A Shipwright in Training

When I’d make an estimate of how long a particular project would take, my friends learned to apply a Tom Factor of roughly 2 or 3 times the original estimate.

Call me crazy, but I think other people have this problem as well…

Here’s the first stab we made at estimating how long this project would take. We did this about 2 weeks ago. The Whitehall estimates are in Blue.

It might be a bit hard to read these, but let’s highlight a few of the more optimistic ones:

Sept. 24, Molds Up (i.e., we’ve made all the forms for the boat and they’re attached to the floor and ready for the ribbands to be bent on them)

Oct. 5, Framed

Well, here it is, Sept 26th and we haven’t made a single mold yet.

We’re not really even close.

We’d estimated 2 days for lofting. It’s now 5 work days after returning from Mystic, and we’ve easily got one more full day of lofting ahead of us. That makes a Tom Factor of 3 so far.

The other day I said that we made a point of locking down the inner points first so that they didn’t have to move any more.

Well, that wasn’t exactly true either.

Life has a way of interfering with our plans.

Take this section of the long lines. You can see a couple of lines here in the center that are blue and red.

The blue ones are the original lines and the red ones are the corrections. When we were fairing out Diagonal B, we realized that this affected things that previously had been locked down.

Let’s go back to the body plan for a look.

When we drew out Diagonal B (the green line in this view) on the long lines, we found that it had a dip around Station 7. In order to correct this, we pushed Station 7 out along Diagonal B just a little, maybe 1/8th”. Diagonal distances are measured from the top downwards, so pushing the Sta. 7 batten down and to the left increases the distance it lies on the diagonal. On the long lines, this translates into the diagonal moving upwards. In the long lines photo above, you can see the red / blue lines arcing up and to the right have the corrected red line on the top. That’s Diagonal B as it looks in the long lines.

However, when you push the Station 7 batten down to increase the height of Diag B on the long lines, the batten also moves down along Buttock 3. If you imagine pushing that batten down a bit, you’ll see that the batten moves downwards on Butt 3. Buttocks are measured from the bottom up, so this has the effect of decreasing the hight of Butt 3 at Station 7 on the long lines. Again, looking up at the long line photo above, you’ll see that the lower red / blue lines arcing down and to the right have the red line below the blue one. That’s Butt 3 moving down.

Each time you move one thing, other things move along with it. And that’s the way it should be… all the parts of your boat are connected.

This has led to hours of staring and moving things around. You move one thing to get it fair and another thing looks like Ass. So, you move something else, or you split the difference, or you try to think of a 3rd option. It can make your brain hurt.

And so, after a full day on the lofting floor, we’ve got a few more long lines laid down. The satisfaction is that as we go, the corrections we’re making are smaller and smaller.

Thank God for that. I’m really ready to make things out of wood.

One of the good things about the 2nd year here is that we get to see how someone else handles a tricky task like lofting. Warren is a fan of not laying down your lines until you’ve gotten all your views to agree with one another. At that point, you lay it down in pen and treat it like gospel.

So, the question is, how do you look at all those lines you’ve taken off your boat (or taken from a table of offsets) all at once so that you can see where things are looking wonky? First, a couple of things to keep in mind:

• your long lines will show unfairness better than the relatively short lines in your body plan.
• You should work out from the bottom and center of the boat to the edges when fairing
• Trust the intersections that are close to right angles more than the more acute intersections

In case you haven’t already guessed, this little entry is not for everybody.

But here’s a quick refresher of the things I’m talking about. The body plan is a view of the boat sliced like a loaf of bread, the plan view is looking down on the boat from the top, and the profile view is just like it sounds, a view of the boat from the side.

Here’s the body plan we’ve been working out:

The plastic batten in the center left isn’t really the greatest looking thing, but a lot of that is because of how much of the batten runs out above the actual sheer line. All of these battens run out above the actual sheer line.
Think of these lines as outlining the edge of the boat as you slice it from side to side along its length (like a loaf of bread). The lines to the right of center show slices of the boat from the middle to the bow of the boat. If you put your hand over the left side of this view, it’s like you’re looking at the boat coming at you. If you blot out the right side, you’re looking at the boat sailing away from you. That clear plastic batten describes the shape of the transom. I think it’s a little off… here’s a photo where you can see the transom:

The guys who built these boats didn’t go from plans. They pretty much started with a stem and transom profile, a length, and then winged it from there. That thought comforts me when I’m working to fair out lines to within a 32nd of an inch.

So, here’s how we loft.

1. We use thin battens to lay out the body plan from the information we got by taking the lines off of the boat. We hold them in place with finish nails so they can be moved as we go.
2. We lay out the keel, rabbet, and sheer in the profile view. These are long lines, because they go the length of the boat. We get these lines fair.
3. Using the faired lines from step 2, we go back to the body plan and correct the points for the sheer and rabbet. We won’t change those points any more… they’re locked in because we know they come from a nice, fair line.
4. We use pickup sticks to get intersections of the stations in the body plan and the first water line. We then plot out that waterline in the plan view.
5. At this point, the negotiations begin. As we see unfairness in the waterline in the plan view, we make little adjustments to get it fair, as long as these adjustments don’t screw up the way the stations look in the body plan. It helps to have one person looking at the waterline and suggesting changes, and one person at the body plan saying whether or not those changes will work. Let’s look at what I’m talking about.

Here the pickup stick is laid across the 2nd waterline, called the LWL, or Load Waterline (the first waterline is the horizontal line below it). The end of the stick is on the red centerline. Each wooden batten lies along the points we took from measuring the boat, and each one represents a cross-section of the boat. These cross sections are called stations. We slide the pickup stick beneath these battens, and then make a little mark on the stick exactly where the batten crosses the stick. We then label these marks, “station 1, station 2, etc.” so that we know where the marks come from.

We now want to take those measurements and use them to draw the waterline as if you were looking at the boat from above (or below, it doesn’t matter… we’re assuming the boat is clear). Essentially, the shape we’ll get is the shape the water traces along the hull if we dipped the boat into water just to the level of the waterline.

So, we take that stick, and hold it up to each station mark on the plan view, and make a little tic mark on the lofting at the height of the waterline as you go from station to station.

Here, the pickup stick is at station 6. We put the base of the stick exactly on the baseline, since this represents the center of the boat as you’re looking down on it. There’s a tic mark on the stick that we made where the waterline intersected with station 6 in the body plan. We transfer that mark to the lofting, and label it “LWL.” We go along each station, making a tic mark that corresponds to the distance from center the LWL was at each station. We end up with a series of points that we connect together with a long flexible batten.

If that batten makes a nice, fair curve, we say “Woo Hoo!” and we don’t have to change any points on the body plan where the stations intersect the LWL.

If it’s not fair, we move the batten slightly up or down to create a fair line. Say we moved the batten at station 6 down 1/8″ to make it look more fair. On the body plan, we’d have to take the batten that defines station 6 and move it in towards the centerline by 1/8″ at the LWL.

Maybe that will make the body plan batten look awful. If so, then we know we have to fair things out somewhere else.

What I meant earlier about working from the bottom and center out was this:

1. Transfer and fair your lowest waterline
2. Transfer and fair in the first butt line
3. Transfer and fair in your first diagonal
4. Transfer and fair in your next waterline
5. Transfer and fair in your next butt
6. and so on, working outwards
7. Each time you fair in a long line and transfer any changes to the body plan battens, mark where those battens now cross the butt or waterline that you just faired. Those are now locked in. Any changes as you work out with have to happen between these locked points and the locked in sheer points.

In case you don’t know, the butt, or buttock, lines in the body plan go up and down, since they slice along the sides of the boat like you’d slice a banana for a banana split. The sheer lines on the body plan haven’t been drawn here, but you can see how the battens run out above the sheer. The arrow below is pointing to the mark that indicates the sheer line in this view. We just haven’t drawn it in yet.

See, I told you this entry wasn’t for everybody.

I’m really hooked on using the battens this way though. It makes it so much easier to work back and forth, adjusting multiple views as you change a point.

We had 2 teams, each working on their version of the same lofting.

It would have been too much trouble to have 7 people try to loft one boat together. This way, we each get to really get into the process.

Meanwhile, the other group of 2nd years are working on lofting the Bulldog, a 1934 boat built for junior sailors.

They didn’t take the lines off her, instead they used numbers from the original plans to generate their lofting.

She’s in rough shape. You can see that they’ve already taken her stem out to see how it was constructed.

This is the body plan they’ve generated so far (they’re a few days ahead of us).

Meanwhile, the 1st years have finished up their bench projects, have lofted their beetle cats, and are setting up the molds to place their boats on.

It’s starting to look like quite the production shop down there. We’re up in the room behind the balcony these days, where we remain mysterious and aloof… like monks.

For folks interested in the background of this particular boat that we’ve been lofting, here you go.

This particular Whitehall rowing boat was built by Stephen Roberts, probably around 1870-80 in Manhattan.

His stamp on the inside of the planking. It reads “S. Roberts, Builder” I can’t exactly read the 3rd line, but it says something about Harlem, and then NY.

As far as we know, this is the only true Manhattan built Whitehall in existence, and as a result, this is the boat that anyone doing research on these types of boats goes to.

And we get to spend 2 days with it.

Bob had asked about stem construction. The stem is connected to the keel via the forefoot, in the manner described by John Gardner in his chapter “A Whitehall Pulling Boat” and you can see the joint faintly showing through the paint and grime here:

It almost looks like a gripe, but you can see how long it extends back. A regular gripe, for those of you who don’t know, is a triangular piece of wood that connects the stem to the keel. Here’s an example of one:

In our case, the stem drops down, almost to the lowest level of the keel, and then curves back towards the keel. The forefoot provides a large, solid connection between the stem and keel.

So, back to taking the lines off of this particular gem. We started by leveling the boat over the lofting grid that we’d drawn up at school the day before. We level fore and aft as well as athwartships. Next, we plumb down from the center of the stem and stern, and line the boat up on the grid fore and aft.

We have a measuring jig that we built the day before at IYRS, and we place it at various intervals along the length of the boat so that we can measure the hull at each of these locations.

We also stretch a string above the keel that will act as a baseline reference point when we transfer our measurements to the lofting floor back at IYRS.

We move the measuring jig down the boat at each of those taped off lines, essentially taking cross-sectional measurements of the boat all along its length.

While some of us are doing this type of measuring, others are making note of her scantlings, or the dimensions of each of her component parts.

Like I said, she’s a beautiful boat. Here you can see how her sheer is curved to match the shape of the transom

But it flattens out forward to match the flatness of the intersection with the stem:

We end up detailing things like the ways in which the frames are set into the sheer clamp

Here, you’re looking down into one of the thole pin (i.e., oar post) holes, and you can see a frame coming up and angling into the clamp at 45 degrees. Every frame is pocketed into the clamp this way.

We also trace the lines of things like the seat knees

and the transom.

We also just do a lot of admiring.

There are other boats with fancier soles

and they’re very nice in their own way. But the simple elegance and precision of this boat’s construction makes her truly stand out.

Earlier yesterday, I stopped by the Mystic Shipyard to say hello to old friends, and they were getting ready to take Annie out sailing.

Annie’s a sandbagger, meaning that she has a HUGE sail area relative to her hull size. Sandbaggers are so named because sand bags were used to help add weight to counterbalance her incredible heeling forces as she sailed along. You can see a modern yellow sandbag on her side deck (ok, they now use water bags) and a few more tucked inside on port. She uses about 20 of these at 35 pounds each… Along with a full crew of sailors, there’s a lot of weight holding this boat down.

She raced that day against 2 other sandbaggers, Bull & Bear. I found out later that they did quite well.

Annie was restored here at Mystic. Nice little tiller detail, eh?

If I hadn’t been committed to doing the lofting I would have been out with those guys in a heartbeat.

You just can’t do everything.

It’s a good argument for cloning.

The Whitehall we’re working with was described by the curator as “a piece of the true cross.” That’s the level of respect that the folks here have for this boat, and the more we look at it, the more respect we have for its builders.

And let me say right out that I’m woefully unprepared to write much about this boat right now. Here’s what I can tell you.

It’s one of the very few, if not only, fully original New York built Whitehalls left in the world today. I’ve spaced out the name of the builder, but he had 3 workshops in NYC in the 1860’s – 1880’s. The curator believes this one was built around 1870-1880. The builder was a city alder around the time that this particular boat was built, but he disappeared from public records sometime in the 1880s. No death notice, marriage notice in the papers, nothing… poof.

The boat was built as a pleasure craft rather than a working boat, which probably has a lot to do with why she’s in such incredible condition. Unfortunately my camera battery was dying as we were looking her over today, so I only have a few photos. We’ll be back tomorrow and the battery is fully charged, so… more details to follow.

She’s 15′ 3″ long, and was built to the highest standards. Here’s just a few of the little details that start to jump out the longer you look at her. Looking forward:

The frames taper from 5/8″ at the top down to 1″ at the bottom. Tapering gives the frames a a more delicate look while retaining their strength down at the bottom of the boat where there’s the most strain. You can barely see it here, but the seat is notched around each frame. Notice how the center sole board is notched so that it can extend way forward. You don’t need to have the sole continue this far, and notching it is more trouble to build, but they did it. They also tapered the edges of the sole and margins (the boards to either side of the sole) to make them lie snugly against the frames and also expose a thinner edge, making the boards appear more delicate… another detail that could easily be left out. You can also see the beading around the edge of the seat, well there’s beading all over this boat. You can just barely see it in the seat riser board (the board that goes fore and aft along the frames that the seat sits on).

Looking at the rear seat (also called the Sheet):

You can see the beading along the outside edge of the sheet, and again, the way that the sheet is notched into the frames. That notch is exactly the width of the bead, so you get the sense that the boat is all a single construction. The parts just blend beautifully into each other.

Here, we’ve flipped the boat and have started to take her lines.

This took a lot longer than expected, as we were really careful about getting her as level (both fore and aft and athwartships) as possible, and as aligned with our grid as possible.

You can see what looks like a waterline along the bottom, but it’s just dirt and crud from being in the water. That is essentially her waterline, since it marks the area that was submerged, but these boats weren’t built with a cut and painted waterline.

You can also see in the photo how the sheer strake is a lap strake, while the rest of the boat is carvel planked.

The sheer also has this nice little bead above its lower edge

and below that bead the sheer is slightly tapered inwards. Again, this gives the plank a more delicate look. Not only that, but as the sheer approaches the curved transom, the outside of the sheer plank is gradually curved to match the curve of the transom.

It’s like that everywhere… just as strong as can be, but it looks as delicate as a violin.

It’s going to take us a long time to build this boat, and it’s going to tax our abilities to the fullest. I’m in awe of this boat, and I can’t wait to try to replicate her!

I’ll put up more photos of the boat tomorrow, and who knows, I might even have the builder’s name by then!

After 2 weeks of surveying and project management, I’m ready to be back in the shop making sawdust. Too many nights up until 2 am working out numbers and getting estimates together. I’m happy with the final results though, and I think I have a couple of spreadsheets worked out that will be at least somewhat helpful when it comes time to estimate an actual project.
We’ve been given our assignments for the 2nd year’s projects, and I think it’s going to be a good year. I’ll be on a team of 7 folks doing 2 boats. The first is a 1922 6-meter called Madcap.

Here’s a site with a full description and more photos of her. (more…)

Up till 3 am working out an estimate of every single part that goes into building a Herreshoff 12 1/2. It’s an interesting process… stare at the drawings, see another place for a fastener, see another operation you didn’t think about before. Give it a rest and something else just appears in consciousness, like looking at an optical illusion where suddenly you get the perspective shift that reveals the alternate picture.

Bacchus, or 2 lovers kissing? Hmmm.

(more…)

This week we’re doing project estimation & management. The task is to come up with as accurate an estimate as a newbie student can of how much it would cost to build a Herreshoff 12 1/2. We’ve got the construction plans for the boat, the Jamestown Distributers catalog, prices from our lumber and other materials suppliers … after that, it’s a slow steady process of coming up with a list of every single part that it will take to build the boat.

So, to do that, you build the boat in your head. The construction plan is invaluable here.

The first task of boat construction is the backbone. So, we look at the stem, keel, transom knee and transom. The drawing gives sided dimensions for some of these parts, and the rest we have to work out using a scale ruler.

Sided dimensions?? Oh man, I was hoping you wouldn’t pick up on that one. I’m sure I’m going to just bollix this up, but here goes. (more…)

It’s a little strange to head back to school without buying school supplies. Just to get in the general spirit of things, I bought a new box of sharpies (1001 uses) and that felt strangely wonderful. Now I want to find things to mark.

I almost didn’t return for the 2nd year due to financial concerns. It’s a long story, but refinancing my house ended up costing more than I’d realized and it just didn’t look like I could realistically swing another year of tuition plus limited income. The folks at IYRS were able to help out substantially with scholarship money, and I’ll be working 20 hrs / week on the Aurora during the winter doing various improvements, and general boat maintenance so that should help make ends meet. So, it’s back for the final year. I’m looking forward to having more time to practice the things I was learning last year. (more…)

Ok, it’s been 2 weeks since my last entry. The following have happened in the following order:

• I made a lot more splines to fit between the stringers on Roann
• I made a new set of pads to go over the stairs leading down into the hold of the Charles W. Morgan
• I packed up my tools and said goodbye to Mystic Seaport
• I packed up my car and said hello to Merck Forest for 4 days
• I unpacked my tools and said hello to IYRS for another year

Wow. When you put that in a bullet list, it just doesn’t seem like 2 weeks worth of events, but I have 4 loads of laundry that will argue otherwise.

Mystic seaport… after 3 months working there full time, I can say with complete confidence, that, yes, I’ve used lots of really old, really cool tools. I thought it was high time that I gave a little behind the scenes workshop tour for folks that care about that sort of thing.

And, really, if you’re reading this kind of blog, you just get all breathy over this sort of thing. Fess up, it’s ok. Me too.

Our actual workshop space is a little cramped with machinery, but it’s long and we’ve rarely felt crowded.

The space is old, and steeped in history. For instance, this photo on the wall shows a group of shipwrights here quite a while ago… maybe 1940’s or 1950’s?

You can’t really see it in that picture, but above their heads on a rafter is a sign that says “THE MAN WHO LENDS TOOLS AIN’T HERE TODAY!!” That exact sign is still on the wall today.

It’s little bits of history all over the place that makes the shop feel different than any other shop I’ve been in.

Most of the tools around the shop are older than I am. However, they were built to last, and with good maintainence, they continue to work beautifully. Here’s just a sampling.

The wide belt sander. It’s a beast.

The disc sander.

Just look at the size of the control wheel to adjust the table angle. This was before companies started combining disc and belt sanders into one machine.

Yes, under those piles of wood is a very big lathe. The headstock is to the left, buried within the wooden box. The tailstock is visible near the middle of the picture. Those giant beams there that the various wooden parts are sitting on… that’s the base of this beast. As you can see, we don’t use it much. There’s a much smaller lathe to the left of this one. Thing is, this isn’t the largest lathe in the shop. There’s a spar lathe that’s essentially set up on railroad rails and can turn spars over 70′ long. No photos right now… sorry.

In the main shop area are 2 monstrous thickness planers.

The whole place shudders when you turn them on. One of the guys in the shop is deaf, and he is aware when we run that first one… he can feel the vibrations in his body.

Of course, no shop runs without a planer.

And there’s the table saw of course.

However, this one is unique. Notice the huge height adjustment wheel. On this particular saw, the blade doesn’t move. Instead, the entire table top goes up and down. It has a huge motor fixed to the floor, and this thing has more torque than any saw I’ve ever used.

Naturally, every boatyard has piles of band saws. We live on band saws, and over the last 3 months I can say that my skills have really improved on these guys. When the saw is well set up, I can now split a pencil line reliably for most of the length of a cut.

Here’s the big ships saw.

The table of a ship’s saw doesn’t tilt like a normal band saw table would. That’s because the designers assumed you’d be sending huge chunks of wood through this puppy, and they’d just slide off of an inclined table. Instead, the entire blad support and motor unit tilts. It’s really quite dramatic to see it in operation. And, it’s surprisingingly quiet.

Here’s a beast you don’t see every day: a dedicated resaw band saw.

This band saw is designed to take wide boards and cut them into slices. Sorry for the lousy photo, but you’ll just have to take my word for it. I’d never seen another machine like it.

So, that’s where I’ve been spending my days for the past 3 months when I wasn’t inside the boat.
When I left, we’d made a good dent on putting in the splines between the stringers.

The ceilings have been painted white, and the white patchy stuff in between the stringers is the 5200 that glues in and covers over the splines.
At the shop we use wood scraps in lieu of paper for notes. When I measure out the width of the gap that the spline goes into, I’ll jot down the width and where along the length of the spline that width occurs.

I mark the width’s in 16ths of an inch. In this photo, the widths are marked across the top right edge of the scrap, and the distances from the end are at the bottom left. You can see that I started measuring from the right side of the spline, and that the gap was 7/16ths wide at the zero point. By 8 3/4″ from the end, the gap had narrowed slightly to a little more than 6/16th’s (the 6+ mark), and by 16″ from the end, it was down to exactly 6/16ths (or 3/8″ if you want to use normal terminology and reduce the fraction).
Armed with this information I’d mark out a spline, cut it to width on the band saw, and tune it up with a hand plane to get right on my line.

In this photo, the lighter strip of oak is the spline. It’s sitting on a yellowed pine shooting board. If I measure and cut everything right, the spline slides into the gap with just moderate tapping from a hammer. Here’s a good one.

No gaps and an even bead of 5200.

The last 2 days at Mystic were spent making up new stair treads for a set of stairs leading down into the hold of the whaling ship, Charles W. Morgan. No photos, sorry bout that. Not really stunning work anyway… just the basic maintainance stuff that needs to be done when thousands of folks come walking on the ship throughout the season.

It was fun to be down there screwing things in with a hand brace

(no, I’m not trying to be “traditional,” it’s just that the damn batteries on my drill crapped out.) and hearing the kids come down into the hold. This conversation happened a lot:

“Mom, there’s a guy still working on the boat!”

“No, honey, they’re not still building the boat.”

“Yes they are!”

“Oh, ok, well keep away from the nice man and don’t interrupt him.”

At this point, I’d say “Hi” to the kid to indicate that I am in fact Three Feet Away From Them and can hear their entire conversation just fine. The kids would usually ask questions and eventually the adults would get it that this is a museum and that the staff doesn’t mind answering questions. NOTE TO PARENTS: I think it’s a good thing for kids to ask questions when they don’t understand something. If the workman is tired of answering questions, it’s his responsibility to indicate this. It’s not the kid’s job to rescue the adult from this responsibility by shutting up, and it’s not the kid’s fault if the adult is uncomfortable with assertiveness. There are many perfectly polite ways of telling someone that you’re not going to talk with them any more.

Yow, is it obvious that I was a child psychologist?

I’ll miss Mystic. There’s a really nice camaraderie there, the pace is relaxed, and skill level of my colleagues was truly impressive. It’s on the list of possible places to land after school is done.

However, I haven’t had a real vacation in a long time, so I took off to Vermont for 4 days and stayed in a beautiful cabin at Merck Forest.

Quiet, no electricity or running water, inexpensive, organic produce at the visitor’s center, beautiful views every morning, lots of trails to hike…

big enough for a lot of friends if you like…

It’s perfect for a winter xc ski group as well.

It was just the right place to land after a summer of 6-day work weeks. Next Tuesday it’s back to IYRS… but that’s a story for another time.