What shall I wear?

Wow. The Betty Boop is finally at the point where her final appearance is about to be determined. What should she wear to the ball? What make-up? Which dress? Heels? Necklace? Does this make my ass look fat?

I spent most of the last two days poring over old pictures of the boat, trying to figure out what color she really was, which "red" is right. The old classic Grand Canyon Dory red? (an automotive paint, 1954 Cadillac Aztec Red.) No. Too red. Jim thinks more of a tomato red. I agree. Almost an orange. In fact the color I settled on is called Allis Chalmers Orange--a reddish orange tractor paint. If this picture isn't sexy, what is?

Turns out that it is almost exactly the red of my dory, Cataract. Maybe I just like that color.

The other agony has been fine-tuning the white line on the side. I wrassled with images of Ronn Hayes's stripe, and tracings I made of Larry Testerman's stripe. Both had a barb on the front and tucked down to the chine in the stern. Ronn's harpoon curved back (Ronn's son Pete says they picked the harpoon motif to emulate Ahab's quest for the white whale, the Canyon being Ronn's Moby Dick--gotta love that) ; Larry's barb curved forward. We chose Larry's. It seemed to play better with the prow line.

I am a big fan of proportional lines that diminish precisely at the same scale the hull measurements do--fat in front, slender in back.  Both Ronn's and Larry's dove proportionally and got fatter toward the stern. A bit clunky to my eye. Ronn's was too high in front and left no room for a name. I like a name up there. In the end I picked Larry's bow proportions and diminished them proportionally to the stern.

Is it becoming apparent that I am anal compulsive? You ain't seen nothin yet.

And then came the font for the name. I wanted something that evoked Betty Boop. I YouTubed several of her cartoons--some of them over-the-edge provocative--check 'em out--but no fun fonts. But in a book of her cartoons, drawn by Max Fleischer, her inventor (he's the artist who came up with Popeye), I found what I wanted. I sucked the letters out in PhotoShop and lined them up for the bow name. Love it. Especially the little dingbats on each end that look just like chili peppers. 

Oh, the agony. Wanting to get it right.

In the end we picked Ronn's original name and a distillate of his color. We chose Larry's forward-arcing barb and his bow proportions. And Max Fleischer's hand-drawn font.

Yup. That's it.

Oh, and why not take that harpoon handle and run it right on over onto the bottom? Seems appropriate that every now and then folks will get a glimpse of Betty's curvaceous butt. Imagine how that will look as she pops over the big wave in Sockdolager. Boop-oop-a-doop.

Tomorrow she gets another coat and we pull the masking tape. Those dark harpoons will suddenly become blinding white. A final offering at the Betty Boop shrine and off to bed.

Whitey tighties

I did a bit more sanding this morning and around noon, painted on Betty's underwear, an enamel undercoater. That crazy side patch really stands out--but the story of Ronn Hayes driving into a gas station canopy with his brand new boat, and putting huge patches on both sides of the boat, is too hilarious to ignore. It's part of the boat, as are the patches.

Tomorrow the paint goes on. Although I have excavated some traces of the original paint which, according to Gary Ladd, Hayes called "Canyonesque Pink." But Ronn's son recalls the color as being orange, and the Lord Calvert ad shows as being red. The wee chips are a hideous neon pink that I just can't bring myself to replicate. So I am going with the Lord Calvert ad colors--red, white, and baby blue.

Back from the dead

Another big day. We faired out Betty's hull, spliced on her partially missing rub-strip, and replaced her outer chines. Each was a bigger process that we anticipated, but each we accomplished without tears or swearing to any major extent.

This bizarre picture is the inside of one of the outer chine strips that we removed last weekend. If any piece of a boat was unlikely to be salvageable, it would be the outer chines--the first thing to hit when you hit. But damned if we didn't rescue 1.75 of the original two. This picture shows the inside of one of them--covered with rotted boat sides and paint and debris, glued on with a thick later of silicone. Fortunately a sharp chisel peeled this whole disaster off, and a bit of scraping and sanding brought out some fine, unrotted mahogany.

Anyhow, we faired out the hull with microlight and RR 2040--our new favorite resin. And scarfed on the piece of missing rub rail. Then the rehabilitated chines went on. Here is a shot of the jig that is about to pull on the new piece of chine as soon as it comes out of the steam bender.

And here we are awaiting steam bender, which has just about cooked a new piece of mahogany to perfection. It is nice to wait and watch from out here--far fewer volatile solvents in the air, even if it is approaching zero degrees.

And on it goes--fast, before the steam cools.

And now, no matter where you may bang on this hull with a hammer, the boat sounds solid, strong, and ready to go boating. We are desperate to paint her and roll her--but maybe breathing a bit of fresh air is a better idea for a few hours.

Ground paint and xylene

Ugghhh. What a long day of wretchedity. Even though I managed to procrastinate until nearly four o'clock, I still ended up with nearly an eight-hour day in the shop and, thanks be to cussedness, I got done what I hoped to get done.

A) trim the floor back into the plane of the sidewalls. Done: with a Dewalt circular saw and grinder.

Here it is about half done:

B) Remove old paint from boat. Done: With a paint scraper, belt sander, random orbital sander, grinder, a lot of patience and muscle, a modest amount of alcohol, and an assortment of other tools. And swearing.

The stains on the floor are from a Lord Culvert blessing on Tuesday. The big patch on the left near the chine is replacing an old bad patch and a bit of assorted other trauma.

C) Saturate the entire exterior with penetrating epoxy. Done: with about a gallon and a half of Restor-it, also known as Clear Penetrating Epoxy Sealer, also known as "thinned down crap" (by my epoxy chemist friend) (but hey, I bought it before I knew... and it does seem like it will stabilize and seal the old boogered wood.)(epoxy chemist says use a really good low-viscosity epoxy and thin it with xylene--better product at a fraction of the price.)(the bastards are charging you about $80 a gallon for the $15 xylene they are thinning theirs with, says he.)(next time. Like I say, I'd already bought the stuff.)

This is after about four liberal coats. The wood has finally stopped slurring it up.

It almost looks like a boat again. Tomorrow, assuming this stuff kicks in a timely fashion, I will fair out the boat for sanding, add the missing half of the left rub strip, and perhaps even affix the outer chines. Then I can paint it! Whee!

P.S. I shed my clothes and took a long hot shower an hour and a half ago. I can still smell the xylene.

Floored

After yesterday's epoxy seminar I Tom-Sawyered several of the participants into helping put the floor on the Betty Boop.

Here is the gang under the boat, practicing for that nasty flip in Granite Falls. And marking all the ribs and chines so we can place our screw holes and edge cuts precisely.

Screwman Tanner Pattie pauses for refreshments, while drillers Andy Hutchinson, Jim Hall, and Roy Lippman wait for him to catch up.

I do a victory dance.

And we discuss why a few of our precise screw holes didn't catch the screws. It must have been the lord's will.

The discussion migrates up to the house.

Demo derby

We spent a good deal on Monday, Tuesday and this morning making things out of fiberglass and epoxy, then wrecking them. No just to be spiteful--we are looking at switching to a more modern, less toxic, and from what we can tell, far more appropriate epoxy product. 

In September, Greg Loehr of Resin Research signed onto a Grand Canyon trip on which I was rowing my old Briggs dory. The topic inevitably turned boatbuilding and it turned out Greg had been developing leading edge epoxy resins for the surfboard industry for the last three decades. You know, surfers, those dirtbag guys who don't have a lot of money but abuse their equipment to an unparalleled degree. Kind of like boatmen. Anyhow, Greg volunteered to come up to my shop and put on an informal seminar for several of the local resin-heads, and see what we thought of his product.

Greg's outfit, Resin Research, makes four different resins, ranging from very hard and brittle to pretty flexible and resilient. For us, flexible and resilient sounds pretty good. Our epoxy of choice for the last three decades, the venerable Gougeon Brothers' WEST system, dependable as it is, is quite brittle. And we crash our boats into rocks. And they explode.

So here is a table full of lay-ups we made with wood, foam, fiberglass and Greg's 2040, the most resilient of his resins.

And here is Dan the next morning, testing a fillet joint we made. He is synthesizing a bad wreck in a rapid by hurling a fifty-pound hunk of pig-iron at our sample.

We were mightily impressed with how tough the 2040 is. We did some comparable tests with WEST and, well, they shattered pretty badly. Puncture tests were equally impressive. In fact, a layup of toilet paper with 2040 was significantly tougher than WEST with fiberglass.

Eventually, of course, Dan and the pig-iron won. But it was nearly always the substrate--wood or foam--that failed, and not the 2040.

So in my humble opinion as a crazed boatbuilder, I'd advise any and all of my ilk to get hold of some of Resin Research's 2040, check it out, and consider switching brands next time you run low on resin. Not only is it way tougher, it is far less toxic, and most importantly to the dirtbag boatbuilder, it's cheaper.

Resin Research

Project 21 resins, including 2040

They also have a super-fast hardener called Kwik Kick, for those of us that are ready to do several processes in a row without waiting days for stuff to kick:

Kwik Kick

No adult supervision

See....
The problem is that Jim comes by, and we're both bachelors with a tendency to go off the rails, especially when we're in bad company.

Things started out really well. Our scarf joints from yesterday came out wonderfully. So we went ahead and began cutting the new inner chines out of the giant megaboard that Crazy Allen Wilson made me strap to my car in Oregon this summer and bring home. Sweet, holy, yummy Port Orford Cedar.

But that long line of magical sawdust got us headed the wrong way.

Okay. Stop. Go outside. Fire up the steam bender to make the new chines suffer that ridiculous bend of Betty Boop's prow. Except that they are eleven-foot boards in a nine-foot steamer. Hmmm. No problems. Strap a river bag on the end.

But watching the steam boil out, and the drip, drip, dripping of the condensate out the far end made us get bad Port Orford thoughts again. By god, it's a still!

Then the wheels really came off. The rotted shrapnel of the original floor looked so much like a shrine that we had to follow through with the concept.

But this was good. We had somewhere to pray for the chine boards to actually bend without exploding.

It sorta worked. But shoving the cooked, bent boards in and out of the wicked bend seemed to be causing them a lot of stress. So we figured we'd just shove them in once and trim them in place. Very professional. Here is Jim cutting the precise 8:1 scarf in mid air. I've already screwed the far end in place. Don't try this at home.

Cut to guess, grind to fit.

Well, okay, before we got our prayers right we did have one teeny weeny explosion. But the board broke at such a radical diagonal we decided to call it a scarf joint and glued it back together in place with a magic potion to help it heal.

At day's end, things looked pretty good. Yesterday the old rotten bottom was still in place. Tonight all the rot is gone or stabilized, and by morning it will be ready to put the new bottom on. Oh yeah--when we weren't snorting Port Orford shavings or distillate, we redesigned my DUH scarf jig and scarfed up a new half-inch bottom. Betty Boop's gonna be a boat again.

 

The candles must be working.

Huge day in the shop

After an hour of snowplowing while the shop heated up, Jim Hall came by and we modified two old sawhorses to hold the Boop. Then the crane (I love my crane) helped us flip the boat on to its stands.

 The outer chines put up a bit of a fight coming off, as they were glued on with copious amours of silicone, but we persevered.

Then we dug away at the bottom screws, spaced at about three inches apart on average and caked with many colors of paint. Let's take a minute to praise old-style slotted screws. It is so easy to knock the paint and putty out of the groove and back them out. Had they been phillips or square drive, we'd still be digging.

This gave us a fine display of what was too rotten to save and what was good enough to keep. This next shop is from the heart of the rot zone. It's hard to see in the picture how bad it is, but there's a lot of boat missing here.

No problem. Cut that junk outta there. Here Jim is scarfing the trailer guard board back to a 8-1 bevel. Roy is cleaning up the fatigued edge on the far side. To the lower left we have removed a long strip of unsalvageable side. Next Jim is going to bevel this new edge as well.

The far side is now impregnated with epoxy and squeezed between a clamp or two, which will strengthen the traumatized plywood edge to at least its original strength if not moreso.

And finally we scarfed in a new panel on the near side. By tomorrow morning we'll be ready to replace the forward two-thirds of the inner chines, which we removed due to rot.

A remarkably productive day. Time for a sip of Lord Culvert.

Lord Culvert

Exciting news in the boathouse. While searching high and low for a few items in town, I sank to actually going the the WalMart. And danged if I didn't stumble across a bottle of the very whiskey that Betty Boop advertised way back when. So of course I bought it.

You know, it's not that great, but whatcha gonna do?

If only the bottle were square it would probably taste better.

By chance I got an email that evening from Gary Ladd, good pal and boating buddy of Larry Testerman, later owner of the Boop/Great Thumb, mentioning that it was he, Gary hisownself, sitting in the front seat of the Boop in that advertisement as Ronn Hayes piloted through Crystal Rapid back in 1971.

Ready to roll

I got all the little frame pieces affixed that the decking will attach to. Only 13 pieces of decking to cut! And five hatch lids! Piece o' cake. 

For some reason I decided to keep one piece of the original decking--the leany-back face of the trunk. I should have pulled that too, but I just wanted one piece from it's former incarnation. I dunno...

The bow bulkhead is now about three inches further inboard in order to coincide with the ribs. Seemed to make a lot more sense that having a second rib in the middle of the footwell.

She still looks pretty scary with all that weathered wood and peely paint, but it's an illusion. She's pretty damned sound now. Well, mostly sound. Sound enough to roll over and remove the bottom. Then we'll see what scary things emerge. I think the inner chines will need the center 60% replaced, and a few pieces of the outer wall will need scarfing in. But that's not too bad.