More bottoms

Seems it's the year for new bottoms. The old Julius shredded his bottom over his many floats, swelling, shrinking, swelling, shrinking, swelling, cracking, tearing loose screws, swelling, shrinking, cracking some more. But he's going to be fine.

Here is a shot of Julius when he was a youngster back in 2002, when I rowed him to Hoover Dam:

And here is a link to Buzz Holmstrom doing the same 75 years ago.

After Jim and I pulled the bottom off on Sunday, we filled all the screw holes, repaired most of the cracks, and trimmed off all the irreparable sections. Today I cleaned up all the patching, resurfaced the ribs and chines, and scarfed together two new planks. We decided to go ahead and rip the original floor boards in two, so now I'll be replacing the original five floorboards with ten narrower ones. More screws, more chinking and caulking, more battens, but I think it's going to work out fine.

Here are the ripped down floorboards. I left the outmost two boards wide and will trim them off after we plank the boat.

Two new narrow boards are being laid up in the back of this next picture. They will go near the center of the boat, thus forcing the older boards further out where I can trim off more of the troubled edges and ends.

In the foreground I am scarfing together a new floor for my wee McKenzie boat, Juan. Juan achieved a smidgen of notoriety in 2007 when we built him in a week for two hundred dollars worth of lumberyard wood (and a little more than that in beer and whiskey). But alas, although the rib work, gunwales and sides all held up just fine, the 3/8" CDX floor turned porous last year. When we built it I noticed (and filled) a lot of voids in the center plies. But I couldn't fill the zillions of hidden ones. When the outer plies started to crack with age, water began flowing through the entire floor. A bit disconcerting, that. And impossible to patch. So I am adding to the cost of the boat by $75 for a new Meranti mahogany marine plywood floor.

Here is Juan a year ago on the lower Colorado with his chuck-box seats out on the beach, one of his floorboard tables set up, and the seat backrests guyed onto the table as wind blocks in the downstream howler. This was day four of the trip and Juan's floor had swollen up and stopped leaking. But the first day was a little frightening. And embarrassing, as our shuttle driver watched us bailing frantically, sinking quickly. "We'll be fine. Really." Over the course of four years Juan had become okay for an expedition, but kinda worthless for day-boating. He'll be all better shortly.

And the beat goes on

Off go the dories with their new bomber bottoms. We'll see if minor insults such as they received in the past few years cause any new visible results. Based on our product testing, wethinks not.

Next up--or next down actually--is the Julius, the lapstrake replica of Buzz Holmstrom's 1937 wonder boat in which he became the first to solo the Green and Colorado Rivers. By subtracting a foot in length from the classic Galloway design and adding that much in width, Holmstrom created the best boat of its time. But Buzz's original boat disappeared in the fog of time, last seen in the 1950s in his home town of Coquille, Oregon. Newspaper ads with photos of its last known appearance brought us no results in tracking it down. 

So Roger Fletcher of Rivers Touch and I recreated it from the many photographs in existence. With a lot of help from a lot of friends, we built Julius in 2001. I put about three thousand miles on him in the next three years, running the Green, Colorado, Rogue, Salmon, Yellowstone and Grand Ronde--all the rivers Holmstrom rowed in his brief, brilliant whitewater career. Julius handles as nicely as Edith did crankily--due to Holmstrom's uncanny homespun designing and boatbuilding skills. 

But dry desert air, alternated with prolonged immersion in rivers, repeatedly shrank and swole the bottom, loosening the screws and cracking the planks to the point where no amount of soaking would tighten her back up. And a confession: there were, before I built adequate shelter, a few seasons of irresponsible storage that put undue strain on the decking. So for the last few years, Julius has waited patiently in the loft for a reboot.

2012 is the 75th anniversary of Buzz's big run, and I plan on taking her down Grand Canyon on a celebratory AzRA trip in April. So down Julius came around noon today and Jim and I lit into the bottom. Off with the battens.

Some of the screws didn't really appreciate the shrink/swell ride. In the background is one of the bigger cracks that formed over the last decade.

And off with the tortured planking.

Stunned we were--stunned--by the sheer tenacity of the SikaFlex caulking we had applieded between the bottom planks back in aught-one. Man, that stuff is killer strong. But we, too, are persistent.

Things look very good inside other than one cracked floor rib. We fix. And one split inner chine log. We fix.

The floor planking, for the most part, is in good shape. Here we are repairing a long split, figuring an epoxied split is no weaker than a new board, and new fifteen-foot Port Orford cedar planks are hard to come by in Flagstaff.

Back when Julius was new I used a hot copper tip on a propane torch to burn the name into the sheer strake. Turns out I only burned the oil/varnish on the surface, which all wore off. I'll torch him better this time around.

I am thinking a lot of the stress of the swelling boards was accentuated by the fact that the planks were quite wide and not quarter sawn. Flat-sawn planks such as these swell a lot more. (And cost a lot less--unwise savings, that.) So we are going to rip the planks in half lengthwise and hope that several narrow boards will self-destruct less catastrophically than a few very wide ones did. We'll add a couple pieces of new wood where a couple old planks rent themselves asunder. In '01 we simply butt-jointed the planks. This time we will cut the proper bevels in the joints and chink them with cotton before caulking. That worked wonderfully on the Edith. And we'll hope for the best. Hey, I got a lot of miles out of the original floor, so this may last the rest of Julius's career.

Firm sexy black bottoms

After a couple days prepping and taking care of other details, life, etc. (here's Dan grinding and puffing the Euphrates)...

...we hit the shop hard at about nine o'clock this morning. Greg Loehr of Resin Research not only sold us the resin, but drove up from Tucson to deliver it and lead the charge laminating the new bottoms. That's a full service epoxy man.

Dennis is back on his feet, more or less, after his losing argument with a water taxi propellor in Belize last December. He adopted the role of mix monkey, supplying the team with resin. Jim ran interference taking care of whatever the rest of us were missing, and Dan and I were lowly squeegee-ers.

Dennis and Jim admiring Lodore in her silky whites before the juices get flowing.

The juices get flowing.

Greg spreading goo.

 Pushing out the bubbles through 25oz biaxial glass, Xynole, and 6oz cover glass, all-to-oncet.

Why is everyone laughing?

You can't keep a good man down. Trimming the green glass before it's too hard to handle.

Four and a half hours later, including a pizza break, the bottoms are flow-coated with graphite and resin, and are firming up in the wood-fired shop. Lodore and Euphrates are far better equipped for their next conversation with a midstream immovable object. Dang, if Greg hadn't short-circuited so many of our favorite hard ways to do things, we could still be up to our elbows in goo. I guess making 35,000 surfboards helps you to refine the technique.

Changing of the guard

This was a weekend of major transition at the boatshop. RJ Johnson brought in his 1974 Briggs boat Surprise Canyon for a few repairs and modifications. In an earlier life Surprise Canyon was Nonnezoshe, and ran many a trip with the Betty Boop (then known as the Great Thumb) and Gary Ladd's Tatahotso. This was the first time Surprise and Betty had seen each other in more than twenty-five years and I imagine they had quite a bit to catch up on during their two nights together in the shop. (We let them have some privacy.)

RJ wanted a removable transom, which was normally stock on Briggs boats, in order that he could drop on a motor for those pesky reservoir crossings. What is more fun than cutting giant holes in boats? Yahoo.

The hinge on one of RJ's hatch lids had ripped the end-grain plywood to smithereens, so we re-saturated it with epoxy and made it back into a solid substance.

Lest the same thing happen again, we switched the placement of the hinge to beneath the hatch lid. Here I am routing a channel for the new hinge placement.

And RJ is screwing the reconstituted hatch lid back onto the boat.

Meanwhile the build-up of the removable transom is hardening, along with a repair on some delaminating side-wall plywood.

Jim is creating a brace to go in the bow hatch, where the two stock horizontal ribs meet the bow post. This was a weak spot in all the Briggs boats and they usually blew out on the first solid wave hit. I know I blew two pair of them out of two different boats in two consecutive trips back in the early eighties, both of them in Waltenburg Rapid at extreme low water. Boom! BOOM!

That should do 'er.

Jim also put a wonderful finishing touch on the Betty Boop—an Andy-Hutchinson-style decoupage of the classic Lord Culvert ad featuring Betty herself on a 1971 trip.

This morning the boats bid each other goodbye, Surprise Canyon heading back to Boulder City,

 

and Betty Boop heading upstairs to offgas paint fumes for a while. Those two boats will see each other again soon, I bet.

It was also the weekend of my final switch to modern epoxy. Out with the last of the WEST System,

 

and in with a slick new dispenser for Resin Research.

And lest things get boring around the shop, before noon we brought in two more boats in need of a beefed-up bottom: the Lodore and the Euphrates, both born in this shop two years ago, but with not quite a tough enough bottom lay-up. That's about to change.

Edith meets the family

This being the one hundredth anniversary of the Kolb brothers' expedition down the Green and Colorado, the Grand Canyon Association decided to do a retrospective show of the Kolb bothers' escapades during their three quarters of a century on the rim. Many Kolb descendants came to the opening on Wednesday and Thursday so Edith and I drove up to join them. Here is Edith getting her first rim view of the Canyon:

Down in the Kolb Studio we met Emery Kolb's grandson, Emery "Smoky" Lehnert and his wife Ruth. Smoky grew up at the rim with Grand Canyon and the Kolb Studio as his playgrounds. This is their first visit since Emery Kolb died in 1976. Boy, do they have some stories. 

Storytelling runs in the family, and Smoky's daughter Jennifer suffers from the affliction as well.

Jennifer's daughter Kerstin, one of Emery Kolb's twin great-great-granddaughters, listens to grandpa spin another one.

Edith spent all afternoon basking in the sun in front of the El Tovar.

Even the new Superintendent, Dave Uberuaga, succumbed to her charms.

It was an utterly delightful time. What a treat.

(thanks to Wayne Ranney for the last two shots)

Now what?

Well, Betty Boop is, for all practical purposes, done. Woohoo! She needs some water. White water. Soon.

Here are a few catch-up photos from the last few days of being too tired to tell stories. Below is a shot of drilling the holes for four eleven-inch stainless steel twelve dollar goddam bolts that hold the oarlocks to the gunwale. The levels are clamped to the side of the boat to give me a visual idea of where I am heading. Astonishingly, it worked.

Test-fitting the new hatch lids.

Hurrying the epoxied-on nonskid texture by the wood stove.

Peering through the self-bailer with the boat up on its side.

Painting lids

Then suddenly this evening: done.

Now what? Plenty. Tomorrow Edith comes down from the loft to go for a ride up to Grand Canyon for a party with the Kolb family on Wednesday/Thursday. Betty will be going upstairs to let her paint cure until a river screams out for us to go run it. And Euphrates and Lodore will be coming in this weekend for a bottom beef-up next week. No rest for the psychotic boatbuilder.

Feliz año nuevo

Betty Boop and I rang in the new year with an evening visit from Audria and Laura, wherein we toasted, got roasted, and launched a flaming chinese hot air balloon that immediately got caught in a tree. We freed it in time for it still to fly high, with much shouting, screaming, a ladder, and a long stick. 

When midnight struck I took a break from painting hatch lids to send up a few aerial fireworks. The launch mortar tube blew to smithereens on the first launch, more smithereens on the second launch (after a quick fix) and into final fragments on the third, showering the driveway and my long-suffering van with exploding magnesium sparkles. 

My omens predict a year of things going hilariously, spectacularly awry. Excellent!

As you see in the picture, Betty Boop is nearly done--a day or two of details and she is ready to rock--hinges, latches, a few dollops of paint. I had figured three weeks to refurbish her. Ha! More like about seven. But without my blind, manic, unrealistic optimism, I'd never start anything. And without all the incredible help, encouragement, advice, and occasional jeering from so many fine friends, I'd never get anything done. Thanks to everyone who has been a part of Betty Boop's rebirth. She'll be floating soon. Happy New Year y'all. 

Boop-oop-a-doop.

The envelope please...

Well, here are the eight contestants for our floor bottom beef-up. Lots of hammering and rock hurling went into this careful scientific analysis.

And the winner is...

#2.

A layer of biaxial cloth, covered by a layer of Xynole, whatever that is, and covered with a layer of 4-ounce glass to make it easy to finish. All laid up with Resin Research 2040. 

Number 2 looks a little worse for the wear, but that's because it went though the semi-finals and finals. It held up remarkably to some serious abuse, failing well after we thought it would. The runner-up was #8, which was this same lay-up with a layer of Core Mat beneath the biaxial. It was the toughest of all but the additional weight and expense did not seem worth the marginal increase in toughness.

A few of the others flunked outright. Such as numbers 4 and 5 here, which are two different weights of Core Mat with Xynole and 4-ounce glass. The Core Mat just collapses without a biaxial covering. So there you have it. Losers!!!