A Shipwright in Training

Well, like Russ Feingold, Kevin & I now officially have a spine. We attached the transom last Friday, thus completing the whole spinal column of the boat. Four screws, that’s it. And of course, bedding compound on the faying surfaces (remember? Any suface where 2 wood bits join up tightly are faying surfaces).

I was particularly pleased with the sternpost (painted with red oxide primer here) / transom joint. Jen, our instructor, pressed us to get it perfect, and we came pretty close. Here it is from the top, looking slightly down.

You can see a very slight gap (about the thickness of a sheet of paper) between the post and the transom on the left side. No matter, it all gets filled with bedding compound anyway.

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OK, now I hate school.

Kidding, I still love school.

This last week we’ve been very productive despite going right up to the edge of screwing up and then recovering. Whew. 2 brains are much better than one. Of course, we’ve still made a few screw-ups, but they were relatively minor and easily fixed.
The word for the day: stopwater. A stopwater is a little pine dowel that we make ourselves and it goes in a joint that could potentially allow water to enter the boat. When it gets wet, it swells and forms a barrier to creeping water. We’re contemplating making a few stopwaters out of sodium. When the water hits them, they react with explosive force. We’d have to call them Gowaters. Of course, they’d sink the boat in an instant, but boy would it be exciting on launch day.
Here’s a stopwater.

Above, you’re looking at the stopwater that bridges the stem (mahogany, orange wood) and keel. You can see that it spans this joint. The pencil line above the stopwater marks the rabbet… this is where the top of the planks will rest when they join to the stem. When it’s finished, the stopwater will be cut flush with the rabbet and planking will hide it. However, if water ever creeps in along the joint, it’ll be stopped by the … stopwater.
Here’s another one, this time at the aft end of the boat.

See? Joints get stopwaters.
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Guess what? Rhode Island is rural!! Go figure. Farming is a big way of life here on Aquidneck Island (home of Newport, Middleton, & Portsmouth) and they have a great Harvest Fair here. There’s an antique tractor parade, and most of them have the farmer’s kids doing the steering. YOu can kind of see this in the 2nd tractor in line here.

There’s also a greased pole climb (I think the grease was pretty much off by the time this kid went up), but nevertheless it was pretty impressive.

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There’s a good reason this week has flow by… we had Monday off and we spent Tuesday drafting. Drafting days always fly by… the work is so close and precise that I just get lost. One minute I’m drawing a line, the next minute it’s lunch. Here’s a shot of how it’s going so far. The top view is called the Plan View and it shows the boat from above. Each line is a contour of the hull at specific hights… like sections of a layer cake or contour lines on a map. The drawing below it is the Profile View, and again it shows slices through the boat, only this time the slices are vertical, going fore and aft. The table on the lower right is called the table of offsets and it’s a list of measurements we made of our actual boat. We use the table of offsets to arrive at these lines.

Here’s a detail of the Body Plan as it’s being developed. You can see little dots above the Butt 8 lable on the right. When those are connected with the rest of the measurements I’ll have a head-on view of the left side of the boat at Station 2 (about 3′ back from the bow). Station 1 is already drawn (about 1.5′ back from the bow).

Wednesday we continued to work on spine components: centerboard, centerboard trunk, transom, and attaching the skeg to the sternpost.
Kevin paints the centerboard trunk with primer. Good vapor mask there, Kev. The vapor mask works so well you can’t smell the paint. Without it, you get major fumes, especially from the copper-based bottom paint. It’ll do bad things to your brain without good ventilation. We’ve got a fantastic spot, right next to the huge garage door that’s frequently open. Bummer about the folks far away from the door.  We don’t expect them to live past 27.

The centerboard has been sealed with epoxy and is ready for primer and bottom paint.

The transom is made up of 3 1″ thick oak boards. They’re epoxied together, and connected with oak splines and silicone bronze drifts. The splines are strips of wood that nest in slots cut into the mating surfaces of the wood. The drifts are long rods that go through the entire assembly. It’s a bit of overkill really, useful only if a barge hits you in the transom. Still, better overbuilt than underbuilt.

Here’s a close up of a drift, and you can see the slot that the spline goes into.

Drilling the holes for these things was a bit harrowing. Here’s the deal: you have to drill a perfectly straight 1/4″ hole through 12″ of oak and come out more or less exactly in the middle of your board on the other side. Once you do that, you have to continue that hole EXACTLY with another 1/4″ hole in the next board so that when you drive the drift through your first board into the second board, the faces of the board line up exactly. There’s tricks for doing this, but a mistake here is a big mistake and can cost you an entire board.
We didn’t make any mistakes. They came out perfectly. Here they are about to go together.

The glue up is a pain because you’re using epoxy and once it starts to kick (i.e., dry really really fast) you don’t have much time to work at all before you’ve got a solid, sticky mess on your hands and the whole deal is ruined. The difficult part of our glue up (and others as well) was that the splines went a hair off center and we had to push them around to get them to line up in their slots all nice.
Here you can see 2 splines sticking out of the glued up joint… this is not a bad thing. What’s important is that the splines got into the slots in each board. We just trim off the excess spline material sticking out anyway.

This transom will never come apart. Ever.

Yesterday I cut the back edge of the keel where it will connect to the skeg (it’s like a little keel under the boat and all it does really is protect the bottom of the boat and the rudder). There it is, the very end of the keel (now primed red… Thanks Kev). You can’t really tell here, but honest, it’s a very nice bevel.

Today I drew out the skeg / sternpost connection and drilled the holes for the bolts that will hold them together. I also made a mortise and loose tenon (the little square drawn in) that acts as a key to keep everything lined up when it’s bolted together.

In the meantime, Kevin cut out the transom, and planed it to its final shape. He’s really excellent with edge tools. My skill lies more in the planning and fussy joint work.
Today was a fine clear cold day. We had a cookout for lunch beside the school. Here’s a tip: if your coals are not getting going fast enough, blow compressed air on them. It’ll make a fine blast furnace and you’ll go from nothing to perfect coals in 10 minutes. Sure, you need to own a serious compressor, but it’s really worth it.

We left school early and spent the afternoon touring the amazing, luxurious 3 masted ship ADIX. Good lord, word can hardly describe this beauty. Here’s a few shots above decks. I was too stunned below decks to take photos.

This is the door to the engine room. THE ENGINE ROOM!! Lord, it’s really a mansion floating on the water. There are oil paintings (i mean, important, original oil paintings) throughout the ship. The woodwork is as good a quality as I’ve seen anywhere, and the crew were professional and personable. It’s run like a traditional British ship. The crew generally stays forward of the main mast when the owner is aboard, and they do their work as silently as possible. The owner and his guests stay behind the main mast and indicate when they need something from the crew… chairs moved, refreshments, etc. It’s the age-old class system, but it works well on a ship.

Another fine week.

I still love school.

It took the better part of the day, but the stem rabbet is done.  At least the port side.  Kevin gets to do the starboard side.  I also get to plank the port side… this way if there are planking problems you’ve got no one to blame but yourself. 

So, here’s how it started.  First couple of cuts there next to the bevel gauge.  I used the bevel gauge first to copy the proper angle for the rabbet.  Once you’re pretty sure what the proper angle should be (this is best explained by looking at a video… just take my word for it, you have to get an accurate read on what the angle should be first) you then attempt to carve a little angled slot into the stem where one side of the slot is your desired angle.  This angle changes along the length of the stem, so you’re constantly readjusting it as you go. 

9:20 am, a couple of slots cut.

1:00 pm a couple of slots now connected up to form a continuous rabbet.  Once you’ve got a lot of slots, the connecting cuts move along pretty quick.

2:15 pm.  The whole rabbet is now roughed out.

We use a little scrap of wood called a fid to test the angle.  It’s 1/2″ thick, the same as the planking, and it shows us what the planking will look like as it enters the rabbet.  When you cut it right, the fid will be coming in at the correct angle, there will be no gaps between the fid and the walls of your cut, and the top edge of the fid will come just to the scribed rabbet line.  Here’s a good fit.

That’s all there is to do with the rabbet for now.  Final tweaking happens once the stem is attached to the boat and we start the actual planking.  One full day of work, and all there is to show for it is a groove in wood.  But, it’s a good groove.

Nancy from work, and KC, Samara, and Maxx were in town today and I got to show them around the place.  It was great to see them, and to feel reconnected to Madison life.  Nice nice nice.  At dinner out, KC surprised Nancy and I with a birthday chocolate volcano (we share the same birthday in November) and piles of ice cream.  Amazing how fast sleepy Maxx rose to the challenge of eating that puppy.

I’m definitely the luckiest guy I know.

Yes, I still like school. Despite the fact that it will soon poisen me and I will die a truly horrible death, it was fun while it lasted. More on that later.

We spent Monday in the drafting room making very detailed, scale drawings of the beetle cats that we lofted a few weeks ago. We used the information from that lofting to make these drawings, and it’s here that we can get a good idea of how precise we’ve been (or not). It’s careful, slow work, and the thickness of a pencil line matters in these drawings. A lot of folks didn’t like it, but I did. Time flew by and it took a lot of concentration.
Now we’re back in the shop, and a lot of parts have been taking shape these past few days. We pulled the stem from the glue up. Yug. Hard hard epoxy. (by the way, this is someone else’s stem, we were a bit less liberal with our glue). That’s one ugly stem.

15 minutes of belt sanding gets the bulk of the epoxy off the edges. Flatten the side of this thing on the jointer, use the thickness planer to thin it down to 1 1/2″ thick, and you’ve got a nice little stem, ready for final shaping. You take a template, trace the outline on your stem, band saw it to rough shape, and then plane, spokeshave, and scrape it to your line.  Easy.

Here’s our stem, all cut out pretty like. You can see the template below it. The template also has lines on it indicating the rabbet and bearding lines. These lines tell you where to cut the all-important rabbet (scarey music here). The rabbet is a v-shaped groove that you carve into the stem and keel. The planks fit into this groove, so you have to make your rabbet just exactly right so that the planks fit perfectly. If they don’t, you get a leaky boat. The bearding line is the inside edge of this v-shaped groove, the rabbet line is the outside edge. In the center of these two lines is the apex of the v, and it’s called the…

wait for it…

middle line.

To make a nice fair curve, we lightly tap in nails along the rabbet and bearding lines through the template and into our stem, take the template off, and then re-nail through those little holes. Then we put a batten (any flexible strip… here it’s the thin clear plastic rod off to the right) up against our nails, draw a pencil line along it, and viola, a nice smooth line. The blue ducks (actually they look like whales) are made of lead and they help hold the batten down while we draw the lines. you can see our stem has the rabbet and bearding lines drawn on it.

Drawing the middle line is the final step before cutting the awesomely important rabbet. Here’s Kevin working out the proper angles to do this.

It’s easy once you know what’s up, but it’s hard to describe it in words.

In the meantime, we’ve traced out a centerboard from marine plywood, roughed the shape on the bandsaw and planed, spokeshaved, and rasped it to the proper shape.

Next step is to cut a 5″ hole in it, and fill the hole with molten lead. That was a ton of fun. We melted the lead out back, clamped a sacrificial scrap of plywood underneath the hole to make a little pool, and poured away.

Yes, it scorches the wood. It’s wild.

Now we’ve got this nifty plug of lead in our keel to keep it from floating up when we’re sailing along. But, we put a healthy plug in, enough to rise proud of the surface a bit. The best way to smooth that down, is with your hand plane.

Yes, you can plane lead. It’s quite soft. And really poisonous. That’s why it’s important to eat those little shards of lead so that you can develop a tolerance and keep the people from the EPA from asking inconvenient questions about where you walk after planing lead, what sort of breathing protection you were wearing, whether or not you washed your hands afterwards and if so, where you put the rinse water… all that sort of stuff. Word to the wise, taco sauce really helps the lead go down smooth.

We also cut out our skeg (not pictured) and our sternpost (one of the main thing that holds up the transom).

Onward onward. Tomorrow we cut the dread rabbet. Each student cuts one side of the stem rabbet. That way, you’ve no one to blame but yourself if your planks don’t fit quite right on that side. Kevin and I have agreed that I’ll go first.  Heaven guide my mortal, shaking, lead-poisened hand.

This has been a busy week, hence the lack of blogging.
I still love school.
This week we got partners, and my buddy Kevin and I are now working on a little beetle cat together. Here she is as we got her. You can see where a previous owner went to the trouble to build a new stem and added on one plank on the port side, and then just stopped. Go figure.

You can see lots of rust damage from years of water getting through little cracks in the paint and destroying the iron fastenings.

So, the first order of business was to take off the deck and deck supports so that we could flip the boat upside down on top of molds that will hold the boat in the proper shape as we take it apart and re-assemble it with new bits. Here’s Kevin taking off the decking boards.

This is a view of the top edge of the sheer (top plank). With the decking removed, you can see where water infiltrated through the fastener holes and rusted out. I also think they used fasteners that were too large and didn’t predrill the holes so they split the planking where they fastened into it.

Deck all removed, and half of the centerboard trunk removed, revealing the centerboard (deep blue).

We set up the molds precisely on a grid that we’ve drawn on the floor, and then we brace the hell out of them. After all, we’re going to be plopping a boat on top of them, bending wood over them, and climbing on top of them. They need to be rock solid. Here’s Jason setting up his stations. These molds define the shape of the hull and we’ll be pulling the old boat down onto them to bring it back to original design shape.

And here’s our boat on the molds.

We screw the boat to the molds to hold it solidly, and then begin removing its spine: garboards, keel, stem, sternpost, and eventually the transom. Here’s Kevin taking out garboards (the planks that butt up against the keel).

You can see the cotton caulking that went in between the garboard and keel. The little light squares of wood act as washers to keep the screws from pulling through the plank when she screw it down to the molds.

Keel and stem removed.

Next, we fashion a new keel from 1 1/2″ oak and cut a rabbet (the slots you see on the left and right sides). We use a template to get the correct keel shape, and use a circular saw and hand planes to cut it out to the exact shape.

Then we put it in a steam box for an hour and a half (1 hr / inch thickness is the rule) to soften it up.

Then we clamp it to a long curved mold to give it the curve we want. Hot hot hot!!!

While that’s cooling down, we cut strips of mahogany, stack them up so that steam can get to all surfaces, and steam them as well.

When they come out of the steamer box, we bend them to shape on a form as well. Now, it’s starting to look like a new stem.

Once they’ve cooled and hold their shape, we epoxy them together in another form. This second form holds the laminates in the same shape as the first form, but laying the strips sideways on the table allows us to stack them more precisely. We’ve covered this bench with plastic, screwed in angle irons to the table along the edge of a pattern, and then we clamp the wet, glued layers up to the form. In a day we’ll take it off, clean up the glue and have ourselves a rough stem to work with.

We’re using mahogany for the stem rather than oak (original) because oak moves too much as it gets wet and dries. The result is that almost every beetle cat we get has delaminated stems. Mahogany is far more stable and will last much longer. For instance, here’s the original stem from this boat. It’s no surprise that the stem was one of the things the previous owner replaced.

And here’s the new keel clamped to the molds. This is what we’ll rebuild the boat around.  The combination of stem, keel, and transom constitute the spine of a boat.

Not bad for a week’s work!

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