A Shipwright in Training

There was an excellent April fools NPR episode some time back about maple trees exploding in Vermont because the maple syrup farmers hadn’t tapped the trees enough and they exploded from the sap buildup. When we say a board blows up, it’s a little more subtle but damn frustrating. For instance, our breast hook exploded the other day.

Ignore the holes, those were something else. Note, instead, the massive cracks (called checks) at the end of our board. This happens when your wood dries too fast. We had to re-make this part and scrap an otherwise beautiful chunk of 1 5/8″ thick premium red oak.

Our mast has been drying too fast.

The mast I’ve been carefully planing down, and the same mast I spent the past day and a half sanding to get it exactly round. Rather than do a clever little build up about how great everything was going and then jerk the rug out with a picture of the cracking, I’ll just cut to the chase.

It’s been splitting right next to the seam. Our solution has been to fill the split with epoxy to stabilize it, but today two more splits opened up, and an old one almost doubled in size. I filled those too, but she desperately needs to be shellacked. I’ll do that tomorrow, but I wasn’t able to do it today because we had to wait for the epoxy to cure. Shellac will slow down the transfer of moisture across the cell walls of the wood and allow things to slowly acclimate (and not bust apart).

Here she is, sad little thing.

The check looks darker because it’s filled with expoxy right now, but that’s about a 3′ long check. I think we’ll be able to salvage it, but what a PAIN.

(more…)

Once we flipped the boat over, painted her, and had time to really look hard at her, the problems started to become apparent. So apparent that even the instructors noticed. Woah, that’s pretty big.

The main thing was that Kev had not fit a couple of planks up against the frames very well, and as a result, they were faired down too thin. One we decided we could fix with a little epoxy and fairing compound (West Systems 410 for you boat geeks out there) but the shutter was just too thin. So, over the boat went again, and off came the plank.

You can also see a line of puttied screw holes at the location of the #2 frame. Turns out that frame wasn’t fitting well either, so before we flipped the boat we replaced that. I was concerned that I might have had a few thin planks as well, but we used a giant pair of calipers to reach around the hull and measure the plank thickness and I was fine.

So, for the past couple of days, Kev has been re-making his shutter. He popped the new one in today and we faired it down, put fairing compound around the low spots, and tomorrow we’ll finish fairing and caulking it. Hopefully we’ll have the boat back right side up in a day or 2 so we can get on with interior work.

The boat looks eerily like it did when we first got it. Compare:

Off by one plank. Creepy. (more…)

Once the boat is flipped, the next batch of things just comes along. It’s almost anticlimactic. But, still, I like having a boat-shaped hull right there in front of us all day.

Painting it is a pain, but I’ll get into that later.

Parts parts parts. While Kev was working on making the mast into a nice, tapered rectangle, I bent and cut out the gaff jaws. These are the things that attach to the end of the gaff (that rod that holds the top edge of our rectangular sail up in the air) and slip around the mast.

And then I milled up sheer clamps for everyone. The sheer clamp is a long rectangle of wood that… wait for it… clamps to your sheer. It helps to stiffen the upper edge of your boat so that it holds it’s homely little catboat shape. Here you go, a pile of sheer clamps!

Ok, it’s just the bundle of wood there on the right with blue tape around it. (more…)

I love having skylights in my attic room. I can stand with them open like a meerkat poking out of his burrow and get a fine view of the snowy street.

+ =

Something about the snowy / sleety day and a few people being absent that just sucked the energy right out of the room today. People were standing around in a fog or just hanging out and talking. Kev read the paper. I did what I always do… worked along, looking for that happy little groove when it’s just me and the work. We did manage to flip the boat but my camera battery crapped out just as we were about to start. Dopey got some nice pics though, and I’ll post them soon. In the meantime, here she is, all sleek and sassy.

We’ve removed the molds and installed cross-spalls to help keep the hull shape. (more…)

This week has primarily been about paint. Or, to be more accurate, it’s been about primer paint. The Beetle Cat gets 2 kinds of primer, red oxide below and white primer above the waterline. After Kev finished caulking and puttying his side of the boat, we were ready to go.

In order to conserve brushes and rollers, it seemed like a good idea for him to paint his white section while I painted my red section. Then we’d switch. One set of red brushes, one set of white.

Guess how many times people came over and said “Hey Kevin, you realize that you’re going to get white paint all over yourself when you lean over to paint your red section, don’t you?” The answer is, “many, many times.” People are just So Helpful, don’t you think? Still, it helped Kev practice his eye rolling, and that has to be good for the ocular muscles. (more…)

Since WB put a link to this little site on their home page, I feel it’s prudent to make one thing abundandtly clear: I’m a rank newbie.  Granted, I know my way around a woodshop and I have amassed a sizeable arsenal of tools over the years, and I generally know how to use them with a modicum of skill  BUT when it comes to building boats, I’m a newbie.  Therefore, from time to time, or maybe on a regular basis, I’ll state something here with great confidence that will be stunningly wrong.  Or only partially wrong.  Or only wrong in one instance but dead right in the tropics during an eclipse.

You get the picture. 

So, when that inevitable comment comes that reads something like this: “I’ve followed with interest your fascinating treatise on why water is not, in fact, wet. I feel compelled to tell you to never write another word for as long as you live, and to issue a formal apology to anyone who has ever been exposed to your thoughts.”  I would hope that said writer takes a deep breath, recalls when (s)he was a newbie, and respond accordingly.

And now, for today’s errata and subsequent correction.  I think I’ve said on more than one occasion that the good thing about cotton as caulking is that it swells up nicely and forms a gasket when wet.  Actually, when cotton gets wet, it becomes slippery and unmanagable, and we generally don’t like it.  Thus, if you have a leaky seam, you don’t see people shoving cotton into it to stop the leak.  You see people slathering tar or putting on a sticky patch from the outside.  One person wrote asking if we used a cotton / wool blend ever, because wool has nice waterproof qualities.  The answer to that was, “no” by the way.

So here’s the deal with cotton.  We don’t really want it to get wet.  What makes cotton good is that it acts as a gasket because it’s flexible and it conforms to the slight irregularities in the wood surface when the wood swells around it.  See, the wood swelling is the important thing, not the cotton.  You could just as easily use nylon string.  What matters is that it conforms fully to the wood surfaces in the joint as the wood swells.  When the wood swells, it pushes up tight against the cotton, and the cotton, for all intents and purposes, acts like a solid rubber gasket. 

So, there you go.  Fact of the day.  Try not to be too hard on people who confidently spout off about cotton swelling and filling gaps between planks.  They’re young, just like you once were.

When I go to work, I go to work on hounds. Looking back at my first post about this back on Jan 27, I realize I’ve been working on these puppies a lot. I’ll get photos soon, but right now suffice it to say that I’m getting used to making hounds. 2 1/2 hounds are now complete, but I’m moving much faster than before. That feels good. Jim says that he expects hounds to take about 4-5 hours each, and it’ll take some time before I’m at that level. However, today I finished one off in about 6 hours!

Back at school the folks with the thin planks have generally put their shoulders to the wheel and are working along to get the boats ready to flip next week. While I was waiting for Kev to finish fairing his side of the boat, I built a little cradle that we’ll use to hold our boat when it’s flipped over.

When Kev finished fairing his side, we proceeded to scribe the waterline.

Now, doing the waterline is a pretty cool little process. There are low tech and high tech ways to do it, and naturally we’re going low tech. What’s the waterline? It’s a line that’s scribed onto the hull of your boat that describes the level that the water reaches on your hull when you’re afloat. If you dropped your nice white boat into a pond of ink, the waterline would be the top edge of the inked surface when you finally pulled your boat from that toxic dump. That’d teach ya to try to sail in ink ya scurvy lubber.

So, here’s the basic idea: you want to paint the part of your boat that sits below the water most of the time with bottom paint to minimize problems with little boring worms (insert your own joke here) and other marine pests. So, apart from sitting your finished boat in a very very calm pond and then carefully swimming up and making little marks where the water hits your boat, you’ve got to figure out where to draw your waterline. Luckily, the designers of most boats have already figured that out so you almost always have a place to start. On the Beetle cat, the waterline has one easily identified point: the place where the skeg goes into the hull. In the photo, the skeg is painted red. That back corner where the skeg dives into the hull? That’s where the water reaches too.

Really, when you think about it, the waterline is just a horizontal plane that cuts through the boat. To scribe a waterline you need a way of drawing a perfectly horizontal line across the curved surface of your hull. Boat builders are a clever lot, and a long time ago they figured out how to do just that.

(more…)

When I go to work, I go to work on hounds. Looking back at my first post about this back on Jan 27, I realize I’ve been working on these puppies a lot. I’ll get photos soon, but right now suffice it to say that I’m getting used to making hounds. 2 1/2 hounds are now complete, but I’m moving much faster than before. That feels good. Jim says that he expects hounds to take about 4-5 hours each, and it’ll take some time before I’m at that level. However, today I finished one off in about 6 hours!

Back at school the folks with the thin planks have generally put their shoulders to the wheel and are working along to get the boats ready to flip next week. While I was waiting for Kev to finish fairing his side of the boat, I built a little cradle that we’ll use to hold our boat when it’s flipped over.

When Kev finished fairing his side, we proceeded to scribe the waterline.

Now, doing the waterline is a pretty cool little process. There are low tech and high tech ways to do it, and naturally we’re going low tech. What’s the waterline? It’s a line that’s scribed onto the hull of your boat that describes the level that the water reaches on your hull when you’re afloat. If you dropped your nice white boat into a pond of ink, the waterline would be the top edge of the inked surface when you finally pulled your boat from that toxic dump. That’d teach ya to try to sail in ink ya scurvy lubber.

So, here’s the basic idea: you want to paint the part of your boat that sits below the water most of the time with bottom paint to minimize problems with little boring worms (insert your own joke here) and other marine pests. So, apart from sitting your finished boat in a very very calm pond and then carefully swimming up and making little marks where the water hits your boat, you’ve got to figure out where to draw your waterline. Luckily, the designers of most boats have already figured that out so you almost always have a place to start. On the Beetle cat, the waterline has one easily identified point: the place where the skeg goes into the hull. In the photo, the skeg is painted red. That back corner where the skeg dives into the hull? That’s where the water reaches too.

Really, when you think about it, the waterline is just a horizontal plane that cuts through the boat. To scribe a waterline you need a way of drawing a perfectly horizontal line across the curved surface of your hull. Boat builders are a clever lot, and a long time ago they figured out how to do just that.

(more…)

When I go to work, I go to work on hounds. Looking back at my first post about this back on Jan 27, I realize I’ve been working on these puppies a lot. I’ll get photos soon, but right now suffice it to say that I’m getting used to making hounds. 2 1/2 hounds are now complete, but I’m moving much faster than before. That feels good. Jim says that he expects hounds to take about 4-5 hours each, and it’ll take some time before I’m at that level. However, today I finished one off in about 6 hours!

Back at school the folks with the thin planks have generally put their shoulders to the wheel and are working along to get the boats ready to flip next week. While I was waiting for Kev to finish fairing his side of the boat, I built a little cradle that we’ll use to hold our boat when it’s flipped over.

When Kev finished fairing his side, we proceeded to scribe the waterline.

Now, doing the waterline is a pretty cool little process. There are low tech and high tech ways to do it, and naturally we’re going low tech. What’s the waterline? It’s a line that’s scribed onto the hull of your boat that describes the level that the water reaches on your hull when you’re afloat. If you dropped your nice white boat into a pond of ink, the waterline would be the top edge of the inked surface when you finally pulled your boat from that toxic dump. That’d teach ya to try to sail in ink ya scurvy lubber.

So, here’s the basic idea: you want to paint the part of your boat that sits below the water most of the time with bottom paint to minimize problems with little boring worms (insert your own joke here) and other marine pests. So, apart from sitting your finished boat in a very very calm pond and then carefully swimming up and making little marks where the water hits your boat, you’ve got to figure out where to draw your waterline. Luckily, the designers of most boats have already figured that out so you almost always have a place to start. On the Beetle cat, the waterline has one easily identified point: the place where the skeg goes into the hull. In the photo, the skeg is painted red. That back corner where the skeg dives into the hull? That’s where the water reaches too.

Really, when you think about it, the waterline is just a horizontal plane that cuts through the boat. To scribe a waterline you need a way of drawing a perfectly horizontal line across the curved surface of your hull. Boat builders are a clever lot, and a long time ago they figured out how to do just that.

(more…)

Let’s just make this clear from the get-go, the teeth gnashing is coming from people other than me this week. But we’ll get to that later.

Monday was the deadline for getting shutter planks in, and almost everyone made it. Normally Jen makes cookies for us when we make a deadline, but her daughter was sick that day so she didn’t come in. However, on Tuesday, we got a big plate of star-shaped rice crispy treats. That was pretty great, especially when I hadn’t made time for breakfast that morning. There was a great chewing with teeth, but no gnashing. That came later.

There was minor frustration when I had to make a repair at the aft end of a plank that got chipped out.

No big deal. A little epoxy, a little fitting, it’s all fine. You can see the string inside the transom / plank joint. I’ll mention that later.

So, once you have all your planks on your boat, and the hull is faired, the next thing on your list is to caulk the joints. This is one of those things that boatbuilders do that no other woodworkers do, and so it’s extra cool to learn.

In the old days, and perhaps still in some places, boats were caulked with oakum. You could go run off to Wikipidia or my glossary to figure out what that is, but I’ll save you the trouble. From Wikipedia:

Oakum is a preparation of tarred fiber used in shipbuilding,
for caulking or packing the joints of timbers in wooden vessels and the
deck planking of iron and steel ships, as well as cast iron plumbing
applications. Oakum was at one time made from old tarry ropes and
cordage of vessels, and its picking and preparation has been a common
penal occupation in prisons and workhouses. In modern times it is made from virgin hemp fibers. White oakum is made from untarred materials. The fibrous material used in oakum is most commonly a hemp or jute fiber impregnated with tar or a tarlike substance.

It should be understood that this “tar” is not the tar used on streets and roofs, but rather pine tar, also called Stockholm tar, an amber-colored pitch made from the sap of certain pine trees.

We don’t use oakum. But now you know about something cool and old and you can impress people with your grasp of arcane boat building facts. We use cotton.  (more…)