BYYB Forums

So I found good 2×12×16 but have need to cut some to 1×12×16.  What's the best way to do that?

Yikes!  You don't want much.  What are you doing?  If you are going to use this board for the keel of a weekender, you have a couple options.  You can rip it down on a table saw to much smaller strips and laminate them back together which would give you a much more stable stick in the end,  but you would also lose a ton of it to saw dust.  If you are building the keel for a weekender, you could rip it down to two inch widths and stack those sticks on top of one another to make something big enough to cut a keel out of.  Some keels are in fact made exactly that way.  Again, you will lose a bunch of it to saw dust, but if the board is cheap enough that you can buy a few of them, you could end up in good shape.  I'm not sure, but I think that the end product would be a lot more stable than the one by layup that the plan calls for. 

Paul has a scheme to layup a keel with both plywood and dimensional lumber that I like very much.  It gives you both stability of the ply with durability of the dimensional and all you have to do is make sure to cover the end grain of the ply.  I built my keel out of 3/4 inch plywood.  I couldn't find any reasonable lumber at the time I started my build, so I went with ply.  It complicated my build, but in the end, I don't think it was too bad a thing to do.  I did add a hardwood shoe to my keel so that no end grain showed, and covered that with a skid plate.  I had to drill out the screw holes for the skid plate over size and back fill them with epoxy before setting the screws.  Again a complication, but so far, my keel is rock solid. 

I guess that most builds are complicated by material availability.  Working around those issues is part of the charm of boat building for me. 

Al

Thanks - I watch a shipwright YouTube channel and he is able to do this with a huge ban saw. But there isn't a mill nearby and I have no way of gaining access to anything like that. I guess I figured I wasn't the only one since the plans call for 14' 1×12. I'll have to think more about it since I can't follow the plans. I'm surprised it is so hard to find the materials I need.

Any 1x12 (or 1x10) found in the big box stores will be relatively unstable. This is because the wood is flat sawn, farm raised and cut too young. The best thing you can do is rip these widths right down the middle on a table saw and flip one of the resulting two pieces end for end. This can be edge glued and the results will make a much more stable and stiffer board. A lot of trouble for a Weekender keel though.

Instead of all this, substitute the middle layer of 1x stock for plywood, cut to shape of course. On a technically level, it's not quite as strong as a solid wood laminate, but it is more stable and will hold the solid pieces together better. The strength issue isn't as important as you might think in this keel, so not a concern. Glue and screw all the pieces and leave a small gap at the bottom of the keel, where the plywood ends. Backfill this area with epoxy, so the end grain is protected. If I did this, I'd take the extra step of using two layers of 3/8" plywood, instead of one 3/4". This will let you overlap the seams, making a continuous plywood central layer in the deadwood assembly, which will be even stronger, because of the extra plywood veneers and glue line.

As to resawing stock down, like a 2x12. You can use a table saw, but most don't have one big enough to do this with 2 passes. A big band saw can do it, but again most just don't have this, nor most wood shops. If you have a 10" table saw, you can get somewhere between 2.25" to nearly 3" of height from a single pass. This is enough to cut a 2x6 in two passes through the saw, which is why I recommend ripping the 2x12 down the middle. Yeah, you'll have more seams and pieces to contend with, but the resulting keel will be more stable with a bunch of overlapping joints.

[attachment=1585]

The above shows the plywood center piece, with a single 1x12 on the left and two 1x6's on the right. Note the epoxy plug along the bottom, to seal the plywood end grain.

I think I've decided to use the available 2x12x16 as the center material and a configuration of 1x8x12s and 1x6x10s. This will make the keel 1inch wider than planned. Do you think this extra inch will cause real issue? Or will it work just as well as the original plans?

A center layer of 2x stock, covered with a layer of 1x stock on each side will make a 3" wide keel. The stock keel is 2 1/4" wide, so not much of a difference. It's unnecessary and several have opted to use a single length of 2x stock, instead of the three layers of 1x stock the plans call for. I dislike the single layer (2x12) approuch, but it does work and slightly less weight and drag associated with it too. Do your best to not over build this puppy - it's likely the biggest mistake new builders make.

I had a lumberyard that would resaw the 2 x 12's on their big band saw, but it was challenging to say the least. Resawn boards are never exactly the right width, so it took a lot of work to make a keel that was a consistent width by flipping and rearranging the boards.  I like Paul's suggestion that, at first, looks like more work but will be easier in the long run.

I own a very old resawing machine. I think it might have been originally steam driven, but was converted to electric decades ago. It can take a 3" blade and man you don't want to have to take this some place to be sharpened or welded back together. I bought it in pretty rough shape, as the guy was thinking he'd just sell it as scrap metal. I replaced the motor (5 HP), which isn't big enough if I was resawing big hunks of hickory or something, but is fine for most of the stuff I've used it for. I haven't used it much and it has a 1.5" blade on it now. I thought I'd get a lot of use out of the darn thing, but nope, not really. I did rip a 14" tall log, harvested from my land for a new ridge beam in the barn, but mostly it sits in storage waiting for another gig, which is pretty infrequent now. It's hard work to manhandle large timbers though a machine like this and setup takes forever. The ridge beam for example was 4x10, spliced at 18' to span the ridge. Now think about the in and out feed tables you have to setup for these kind of cuts. This is part of the reason it doesn't see much use.

Back to the "composite" keel idea. Solid wood tends to move with environmental changes. This leads to cupping, checks, splits, egged out fastener holes, etc. The three layer sandwich in the plans does address some of these things, but the substitution of plywood for the center layer solves much of the problems associated with the three layer solid wood approuch. Yeah, you're right Frank, it's a little more work, but not as much as you'd think, because you have to cut the center layer out of either material. The advantage in this regard is you can make a bigger hunk of center section with plywood. The whole stem and forefoot can be made as one piece, saving some seams. If I was doing it this way, I'd use two layers of 3/8" for the center section, so I could overlap the seams and increase the veneer count.

A single layer of 2x12 can work, but will tend to cup, twist, etc., unless it's a really nice, straight grained, quarter sawn piece. I do find these types of pieces at the big box store, but you do have to go through a few stacks of 2x12's to find them.

I remember corresponding with Mike Stevenson about this, and he said at the time they created the Weekender plans you could readily find 1 x 12 doug fir boards with tight, straight grain in many lumberyards. I had some rough doug fir 2 x 3 that my dad used to build a patio cover and today it would be sold as premium wood at a premium price. Back then, the 1980s, this was very easy to find. 

Douglas fir was used mainly because the Stevenson's hailed from California where it was the least expensive wood available. It also happens to be OK for boat building.

You're not kidding Frank.  Yesterday I bought five 1 by 6 ten foot boards of straight tight Doug Fir and it came to $140.  I have come to the conclusion that unless you intend to create an heirloom, just buy decent materials and protect the heck out of them.  My sense of things is that few weekenders survive very long with their builders whether they rot or not.  So, you don't have to break the bank to have a lot of fun.  On my current build I am spending some money for Doug Fir because I can, and I got frustrated with the lesser lumber I could get.  I'm still not going to use marine ply though. 

Al