Glen-L Squirt

The idea of building a boat came to me very early, in childhood. The first attempt was a failed surfboard. Thirty-five years later came the second attempt, a very small boat for fishing close to shore. At the time of writing this post it is 90% finished and being built back in the village. If I manage to get there at Easter it should be done.

(edit: it's finished!!! it's the one below)

Now it is time for something harder. A small runabout.

The choice was easy, the moment the photograph below landed in front of me.

It is a 1950 design, the Squirt, from Glen-L.

The boat will be built from sapele, marine okoume plywood, fiberglass cloth and an epoxy resin made for boatbuilding.

The timber will be joined with silicon bronze screws which, of course, were not available in Greece. I tracked them down and bought them from England.

I also bought the plans from the company's website.

After a good deal of thought I decided to stretch the boat slightly and change the plans a little. Overall length will be 3.35 m.

For the frames, the transom and the keel I decided to make templates out of plexiglass. So the plans were digitised in AutoCAD and laser cut. Anything too big to go in the laser was cut on a friend's CNC, in two pieces with an overlapping section on both and dowels to locate them exactly.

Finally I bought the sapele and the 20 mm and 6 mm marine okoume plywood from a timber merchant in Perama that stocks boatbuilding timber. I picked the straightest grain I could find, though there was not much to choose from. Back in AutoCAD, I worked out how the pieces would be cut from the board.

Cost of materials

So far:

100 euros for the plans

190 euros for the screws

150 euros for the sapele

160 euros for one sheet of 20 mm okoume plywood and two sheets of 6 mm

(and 150 euros for boatbuilding books)

So this is the place where I will show the work as I go. I honestly do not know whether I will manage it, since I am not a naval architect, nor a joiner with a lot of experience in wood, and I do not have professional tools. What is certain is that I am going to enjoy it.

So if you would like to enjoy it too, either to laugh at my mistakes or because you find something of interest in it, you are welcome to follow along.

It will certainly take a good few years...

With the materials gathered, work began on the pieces that make up the frames, the keel and the transom.

The parts were marked out on the sapele and the plywood, cut on the bandsaw, thicknessed to 20 mm on a joiner friend's planer (after I saw that mine could not manage it very well) and then routing began using the templates. Along the way I realised that the little 600 watt router was not going to do the job, so I bought a bigger 2.2 kW one with 12 mm cutters, and built a new, larger router table for it.

Some photographs of the work (gluing with epoxy, then screwing and nailing). The packaging bags are there because the material they are made of does not stick to resin, so I do not have to worry about the clamps gluing themselves to the timber. To make sure I did not drift away from the plans or lose symmetry, I printed the drawings full size at 1:1 and did all the glue-ups directly on top of them. That could not be done with the transom, because it is a single piece of plywood. There the shape was traced across with carbon paper.

Next, the holes were drilled for the 10 mm galvanised carriage bolts in the transom knee. First the large holes with a 25 mm spade bit, for the nut and the socket that would tighten it, then drilled through with a 10 mm bit for the bolt itself.

The next job was cutting the bottom edge of the transom to a 12 degree angle. I bought an aluminium angle to use as a fence on the table saw. The angle was set and a sacrificial guide batten was screwed to the transom, parallel to its edges, so it could follow the line of the aluminium. The batten and the aluminium had to be set up twice, because the transom is not straight across but a very shallow V.

Then, in the same way as the transom bolts, holes were drilled for the carriage bolts that reinforce the joint between the two halves of the keel at the frame.

The next job was gluing the motor reinforcement to the transom, and the transom to the keel. Because the clamping had to reach a long way, and because I do not own clamps with that much capacity, I used rubber cut from bicycle inner tubes, quartered lengthways.

The holes for the carriage bolts in the transom were drilled along with the recesses for their heads. Once they were bolted up, the gap was filled with resin.

The same was done with the bolts that went through the transom and the motor reinforcement.

The first building base is made so that the boat's framework can be built on top of it, up to the point where the hull is finished. Once that work is done a new base will be built and the boat will be turned right side up so the interior work can start. It was built out of Swedish pine. It cost around 120 euros including the screws. Below are some photographs of building it and the drawings. Some changes were made along the way because I found it was not entirely practical. It took about 5 hours to build.

Next the frames and the transom were set up on it, and the hardest job so far began: levelling and aligning them. Unfortunately the Swedish timber was poor quality and warped, so everything needed packing out with blocks, wedges and so on. That, combined with the transom having to sit at 12 degrees to the keel, meant the job took 4 hours, and another 4 afterwards because I found I had made a mistake the first time and pulled the whole lot apart. A laser bought from China was invaluable for this. A few photographs...

With that done it was time to glue the forward section of the keel onto the frame. The joint was backed up with two screws. A few photographs...

The next job was cutting and gluing the keel and the rest of the timber along the bottom of the boat.

The keel was cut and then dressed with a hand plane, because my thicknesser is completely unsuitable for stock that long.

I found that the plans have an error. Where the two pieces of the keel meet they are not parallel, there is a small angle of 2 to 3 degrees. To get them to glue up properly, a wedge was glued onto one of the pieces.

The rest of the timber was shaped at a wooden boatyard.

Then, once I had cut the notches in the transom, I offered the pieces up to see how they sat. I found they were not bedding down properly on the frames and would need to be twisted a little along their length. To do that I wetted the timber, wrapped it in wet towels and clamped it in place. I left it for 3 days with the towels and another 2 without, and then glued it.

The next job was gluing timber end to end to get the length I needed.

The sipo I had bought is 3.05 m long and I need about 3.70.

The join was made using a scarf joint.

The rule is that the length of the tapered section being glued should be eight times the thickness of the timber. Working it out (tangent of the triangle) gives an angle of about 7 degrees.

For the cut I used the table saw with the help of a jig I made. In fact I had built the jig some time ago for gluing the binding onto the necks of musical instruments, and that was a 13 degree joint. A second fence was added at 7 degrees for the scarf joint.

Once the pieces were cut they were sanded while clamped together, to take out the imperfections of the cut, and then glued using an aluminium angle to hold them straight, along with clamps.

Next the notches had to be shaped so these long pieces would sit down and glue in place.

All of these notches have been cut square along their length. However, because these pieces are going to be bent, they land in the notches at an angle.

At the first frame the pieces are still opening out, while at the second they are closing in. This process took a fair while, testing with some thin battens that bent very easily.

Once the twisted pieces had been left clamped and glued for 7 days, so the resin could reach its full strength, the clamps came off and screws went in for extra strength. I ran resin into the holes drilled for the screws. Finally the carriage bolts went into the keel, in the same way as the earlier ones.

For the side timbers that tie the transom to the frames and the keel (the chines and sheers) I again used sapele and sipo, bought at 8 and 6.5 cm thick. The dimensions are 355 x 32 x 16 (two pieces glued together) for the sheers and 340 x 45 x 25 for the chines (a single piece, which in the end I could not bend. Read on).

For the bending I used a steamer bought from amazon.com for around 60 euros. I did not make a wooden box or a PVC pipe to hold the steam, I used food packaging bags 5 m long instead. The process I followed is shown below. The bag was closed at one end around the pipe while the other was left open so I could drain off the water as it condensed. Small holes were made in the underside of the bag so water could escape there too, but the damp seems to have stuck the walls together and it did not drain from those. Every so often I lifted the whole arrangement slightly so it would run out of the end.

A few notes on timing. The theory says an hour is enough to bend an inch of timber (about 2.5 cm). Of course a lot of things affect that (the equipment, the species of wood and plenty more, I imagine).

I filled the steamer almost to the top with water (half a finger below the max) and plugged it in. Fifteen minutes later steam started coming into the bag. Four minutes after that it had filled to the far end and steam started escaping. After about 20 minutes I decided to take some water out, I reckon a finger and a half to two fingers, because I thought it would boil more easily. The steamer switched itself off exactly when I was going to switch it off anyway (the water inside reached the limit) after 50 minutes. Even though the timber was 1.6 cm thick and the theory says 35 to 40 minutes would have been enough, I left it a little longer to be safe.

The bending started at the front and worked aft. The day before I had spent a little time working out how the bent timber would be held onto the rest of the boat. I tacked on some wedges so a clamp would have something to grip. In some places it was very easy to get hold of.

The final result is shown below. I have left the timber slightly long so it can be cut to its exact length later.

A few short videos of the process. Unfortunately there was no way to film the actual bending, as there was nobody else there.

The pieces were left clamped up to dry and take their shape.

I found that the only way to get them to sit perfectly against the forward face was to clamp them there first, with all the other clamps removed, and twist the timber to follow the imaginary "straight lines" made by the forward triangle. (I tried to bend the forward sections further on their own but could not get a good result.) The forward part was glued first, on both sides. That was so I could make small adjustments and get the structure perfectly symmetrical. Some photographs of that glue-up and of the second attempt at more bending.

They were then glued at the remaining joints on the frames and the transom.

Before gluing at the forward frame they were tacked in place so I could check the two curved pieces were symmetrical. Using a string line I pulled the centreline that splits the boat down the middle. Checking it, I found it is almost symmetrical about that axis (it is out by one or two millimetres, and those get corrected when the timbers are faired) but there is a problem on the z axis. One piece, even though it was glued exactly the same way as the other, sits closer to the floor. The difference runs from zero (at the frame and at the triangle forward, obviously) to around 7 millimetres somewhere near the middle. It is a serious problem, because when the timbers are faired they are cut at an angle and end up triangular. If one is at a lower level then in the end we will have a deck that is not symmetrical. Say by a centimetre, but it will show because of the shape of the final pieces with the stripes.

Once I have glued the second run of timber I will try to fair them on all three axes, measuring the distance from the floor and from the centreline every so often (every 15 or 20 cm). If fairing takes more wood off the low side then a third piece will have to be glued on top to build it back up.

Once that is done I will start fairing for the plywood to be glued on.

There is another solution that corrects the problem visually, which will be used if the above does not go well. Essentially, if it does not come out symmetrical in the end, the plywood and the striped timbers on the top are glued perfectly symmetrically and a wooden fillet is run underneath, around the perimeter. Where the plywood overhangs, the fillet is left slightly thicker. I will explain it better if the problem actually shows up (it has shown up for most people who have built this boat, and I do not expect to get away with it even though I know about it).

Some photographs of the glue-up with the clamps.

The next job was gluing the last timbers of the boat's framework, the chines. I had overestimated what my steamer could do and had intended to glue a single 2.5 cm thick piece on each side. After an hour the timber bent fairly easily, but it also had to twist along its length at the same time, a long way, and in opposite directions at different points. I could not do it.

In the end I cut the pieces in half on the bandsaw. That left roughly two pieces of 1.1 cm of clean timber. If anywhere needs to be thicker, a third piece will be glued on.

I found that the gluing surface, done the way the plans show it, would be very small indeed. It makes no sense to glue nothing but end grain onto the keel at an angle. So I decided to make a backing piece like the one the sheer timbers land on. I took a rough measurement of the angle the pieces arrive at and copied it onto the backing piece. Thirty-six degrees on each side. Also 12 degrees off vertical, which turned out to be wrong. It needed more, read on.

The points at the transom and at the first frame, which did not need much bending, were glued first. Then they were heated with the steamer and glued at the second frame. I chose to glue the forward point last, so I could see where the backing piece would need to go. One problem that can come up is these timbers sitting lower than the surface formed by the plywood that joins the sheer timber to the keel. If that happens it will spoil the shape of the boat forward (the V). The higher up it goes (with the boat upside down) the further the timber stands off the surface, but the harder it gets, since its natural tendency is to go downwards (it has to be bent with heat). The plans do not say where they should be fixed. They say it does not particularly matter.

After the final bend I found the right spot to glue the backing piece. The timber was cut at the right point ready for gluing, and the backing piece was glued on.

Then came the glue-up, with a lot of clamps.

Once both pieces were glued I found their bevel was wrong. I found the photograph below from another build to make the problem clear. The bevel shown by the red line is the problem. The red line should come outside the white one, so that the timber can be cut back to a bevel the plywood can be glued to.

To get that bevel I would either have to unglue and reglue the timbers, which is very difficult with epoxy, or glue new pieces on top and cut a new bevel. This is a mistake which, as I found out, has been made on almost every build of this particular boat. The photograph below shows the framework in its final state.

Fairing the framework is essential work, so as to create the surfaces the hull plywood will be glued to. The process starts with fairing at the transom and the frames.

Then, using a straightedge, I mark the curve above which material will have to come off.

The whole job is done with a hand plane, a rasp and sandpaper, and it is difficult, tiring and above all nerve-racking. Nerve-racking because in some places a lot of material comes off. There is not much wood left, and depending on how it turns out it may need reinforcing from the inside.

Once I had finished the frames I carried on with the top of the boat as it sits on the base, which is to say the bottom of the boat. The aft section is the easiest part, as it is made up of two straight lines. The work starts with the hand plane to take off the bulk, and then with coarse sandpaper which I have glued to a large flat board, sanding all the timbers on one side together.

On to the sides of the aft section. Here the process is a little different, because we do not have straight lines but curves, and curves that change as you move forward. The timber was taken off little by little, checking with a piece of plywood 30 cm wide.

On to the middle section of the boat. Much the same process. Here the bottom timbers that do not terminate at the second frame had to be thinned as well. The process is a little different because at the second frame we do not have straight lines. So from a straight line at the first frame, where I could sand all the timbers together, I ended up with a curve as I moved forward. In fact, so as not to lose too much wood off the two that do not terminate at the frame, I had clamped them down.

The last part to work was the bow, which was also the hardest because of the tight curve.

Here the Rabl method was used.

We divide the keel and the two horizontal timbers of the framework into equal parts according to the length of each. Then with a saw we make cuts at those points, following the straight line. We take off the wood that has been marked, and then the rest, having marked it. The method is explained in the link below.

Once that work was done I fitted the keel carriage bolts. That had to be done at this stage because a fair amount of wood had come off and the holes I had drilled had to be counterbored again.

I also took a little off the bottom timbers where they meet the transom, so that any water getting inside runs to the point where the drain plug holes will be drilled.

The last job before the hull plywood goes on is reinforcing the transom where it joins the boat's framework. The two plywood gussets were cut and glued, after first cutting the angle on the transom side to match. That was done on the table saw with a fence. I decided to use plywood rather than sapele or sipo, because in one of the two directions the grain would have run the wrong way, with the risk of it breaking if it took a heavy load.