Practical Boat Owner – June 2019

BUILDING A WESTERN SKIFF – PART 2

building the fi rst MkII kit, which consists of
all the plywood components, plus an MDF
building jig and MDF templates for all the
solid timber parts. Although Jeremy has
previous experience building epoxy ply
dinghies, the ease of building of the
Western Skiff is clearly still as appealing
now as it was when the kit was fi rst created.
Last month, Jeremy had erected the
frames, laid the bottom board and hung the
fi rst two planks on each side. Unlike when
I built one of the original kits 22 years ago,
when I had sheathed just the bottom board
and the garboards, Jeremy had decided to
sheath the next plank up as well, to guard
against damage when the boat is dragged
up a beach (note the ‘beaches’ on the
River Dart, where Jeremy and I both live,
are mostly shingle rather than sand, so
can be quite hard on a boat’s bottom).
Jeremy duly ordered a 5m sheet of 1.5m
wide 200g/m^2 glass cloth from East Coast
Fibreglass Supplies which meant he was
able to cover the area without any messy
joins. Indeed, there was a bit of overlap on
each side so that, when Jeremy hung the
cloth over the boat for 24 hours to allow it to
‘relax’ over the shape of the hull, it looked
like a magnifi cent silvery wedding dress.
Unlike me 22 years before, he didn’t
bother priming the planks beforehand but
applied the fi rst coat of resin straight to the
dry cloth – proving there’s more than one
way of skinning a boat.

Overlaps
One of the problems with Jeremy’s
approach was that, whereas the join
between the bottom board and the
garboards is a smooth chine – presumably
to facilitate sheathing – the join between
all the other planks are overlaps.
“One of my big worries was how the
glass cloth was going to take the chine,”
he told me. The solution was to tack the
cloth in place with staples, just enough to
hold it in place yet loose enough to be
easily removed. Jeremy then used a
low-viscosity resin without any thickener to
achieve maximum penetration in the
wood, which he literally poured onto the
cloth and worked in with a special
squeegee. His only regret was that, as he
was working in an uninsulated garage in
mid-winter, he had ordered medium
setting hardener, when in reality the
temperature never went below 10°C and
he would have been better off with a slow
hardener. As a result, the resin thickened
ever so slightly while he was working it,
creating a couple of slightly unfair areas
(though Jeremy is a perfectionist, and I’m
quite sure no-one else will notice).
As soon as the fi rst coat of epoxy was
dry to the touch, Jeremy applied a second
coat, both to fi ll the weave in the cloth and
create a smooth surface, and to make
sure the cloth wasn’t exposed when the
bottom was sanded down for painting.
One of the distinctive features of this kit

• along with many other kits cut by CNC
  cutters – is that there is no attempt to

Jeremy wetting out the glass cloth on the

garboards and lower plank with epoxy

View forward of the righted hull before the long job of fi lleting the internal joints

Extended epoxy sheathing will protect the

hull against scrapes and knocks

ABOVE The size

of some of the

epoxy fi llets might

look alarming but

the end result

is surprisingly

strong

LEFT View astern,

again before the

internal joints

have been epoxy

fi lleted