I am not telling. I can show you mistakes on every thing I have ever built. But you would have to be extremely knowledgeable to see them. So if you never tell someone about your mistakes, they will never know. The best boat builder in the world, made a mistake on a boat the class was building at the Wooden Boat School. When he discovered it he simply said “I wish I hadn’t done that”. And he showed the class how to fix it. So even the best make mistakes, they are just better at correcting them.
One time discussing good cabinet makers vs run of the mill cabinet makers with an elderly, yet exceptional, cabinet maker friend he said," You know the difference?" Confidently I said, good cabinet makers don't make mistakes. He said, "No, good cabinet makers know how to fix their mistakes.
Every time I mess up, I learn a new way to fix it. Lesson learned.
My biggest snafu was to trust that brand new epoxy measuring pumps would correctly measure out the right amount of resin and hardener (2:1).
I’d cut out the 70 or so ply pieces for my SCAMP build and applied a coat of epoxy to both sides, when, a couple of days later, I came to sand them down ready for a second coat I found that the epoxy hadn’t set and was balling up and clogging my sanding discs like crazy. I contacted the supplier who had discovered that due to a manufacturing fault the pumps were dispensing about half the amount of hardener as was needed! My only recourse was to remove as much of the epoxy from the pieces as I could, sanding wasn’t going to work, so I resorted to a hot air gun and scraped off as much gunk as I could before finally sanding back to a good surface. I got through three hot air guns which couldn’t take the continual use (about forty hours in total, thankfully the supplier exchanged them all under warranty). In addition I used about forty Mirka sanding disks. The epoxy and pump supplier resupplied me with epoxy, new pumps and a box of sanding discs. I’m now pretty wary of pumps and always check how much they are dispensing by weighing the product (anyone else doing the same should note that the ratio by weight is not the same as the ratio by volume).
The pieces were all recoated (twice) and I’m glad to say that my SCAMP is finished and launched.
Many years ago, I attempted to paint my Com-Pac 16 with a water based polyeurathane paint. Ya know, to avoid the fumes of oil based paint. After all the prep work such a job entails, I made certain to have quality tools like a lint free foam roller and a rather expensive badger hair brush for the roll and tip method. No cheap nylon brush for me! I dreamed of the "sprayed" look.
As anyone who has even minor experience painting knows, this turned into a nightmare. I learned my bullheaded persistence would not pay off as I attempted to "tip" the rolled water based paint with an animal hair brush. Textured paint was not the goal. And, yes, I painted the whole thing that way, wondering why my technique was off.
Humbled, I let it dry. Sanding and fairing followed. An undisclosed extended time later, I painted it successfully with the roll and tip method.
One might think that as we age the cumulative wisdom would prevent, or at least reduce, the frequency of mistakes. However it seems that nature has an evil side. I seem to find the situation is just the opposite, and growing! I'm now well into my 70's and 80 is just a short sail away. So I never have to wait too long for the next lesson in humility. For example, recently I painted the plywood tops of my sleeping berths. It was a nice day so I did this outside and, I must say, I did a really nice paint job. Well, after the paint cured enough I decided to put them in place. Hauled the starboard ply in and screwed it down easy. Went back outside and fetched the port berth ply, took it into the boat cabin and.... lo and behold, I'd painted the bottom surface not the top as I'd wanted. After a couple of double takes and face slaps, I just had to laugh. What else can a guy do in that situation?
After recovery, I got out the paint again. Still smiling.
I am currently building an Artic Skua sailing canoe. I do not know what i did wrong, everything measures up perfectly, but I broke the same bottom plank twice trying get the ends to meet to make the stern.
In both cases it broke in the exact same spot, 6 inches shy of the stern. I finally got it repaired and together, but now there is a slight hollow in the plank that is going to require a bit of filling and fairing to get right.
I look back at my first build and all the terrible decisions I made- for example a mast stepped by dropping through a partner in the middle of the deck into a sleeve in such a way that the whole 17' has to be vertical above deck height before it drops in. Throughout that build I was carefree. Just happy to be building a boat, ignorant of all my mistakes. Today I'm in the middle of build #6, and it seems I make two mistakes every time I touch a tool. Sometimes it feels like I've become less skilled when the opposite is true. Now I see details I didn't before. I have some idea of how a piece will perform. If you know you did it wrong, you know something about how it should be done. If I wasn't making mistakes, I wouldn't be learning. At that point it might be time to move on to something new, but I don't expect that any time soon.
As The Resourceful Sailor, I tend to look for alternative approaches. They do not always work out. Oh well. I have never built a whole boat, so I can't speak from that experience. I will say that whenever something doesn't go right, I fix it until my head allows me to move on. There is no shame in that. I remember reading in one of Lin and Larry Pardey's books (I can't remember which or whether Larry was building Serraffyn or Taleisin), and his boatbuilding friend said to never move on until he was truly satisfied, even if it meant a do-over. So that's the premise I work under. The advantage of a small boat you build or work on yourself is that you get to make the decision. If others were working on your boat, they may not make the same decision you would, and you may never know. That's the cost of education. Practice also usually makes for better results. I chuckle about my first epoxy jobs.
In the rafters of my small garage hangs an unfinished canoe. I built a Trailcraft kit canoe in the middle 1970s, and 30 years ago found an ad for plans for those canoes. It seems the factory which made the kits had burned down shortly after I got mine for a 12 footer. The owner had retired and was selling what he had left of the enterprise. I bought the plans for a 16 footer. When I finally got around to building it, my garage was too short to use as a shop. "No problem, I'll just shorten it to 14 feet." Somehow I made a math error and ended up with it being 12' long. It is a painted canvas on frame type of build. Now all the stringers are twisted so they have a sharp edge along the outside. Some day I will get a sander and try to smooth those down in the hopes that they won't wear through the canvas cover, but until that happens it is hanging out of the way....
I volunteer at an historic publicly owned boathouse in Gig Harbor, WA. My small catastrophe was the result of using poorly labeled containers of donated epoxy resin and hardener. I mistakenly mixed up a batch of epoxy using hardener rather than resin. A week after completing my glue-up I came back to find a gooey mess that required a nasty cleanup and then a repeat of the original glue-up process but with properly mixed epoxy and thickening additives.
Yes, did that too on one occasion - like you, I came back, scraped it all off and started over. #$%^ oh well! Lesson Learned: don't listen to music in the shop, and don't work when tired.
I Rewrote the Old Saying - ‘Measure Twice and Cut Once’
My mistake did not involve building a boat, but it did involve adding a room to a large garage where I planned on building a boat.
I took measurements for the room and figured out the length of all the rim beams, floor joists and studs it would require. Went to the lumber yard, picked the pile and filled up my trailer with lumber. Returned to the garage and discovered that the rim beams and floor joists were too short because I got the floor layout switched 90 degrees. The room was a rectangular room, not a square room, so the lumber was useless.
Many years ago, I took my father out in one of the several leaky centerboard boats I persisted in fixing up. We were doing fine until, as we passed the bar at the mouth of my marina's creek, I told him to drop the centerboard. He let go of the centerboard pennant and the board, made of 1/4 inch diamond plate, immediately went to the full down position and ripped the hoisting hardware out of the overhead.
Lesson learned--be very careful when giving instructions to novices.
This boat is one of several that led to my aversion to centerboard trunks, as they invite water to come aboard..
Several years ago, I assembled a new kit from Duckworks for a lightweight Portage Pram. I was in our family room, and, like many stitch and glue kits, the parts went together like Legos except for the "transoms" which looked almost identical. After dry fitting both ends of the pram with tape, I realized that I needed big blue tape labels for "Bow" and "Stern" because I had dry-taped them in the wrong ends of the boat several times. The final assembly with epoxy went well, but I still needed the labels while I installed the seat and other fittings to be sure which end was the "pointy" end. The final product weighed only about 35 lb and fit inside my Scamp for trailering. I found that in big waves, the light dinghy caught up with the Scamp and surfed past me, so I just went back to cruising the Scamp without the dinghy. Very fun project, and great to work with parts that are so perfectly designed and made.
Not exactly a bonfire mistake, but I did have a moment. I had procured a beautiful, wide, unblemished length of 1"-thick mahogany that I set aside to use for the main thwart in the Bluegill I was building. I checked all the angles, measured the width, cut it....and it was 2 inches too short! Argh, I'd measured the inside dimension and forgotten to add the 2 inches for the width of the tape meausre case. How dumb.
I recovered by cutting a couple of 2" slices of the remaining scrap and setting them on edge between the side of the seat and the inner face of each topside. I called it a sort of fastening piece to affix the horizontal seat to the vertical topside. It made a nice place for some extra screws and epoxy. Close call.
[When I put the Bluegill on the derelict heap, I salvaged that seat and other parts, and now a good chunk of that seat is the main thwart on my Core Sound. :) ]
I am not telling. I can show you mistakes on every thing I have ever built. But you would have to be extremely knowledgeable to see them. So if you never tell someone about your mistakes, they will never know. The best boat builder in the world, made a mistake on a boat the class was building at the Wooden Boat School. When he discovered it he simply said “I wish I hadn’t done that”. And he showed the class how to fix it. So even the best make mistakes, they are just better at correcting them.
One time discussing good cabinet makers vs run of the mill cabinet makers with an elderly, yet exceptional, cabinet maker friend he said," You know the difference?" Confidently I said, good cabinet makers don't make mistakes. He said, "No, good cabinet makers know how to fix their mistakes.
Every time I mess up, I learn a new way to fix it. Lesson learned.
My biggest snafu was to trust that brand new epoxy measuring pumps would correctly measure out the right amount of resin and hardener (2:1).
I’d cut out the 70 or so ply pieces for my SCAMP build and applied a coat of epoxy to both sides, when, a couple of days later, I came to sand them down ready for a second coat I found that the epoxy hadn’t set and was balling up and clogging my sanding discs like crazy. I contacted the supplier who had discovered that due to a manufacturing fault the pumps were dispensing about half the amount of hardener as was needed! My only recourse was to remove as much of the epoxy from the pieces as I could, sanding wasn’t going to work, so I resorted to a hot air gun and scraped off as much gunk as I could before finally sanding back to a good surface. I got through three hot air guns which couldn’t take the continual use (about forty hours in total, thankfully the supplier exchanged them all under warranty). In addition I used about forty Mirka sanding disks. The epoxy and pump supplier resupplied me with epoxy, new pumps and a box of sanding discs. I’m now pretty wary of pumps and always check how much they are dispensing by weighing the product (anyone else doing the same should note that the ratio by weight is not the same as the ratio by volume).
The pieces were all recoated (twice) and I’m glad to say that my SCAMP is finished and launched.
Many years ago, I attempted to paint my Com-Pac 16 with a water based polyeurathane paint. Ya know, to avoid the fumes of oil based paint. After all the prep work such a job entails, I made certain to have quality tools like a lint free foam roller and a rather expensive badger hair brush for the roll and tip method. No cheap nylon brush for me! I dreamed of the "sprayed" look.
As anyone who has even minor experience painting knows, this turned into a nightmare. I learned my bullheaded persistence would not pay off as I attempted to "tip" the rolled water based paint with an animal hair brush. Textured paint was not the goal. And, yes, I painted the whole thing that way, wondering why my technique was off.
Humbled, I let it dry. Sanding and fairing followed. An undisclosed extended time later, I painted it successfully with the roll and tip method.
One might think that as we age the cumulative wisdom would prevent, or at least reduce, the frequency of mistakes. However it seems that nature has an evil side. I seem to find the situation is just the opposite, and growing! I'm now well into my 70's and 80 is just a short sail away. So I never have to wait too long for the next lesson in humility. For example, recently I painted the plywood tops of my sleeping berths. It was a nice day so I did this outside and, I must say, I did a really nice paint job. Well, after the paint cured enough I decided to put them in place. Hauled the starboard ply in and screwed it down easy. Went back outside and fetched the port berth ply, took it into the boat cabin and.... lo and behold, I'd painted the bottom surface not the top as I'd wanted. After a couple of double takes and face slaps, I just had to laugh. What else can a guy do in that situation?
After recovery, I got out the paint again. Still smiling.
I am currently building an Artic Skua sailing canoe. I do not know what i did wrong, everything measures up perfectly, but I broke the same bottom plank twice trying get the ends to meet to make the stern.
In both cases it broke in the exact same spot, 6 inches shy of the stern. I finally got it repaired and together, but now there is a slight hollow in the plank that is going to require a bit of filling and fairing to get right.
I look back at my first build and all the terrible decisions I made- for example a mast stepped by dropping through a partner in the middle of the deck into a sleeve in such a way that the whole 17' has to be vertical above deck height before it drops in. Throughout that build I was carefree. Just happy to be building a boat, ignorant of all my mistakes. Today I'm in the middle of build #6, and it seems I make two mistakes every time I touch a tool. Sometimes it feels like I've become less skilled when the opposite is true. Now I see details I didn't before. I have some idea of how a piece will perform. If you know you did it wrong, you know something about how it should be done. If I wasn't making mistakes, I wouldn't be learning. At that point it might be time to move on to something new, but I don't expect that any time soon.
As The Resourceful Sailor, I tend to look for alternative approaches. They do not always work out. Oh well. I have never built a whole boat, so I can't speak from that experience. I will say that whenever something doesn't go right, I fix it until my head allows me to move on. There is no shame in that. I remember reading in one of Lin and Larry Pardey's books (I can't remember which or whether Larry was building Serraffyn or Taleisin), and his boatbuilding friend said to never move on until he was truly satisfied, even if it meant a do-over. So that's the premise I work under. The advantage of a small boat you build or work on yourself is that you get to make the decision. If others were working on your boat, they may not make the same decision you would, and you may never know. That's the cost of education. Practice also usually makes for better results. I chuckle about my first epoxy jobs.
In the rafters of my small garage hangs an unfinished canoe. I built a Trailcraft kit canoe in the middle 1970s, and 30 years ago found an ad for plans for those canoes. It seems the factory which made the kits had burned down shortly after I got mine for a 12 footer. The owner had retired and was selling what he had left of the enterprise. I bought the plans for a 16 footer. When I finally got around to building it, my garage was too short to use as a shop. "No problem, I'll just shorten it to 14 feet." Somehow I made a math error and ended up with it being 12' long. It is a painted canvas on frame type of build. Now all the stringers are twisted so they have a sharp edge along the outside. Some day I will get a sander and try to smooth those down in the hopes that they won't wear through the canvas cover, but until that happens it is hanging out of the way....
I volunteer at an historic publicly owned boathouse in Gig Harbor, WA. My small catastrophe was the result of using poorly labeled containers of donated epoxy resin and hardener. I mistakenly mixed up a batch of epoxy using hardener rather than resin. A week after completing my glue-up I came back to find a gooey mess that required a nasty cleanup and then a repeat of the original glue-up process but with properly mixed epoxy and thickening additives.
Yes, did that too on one occasion - like you, I came back, scraped it all off and started over. #$%^ oh well! Lesson Learned: don't listen to music in the shop, and don't work when tired.
I Rewrote the Old Saying - ‘Measure Twice and Cut Once’
My mistake did not involve building a boat, but it did involve adding a room to a large garage where I planned on building a boat.
I took measurements for the room and figured out the length of all the rim beams, floor joists and studs it would require. Went to the lumber yard, picked the pile and filled up my trailer with lumber. Returned to the garage and discovered that the rim beams and floor joists were too short because I got the floor layout switched 90 degrees. The room was a rectangular room, not a square room, so the lumber was useless.
Moral: ‘Measure Twice and BUY Once!!! Lol!
Many years ago, I took my father out in one of the several leaky centerboard boats I persisted in fixing up. We were doing fine until, as we passed the bar at the mouth of my marina's creek, I told him to drop the centerboard. He let go of the centerboard pennant and the board, made of 1/4 inch diamond plate, immediately went to the full down position and ripped the hoisting hardware out of the overhead.
Lesson learned--be very careful when giving instructions to novices.
This boat is one of several that led to my aversion to centerboard trunks, as they invite water to come aboard..
Several years ago, I assembled a new kit from Duckworks for a lightweight Portage Pram. I was in our family room, and, like many stitch and glue kits, the parts went together like Legos except for the "transoms" which looked almost identical. After dry fitting both ends of the pram with tape, I realized that I needed big blue tape labels for "Bow" and "Stern" because I had dry-taped them in the wrong ends of the boat several times. The final assembly with epoxy went well, but I still needed the labels while I installed the seat and other fittings to be sure which end was the "pointy" end. The final product weighed only about 35 lb and fit inside my Scamp for trailering. I found that in big waves, the light dinghy caught up with the Scamp and surfed past me, so I just went back to cruising the Scamp without the dinghy. Very fun project, and great to work with parts that are so perfectly designed and made.
Not exactly a bonfire mistake, but I did have a moment. I had procured a beautiful, wide, unblemished length of 1"-thick mahogany that I set aside to use for the main thwart in the Bluegill I was building. I checked all the angles, measured the width, cut it....and it was 2 inches too short! Argh, I'd measured the inside dimension and forgotten to add the 2 inches for the width of the tape meausre case. How dumb.
I recovered by cutting a couple of 2" slices of the remaining scrap and setting them on edge between the side of the seat and the inner face of each topside. I called it a sort of fastening piece to affix the horizontal seat to the vertical topside. It made a nice place for some extra screws and epoxy. Close call.
[When I put the Bluegill on the derelict heap, I salvaged that seat and other parts, and now a good chunk of that seat is the main thwart on my Core Sound. :) ]