Plastic Classic Forum

Four coats of spar varnish over epoxy. Now on to making/remaking the forestay and shroud attachments; the original homemade fittings are inconvenient at best. Whatever solution I come up with has to be installed before the deck.

Pictures below are today:
Don't look too closely; there are drips (boo!)
This is of the three patterns I made using Home Despot's best 1/4" underlayment at $10/sheet. Not too tough, perhaps; there is an extra 2" everywhere except along the centerline. This will allow me to ballast with suspended weights or with tie-downs to bow the deck to the curved deckbeams. I will fit the centerline joints and epoxy the backup strips on the living room floor. Then install the foredeck. Then fit the sidedecks. And at last the afterdeck.

Interestingly, the Shelmarine Lloyds BS 1088 marine plywood is about 4'-1" x 8'-3" and over 1/4" thick. Old stock (about three years in the barn and it was old stock then) of 5 equal plies of Khaya. Shelmarine cannot buy enough Khaya in commercial quantities which is why most folks today use Okoume.

The bricks ballast the underlayment to the curve.

Your Flying Dutchmans are all things of beauty, Doug - thanks for continuing to share pictures of them on this forum. And good luck with getting the deck on - how much more work will there be after that? The boat will certainly appear quite complete to the untrained eye after that!

SWOON...

I'm in love.

Thank you for your kind comments.

Here's more progress: The dining room table was the only place I had that was large enough to lay out the panel halves and plane their edges. I clamped the panels to the table and used a #5 jack plane as well as a little touch-up with the block plane.
Here's the foredeck glued and clamped. The joint is butted with a backer 'block', strip of marine plywood. The glue is West System's 105/206 (slow hardener) and their 407 low density fairing filler. The 407 may not be intended for bonding but it's the right color to mask an ill-fitted joint. I clamped to the largest flat thing I could find, the living room floor, in order to get the butt edges in plane. The blocks are 2 1/2 lb lead ingots that I cast as a way to neatly store all the scrap lead I'd collected over the years, mostly drain pipes out of our house.
Here is the finished foredeck and the after deck being glued. Unfortunately, my hot air gun is on Quetzal so I'll have to wait to see how well things did until we return from a weekend aboard. The hot air gun makes quick work of removing excess epoxy.

Aaaaand! Here's the foredeck glued and 'clamped' to the boat.

The last piece of deck went on on Thursday. I trimmed and sanded it Friday, then put the boat away for three weeks (I'm on my way to Borneo). The spray shield is just sitting there, so far; the deck needs to be fitted to it and to the other pieces of trim.

My grandmother and her sister used to sail a FD like that, but I have no pictures. Yours is beautiful.
And I'm envious of your travels- I lived on Borneo for a year.
Selamat jalan jalan.
David

Hulukupu wrote:My grandmother and her sister used to sail a FD like that, but I have no pictures. Yours is beautiful.
And I'm envious of your travels- I lived on Borneo for a year.
Selamat jalan jalan.
David

Selamat Meluncur

More progress. The coamings are in. I've roughed out rubrails using wood from a 1964 Hinckley B-40 mast. Great quality wood at the right price (if you don't count the number of trips from back yard to basement resetting the breaker before I realized that the dehumidifier was on and plugged into the same circuit).
When I was given the mast, I cut it into a length suitable for wood for a Flying Dutchman mast and for the rubrails. I used the aft section of the upper 22'.

We spent two weeks cruising Quetzal on the Chesapeake, so progress was somewhat delayed.
Port inner rubrail.

Each rubrail consists of a continuous piece fitted to the angle of the hull, bottom level and outside face vertical. Then the forward 9'-4 has a second piece making something of a spray deflector. Modern FD don't have sprayshields or coamings and no rubrails.
Port outer rubrail.

Then the tops of the rails were made flush with the deck, rounded and shaped, and sanded. Finally the whole shebang was sanded to remove scratches, dirt, etc.
First coat of varnish.

I'm using Pettit's 2015 Flagship. The interior and exterior of the hull and underside of the deck are coated in epoxy. The interior, exterior, and the top of the deck will finish out with 4-5 coats of the 2015.
Detail at the bow.

Now that all that clean wood cannot get dirty as readily dinged, I will prepare for all the fittings and their fastenings, coating out the bores, adding backup blocks, etc. Might not be until spring, weather depending.

Just gorgeous....more pics please!

Third coat on the deck; two more to go. New shroud and forestay fittings made; all holes in deck predrilled for fittings.
View from the hayloft. (Modern FD don't have sprayshields; these don't shield anything and snag the genny when tacking; pretty, though!) That's just newspaper on the floor of the boat; there will be 2" thick cakes of Dow ethafoam flotation upholstered in Sunbrella, tied down to the frames and stringers.
Shroud fitting - the aft sleeve is for the trapeze retracting shock cord; the jaw extends down to the actual chainplate and is adjusted with a wingnut (modern FD have a multipart tackle for adjusting mast rake from either side, on the fly(!)).
Forestay fitting - the aft eye is for the genny tack, the sleeve is for the adjustable forestay cable which is deadended back by the maststep (modern FD have a multipart tackle for adjusting mast rake from either side, genny and forestay, on the fly. Additionally, the genny would be on a roller furler, rather than hanks like this old boat. Additionally, the spinnaker would be launched through a large hole in the deck between that fitting and the bow.)
Thwart, traveller, mainsheet jam cleat, genny snubbing winch. (Modern FD don't have a thwart; the traveller is one of those dandy windward sheeting Harkens on a substantial track with multipart tackles to drag the car to windward on each tack; the snubbing is done inside the genny turning block and the genny sheet jam cleats are forward, next to the shrouds, so that the crew can be on a continuous trapeze.)

Well, the season is advanced, gettin' too cold to work in the barn, gettin' too cold to cure epoxy or varnish. Here's how far I got; 7 coats of spar varnish on the deck, nearly all fittings reinstalled. Yet to go next Spring includes: finishing the epoxy on the hull exterior, sanding and at least four coats of spar varnish. Restore centerboard and rudder, install rudder pintles, shorten shrouds to suit the new chainplates, install some few other bits of string and hardware, make Sunbrella wrapped flotation cushions for the sole (yes, lots of that varnished interior will be hidden under the flotation).

Absolutely outstanding work, just gorgeous.

WOW, That is without a doubt the most beautiful restoration of an FD that I have seen. Congrats and thanks for sharing with us.

Thank you all for your kind and encouraging comments.

I will confess, however, that the drips in my life will likely result in at least one more coat on deck and in the interior. I learned, for coat number seven, that a liberal dose of brushing liquid (more than the 15% recommended) resulted in just two small drips/sags which appeared over an hour after I had quit monitoring the work and had seen none. The drips from coat number six, which weren't many, even with 48 hours drying, telegraphed through; I should have wetsanded after 24 hours, rather than after the 48. Imperfectly dry/hard varnish 'picks up'/softens and swells under fresh varnish.

Varnishing the hull next Spring will be a fun exercise in working fast, to keep a wet edge, brushing, tipping, and controlling sags on the curved surface.

You really should post the pics and story over at the Wooden Boat Forum...

Beautiful work!

Hey Quetzalsailor,
Reading the last sentence of your last post gave me an anxiety attack. At least you can't blame Delaware summer humidity.

Well, I really cannot stay away from the FD work. The two centerboards in the foreground are restored for use and the thing in the background is a third. Both centerboards were shorter than the class rules. Both were damaged, so I sawed out wood and added new. The board in the background is warped: bowed one way at the leading edge and the other at the trailing; additionally, the tip is warped in the middle. What you might see are strongbacks and clamps holding the board past straight for the three conditions. We'll see what it's like in the spring.
That's three coats of Petit 2015 on the near one and one coat on the other. That's a piece of African sorta-Mahogany (not Khaya) and it was really the wrong color, almost an Oak-ish beige, to match the original real Honduras Mahogany. I stained just that piece with reddish oil-based stain and varnished. T'aint perfect; the piece is quartered while the rest is slab sawn, but I will settle for it.

Next is to get a workable, and pretty kick-up rudder. Here's US 29's original rudder.
The rudder and rudderhead are homemade and pretty clumsy; I epoxy-'glassed the blade about 20 years ago and there's no varnish on it.

Well, actually, I own three Flying Dutchman sailboats, but only the '58 +/- Dutch-hulled boat has gotten any work. The others are a '76 Italian-made Silenzi and a '78 German-made Mader. Since I had to build a rudderhead, which is a pain, I decided to build three rudderheads identical and all at once for the boats. I had several rudderblades and heads; I repaired the blades and burned the rather poorly-made heads which would have taken more effort to rebuild adequately.

First trial assembly today. Plenty of fitting and finishing yet to do, as well as to make the brackets that they actually hang on the boats' transoms.
Kicked-up position.
Bracket; rudders are pinned to similar brackets on the transoms.
The three rudders.
The kick-up/shock cord down control sheaves.

I made the plywood for the heads and veneered one of the blades. I chose the veneer to match the blades as well as I had stock to to.

Finally assembled the three rudders.
And on to the tillers...

Well, I have not posted on this subject since the winter, but I have not been sitting around. Here she is on Sunday afternoon.

Here are a couple of the Heckrottes and a few of our manias, soon to celebrate our 20th anniversary. Sue's an astonishingly fecund gardener; Kochi, the Coon Hound, is an astonishingly dedicated but unsuccessful squirrel huntress. 20 long, dreary years, as Sue's parents used to quote one of their oldest friends.
We intend to take her to the water this weekend. 11 years since I began restoration (2 years were too hot for working in the barn and two were curtailed by my dad's passing and Hurricane Irene smashing through their house). 19 years almost to the day when she won the 'Mononomac Gremlin' trophy for the worst misadventure suffered by a contestant during the then-annual FD regatta at Lake Monomonac near Rindge NH, on the border between MA and NH. I kicked the tube type self bailer and it broke out of the bottom; we sailed back to land with me kneeling on a life jacket to staunch the reverse drain effect. We found later that, unrelated, a huge strip of veneer was missing off the bottom. 20 years, almost to the day from our wedding on 1 August 1992. 20 years and a week, almost to the day, from when I towed her home from Miami FL, the weekend before our marriage.

It looks like your spring varnishing was a success. I hope you share some pictures of the gang on the water. Congratulations!

Wow, looks fantastic. She'll turn heads for sure!

Are you still on Lake Monomonac? I haven't heard that name in a long time, I surveyed the lake back in the early 90's.