Puddle ducks.

Sometimes, projects need to get big.  Most of my projects are small.  This time.. it's big.  like 4x8 foot.  Big.

There's something magic about that first time you sit "in" your boat.  Here's Dan, sitting IN his boat. I should also note, that this was day two of boatbuilding.  I think.

It doesn't look like much, well, it isn't much.  But it is a puddle duck.  http://www.pdracer.com/

Sadly, this set of blog posts is going to be somewhat out of order.  But here we go anyway.

The Puddle Duck is a class driven sailboat.  They tightly regulate the hull shape, but not it's height.  And as long as you don't have foils or submerged balast, essentially anything else goes.  People have run giant sail rigs.  The boats have gotten on plane.  They have been used as overnight sailing boats.  They've been built 8" tall, and 24" tall.

On that specific note, our hulls are 12" deep.  Which is fairly shallow.  Both Dan and I don't mind getting wet.

We've chosen to go the 3/16" thick underlayment method for the hulls.  The underlayment is made with waterproof glue, so is suitable for what we're doing.  We're also doing chine logs, instead of stitch and glue.  I'm sure this is the cheaper method, but i'm also sure it's more time consuming.

The first day, we cut out the hull sides.  As pre-game, Dan cut up the chine logs for us.

For gluing up the hulls, we're mostly using titebond 3, and a whole lot of 1" long screws.  The screws are removed after the glue is dry, and we're filling the resulting holes with thickened epoxy.  You can seriously bulk up epoxy if you buy some very, very, cheap materials.  I think I spent $40 on sillica and Microbaloons, and ended up with more than a gallon of additives.

Later that day, we got the bottom on the hull.

You can see a fillet we screwed to the aft end of the hull to keep the sides square while we got the bottom glued and screwed in place.

As usual, when you get in that building groove, pictures stop taking precedence.  Two building days later, here's Dan working on gluing the bottom on my hull.

I love how epoxy filler looks.  This is how we're waterproofing the tanks, as titebond isn't a good method for closing big-ish gaps.

Here's Dan's hull.  The left side is filled, and some of the holes on the starboard side are filled.  It's going to take two more epoxy sessions to completely fill all of the holes.  

More will follow as the boats get built.