Glen-L.com

Hello everyone. I first began looking at Glen-L boats about 1997, but with 4 kids and life getting in the way I kind of forgot about it. I bought an awesome 22 ft power boat from Galay of California about 13 years ago and had it for about 5 years and got rid of it. I am down to only 2 kids at home and they are both the kind that want to do projects with me. So after building pools and decks and miniature versions of my house for a shed, we have finally gotten serious about the Glen-L boats again. I am pretty good with wood and have a lot of wood skills that will transfer over pretty good. One thing I have considered is that with boats, nothing is square and plumb. I am thinking in reality you will have a control line to build off of and after that it is measuring, triangulating and eyeballing to get things done right. Well since I have a lot of experience in historic building renovation, I can do that. In old buildings everything leans or sinks or rises or the walls are different thicknesses so it becomes as much art as science to make a room look square and plumb. Many times you have to "cheat" things and intentionally build something crooked so that it will look straight. Anyway, sorry to run on with the historic building lesson.
I have a 4-7 year plan for 2 boats. The first is a Quick build of a Cabin Skiff 16. I have chosen this plan primarily for 3 reasons: because when we are done with it I am going to give it to my son and I think an amped up 16 foot boat would be good for him. He is 15. Because it can be done in the garage. Because the s & g method will be easier from the woodworking standpoint, but will allow me to practice my glass, fairing, and finishing skills. The boat will be used on large ponds and for lake use primarily by my son and myself, or him and his BRO as he is called around here. they can take it load there camping gear and go to the lake and camp on the island.

I may or may not use the Marine plywood on this boat hull. It will depend on the price and availability. I plan to use yellow pine and fir for all for other wood. My thoughts are that This boat is not intended to last forever, I don't want to dump a lot of money into it. I have a question about using P/T Pine. Is there a reason why not to use it. Is it because off the weight or moisture content? If so, I will be air drying this lumber. Does the P/T react with the resins? I plan on using bondo for the filleting and I will be coating the interior of the boat with poly resin also. I may use glass cloth on it also. Wondering what your opinions are about that. I am aware that epoxy is the better, harder, choice, but as I said I want to build this as a good boat, not a great boat. I also plan on using a combination of construction adhesive and Titebond 2 or 3 wood glue for all non-hull joints. I think with good paint and coatings, and good maintenance this will work fine. But if there is something about this that just won't work I would like to know it.

The second part of the plan is to build a 3d garage onto my house, 35x12x 12 ft O/H door. Have to have a place to build the second boat. That boat will be either a Stretched Monsoon, A Phantom, or a Kona Kai. I really want the gung-ho, but at 10-0 beam I can't trailer it and I am years away from having a place to moor it. I want a boat that I could drag tubers around on at the lake. Take 6-10 people out on, has a cabin both for daytime relaxing, and for temporary lodging. I also want the boat able to take to the tx Gulf Coast and go deep sea fishing, as well as go from Corpus, around the gulf coast all the way to the keys if I wanted to. Ideally I will be able to transfer to Florida at some point and be able to spend a lot of time boating through the keys. Do these seem like good boat plans to use for this?

So how does my strategy to get from nothing to a small yacht sound?

Not to be too forward, being an FNG and all, I would like to offer up a couple of tips in answer to some common discussions I saw as I've been lurking, concerning adhesives and fasteners. I saw several posts concerning the use of PL and Liquid nail type adhesives. I know from experience that you must make sure that any of these kind of adhesives used are either water resistant or used in an area where water won't get to them. Water breaks down standard Construction adhesives. I also saw several questions about the purpose of fasteners when the adhesives are already strong enough to break the wood before they break the bond. This is exactly why it is good to use the specifed fasteners. The adhesive (glue. epoxy, PL, etc) holds the joint together, the fastener helps to transfer the load through the member and will help stop the wood from ripping apart.


Sorry for the excessively wordy first post, but I got a lot of built up thoughts and questions after 15 years of lurking. Thanks.

Welcome aboard! Lot's of questions in there. Where are you located? I think marine ply and epoxy is worth the investment but it is your boat.

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Bill

I told my wife we needed a three-car garage for my projects...she told me to ask her for permission next time before I buy a house.
http://www.unitybuild.net

Welcome to the forum. That's quite a plan you've got!

As far as the PT lumber is concerned, the general recommendation is to stay away from it. It's usually too wet to use for anything besides a house deck, so you'd have to let it air dry for quite some time. At which point a lot of it will probably warp, twist, and cup.
Plus you really want some solid, stable, quarter-sawn lumber for the frames.
There's probably a bunch of other reasons too, but the bottom line is, if you finish the boat properly, then there shouldn't be a big issue with the wood getting wet, so you really don't need all those toxic "anti-decay" chemicals.

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Jeff

My Celerity build.

Thanks. I'm from the San Antonio area. I understand what you mean about the marine-ply and epoxy, but I'm looking at all aspects, budget, time, R.O.I., etc. I haven't decide for sure yet. I know that I won't use poly resin on the hull exterior. I just don't think it is hard enough to give the right protection.



I think I will forego the PT for 2 reasons
1. While I can air-dry and then mill the wood afterwards to make it suitable, your point about quartersawn is a good one. I can't do anything to change that.

2. If I have the confidence to potentially use non marine ply and forego the white oak/mahogany because I can protect it (as you stated) there isn't really a need for it.

Can someone also make sure I understand the term filleting correctly. I understood it to be filling, smoothing, rounding, all of the interior corners- such as at the transom to side joint, battens to hull, floor to side etc.

Does anyone know what the designed top speed for the KonaKai, Monsoon, and Phantom are?

Does the cabin skiff have enough room to actually construct the cabin in a way to sleep 2 as a v-berth, or is it really just a good storage area with a protected cockpit?

Thanks gentlemen.

FYI,

DixiePly in San Antonio shows they sell Okoume Plywood
Paxton shows they have Meranti Plywood
Houston Hardwoods probably will have the best price for Meranti but they are about 3 hours away.

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Bill

I told my wife we needed a three-car garage for my projects...she told me to ask her for permission next time before I buy a house.
http://www.unitybuild.net

You are correct, nothing in a boat is square nor plumb, mostly it is eyeballed.
I would however, use good wood ,and, expect it to last forever, or at least until you are still of this earth, then pass it along to the kids that helped you build it.
Geoduegeon Brothers are still racing a Mahogany strip plank race sail boat that is over 30 years old now.
So, wood/epoxy durability is now documented in sailboat racing with at least a 30 year history.
Use good wood since the cost of the wood compared to the overall price is a small portion.
Good luck with that, you will enjoy the end project more than you realize right now.

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God Bless our Troops; especially our Snipers

Marine ply isn't rated "marine" because it's more water resistant. It uses the same glues as exterior ply. What makes it marine, is that it has none (or at least less) interior voids in the plys. Since some of the ply is going to be doing some serious bending, an interior void could cause a break, or leave a weak point in the panel that could fail at a later time.

Filleting just means filling in corners with thickened epoxy, for added strength. Think of it the same way you'd caulk around a bathtub, just on a much bigger/thicker scale.

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Jeff

My Celerity build.

You should use marine ply. In the big picture it turns out that the difference in price is not that big. But, there is a big difference in quality. Turns out wood is the cheap part. BS1088 is not a lot better than BS6588(I think that's the right number). You can save alittle there.

Bill

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Mini -Tug, KH Tahoe 19 & Bartender 24 - There can be no miracle recoveries without first screwing up.
Tahoe 19 Build

Thanks, gentlemen. I appreciate the input. Just for the record, It is only the skiff that I was looking at going the cheap route on. However, all of my plans that i have been thinking about for months may have got turned on their ear this morning. My dad lives in arkansas, and not too far from him there is a 24' Aquasport that has a deep vee hull. I may get my hands on it, do some butchery or surgery on the gunwhales, depending on your point of view and then build a floor and cabin in it based on Kona Kai or Raven plans. What do you think.

Any factory 'glass hull will be by far heavier than one of the wood boats on this forum. That weight issue is one that amazes people on this forum. The people with factory fiberglass hulls have a hard time to just realize how heavy they are.
But, if you want to go that route, it is your boat.

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God Bless our Troops; especially our Snipers

One thing to keep in mind si that it is going to be your son out in that skiff. You don't need to go over the top but you do want to be sure that it is not going to break apart while he is zipping across the water.

Teach him to swim better. LOL No I agree with you. I won't cut corners in the sense of going understrength on anything. But for adhesives for instance. If a glue is water resistant, has a long life, and is strong enough to tear the wood before the bond breaks, then it is strong enough. I totally believe in the bronze screws, dense woods that are recommended. According to one poster above, the difference in marine and exterior is a structural QC issue. I guess marine plywood has changed dramatically in the last 20 years. When i used to buy a lot of it back in the 80's there was definitely a difference. It was always made with fir and had more water resistant glues than the glue in exterior ply. I would assume the difference there is improvement of the exterior ply, not a decrease in the quality of glue on the marine ply.

I will try to keep this brief but I do tend to get carried away with this subject!

I admit to being one that has "experimented" with non-traditional boat building materials. Some I have been successfully (at least by my standards) incorporated in my builds and others - well not so much! When I built my Cabin Stiff I used marine DF ply for the forward section of the hull - where the bends are severe - and then transitioned to a high quality exterior for the aft panels. That was 14 years ago and it has worked out well. BUT the problem today I can find next to NO high quality exterior plywood. All the stuff I seem to find now is full of voids. Go to you local lumberyard or big box store and look at the edge of a stack of plywood - the sheets are literally full of holes. I guarantee when building with them you will continually need to place screws only to find a void and the screw head pull through the entire sheet. It is just very difficult to find quality plywood that is not marine or similarly rated. The closest I have come is MDO (medium density overlay) that is used for exterior signs. I did a little write-up about it here - http://www.egyptian.net/~raymacke/TG/MDO.html But when building my True Grit I still used marine DF for the hull and then the MDO for the rest of the superstructure.

As to polyester resin - yes it is cheaper than epoxy. And I am very allergic to epoxy and as a result I looked hard for a substitute. I experimented with it while building an 8' pram. One thing I noted is if I just spread the resin on wood it took forever for it to cure. It was kind of setup but still softer than it should be. And some areas seemed worse than others. Why I don't know but no matter what I did it worked that way. Sometimes I would try brushing on additional amounts of a very hardner rich mixture trying to get it to cure. If cloth was added over the wood it seemed to work better and would cure as expected. Again why I don't know but in the back of my mind I was always concerned that wood to resin bond was still staying soft while the surface with the cloth was curing properly. I remember reading somewhere that it is possible that the wood was drawing part of the components in the resin deeper while leaving others on the surface and preventing the proper chemical reaction to make the bond.

But the proof for me was in a rudder assembly I made for sailing the pram. I was lazy and just placed a piece of glass cloth on each side of the rudder and did not wrap the leading and trailing edges - just sanded a feather edge, coated the whole thing with polyester resin and painted it. Looked great! Until the second time I used. The glass cloth managed to get moisture behind it and both sides just peeled off as if there was nothing holding it. I mean fell right off! Even if I had sealed it well I feel any scratch I got that penetrated the cloth would allow water behind it and eventually cause a failure. I decided poly wasn't for me.

Really off the wall I also tried glass cloth with Titebond III glue as resin. Still think it might be better than the poly but the stuff doesn't sand worth a darn so I quickly abandoned that dumb idea.

So yes, epoxy is more expensive but even with my nasty sensitivity I decided it was a necessary evil. The darn stuff is just so versatile - its a glue, its a filler, its a laminating resin - just hard to beat. I will admit to using a lot of PL construction adhesive in the True Grit build. This was mainly done because of the allergy but in my book above the waterline PL can be a workable solution for some joints and it is very convenient to use with a chalking gun. Google it and you will find several test and discussions.

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So Many Rivers,
So Little Time....