Building a Bow Shed

After hemming and hawing, roughly pricing out various options, and thoroughly dreading the alternatives of either crawling around under a cover sanding, or spending years working on the thing I decided I had to build a shed.

Eventually anyone around boats, or Maine, comes across the Stinson Bow Shed. With plans allegedly available by mail order for $20 and some patience. I lacked patience, but the bow shed was for me. Simple to build, easy to get the required width at the height to clear the gunnels, coverable with shrink wrap. I set to work with plans I’d draw like all good projects, from pictures and internet commentary. Perhaps someone will build one off of these.

There are only two or three critical ratios for the arch, but I’ll leave them out here. Most people are probably best buying the plans, otherwise the details are available elsewhere. The pictures speak to the process. It took me about a month to build the thing. It measures 16x34, as wide as I could find lumber for (the bows are as long as the width), and long enough for the mast to fit inside.  I built it right over the boat where it sat.

making the bows on a jig, twenty in all

knee walls to gain some extra clearance

First few bows up

Nadia helped with the first two sets, I did the rest alone.

Plastic On

you can see some of the bracing. I later lightly shrunk the plastic.

arches up and covered

image shows clearances between shed and boat. note boat is not level, but shed is. mostly.

Finished bow shed looking south

Note mast stored along west wall, and plastic covering the ground

north end wall

note the nice room to work in front of the boat, even though the shed is only seven feet longer than the boat

One note of caution for prospective builders, while the lumber and hardware for the tunnel only cost a temptingly cheap ~$700, the knee walls, end walls, and finishing touches (which did include 300’ of 10ga wire) easily tripled that sum. The actual white shrink wrap was a remnant of 36’ wide from work, and luckily just long enough to make it the 32’ up and over the bows.

Once the knee walls and bows were constructed it took me a weekend working alone to raise them and cover it. Another week of evenings and a weekend for the end walls. I’ll have to take the north end off to get the boat out, but didn’t want to bother with doors at this point. I also hung lights and roughed in some outlets to cut down on the extension cord mess. Details are best left to the imagination.

So far, I’m quite impressed with the shed and can recommend the design wholeheartedly. While it doesn’t warm up much with the sun barely clearing the trees right now, hopefully that will change as we move into spring. I also put plastic down on the ground to limit condensation and control environmental contamination.

Getting Started

I found the boat on craigslist, a seemingly rare small blue-water sailboat in the middle of the cornfields. This particular specimen, a 1981 Cape Dory 27, had obviously been mid-refit for some time and desperately needed a concerted effort to actually finish the job.

Owned briefly by an intrepid grad-student who found he was lacking time, I found myself relieving him of his financial commitment in exchange for a dream, a gate code, and a truck-load of woodwork, hardware, rigging and every other part of a boat that isn’t the hull.

everything but the kitchen sink, loaded from the previous owners garage.

Everything was stripped off the boat except the engine. Woodwork, hardware, wires, tanks, plumbing. It was as if I’d purchased a bare hull ready for fit out, except I had the interior stored and ready to go. Just fix a few things up and throw it all back together, easy as pie.

The topsides and house top had been sprayed, and the side decks roughly ground down to laminate now covered in over-spay. The bottom looked good though, and my initial soundings of the deck, while incomplete in hindsight, filled me with encouragement.  A 2” hole drilled in the keel, and the soft cabin sole suggested it had filled with water at some point, a fact affirmed by the water marks on the interior paneling. A steering quadrant had been optimistically installed on the rudder post.

Closer inspection revealed several vertical stress cracks along the port topsides, on the freshly painted house top and around the cockpit. Several patches of un-sanded filler remained on the topsides as well. Perhaps the paint was more of a sales tactic than a thought-out program. The Cape Dory line was evidently known for its excessively thick gelcoat causing stress cracks, and this boat had apparently suffered particularly from this fact.

Stress cracks repaired inadequately by previous owner.

Detail showing crack extending into surface of laminate

more cracks opened up

Cracks ground out to a respectable taper

Filling after some glass in the larger cracks

fairing continues

It was early September, and I had several months left before I would have to get off the project for winter and retreat to upholstery and the like. I figured if I could get the topsides and deck sorted I would be sitting pretty.  

I jumped right in, spending every available moment sanding the paint and primer off the hull. I found a network of stress cracks inadequately repaired and re-emerging. I ground them out more generously and threw some glass in the divots for good measure. Several iterations of filling, fairing, and priming followed. My weather windows narrowing precipitously, I managed to get the hull faired and a few good coats of high build primer on before the snow and temperature fell.

At some point in the fall, I spent a day or two going over the engine, a single cylinder Yanmar YSM-8. I rigging temporary fuel lines and tried and failed to start or even prime the thing by hand, leading me to suspect a bad injection pump. My senses got the better of me though, and I returned later with a battery and re-installed injection pump. The starter and decompression lever turned the engine over much faster than the hand crank, and I soon had diesel coming out of the right places. Finally primed properly, she coughed to life and even pumped water. I ran it several more times, even starting it by hand, with no further trouble, and winterized it happy to have one less thing to worry about.

 I hadn’t touched the deck except some sanding to figure out what exactly was going on up there. But as the weather wettened I started to notice a section of the top laminate on the foredeck was particularly thin, and was starting to bulge up a bit, with a worrying squish.  

Clearly the boat couldn’t spend another winter exposed with nothing protecting the bare decks, and I couldn’t afford to wrap it and walk away for the winter I was already behind and I had to keep pressing on if I was going sailing next summer.

While ponding my options for winter covers, I retreated to the cabin and found the balsa core in the cabin sole completely rotten, so I cut it out. Maybe I’ll lower it a bit.

Interior with some of the sole cut out

Eventually I decided to build a shed.

1981 Cape Dory 27

I am now four months into owning my project of a 1981 Cape Dory 27.

Condition when purchased: Interior and deck striped, decks mostly solid, mast and boom presumably serviceable, all systems removed, engine presumed serviceable. Woodwork and all other removed hardware (which as far as I can tell is almost everything) transferred loose with sale. Sails cleaned and serviceable. Rigging present.

I managed to remove the paint, correct some stress cracks in the gelcote (I believe from the keel board on the cradle rotting out) and get it primed before the snow started to fly (in october). Since then I’ve constructed a shelter and opened up some more projects onboard. Stay tuned for more catch-up posts and hopefully regular updates.

-James