Hull: part-painted

Photo yesterday

Just to get an idea of the colour scheme, took this yesterday.  The green on the hull is not to the waterline yet: I'll do that when she gets to the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, which is this Saturday.  The "Donegal Green" colour was the only Marine Green I could get in Hong Kong, and it looks pretty much like British Racing Green that I wanted, so I'm quite happy with that. [On reflection "Donegal" being a county in Ireland, it's a kind of "British Racing Green"....]
Today we hang the rudder and drill the hole through the Transom for the tiller... A bit scary to drill through the nice Chinese Mahogany transom.....
Managed yesterday to source some gudgeons and pintles with Storm Force Marine.  Not something that there's much call for in Hong Kong, apparently...

One man's eight-year effort to build a wooden ship by hand

Screenshot, of Johah Eaton's build.  Video here.

An occasional reader of this blog, local mate in Discovery Bay here in Hong Kong, sends me a link to this site, a short video of a Jonah Eaton, who's been building a 42' wooden schooner.
Some of Jonah's comments on the vid will resonate with builders of our much littler Somes Sound:

 "There's no right angles [in boatbuilding]; everything's constantly curving and shifting around on you..."

"Building a wooden boat is about as hard as it gets"

Thanks to PS for the link.

Coaming, seats and trunk cover on

Coaming fitted and test varnish.... think will end up

varnishing rather than painting.  At the mast deck beam

are the clamps for the mast deck beam trim, made of Chinese 

Hemlock ("Tie Mu"). The port coaming is not quite fair, yet, I know!  
Needs a bit more tender-loving-trimming care....

Our little hatch, at lowest point that water will collect....
(the bit of wood with epoxy dribble is not the trunk cover, just some
scrap wood.  Since then we've made the trunk cover proper)....

... and the manual hand bilge pump, set to pump from lowest point of bilges

PS: those that are Somes Sound builders will note two scarf joints on the port coaming (the starboard has only one joint).  Reason is simple: that I only had enough wood to make a port-side coaming with two joints. The alternative was to order more marine plywood, just for one coaming, which, in Hong Kong, is quite expensive, around $HK 1,000 including delivery to us here in Discovery Bay, a car-free place, where delivery trucks have to pay $500 just to get here.  So I thought better two joints than a whole new board....
PPS: again to builders: the port coaming is not quite fair, yet, I know!  Needs a bit more tender loving trimming care....

Coaming

Arlene checking the fit of the starboard coaming.  Amazingly, the fit
was good, and all along the coaming, the heights above the deck
were as per the plans.  We'll add a nose of Ramin to the coaming

In the past week or so, we've removed the seats, all the floor beams, floor cleats and floor sole planks to smooth them out and epoxy them, then painted the interior with protective white paint to seal against rain.  We've finished off the side seats and varnished them, and got on with the Coaming.
Both Dave on his blog and the designer, John Brooks in his build instructions, have said that the coaming is the most difficult part of the build, so we approached it with some trepidation.
Having read of Dave's travails with mahogany, and his replacement with marine ply, I decided to go straight to the marine ply option, using the last of my 3/8" marine ply that I had left over from the planking.

Woops....adding back
wood, never a good thing..

We scarfed the ply to make the 12' lengths needed.  Then we made a pattern from 1/4" non-marine ply. Then lofted the plan to the pattern and dry fitted it.  Seemed to fit pretty well, aside from a bit of a gap at the bottom at the forward deck end.  I marked on the pattern that we needed to add about 1/2" at the bottom, when we transferred the pattern to the marine ply. We did this fine for the port side Coaming, but forgot to do it for the starboard side, so had to add some wood back... a touch embarrassing, but we managed it ok.
I've decided not to varnish the Coaming, but to paint it. I know this is not the traditional way, but the scarfing joints -- which are fine in strength -- will show under the varnish, and now that we have the added bit to the bottom part of the starboard coaming, that sealed the decision....

Sunbaking floor sole planks

The port floor sole planks of Douglas Fir are still wet with sap.  We've been tracking their weight in comparison with the starboard dry ones, and they're still about 10% heavier.  So we put them out in the nice Hong Kong winter sun.  It's been about 15-20 degrees C, and 60% humidity, which counts as dry here in Hong Kong.  After initially losing weight quickly, they're now losing it more slowly, which I kind of expected: decreasing marginal returns, that sort of thing.
So, we'll keep them sunning themselves for as long as we can before fitting.

Decks

Decks laminated on.  Note the floor sole planks drying out.  They were
very sap-full when they arrived, fresh-cut Douglas Fir from Canada.

We laminated the decks onto the sheer yesterday afternoon.  They're made of leftover "Tie Mu", lit. "iron wood",  which I find on Google is "Chinese Hemlock".  It's a nice softwood, quite light, apparently used for boatbuilding in China.  Though it does tend to absorb a lot of epoxy...

Next job is to scarf 3/8" plywood for the Coaming, and fit it. Dave on his blog says it's the most difficult part of the build, so have to be on full alert... Dave tried the by-the-book install of mahogany, but found it split, and so changed to marine ply which worked well, so I'm going for that at the outset. We've done the pattern of 1/4" non-marine ply and fitted it, so now just to transfer the pattern to the 3/8" marine ply.

BTW, the floor sole planks that were really fresh-wet when they arrived are drying out nicely.  I thought they'd take weeks to dry out, but they seem to be losing up to 10% of their weight per day, so getting quickly to their dried weight.  They're sitting there, above, on the bow, enjoying this late winter sun of Hong Kong.

Seats

Starboard seat and floor soles dry fitted.  Note the seat support struts:
by the fourth one, I got pretty good at the single dovetail joint....

The floor soles (the planks above) aren't screwed down or fixed in proper position yet, they're just there to see how they fit.  In the final, they need to be spaced 1/8" to 1/4" apart.  Also, I'm going to attach them from underneath to each other with lengths of "Tiemu" (lit. "Ironwood", or Chinese hemlock), which will fit over the floor beams, so that the floor soles can be lifted out easily to get to the bilges. We still need to add two more shorter boards to each side, scribed to quite fine long angles.

[LATER: I've had to take out all the boards to try to dry them. The new ones, Port side, were wet on delivery -- the timber yard told me this, that Canada had sent them newly-cut timber.  I weighed them compared with the starboard ones, and the weigh 240g/board more, so we need to put them out in the sun to dry some.  Luckily this time of year is relatively dry, humidity only 50% so there's some chance that we'll be able to dry them off.  I'll measure them each day and only epoxy them, for protection, and reinstall them, when they're closer to the weight of the dry starboard boards]

Scribing the starboard seat to fit to the hull was easier than I thought.  No tricky bevels or cambers to deal with and I just used a made-up scribing gauge, made of a bit of ply with a permanent marker fitted to it, then run along the hull onto a long piece of scrap 1/4" ply, then cut that pattern and transfer to the final 3/4" ply. It worked pretty well and fitted first up.  Note the angle on the seats, which is deliberate, to make them more comfortable on a tack.
I'm going to do like Dave in California did, and add a trim to the edge of the ply, in my case 3/8" Ramin (Bai Mu, or, literally "white wood") a local fine-grained hardwood used in furniture trade, but which seems to work well for marine as well -- I used it to laminate the inner and outer stems, then epoxied to avoid rot.  I also used it to laminate the floor battens. So far so good, though we're not on the water yet...
Next is the port-side seat, final trim of the floor soles, and then loft and fit the coaming, which I'm going to make of ply, like Dave did.  Happens that I just have enough 3/8" ply to do it without ordering any more wood, and as Dave said it was tough to get the mahogany to fit without breaking.
I'm only doing the seat supports and not the lockers under the seats on the principle that (a) if you have any storage space, it'll get filled and (b) it's easier, which is important to a lazy sod like me.

Example of the principle that any available storage space will be filled -- just like Parkinson's Law that work will expand to take up the time available to do it -- is in the photo of the rear locker at left, which is already full of junk...

Floors

Will probably replace the outboard sole plank here by
a slightly longer one, scribed to the fine angle above.
These are just dry-fitted to see what they look like...

...  and they don't look too bad.  We need to take them off
and trim to final shape at the aft end.  Other than that, they
fit pretty well, given our very basic scribing skills.....

These are made from Douglas fir, 4" x 3/4" wide, ripped to 2" on the table saw.  I tried them at 4" but they looked a bit industrial.  These ones look pretty good, and smell nice, just after they've been cut.  The scent of new-cut wood....
They need to be removed and trimmed, with the scribed parts at the top of this picture evened out to a consistent even curve and the edges of all planks sanded down to round them off.