Composite fasteners

Have you seen an older wooden boat hull weeping rust from failing fasteners?  Well of course the rust is not the fault of the fasteners but the surrounding materials which are supposed to protect them.

But what if the fasteners were made of non-corrosive materials?  Non-metallic materials??!?

If that old strip planked hull had been built with these, it wouldn't be weeping rust...

Craft a Craft recently had this to say about them:

Our friends at Glen-L are now carrying these interesting looking composite fasteners. Leave them embedded as you cold mold and save the hassle of removing and filling holes.

These fastenings are excellent for attaching layers of planking during cold molding because they don't need to be removed.
In the past, when using staples to fasten the layers in cold molding, they needed to be removed once the glue set if they were a corrosive metal. Imagine having to remove thousands of staples! Well, not any more!
Raptor® composite fastenings don't need to be removed. The heads can be sanded right off without damaging your tools and will even take a stain.
Composite fastenings won't replace bronze screws in boat building, but they will be of tremendous value for applying a final layer of mahogany for a planked look, for strip built boats and cold molded construction.
Besides being a huge time-saver:
They

• can be sanded, sawn or cut
• Won't rust or corrode
• No need to putty, can be stained, painted or left bare
• No electrolysis or galvanic corrosion
• They bond like glue-the entire shaft fuses permanently with wood

Dock steps from one sheet of plywood

Craft a Craft recently featured a step design which originated on the Make Magazine site (a good spot to haunt for ideas).   Although Craft a Craft was seeing this as part of a boat, I think it could be an interesting set of dock steps...

Visit - Single sheet steps

We've seen a variety of single sheet boats, where people see what kind of boat they can build from a single sheet of plywood or the like, but this is slightly different.  The plans are for a set of steps built from a single sheet of ply.

I don't know that in boat-building you are really desperate to save wood in building a set of steps, but the overall design, with the single "foot" treads looks like something that might be neat or useful on a boat.  It even has some good "included" storage areas.

Don't leave home without it

Anyone who hacks on cars knows that a coat hanger is nearly the equivalent of duct tape - the things you can fix with a  coat hanger are almost innumerable.  You should have a few on your boat too.


Ah, but add this tool (featured on Craft a Craft), and the list grows even more, perhaps especially for boats.  Because with this tool and an old coat hanger, you can make a hose clamp, custom-sized to the application. 

Well, OK, you really should use the stainless wire that ClampTite sells - it *is* stainless, and it is specially selected to work with the tool.  But in a pinch, you really could use a coat hanger.

Now there's another thing I need to have onboard Eolian.

He who dies with the most tools, wins.

Sparkman & Stephens type plans

Sparkman & Stephens build some absolutely gorgeous boats. In doing one of your projects, you've probably not said to yourself, "I wonder how S&S would do this."

But maybe you should have.

This gem is from Craft A Craft:

Sparkman & Stephens, a long time maritime design firm, has placed quite a few of what they call "Type Plans" available on their web page. These are small detail plans of various features on boats,say bunk board mounting or sail rigging designs, etc. Looks like there could be some great ideas to use here if you are building or modifying a boat.

S&S Type Plans
Over the years we have created a catalogue of typical details which might be found on any yacht which we refer to as "Type Plans". These were delivered to shipyards along with the plans and specification when building a new S&S boat to assist them and to attempt to standardize many of the details that can be found onboard an S&S boat. While many are somewhat outdated we include them here as they are extremely interesting. We hope you enjoy reviewing them.