Today was a gorgeous day. So beautiful I couldn't bear working under the dim tarp I have been laboring away like I was in a cocoon. I opened up the side with hull #1. It was nice to feel the warmth of spring continue though it is suppose to go back to cold cloudy. Much was done today continuing yesterday's push. Hull #2 is now glassed and has two coats of resin. I glassed the otherside of the rudder cheeks which I had started yesterday. Today my thoughts turned to decks and cabins as there will be some fitting. Yesterday I cut a cabin side a little prematurely. Remember to order extra plywood! The piece will be used somewhere but I have some clever layout to do to make everything fit.


Much has happened here since the first beginnings. Go back to my first post for a view of what my back yard once looked like. Between my boatbuilding and my daugther's digging the back yard is trashed.

The last shot taken with my Canon SD450 before the dreaded E18 lockup code appeared on the screen. Remind me to bring my sextant as backup to my GPS when the time comes to set sail! I have backup cameras but the SD450 was the most convenient. I don't much want my digital SLR around the dirt and dust. Camera repair anyone?

I was at it early today as I had to teach a class in the afternoon. I got at the boat at 630 am rehanging it in the slings to flip it over. This went smoothly and didn't take long. I guess lifting weights helps build the muscle strength needed to do this. I don't mind doing mindless/purposeless gym routines when I can apply it to real life lifting. Once I was into the 7 am hour and I could here the workers on the house being built a block away I fired up my sanders to take care of two fair patches I had done and rough glass and drips where I had overlapped the glass from the other side around. Next came a cleaning of the dust from the hull and then I laid out the glass cloth. To keep it smooth I hang spring clamps from it all the way around. I took my daughter to school and got right at glassing. By ten thirty I was done with the coating process. I had extra resin so I flipped the shelves I made yesterday over and gave them a coating. I also got the rudders out and glassed the upper cheeks. With an hour and a half until I needed to be at my teaching gig I got out the hull side panels and cut out one inner cabin side. Luckily I oversized the cut a bit though I didn't give it enough belly on the lower edge though this can be corrected. I may be encountering an issue because of how I'm deviating from Wharram's plans with an internal stringer but I've done it so I'll need to take care of it as I go along.

Since Hull 2 was on its side and the resin had cured enough to allow sanding I did just that. Then I gave it a second coat of resisn. That got me to 1030 am. I thought I was going to work on the hull all day so I had to think of something else to do. As I can't get started on the mast, not enough room with the boat on its side, I had to think of something else. Looking through the plans I saw that I needed to build two shelves for the area below the hatch opening. These I cut from 6 mm plywood and made a kerfed edge from some nice Doug Fir I have from a table I built a number of years ago. That got me to noon. To keep going I decided to check dimensions on the cabin sides verified that I was bang on height-wise but needed to make the sides slightly longer. I redrew the lines I had layed out in October of last year and sanded the side of this material that I had already coated with the first coat back in October too. I made up a temporary rack to suspend coated full sheets of ply and then layed down a second coat on the insided of the cabin sides and a first coat on one side of the shelves.

Speaking of shelves, I don't plan on cluttering the hulls with a lot of built-ins. Flexi-space remember! Instead I'll be using soft storage in the form of cloth bags that hang on the inside of the hull sides with twist fasteners at the top so they are well secured but easily removable. The rest goes below the bunks or in drybags.

With the self-imposed pressure of time 95 days to launch, I'm feeling the pressure to keep at the work. It is consuming me so I guess I've become a full-time boatbuilder.

I love the look of a big smoothed out roll of glass cloth over the hull

It looks even better once it has been wetted out

Jury rigging is an important skill. Here I'm supporting the hull with and old epoxy tub.

Deck stringers being prefinished

Jury rigged clamping. I didn't want to put more holes in the hull.
Today was a good day of boatbuilding. The temperature was in the sixties for most of the day so the resin I spread at 11 am to 3 pm was dry to the touch by 6 pm.

TRICKS - I have recently come up with.
1. to save on foam rollers store good ones that are impregnated with epoxy resin in a bag in the freezer. When you need them next take them out and re use. This works for brushes too.
2. to prevent disposable gloves from tearing or getting holes in them at the finger tips buy XL gloves and wear a pair of thin work gloves under them. I use the cloth type with a rubber coated palm.
3. to fair the fillet at the lower edge of the upper hull buy some base shoe, you need a 16" section, add a handle at each end and glue sandpaper on the curved face. Now you have a custom fairing tool that works great to get a consistent fillet at the joint between the upper and lower hull sides.

Here is a series of pictures from preparing the outside of the hull for glass. Today I contuned from where I was yesterday sanding all the filler smooth. First I used the belt sander, then a randon orbital and then a fairing board. I still have a couple of hard spots that I'll fair after I've glassed with fairing compound. One trick I've started to use for smoothing both fairing compound and glass cloth is to cover it with thick plastic 3 mil. The work I finished at 530 tonight I could already remove the plastic four hours later - yah! for spring and warmer temperatures.

I'll post some pictures later but I'm hard at it doing the second sanding of the outside of hull 2. I flipped it by hand, no straps yesterday and set it on sawhorses. Using my belt sander I knocked all the drips and runs off before I filled all the screw and wire hulls and faired the keel, stem and stern and the joint between the upper and lower side panels. I just came in for lunch and a cup of joe after sanding one side. I'll do the other once I've had my coffee.

On Friday I figured out thatt I have 99 calendar days left to launch day. That's why I'm working weekends. I have a great deal of work ahead of me before then. I hope I make it.

The week is over and I got an ok amount of work done. I had to work around other projects and commitments. It's 10:30 pm and I just finished gluing in the additional internal stringer I've added to both hulls at the deck level. In the end I wasn't totally happy with the way it worked out on Hull 1 so I changed it. In Hull 2 I used a 3/4 x 1 inch stringer with a 10 degree angle cut into the gluing face where it attaches to the side. It worked charms stiffening up the topside and getting what edge set there was out. It's warm here so if the glue is dry to the touch tomorrow I'll flip the hull over and prepare to glass the outside of the hull.

Not much work done today. It dumped in the mountains last night so I got in some turns in the fresh stuff. I'm 45 minutes from some world class skiing. By 1330 the snow was warm and heavy so I pack it in (first day of spring I guess!) and got home to do a little work. Tomorrow I can work undisturbed. I'll try to finish up the necessary carpentry for the deck stringers and beams before I flip the boat for glassing. Maybe this weekend.

I'm still not in my groove. For some reason I just can't get organized or into the tasks in front of me. Not that this is stopping me from working on hull two. I continued fitting deck beams today. One example of how I'm not in the groove is that I'm not using the most efficient techniques to get work done. Today after staring at a problem with the deck beam on bulkhead 2 that I struggled with on bulkhead 4 yesterday, I suddenly realized that I had the perfect tool to do the work efficiently and neatly. Yesterday the same issue took me a couple of hours to master.

The pictures today show my repair of the broken bulkhead, doubler block installation, temporary tension wire detail and installation of beams and stringers. I'm making plenty of shavings and some progress so I should be happy with my progress.

I got an comment from a Mark Andrews who was wondering if the Tiki 26 is trailerable. Absolutely! This is one of the reasons I chose to build this boat. I want to be able to move it overland easily. Here is a link to a picture on Wharrram's website showing a T26 siting on a trailer. http://www.wharram.eu/photos/index.cgi?mode=image&album=/Tiki-range/Tiki-26&image=Tiki_on_trailer.jpg You can also click on the box above to get re-routed to the right page of Wharram's website where can see the image. For those of you who send me comments, if you want me to reply by email you'll need to include an email address otherwise you show up as anonymous.

Today was not a great building day. I kept getting interrupted. Not good for getting in the groove and getting much done. Luckily I didn't screw anything up. I am working on deck beams, which require a great deal of custom measuring and fitting. Hopefully I'll get further tomorrow. I'm being tugged in many directions. Others want to steal my time.

I finished up all the upper hull fillets today with 2" tape each side. This adds a great deal of strength. I also glassed both sides of the broken bulkhead. As there is a great deal of tension in the upper hull components and the temperatures remain in the forties I'll leave everything to cure over the weekend. Monday will be day 100 of work in the shed. By my estimate I work on average 5 hours per day so I have 500 hours into the project. I have 106 calendar days till my proposed launch date so things are looking good. I may just make it!

These pictures are from today's work. Wire Spanish windlasses and glued joints.

More pics. I've taken to laying the boat on the floor. Easier than hanging by straps.

Blogger works! Owe! My bulkhead exploded. Yes it broke but as it's simple I can fix it. Sad that it broke but this is what I love about Wharram's cats. It feels like you could build one in the jungle with a machete and what surrounds you. As I have been putting hull 2 together, I've been checking dimensions. They are coming out bang on with hull 1. The bulkhead that broke has been relatively easy to get back in line and so far I have glued the crack. Next I plan to tape it and then put a strip of wood on one side if necessary as reinforcement. Today I got all the bulkheads in line and glued up the lower side to the bulkheads. It took some tugging and clamping but all is well and the fillets are in place. I didn't wire them this time round instead I did Spanish windlasses each side with wire from side to side and then drilled a tiny pilot hole and then inserted a screw into the edge of the bulkhead to hold everything in place. I have rubbed down the fillets with rubbing alcohol to smooth them so I can apply fiberglass tape over the joints tomorrow

I must be doing something wrong or missed some important message from Blogger about loading photos. BUT I have other ways........ For your edification I have loaded five hundred plus photos taken of the Tiki build. Go to www.flickr.com/photos/zeitgeistsurfer

Cheers Thomas

OK so I don't get it! I still can't load photos. Disaster struck today. My coat snagged on one of the bulkheads as I walked past it. It broke right at the lower hull panel. It was under tension and has sprung open. I will need to glass it back together when I can figure out how best to do so.

Blogger.com appears not to be accepting photos at the moment. I was going to load a couple of shots from my trip to Valdez Alaska. This is an amazing area. Huge mountains rise right out of the sea. You can ski from peak to sea. Normally it experiences huge amounts of snow. This has been a funny year. Snow has been sporadic and little new has fallen in the last few months. The trip ended up being a great deal of travelling for few turns. I skiied with my friend Michael who lives in Anchorage. The big excitement of the trip was a skier triggered remote avalanche that Michael and I set off. Amazingly it was triggered from about 1500 feet away and was classic in that its peak was at a willow coming out from a rock outcropping at a convex slope that was above 30 degrees slpoe. I was standing on a ridge right above the gully where the debris ended up. The other incredible thing was that a snowmobile had been highmarking the slope about two hours before the avalanche was triggered. Now back, I've unpacked and gotten back to work. Today I removed any remaining wires from the hull and prepped the hull for installing the upper hull sides. Tomorrow I'll sand the upper sides before I install them.

Yesterday was an exceptionally fine day. Sunny and it hit 75.8 F so I did wood work in m y bare feet. I put my shoes back on for gluing though. The bunks are now all in and filleted. Using rubbing alcohol to finish the filleted joints is very efficient. I fitted all the topsides, see little locator blocks in photos and then coated them and glued up the butt blocks. Today I will sand them and give them a second coat. This way they'll be ready for installation Monday when I get back from skiing in Valdes Alaska. It's dumping after a couple of weeks of dry cold snowless conditions so I hope it will be really great.

I've now done in less than a month, with my trip to Baja, what it took two months to do before. I really have to thank Scott Williams for opening my eyes up to using screws to temporarily holding things together. It works very well.

If you haven't read James Wharrams February 2007 letter on his website www.wharram.com you should, it's really good and sums up every thing right in sailing in simple boats like his designs and what's wrong with the mega yacht industry

I was re-reading some of my previous posts. I was intereseted in how I did things and how long it had taken. Thie second time around work is going much faster. This ofcourse is due to the fact that I have figured it out, had the pieces made and with experience was able to take some short cuts. I now have the bunks in place. All fillets on the lower hull are done as is all taping. Below the bunk level the inside now has three coats of resin. I added an extra coat as this area will not be readily inspected in the corners and will experience wear and tear from storing gear and supplies. This time around it has taken me one month to complete what took over two months on the first hull. Today I will clean up anything I can from the bunk installation and then I will assemble the upper hull sides which I might get to wiring in place tomorrow.

I finally really got back at it over the last couple of days. Temperatures have been in the sixties and warmer in the shed so the epoxy sets quickly. I cut out assembled and installed the bunk boards and re-aligned the hull while installing the bunks. The hull appeared to have been tweaked by a quarter inch at the top of the bulkheads so I fixed this. The keel was still true to the stretched line I have under it. The bunk boards add a lot of rigidity to the hull so getting it straight at this point was key.

I got a comment for a guy (Jim) in Hawaii who is building a Tiki 26. I understand his pull of the break when its going off - surfing. I keep getting distracted by powder in the mountains and getting on the water. From the pictures you can see that I'm not getting distracted by my bikes as they are covered in sawdust! I can see carrying a board or two on my Tiki too - it will make an awesone remote access boat. There are some phenomenal breaks on Vancouver Island that I plan on surfing from my Tiki with my buds. I'm not a big surfer but am starting to go more. I use too surf kayak a lot at Tofino before it became a well known break. There use to be ten or so of us who surf kayaked there and two surfers, two guys from the states who came up to surf and to avoid the draft. Hey Jim what island are you on? I might be on the big island in April. I'd love to check out your boat. Send pictures. My email is tsunamichaser at Yahoo dot com.

It is 12:26 AM and I am still at it. I finally got back in the swing of building, though it will be short lived as I fly to Anchorage Alaska Wednesday. Yesterday and today I made good progress on the bunks and the bunk hatches. I continue to learn new tricks and how to compress work so that tasks that were done in multiple steps and hence multiple days are now done together. Compressing work hasn't decreased quality. What I've discovered is that I did a lot of fussy work on Hull one that eventually got buried behinh fillets and in the end was pointless. Scott William's use of screws to hold bits and pieces together have be whole heartedly adopted. They are very effective. Tonight I discovered yet a new way to spread thickened epoxy. Previously, I would always make up a zip lock bag and squeeze out the resin cake decoration style. Tonight I spread it with a brush that I modified. I cut the bristles on the 1" chip brush off leaving only 3/4" of bristle. This make for a stiff brush that is perfect for spreading the thickened reisn when used as glue. Sort of like an acid brush I guess. I also prepped the hull so that tomorrow I can glue the bunk boards in. I can't wait to have both hulls to the same level of finish.

March 3rd and I finally feel back to normal. Laundry done, gear stowed and the various bugs caught in Mexico under control. I tried getting back at it yesterday but kept getting interrupted so after another load of chores first thing this morning I opened up the shed and cutting shop and got at it. I'd left off at the bunks and that is where I picked it up. The goal is to have these finished before I head to Alaska Wednesday night and to have the upper hull sides glued together ready for installation when I get back. With a full day of work today and the same tomorrow, it can be done!

I made it back from La Paz Mexico and an awesome trip circumnavigating Isla Espiritu Santo by kayak yesterday. Unfortunately I got some intestinal bug while there so I'm somewhat under the weather. Temperatures here are cold, snow on the ground this morning, so once I'm re-organized from my trip, I'll see what I can get done on the hulls. The shed stood up to whatever weather happened while I was gone. No leaks. The goal is to get started on the bunks in hull two. I've did the layout when I made the bunks for hull one so I just need to check the templates. Atleast I can cut out the pieces in the cold and prepare the pieces for installation.