Shiplap Siding Tools

These little hooks were manufactured out of metal straps that cost $0.92 instead of paying $50 to $80 for mass manufactured tools. 

The concept is simple, slide the hook onto the top of the last plank installed and rest the next plank in the hooks that hang out. The new plank is now level, straight, and held in place while you are free to move around and screw it into the studs. 

You don't have to measure and hold each plank as you try to get a uniform result, instead you simply rest the plank and get to work. It is a good idea to audit your work periodically and measure the amount of plank displayed to make sure you are within the tolerable limits of your job.

When you are shopping for tools for your project, don't be swayed to purchase the most expensive tool for the job and focus more on making the right tool for the right price for the job!

Doweling the Transom

With all the planks revised and jointed, it is time to drill the holes and cut the dowels that will help support the transom planking. I could clamp and screw the transom planking to the sternpost and transom frames but this would require careful measurements. 

Instead, I'm going to glue and bed the transom together into a large flat panel which I will then attach to the sternpost. To support the planks from sheer forces and from pulling apart, I'm going to glue dowels into the top and bottom sides of the planks and clamp them together.

Dowels will slide into the strakes and provide support to sheer forces placed upon the transom until the transom is screwed to the transom framing. The only problem with dowels is they need to be perfectly aligned or they will not work. If the holes are slightly offset, the dowels will jam and not allow the planks to mate. To avoid this, I used a dowel centering tool, making the process both easy and fast!

The process is simple and straight forward, simply drill two holes in the top of the bottom strake using a drill press and then insert the dowel centers into the holes. Now position the faying surfaces of the planks and press them together, the pins will mark pilot divots into the opposing strake. Simply drill the opposing holes on a drill press making sure to follow the marked divots.

Following this simple procedure, the holes could all be drilled in a uniform fashion. The dowels themselves were set to stagger that was I would avoid running into a previous hole if the strake were rather thin. I also made sure the bottom and top strake would not have the soft wood dowel exposed after I trimmed up the shape of the transom.

The dowels were easy to cut to size using strong sheers. The soft wood cuts with the sheers just like scissors and paper. The dowels were cut to 2 inches, and set into holes that were 1 inch deep into each plank. I followed the gauge on the drill press for controlling the depth of bore into the planks.

With everything cut and drilled, we are ready to glue and bed the planks together and let the curing process begin!

Reusing a Shackle, Halyard Eye Splice

Your current halyard shackle may be working just fine when your halyard needs to be retired. Reusing your current shackle will save on the cost of replacing your halyard.

While this shackle may look rather old and worn, the owner of this yacht trusted it and wanted to reuse it on his new halyard.

The most important thing to remember when splicing your shackle to the new halyard is to remember to slide the shackle onto the line before you make the eye splice in the halyard!

In this example, we are going to use 10mm VPC from New England Ropes. The first step is to pull the core out of the cover. Be sure to insert a needle through the rope just next to the area where you pulled the core out to avoid the line from scooting around.

At this point, the simple straight forward-ness of a Double Braid Class II eye splice ends.

The cover is fed into the core and then tapered gradually to reduce any hard steps that could result in stress points on the halyard when under load. At this point, the core and cover trade places and the cover is fed into the core and the core becomes the cover.

With the cover inside the core and tapered gradually, it is time to complete the splice. Further down the line, you want to pull the core out of the line. You want to pull out plenty of core to allow easier work while splicing. Also, be sure the slide the shackle onto the tail, all the way up to the loop that you pulled out.

The splice will be as big as the span between the cover entering the core and the beginning of the loop. The use of needles through the line will prevent the line from scrunching up in the area of the eye.

Instead of tape, I simply whipped the end of the core and inserted it into the back of the fid and fed it through the loop.

The eye splice is now formed and all that is left to do is taper the tail and feed the loop back into the cover.

Tapering is performed the same way it would be carried out on single braid dyneema. The only difference in tapering the core and tapering single braid dyneema is the VPC core is much softer in your hands compared to dyneema.

With the bury section tapered, be sure to pull the section all the way through the core, ensuring that the area where the cover enters the core now enters the loop as well. With the tail buried all the way in, pull on the scrunched loop to bury the entire tail completely. 

Once the tail is buried into the loop, you need to milk the loop back into the cover. I like to tie the line to a winch or mooring cleat and pull hard on the eye splice and let the cover swallow the core back up. At the very end, you will have triple thickness (Cover, Core, and Core) line entering the cover designed for single thickness. This basically means that you need to pull really hard in forceful snaps to get the last bit of loop to be swallowed up by the cover. 

Once the eye splice is complete, you need to whip the splice to lock it in place. You must use a needle and whipping thread driven through the cover and core to lock the splice in place. The whipping does help to make the splice look prettier, but it also serves as a structural lock to hold everything in place.

Siding Butt Joints

Butt joints are a nifty trick that lets you plank a row that is longer than the longest board you have available. Siding planks tend to come in twelve foot sections. On regular houses, a single wall could be much longer than twelve feet and butt joints are necessary. On tiny houses, butt joints are used for different reasons.

Due to windows, doors, and other features on the side of a tiny house, there are rarely sections where a twelve foot plank will not reach. Instead, butt joints are utilized to use off cut siding planks. For example:

The windward side is seven feet wide. 
Three inches on each side is needed for trim space, so each plank needs to be six feet and six inches long.

If you cut a twelve foot plank at the six foot six inch mark, you now have a perfectly good plank that measures five foot six inches left over as an off cut. Instead of throwing these off cuts out, you can reuse them on the leeward side.

If you use a plank that is five foot six inches long, you need an additional piece that is one foot long. Connecting them with a butt joint will fill in the necessary length and give the tiny house the appearance you are looking for.

Butt joints are merely edge setting two planks next to each other close enough that they appear to blend together. The corners on the lower end of the butt joint are weaker and can be lifted by strong winds (which is why they should only be used on the leeward side and never on the windward side). 

To guarantee a tight butt joint, be certain to only use "primed edge" sides for the butt joint. The siding planks come coated in primer, and the edges that have primer on them are perfectly square and flat. Edges that you cut with a hand saw may be off by a few degrees. While it may look straight enough in your hand, they will result in an open looking butt joint that will draw a lot of attention.

By placing two "primed edges" next to each other, you are sure to have a very tight butt joint that will blend into the house and not be noticed.

Butt joints also allow water to penetrate the siding, which is why it is a good idea to place extra tar paper under each butt joint. A tar paper shingle will help shed any water that works its way in between the butt joint.

Carefully staggering butt joints on the leeward side of the tiny house will allow you to reuse off cut sections of siding that would otherwise be lost as waste. Reusing your materials will help reduce the cost of materials by reducing the amount of waste you generate. Reducing your costs and wastes is a big part of tiny house living, so why not start this philosophy during the construction process?

Transom Planking

The transom of the dinghy is going to be made out of very stout strakes. These strakes are going to be around one inch thick and will tie together the stern of the boat. The planking will run the length of the hull and be fastened into the sides of the transom. The force of the lift rings will also be exerted on the transom, as well as the force from the outboard motor. For these reasons, the transom needs to be stout and overbuilt.

To create the transom, clear pieces of a flat sawn plank were selected and then cut out in a way to produce quarter sawn boards. These boards were then finished on all four sides and jointed to remove any irregularities. Having no irregularities means that the planks will meet perfectly and there will be no space for water to seep through. Since these strakes will be part of the external planking, they need to be water tight to avoid any leaks.

This is also the only section of the hull that will be single planked, which is also more prone to leaking. I decided to make the transom tight seamed instead of caulking the seams with cotton because the transom will have the lettering for the name on it and I don't want the lettering to have to cross over seam compound. By tight seaming the planks, cotton caulking and seam compound will not be needed and polysulfide bedding compound will suffice to keep any leaks from occurring.

The widest part of the transom will be 26.5 inches across, and it will taper down from there to the keel. To ensure that there is enough wood to work with, I cut the transom planks to 30 inches. The ends of the planks contain knots as these sections will be cut off at a later point along with all of their imperfections.

To tie the boards together, I will use wooden dowels that will act as drifts, giving the planks more resistance to sheer forces without the risk of internal metal corrosion seeping out from between the plank seams. The wooden dowels will swell as they get moist, further locking them into place and never letting the wood slide out of place.

The boards are stacked, all irregular thicknesses, ready to be connected with dowels and polysulfide bedding compound, then they will be surfaced to perfection and the sides trimmed to fit the transom of the dinghy.

If you look closely, you can see that the strakes have pink and white colors. The pink is freshly surfaced heartwood, the white is freshly surfaced sapwood.

Douglas Fir heartwood is very rot resistant and strong. Douglas Fir sapwood is garbage and will rot very quickly. I need to revise the strakes and remove the sapwood from the strakes and re-joint the boards to achieve the same tight seams without any rot prone sapwood.

Once the strakes are revised and the seams perfectly tight, the holes for the dowels can be drilled and the entire transom can be clamped together with table clamps, providing plenty of pressure for a few days as the polysulfide cures.