March 2012

Wouldn’t you know it we had several weeks at the beginning of March that were mild enough to start placing the molds on the ladder back frame. My fellow boat builder friends; Bud and Ben came over one day and we temporarily placed all the molds on the ladder-back. We attached 2x4x 48 lengths of lumber to the edge of the mold that met the ladder back. Once these were attached we attached them to the ladder back with 3 inch screws. You know, all the books make is sound so easy to place the molds on the ladder-back and instantly they’ll be aligned both laterally and horizontally. Well, that didn’t happen in this case! It’s a real job to make sure that each form is aligned to the center line. We needed to use a shim here and there but we did it. All the molds were in place and the stem was attached to the 1^st and 2^nd station mold. At this point I had spent 57 hours working on the boat and spent $866.20.

February 2012

The next step was to build the stem’s mold. I followed the plans and built a plywood form to bend the stem. For a uniform bend I have found that you need many, many clamps and since I didn’t have sufficient clamps, I made clamps using two 5/16 x 6 inch eye bolts for clamps. Here’s what I did: I drilled 1” inch diameter holes in the bending form and then used ¾ dowels that went through the ‘eyes’ of the bolts and attached a short length on wood to the top to form a U bolt type configuration. These bolt clamps work extremely well as they don’t leave a ‘cupped’ area in the middle of a piece of wood like a C clamp does.

To make the stem I purchased a white oak board that measured 2x6x60 and ripped the oak into 17 1/8 strips. The white oak board cost $37. As you may know, white oak bends extremely well but it needs to be soaked in water prior to bending. I then soaked 8 strips in water for 3 days and bent them around the form. I found that the white oak bent easily without having to steam the wood. The downside of water soaking the wood is that it took a long time to dry; particularly in March. So to speed the process I decided to glue the strips together with Gorilla Glue. The moisture content in the wood aided the polyurethane glue to form a tight bond and formed an interior stem that had little if any spring back.

January 2012

Over the New Year’s weekend I started cutting out the boat’s permanent molds to the lines drawn on each mold from the ¼ luan plywood. This was quite a process balancing the 4x8 sheets of plywood in my workshop and then cutting them out with my jigsaw. I soon found out that a standard ‘up cut’ jigsaw blade doesn’t lend itself to a clean cut line.  The plywood splintered terribly so I changed to a ‘down cut’ jigsaw blade. Using this type of blade is harder to start but the end result is much better to work with, all the splintered edges are on the inside of the mold. I was able to make a jigsaw cut to 1/8 of an inch from the ‘traced line’.  By the end of January all the molds were cut and sanded to their individual mold lines. The sanding was challenging and I found the best solution was to build a mobile stationary disc sander from some parts I had hanging around my shop. It is important that the surface be square to the sides of the mold. While taking a break from all the sanding, I thought a change of pace was in order, so I built the 16 foot mold ladder back. On completing for ladder-back I found that it was quite unwieldy and decided that I would make legs for the mold with 6 inch wheels. This worked great.

January 2011

The first thing I did was label the plans per the one page list of instructions.  After reading other boat plans, schedules, lofting requirements, tables of offsets, etc., I found that the labeling process is very helpful in understanding how the boat is put together. I than started a “Cut List” to determine how much lumber I would need and the type of lumber that I would need. I quickly found out that this wasn’t the place to start. There are so many pieces of various wood types and lengths that it’s hard to get a realistic list together. So I decided to make a model of the boat to the scale of 1 inch to the foot. Here’s the sequence of events that followed for the building of the Melonseeds hull.

March - June 2011

I purchased a sheet of 1/8 inch birch plywood, a book of tracing paper, a can of spray adhesive and started tracing out the scaled plans for the Melonseed. I than cut out the station molds, formed the stem and transom and assembled them to a ‘to scale’ ladder back form. After doing all of this and recovering from bronchitis I started to put ‘to scale’ planking on the model. As I was moving along on the planking process I happened to drive up and see Mike Wick’s new melonseed project and he suggested that I add 3 inches to the sheer line of the boat. So I decided to experiment with the model. This worked well, so I thought, why not, and I gave it a try. I thought the extra height of the hull looked good so I decided to keep it as part of the boat.  Adding the ‘to scale’ station molds, stem, transom and planks really got me to thinking about the lumber size and requirement for the real boat. Between work, family and spare time I finally finished the boat’s hull about the beginning of the Summer of 2011.

October 2011

In October I finally had some time to concentrate on the Melonseed project and I went ahead and purchased the necessary plywood to build the station molds. From the model I determined that I would need 10 sheets of ¾ inch plywood for the molds. I decided that I would make the molds from imported birch veneered plywood. This plywood has very few if any voids and the veneered face is great to draw on. Well, when I went to order the plywood I found out that it came from Peru and the plant that manufactured this plywood had a fire and shipments would be delayed for who knew how long. My supplier had 14 sheets in stock and I decide to buy all of them thinking that I could use the extra sheets for other parts of the boat.  I also ordered 4 pieces of S/P/F lumber @ 2x6x16 for the mold’s ladder back. The total cost was $513 delivered. 

November/December 2011

I started tracing the plan’s described station mold patterns. I then glued each station mold tracing to ¼ inch luan plywood, added the extra 3 inches to the sheer and determined the distance from the plan’s baseline to the top of the mold. I did the same for both the transom’s mold and the stem. Once all the station molds were on ¼ inch plywood I faired each mold on my shop built stationary disc sander. I like to use ¼ inch plywood for a mold template to assist in transferring the proper curve and dimensions to the permanent mold material. Some will probably say that this is an extra step but after building 4 boats, I can assure you that it’s time well spent. This method also assists in utilizing the best space on the ¾ inch plywood mold.