way you would expect them to. So you need to rabbit plane it, or surface plane it, or use like a shoulder plane. So it goes right to the, the, of the bevel matches the edge of the next piece. Yeah. So it's not feeding cove like you would, if you were to get the material from, that's difficult to do a bead and cove because it's, you need 15 ft. How long is the one you're doing? Now? It's 14 ft. And where is it at? In the process? How far I'm nearly done. I just installed the seats this week. Now, the only thing left to do is to, is as far as construction is to build this like a little deck on the floor, I'll build the floor out. It's just a small little deck that you could pull in and out so that you're not standing in water if there is some water in the boat and then just do the finish. And I'm basically, and I think you so much like my canoe, um, upside down, you fiberglass, clothed the hull and then you epoxy over the top of that, the outside and the inside. And then I put the, the out the outer, well, the outer wells and the gun rolls inside. And that's pretty difficult because it was difficult, more so on the canoe because you gotta go up and in. So it's like a compound curve and it's a pretty severe curve on the recurve of the canoes, but this boat is more of a gentle gradual curve, but it still is difficult and enough. It's got enough uh, structure you can put on, tell, tell us about the little outboard you got because that's so cool. That's fine. I forgot. You remember that? I have a 19 twenties Johnson outboard motor and we got it puffing the other day. Me and Rob my assistant bought it at a garage sale. 100 bucks. I've seen them online for as high as 500. It's a little 19 twenties, all aluminum and steel, all aluminum and stainless. It's not polished up, but once it's polished up, it's gonna look beautiful. We had a great little addition to that way back in the day. My, my, uh, family had a Larson fishing boat and my dad had, had an eclipse outboard motor. I've never seen one since, but the funky thing with that was, um, it didn't have any kind of a magneto on it. So you had to have a 12 volt carbon battery to create spark. So the boat was pretty small for it to run like the battery had to be on it all the time. It was a coil, you know, you pulled it a pole rope so you pulled it to start it, but you had to have it connected to a battery to have spark. So you'd have like a can of gas, a car battery, an adult. And this motor in the transom of the boat. You're, you're like this all the time. And so, do you have a, did you have a favorite part? A least favorite part of the one thing I love about this particular boat is that it's just so classically beautiful, kind of reminds me of like the old fifties, forties. The beautiful design. I can't take credit for it, but I'm just following the patterns on the pages. And, uh I guess the most difficult part was every board on every layer is, is scarf joint because none of the boards from my porch were longer than 7 ft. So every layer, there's a scarf, there's a scarf joint in every single strip and just hiding the scarf joint each time was a pain in the butt. But I did the canoe. My canoe is a 16 ft and I had then like 17 ft strips to the 16 ft. And I was thinking as I went, like, I'm so lucky to be able to fair this curve in one continuous flow with one long piece instead of trying to do subsections. And then the idea of hiding the scarf joint is like, I don't want scarf joint right over one another because then that might create like a, like a, a facet in the boat. So I put the scarf join all the way on this side sometimes and then all the way over there and sometimes sometimes it landed in the middle but I made sure that they were at least a couple feet away from each other. They all land generally somewhere in the middle that, um, if you've not seen Doug Fir, I mean, you'll see Jimmy's boat here. Um, beaut, it's such a beautiful straight crane wood and it's all, this is all straight off my deck like this much. There's like 100 grain lines. It's unbelievable. The growth rings in this. It was my deck for the front of my house for at least 100 years. I ripped it off a couple summers ago, took a close look at a cross cut piece and went, wow, this is beautiful doug for hiding underneath all this aged surface and all this multiple layers of lead paint. So I processed it all and I it's got this beautiful interior as well. Well, I'm gonna look forward to when we see the video of you rolling out to see Ro Ro. And then I'm gonna go to start the motor. It's gonna fall off a couple and then I'm gonna go like I thought you packed the order. I thought when I, the boat that I made was rated for a 25 horse motor, but I gotta say it. I, I don't think I ever put anything bigger than a 15 on it. But the first day I had a motor hanging on the back and started it. I mean, talk about a test of your wood worker manship. Like, you know, you've got this torque on the motor and I'm like, God, I hope I did this transom, right. This transoms got three knees on it. That's like these corner braces, one that goes down to the Keelson, which is the strip right down the middle and then two to the sides, one on each side. So it's got three. It's a really fortified, robust fun. All right. Well, we're all gonna look forward to seeing you sailing m rowing.