Wooden Boat Show at Mystic Seaport

The Wooden Boat Show happens the last weekend of June, at Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. This has been the venue for the past decade, all of which we have participated in the show. This started with us exhibiting the prototype Paper Jet at the 2007 show, where she won the Innovation Award on the Concourse D'elegance. She was a lonely modern trapeze skiff in a sea of traditional boats.

This year the show will be 30th June through to 2nd July. We will have the Paper Jet there again but she will be accompanied by two of our other designs, both exhibited by their builders in the "I Built it Myself" part of the show.

The Argie 15 that Kevin Agee has been building the past few months will be there. I built the striped spars using birdsmouth details, from alternating strakes of poplar and cedar. I also completed the daggerboard and keel using the striped blanks that were laminated from the same two species by Kevin. We launched her on Sunday and I will be sailing her on the North Carolina Sounds at Cape Hatteras for the next few days. For the moment she has some rig pieces filched from the Paper Jet due to lack of time to make new but she will have all her own parts for the show.

"Argie" gets wet for the first time. Me at the stern, builder Kevin Agee at the bow.

The first sail, in very light breeze.

The Argie 15 is our most popular design but we haven't seen one on the Wooden Boat Show before. If you are in New England and have built an Argie 15, here is an opportunity to show your boat along with our new one.

The other new boat is the prototype of the Didi Sport 15 (DS15) design, which was commissioned by Hunter Gall. Hunter has built her over a long period and has produced a very interesting boat in a red, white and blue colour theme. Hunter is Australian but now Naturalized American. The red/white/blue is a patriotic choice of colours and his hull has a small US flag laminated into the epoxy under the stern.

Red deck, blue hull and white trim

The DS15 has a very modern hull with a bit of retro-styling in the deck details.

The colours aren't sprayed paint, as most would expect, which would give opaque finishes. Instead, Hunter dyed the plywood surfaces to allow the grain to show through, then coated with clear epoxy finished with clearcote to add depth and UV protection. This is a radius chine plywood boat, so the rounded part of the hull is laminated from two layers of plywood strips. The strips of the outer layer were edge-matched so that the grain runs through, with very tight joints that are almost invisible The result is a very interesting boat. Come to the show to see her, inspiration from an amateur builder who has never built a boat before.

To see more of these and our other designs, visit our main website or our mobile website.

Argie 15 Nearing Completion

It has been a long time since my last post about our Argie 15 project. Work has been going on but big life events have taken away from the time needed to write blog posts. The main event was a change in the status of builder Kevin  Agee, now our son-in-law after marrying our daughter Michelle last month.

Newly-married, our daughter Michelle and new son-in-law Kevin Agee.

OK, time to get life back to normal. The Argie 15 is nearing completion and looks very different from when you last saw it. It took its first road trip, on my Paper Jet trailer. The destination was my own garage, for painting.

Ready for preparation for paint.

After turning the boat upside-down, final inspection, masking the rub-rails and other bright-finished surfaces, blowing off the dust with a leaf blower then cleaning with acetone, it was ready for spraying to start.

First coat was a high-build epoxy primer, to give an easily-sanded layer to form the foundation for a good finish.

Next came a white primer. This was needed to cover the grey epoxy, which can cause blotchy problems with finish coats.

When I sprayed my Lotus, I changed the colour from the original red to yellow. I sprayed the yellow over a grey primer and found that yellow paint has problems covering grey. What initially looked like good cover is a bit green and blotchy in low-light situations. The green tone is the grey primer showing through and the blotchiness is caused by variations in the yellow film thickness. I must spray another coat over the car to get a uniform yellow colour. Lesson learned, we added a coat of white primer to the paint schedule of the Argie 15 to ensure good cover.

A coat of high-build epoxy primer also went onto the vertical surfaces of the cockpit because these will be gloss white. The horizontal areas will be beige non-skid, so a perfectly smooth surface was not needed.

The transom was to be white, so that was sprayed first, then masked off with paper before spraying the rest of the hull.

Completed hull painting, with yellow hull and white transom

The varnished rub-rails laminated from cedar and poplar set off the hull nicely. The holes through the hull sides are to drain the leeward side seats if any spray comes aboard when sailing in lumpy and breezy conditions.

 The new boat made its first public appearance by doing bar service at the wedding. It worked as a giant cooler, holding beers and soft drinks on ice for the wedding guests.

The other work that has been going on is building the spars. I am doing that work, having decided to make wooden spars using the birdsmouth method. In keeping with the varnished woodwork on the hull, I have made the mast and boom from alternating strips of cedar and poplar. I won't go into the details of building the spars in this post but will do that in later posts on my Boatbuilding Tips Blog. The Argie 15 plans show the mast in two sections, so that the rig can be stowed inside the hull. I could have made the mast in one length by scarphing the strakes into long lengths but elected to stay with the two-part mast. This allowed me to work with lengths that fit more comfortably inside a single garage.

Gluing a mast section using the bidsmouth method.

Mast sections and boom shaped and being epoxy-coated. The one closest to the camera is the boom, the other two being the two sections of the mast. The long mast higher up in the garage is my Paper Jet mast, built by a similar method.

Launch day is approaching. The sails have been made and hardware will soon start going onto the deck and rig.

See more of this and our other designs on our main website or our mobile website.