Toe rail wail

I got back on Monday and the toe rail transition piece was… exactly where I left it.  Warren put most of the crew on other jobs, so here we go.

Armed with (left to right) sandpaper, a good rasp, a pattern for the profile of the toe rail, a spokeshave, and sandpaper pressed up against a concave profile sanding head (the yellow sandpaper) I worked on the shape of the transition piece for about an hour.  As I started to get close, I used thin battens to make sure the inside and outside curves were fair.

It came out nicely I think.

But that’s just the transition.  I had to scarf the transition piece into the toe rail.  We used a nibbed scarf for this so that there wouldn’t be a feather edge.

Here you can see how the scarf doesn’t go right to the top (or the bottom in this photo since it’s upside down) of the transition piece.  That vertical edge forms the nib of the scarf.  The holder I made to work on the transition piece right side up works just fine to work on it upside down.  This part was easy as long as you mark your layout lines accurately and plane right to them.

The scarf in the toe rail is a bit harder.  On the way home for lunch it hit me how to make it… create a holder for the toe rail that holds the rail just low enough to plane the scarf and cut the nib at the same time.  Here’s what I’m talking about.

The holder (scrap 2×4) is routed out to make a slip fit for this scrap of toe rail.  The top of the rail protrudes above the holder by 1/8″, the depth of the nib.

Next, cut a ramp in the end of the holder that corresponds to the angle of the scarf in the transition piece.  Now, measure and saw your nib until the saw just touches the holder. 

You’ve now sawed the nib at just the right depth.  Slide the rail to the edge of the ramp and plane it down to match the ramp.

And there you go, a nibbed scarf.  The vertical bit that you sawed will butt up against the vertical bit on the transition piece. 

A little fitting and fine tuning, and they fit together quite nicely.

That’s Lew’s fancy forestay fitting there by the way.  Nice, eh?  Here’s a close up of the nibbed scarf fit.

So, a coat of varnish last night

And ready to install today.

One of the toe rails has a knot in it that I’ve been very very careful with.  A knot makes the wood weak in case you didn’t know, and in something as thin as this, it’s extremely weak.  I made sure to put fastener holes on either side of it to make sure it was well supported when it was installed.  As I was just about ready to install it, people hammering inside the boat vibrated the deck, and the rail fell off.

See what I mean?  Very weak.  Goddammit. 

Luckily it was a clean break, and it went together fairly well.

A little magic with sanding and CA glue (super glue) should hide this.  Varnish will protect it as well.  The whole rail is bedded in 5200 (the stickiest stuff on the planet) so there’s no fear that the rail will be a problem here… the real problem is aesthetics and making sure the grain is protected from water. 

So, this is what all the fuss has been about.  Making it look like the toe rail makes a continuous curve at the front of the boat.

It came out well I think. 

And then I tightened the screw at the farthest right.  That screw goes right through the short grain of the wood, and I heard it make a little crack sound.

Oh triple goddammit.  Split right at the apex.

As of this writing, it’s clamped together, and I’m hoping that by tomorrow the 5200 will have bound it so tightly that the break can’t be seen.  Again… more CA and sanding to hide it.   Not the way I wanted this to go, but I don’t think any of it is serious.  It just sucks to have to repair something that you’ve worked so long and hard on.

It was 7 pm by that time and I thought it was a better idea to go home than to keep working and break something else.

11 days till launch, if you count the memorial day weekend and the last day of class (which is simply clean up). 

Deep breaths.

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Tags: toerail, deck, repair

 

Wrong time for a re-do

And… painted.

Tick tock tick tock. 

There’s a couple of ways to cope with the impending launch day when you’re not at all certain the boat will be ready.

1. Obsess, fret, stay anxious, be a generally annoying person to be around.
2. Take an “It is what it is” attitude.
3. Run away.
4. Keep reminding yourself, “This is fun.  I paid for this” and get back to work.

But, really, why do just one?  Why not get the sampler plate?  Mmmm mmm, I’ve tried them all. 

In keeping with #3, this particular entry is being written from the lovely borough of Stonington CT on a school night.  I actually have an excuse for that.  I was asked to drive Olin Stephens, yes, THE Olin Stephens, down to Mystic on Thursday for a party in celebration of his 100th birthday.   It was a nice ride, and we were able to talk a bit about the six meter I’ll be building over the summer… Olin designed Cherokee in 1930 when he was 22 years old.  So, I’m taking 2 days off from school to be down here, generally not thinking about school.  On Saturday, Roann will be launched at the Mystic Seaport.  That’s the beautiful eastern-rig dragger that I worked on last summer at the seaport.  It’s been a long time coming, and the party after the launching should be a big one.  I’ll try to remember to take some photos!

At the beginning of the week I made up the T-shaped toe rails.  The final product looks like this:

Ok, it looks like that when it’s upside down.

It fits into the dado we cut into the cap rail some time ago.

Making these long things was fairly easy.  First, you get as long a board as possible (I needed a minimum 16′ for these guys) and thickness plane it to 15/16″ thick (no magic in this dimension, it just looked good when I made up a test piece). 

Next, cut the radius on the shaper.   You can do this on both edges of the  board in order to get 2 pieces of molding while working with this one board.

Cut the lip that forms the underside of the  toe rail on the table saw.

Cut, flip, cut the other side.  Flip the board end over end, repeat.  You get this:

The tenon on the toe rail is only 3/16″ tall, so a 2nd pass on the table saw with the fence bumped over a bit less than 1/8″ should do the trick.

One last pass with the fence bumped over a bit and the blade raised cuts off the toe rail.

By the way, it helps a lot to use a couple of feather boards to guard against board wiggle.

Installing these guys wasn’t particularly hard.  The miters at the aft corners were tricky (turned out to be 34 3/4 degree bevels) but the real work was making the connecting piece at the forward end.  If the toe rails came together in a simple miter, that would be one thing, but this connector is another thing entirely. The idea is to make a piece that looks like the toe rail flows around a tight curve.  Here’s the area we’re working with.  The blue tape is there to protect the cap rail and to give me something to mark on.

You see the dado running in a curve there?  The front piece has to connect to a long piece of toe rail coming forward, curve around over that dado, and connect to the other piece of toe rail.  All the while, it should have the same profile as the toe rail… it should appear to be a single, seamless rail. 

First step was to pattern it out.  In order to get the shape of the dado on paper, I did a rubbing, like people do with tombstones.

This gave me an accurate picture of one edge of the dado. 

The canvassed edge was too soft, so it can’t be rubbed well.  No matter, the dado is 1/2″ wide, so I can use this one line to create the inside line.  After that, it’s time to draw up the pattern for the whole thing.

With this glued to my stock, I can begin to rout out the tenon. 

Ah ha!  Did you notice that you can’t rout the tenon from this side of the drawing??  This is looking down on the dado, and if you put this on the bottom of the stock in this orientation, you’d cut the mirror image.  Now, hopefully the dado is exactly symmetrical and that doesn’t make a difference, but really, why tempt fate?  In this case, trace the lines through the underside of your drawing first, then glue it onto the underside of your stock with the original drawing facing up.  NOW it’s time to rout out the tenon.

Oh, wait, gotta hold this piece somehow and provide a stable base for the router to ride on.  Cut out the middle section, screw it to the table, and use scrap wood to press up against the outside edges.

Those thin strips of wood sticking out between the stock and the scraps wedge and hold the stock in place.   Here I’ve routed out the tenon.

Now, the tricky bit here is that this piece has to fit like a glove on both the deck and the covering board.  The thing is, this isn’t a flat surface.  The whole thing slopes down to either side and the decked section is higher than the covering board. 

Granted, these are small deviations, but this is one of those fine woodworking joints that owners look at, so I want it to fit like a glove. 

I say this to make the next sentence understandable. 

I threw the first attempt away after working on it for 5 hours.  I’d managed to get it to fit against the deck and covering board well, but by that time I’d removed too much wood and it was no longer thick enough to make the transition to the toe rail  Wrong time for a re-do.  Time is precious. 

But, when life hands you lemons, you cuss out life for a bit, throw the lemons in the fridge to make lemon chicken later, and get back to work.

So, attempt #2 started the same way as #1, but a little more efficiently I think.  Trace the dado as before,

and lay out the outer edges where the toe rails will meet up with this piece.  That gives me very accurate lines to use when patterning out the inner and outer edges of the transition.  A compass is set to make the curves at the apex of the transition piece, and it’s all drawn. 

This time, I did some primary shaping on the underside the block before applying the pattern.  I was thinking that this would save me time, but it didn’t do that much.

Then, mark through the paper with little holes in order to make the pattern available on the underside of the stock.  Once it’s glued on, connect the holes to get a full transfer of the pattern on the underside of the paper. 

I cut close to the pattern lines, and as before, I routed out the tenon.  This time, however, a little work on the piece showed me that it was a real pain in the neck to work on the fit while the tenon was in place.  It would be much easier if I was just fitting a somewhat flat piece to the boat.  So, I marked out the inside and outside edges of the piece on the blue tape so it would always be in the right orientation when I fit it,

and then cut the tenon off. 

Now I could fit the tenon independently from the main body of the piece.  When both were right, I’d screw and glue them together, using the tracing I just made to orient them. 

The tenon is quite fragile because of the grain orientation at the apex… you could snap it easily.  It fit the dado well, but it was a little tall and needed to be planed down to fit just to the surface of the dado.  I could have planed it in place, but that would have risked me planing into either the covering board or the canvas, so it was a better idea to make a holder just for this piece.  That was easy.  Trace the tenon on a scrap of wood, and then rout out the groove to about the depth of the dado on the boat.

Now you can plane the tenon easily, and the tenon is well supported in all directions.

Lastly, I made a stand to work on the transition piece.  This has to be shaped by hand to match the profile of the toe rails, and I needed to be able to move a tool all around the piece as I worked on it.  An elevated stand seemed to be the best solution.

Here it is with just a little bit of the shaping going on.  This attempt only took a couple of hours.  But, by the time I got to this stage, it was the end of the day on Wednesday and I needed to drive up to NH to pick up Olin for the drive down on Thursday.  Hopefully Mike will have been able to finish it up while I’ve been gone.  I feel rotten about dropping this in his lap, but he’s talented and very precise, so I know he’ll do an excellent job.  We’ll see how it’s looking on Monday morning! 

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Tags: toerail, madcap, deck

 

Canvassed … getting closer

So after the deck has been faired and primed, it’s canvassing time.  But it takes time to get all that going, so while folks were prepping the deck, a few of us got one of the coaming pieces steamed up and bent onto the mold. 

This was a real team effort.  Like I said before, thin wood like this cools quickly and forces us to act fast.  To give ourselves a little extra time to work we steamed up a 1/2″ piece of cedar that was about the same size as the mahogany at the same time.  We brought them both out of the steamer and clamped them on together with the cedar on  the outside. 

The effect of the cedar was to act as a hot blanket on top of the mahogany while we bent it down, and it gave us a little more time to work.  It also spreads the clamping pressure of the blocks out just a little bit, so there’s no danger of getting indentations from the blocks in the coaming.  A twofer! 

While we were doing that, other folks measured the canvas and ironed it good and flat.

They trimmed the sides to give some overlap around the edges, but got rid of much of the excess width. Once it’s all nice and smooth, they roll it back up and sit it at the bow of the boat. 

After that, they taped off the covering board and inside edges of the cockpits.

The canvas decking is held down with a special glue.  Excess glue will squeeze out down the inside of the cockpit openings and covering boards when we smooth out the canvas.  We want these surfaces to remain glue-free, so we tape them off with paper and painter’s tape.  We also put plastic down on the inside of the boat to protect it from glue drips. 

The glue is about the consistency of yogurt, and we mix it up with an anti-mold agent. 

In the old days, canvas decks were often bedded in white lead.  Now that’s some great stuff.  It kills everything, and gives boat builders all kinds of interesting neurological damage.  I thought there was no way that we’d be using it for this project, but then I looked at the side of the bucket.

The shipping label conveniently covers up the part of the statement that says this product DOES NOT contain the various asbestos, lead, and mercury compounds that you see mentioned on the bucket.  Woah!  For about 15 minutes I was convinced we needed to be in full tyvek suits, rubber gloves… Oh, wait, it’s relatively safe? 

Never mind.

So on the glue goes.  We spread it out on the deck with notched trowels, just like spreading tile mastic.

As soon as the glue is on, we follow behind with the canvas, pressing it down and smoothing out bumps with a rounded batten.  Right behind the batten guy, a few of us start stapling the canvas down in the dado.  A guy follows behind the stapler setting the staples flush with a hammer and punch.  Behind him comes a guy painting on a thinned glue mixture that soaks through the canvas and completely bonds it to the underlying layer of glue. The drying of this wet application also helps to tighten up the canvas and remove wrinkles

It’s a production line.  Here you can see the whole line in operation:  staple, set, paint. 

Jamie setting staples.

Here you can see where the thinned glue has been applied to the forward portion of the deck.

Those dark colored moving blankets have been set over the cockpit openings to stretch the canvas a little bit down in those areas.  This assures that the canvas is held tight against the glue at the edge of those openings.

The aft end of the boat, all canvassed and stapled.  Next, we run a razor knife down in the dado to trim off the excess canvas and clean up any glue that got onto the covering board.

Here we’ve reapplied the painter’s tape on the covering board in anticipation of painting the deck.  I put the first coat on yesterday so it’d be dry for Monday.  From now on we’ll keep the deck covered up as much as possible to protect from shoe marks, dust, the odd tool the falls.  I discovered recently that the rivets in my Carhart pants were perfectly placed to dent the deck when I sat on it and swung my legs over into the cockpit.  Rrrrr.

Meanwhile, the boom has been cut and glued up.

Nice. 

The mast is coming along too, and we’re expecting it to be glued up soon as well. 

3 weeks and counting.

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Tags: deck, canvas, glue, coaming, boom

 

A smattering of projects

The punch list for the six meter is as long as my arm.  But if I think about it, I’ll get all despondent and dreary.  No fun there.  Much more fun to think about ticking things off the list, and that’s what I did today. 

First off the list, the winch post . 

I think it looks like a piece of Danish modern furniture.  It’s all shiny with its 2nd coat of varnish.  It’ll get at least 7 coats before all is said and done. 

For those who care about such things, the large blocking in the center of the 2 uprights will back up the winches.  There will be a jib halyard winch on the right side of the top block and a main halyard winch on the left side of the lower block.  The two smaller blocks are there to help stiffen the whole affair and keep it from twisting from the force of the lines pulling on the winches. 

At the base, right next to the post members, you can see two lighter pieces of wood… those are oak braces that go in between the 2 sole bearers.  The braces are screwed down to the floor timber below it, and into the sole bearers as well.  These are there to brace the post and keep it from racking. 

And just to save you a trip to the glossary:
The soles are the floorboards.
The sole bearer is what the sole sits on.
The floor timber connects the frames to the keel. 

Ok, tick that off. 

Next up, making a new bending jig for the aft cockpit coamings.  The original jig seemed good enough at the time,

but the coamings were left on the jig out in the sun and rain while other things took priority.

They didn’t fare well.

We think the break had as much to do with a hard spot (i.e., a too sharp curve in the jig) as being left in the sun.  The long checks (the splits running left to right) were probably due to the sun and rain.

The upshot: those coamings are toast, and we’ll need to bend some new ones.  We decided to make a new jig, a solid one.  It’s possible that the coaming wood failed because the wood ran straight in the spaces between the 2×4’s in the previous jig, and then had to bend sharply when it curved across them.  A sold jig provides a continuous bearing surface for the wood to bend against.  It’s more trouble to make than the original jig, but it’s close to foolproof.

Mike traced the shape of the cockpit opening, and cut and faired it out to make a pattern.

This is half of the opening where the coaming will go.  The cockpit is symmetrical, so you can make both coaming sides from the same pattern.

The bending jig is a positive mold.  This means that the wood is bent over it, and the face that contacts the jig is the inner face of the coaming.  However, the cockpit butts up against the outer face of the coaming.  Here’s a simplified picture in case this seems obtuse.

So, the problem is that we’ve got a pattern based on the edge of the cockpit but the jig has to be based on the inner edge of the coaming.  The coaming is 1/2″ thick.  Luckily, it’s easy to fix this.  Trace the pattern on some stock for the jig, and then, using a small 1/2″ thick block, subtract the coaming thickness by making little marks all around the inside of the tracing.

You can barely see the little tracing I’ve made on the right side of the block.

You end up with a series of dash marks along the inside of the tracing.

Now, just connect them with a flexible batten

and trace the new line from the batten.

That’s the line you cut to.  I like to cut close to the line, and then get right on it using a stationary sander.  The sander has the advantage of allowing you to fair in your curve a bit more as you make smooth, sweeping motions across the sander.

Once you’ve got this piece done, it becomes your master template.  For this jig, we want a final thickness of about 5″.  This means we need a stack of about 7 layers of plywood. 

I like using a flush-cutting router or shaper bit with a guide bearing to make exact copies from a template like this.  The process would be easy if we had a cutter that was tall enough to handle the whole stack at once, but unfortunately, our longest cutter is about 2 1/2″  This means we have to assemble and cut these layers in stages.

First, we trace out the template onto a piece of scrap plywood and cut it out a little big.  Here’s a slick trick to cutting out a large shape like this.  Put half of the sheet of plywood on a bench, and the other half on a rolling cart just set away from the bench.

Ok, this only works really if your cart fits entirely within the shape of the cutout.  In this case, it does.  You can barely see the cutout line drawn on wood here. 

Then cut your shape out.

Voila!  The cart holds it up and nothing falls and binds the blade. 

All right, it’s not a huge trick, but it’s handy if you’re working alone. 

So, stack up 3 of these guys on your template and screw them all together.  With the template on the top of the stack, use a router with a top-mounted guide bearing to flush cut the 2 layers below it.  Yes, the 2 layers, because that’s all the router will reach. 

We’ll get to that 3rd layer in a minute.

By the way, this goes MUCH FASTER if you use a sharp bit rather than a chewed up dull hunk of junk like I started with.  Word to the wise…

So, after you make this cut, stack two more layers on top of your template, and screw them down too.

Now change your router bit to a flush cutting bit with a bottom mounted guide bearing.

Now when you rout, the bearing still rides along the template and cuts the stack above the template.  Flip your stack, add one more layer of plywood, and use this router one last time. 

In this case, you will be riding on the layers next to the template, rather than the template itself, but if you’ve been careful, it’s all the same.  The only problem that may arise is if your plywood has voids… the bearing will dip into them and give you a little dip on your path. 

That’s why I always use marine grade plywood for my first pattern if at all possible… no voids.

At the end of it all, you have a thick stack of wood that perfectly follows the shape of your template.  A very heavy thick stack of wood.

Now add some holes for the clamps.  They don’t go all the way through, they’re just deep enough for the clamps.  The other side has a mirror set of holes.

(that clamp is in place to show why the holes are there by the way, it’s not doing anything important like solving world hunger or clamping a right wing talk show host’s mouth shut)

With a two cleats screwed to the bottom of this beast, you can now clamp it to a couple of saw horses.

Here it is, all set up and ready to go.  The clamps are hung on the saw horses to that we can pick them up and use then immediately. 

The 1/2″ thick mahogany that will be bent on this form will have been in the steamer for about an hour, but will cool very quickly.  Thin wood cools almost immediately after coming out of the steam box.  This means we’ll have to work very fast, preferably using four people. 

It goes like this:  take the hot board out of the steamer, put it on the top of the jig, have 2 people bend both sides down immediately and hold it there while the other two start clamping in the middle and then work their way down to the ends.  The board has to be held down with one edge running right along one of the jig’s edges to keep it from being bent at an angle.  The whole process should take 30 seconds or less if we’re good.

That’s tomorrow’s job.  But for now, the jig is ticked off the list.

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Tags: jig, coaming, stem bending, winch post

 

More deck work

Once the deck was on, it was time to fair.  Planing, longboarding, finding the low spots… slow, hard work.  Next we filled all the screw holes and low spots with epoxy and fairing compound (we’re using West Systems 110 for this). 

Normally when you fill screw holes, you get your fairing compound to about the consistensy of peanut butter, press it into the hole and leave it just a little proud of the hole to allow for shrinkage.  That’s how most of the holes are handled in this photo.  When you do it this way, fairing becomes a simple matter of hitting those spots with sandpaper or maybe a plane and you’re done.

However, one guy didn’t really like people telling him how to do things, and you can see his work in the upper left of that photo.  Yes, the Blob.  The guy who did this was not really thinking about the consequences of his technique.  It was more a git-r-done approach.  He got-r-done.

And we planed and sanded for half a day to get that done.

Yep, those are just epoxy shavings.  No wood at all.  I’d say we removed 90% of what he applied.  At some point, I switched off this job and went below to install the supports for the halyard winches.  These guys are mounted on the sides of these twin posts.  The main, jib, and spinnaker halyards are led down through the center of the mast, and come out near the base.  This gets rid of some of the deck clutter from these lines.

In progress.  They’ll have blocking between them to stiffen them up.  You can see that the sole is starting to be installed as well.  This is in the forward cockpit, or the pit, where the grinders will work.  Here’s the aft cockpit where the boat steerer will sit.

Yesterday we were finally ready to seal the deck with primer paint treated with an anti-mildew agent.

Looks nice.  There are a few unfair spots left, but they’re quite minor and only visible to people who’ve obsessed over the deck.  Soon we’ll get some canvas on this puppy. 

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Tags: deck, six meter, madcap

 

Devoted to decking

This past week has been devoted to getting the deck on the six meter.  Day in, day out, precision drilling and fitting parts.  More on that in a bit, though, because I want to finish up showing off the metal work I’d started on last week. 

Before making the swallowtails, I fabricated 4 bronze plates that will become the base of the U-shaped running back stay anchors.  The trick was to make them all exactly the same without the benefit of a CNC or other automatic milling machine. 

Thank god for copiers.  I did the same trick with the plates as I did for the swallowtails:  draw them up, xerox the drawing, glue the drawings to the stock, and then carefully cut, drill, and grind to the lines.  The result was 4 identical plates. 

Now the tricky part was making 4 identical U-shaped, threaded bolts to fit into these puppies.  Luckily, IYRS came through again with the perfect bending machine from their systems program.  It’s really a pipe bender, but we modified it a bit to work with the bronze rod stock we’re using for the bolts. 

First I threaded each end of a 15″ length of straight 3/8″ bronze rod.  Then I put the rod in the bender.

To make sure that the bend was even (i.e., that both ends of the rod ended up the same length) I started the bend with the centerpoint of the rod just touching the middle bending surface.

In this case, that surface is a socket from a socket wrench set that gave us just the right bend diameter. Next, bend the rod to 90 degrees, take it out, reverse it so that the leg on the right is now on the left, and complete the bend. 

Not bad, the legs are almost exactly the same length.  No problem, because it’s a little long and they’ll get trimmed down when they’re installed. The legs are still just a little splayed out though.  Seems that bronze has a bit of springback to it.

That won’t do.  So, over to the vise with it.

The wooden pad protect the rod from getting scraped up. 

Overbend it a little more…

And voila!  It fits the plate just right.

We’ll weld the plate to the U bolt soon, but in the meantime, I wanted to fit it in the boat to make sure that I had the right lengths for the legs. 

Not bad.  You can see here how the bolts come down through the sheer clamp and into the swallowtail.

The problem was that they came down a little farther than I had originally thought, and I ran out of thread. 

Hmmm, this creates a bit of a problem.  How do you put more thread on a U-shaped thing?  Normally you’d use a die cutter to cut more thread.  However, the handles bump into the other leg of the bolt when you try to cut one leg.

Luckily, Lew had the perfect solution:  Hex Shaped die cutters.

Hey hey hey.  Check this out.  Put a 1″ socket on the die and you can now use a ratcheting handle to turn it!

The handle doesn’t get in the way of the 2nd leg.  Problem solved.  I cut another 3/4″ of thread and everything fit like a glove. 

Now, on to the deck! 

The astute observer would have noticed that the deck was being started as I was doing the test fitting with the bolts a few photos back, but here’s another view. 

Four deck strips (technically “planks”) laid.  Many more to go.  Mike contemplates the task. 

The process is simple really.  Start from the inside edge of the covering board, and screw and nail each plank in place. 

Screw and nail?  Why both? 

Well, you screw them down to the deck beams, but you nail them to each other to help stiffen the whole affair up.  After all, these planks are only 1/2″ thick.  The nailing is the tricky part.  We nail sideways through 2 1/2 planks to tie them together using copper nails.  These all get pre-drilled because otherwise the nails would split the thin planking.  However, there is very little room for error, and if you’re not careful, you’ll angle your drill up or down just a hair too much and blow out either the top or underside of the deck.  Like this, for instance.

The red lines show the path of the nails inside the decking, going from bottom to top.  You can just see how they’ve emerged at their tips. 

Each plank gets 2 nails in the middle of each bay (the space between the deck beams).  There are 51 bays.  I think we used about 2,500 nails.  That’s a lot of chances to blow your angle by a degree or so.  It also gives you a lot of practice getting it just right.  By the end of 4 days, my Drill Fu was very strong.

Mike and Phil made up some nifty metal jigs to make the drilling process easier. 

They discovered quickly that while it gave them a good, consistent, side-to-side spacing for the nails, it didn’t stop the driller from blowing the up/down angle.  Oh well.

Sometimes we’d drill a hole and find that we’d bumped into a nail from the previously installed plank.  So, we’d leave that hole alone and drill next to it.

My technique was to make a little mark at the location of every nail as I set it in.

That way I knew exactly what was in the way, and it pretty much eliminated hitting any embedded nails. 

The deck curves in, so we herringboned the planks where they met in the middle. 

We got pretty quick at making those cuts, but they did tend to slow things down a bit. 

Ok, Ok, enough on technique!  Here’s the progress with 3-5 guys working solid:

Monday.

Tuesday.

Wednesday.

And finally, today.

Done!  Now we fair up the deck, trim around the cockpits, and get ready for canvassing. 

It seems like we’ve done a lot, and we have, but there’s LOTS more to do, and only 4 weeks left. 

For one thing, there’s the mast.

That’s the setup for the 60′ long mast.  it’s made up of 6 staves and will be oval and tapered.  It’s not easy.  Looking at it up on the catwalk, it seems to go on forever.  Hard to believe it will stick out of that little boat.

I’m making a point of staying at least an hour or 2 late most every night to help get this project in on time, but we’ll see if it’s enough.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

 

Pedal to the metal and ready for decking.

This past week I got to play with metal.  Wow, this is cool stuff when it doesn’t burn/cut/poke/shoot sparks at you. 

More on that in a bit. 

Just when you get your head ready to do something, it’s helpful to stop said head and scratch it.  Is there anything that Must Happen before this process?  In the case of installing the deck, the answer is, “yes, yes there is.”  Here we’ve got the beams faired, the covering boards are on, the decking is cut and varnished on one side… seems like all systems are go.  But wait, after the deck is on, we’ll put canvas on.  And where does the canvas go?  Into a little dado along the covering board.  And how will that dado get there?  We’ll rout it in, using a fence running along the inner face of the covering board.  So, since the decking gets installed starting from that same edge of the covering board … gotta do the dado first before the decking gets in the way.  But wait, there’s more!

We’ve been getting some updates from the folks who are designing the rig for Madcap and one of the things that they wanted was a pair of running back stays.  These require some serious fastening in the aft end of the boat, and luckily, we haven’t put the deck on yet.  Installing these suckers would have been impossible if the deck was in the way.

So, let’s get the dado done.

There we go.  One long groove carefully routed into our beautiful covering board.  

 

Spring has sprung

Here in Newport it’s sunny, warm, ever so slightly breezy.  It’s the kind of weather that’s been bringing people out all week to scrape and repaint their porches.  People are clambering all over their boats, touching up the varnish, putting on new bottom paint, getting to all those projects they could put off during the winter because it was too damn cold.  Or wet. Or far into the future.

Well, these past few days, the future is here, and everyone knows that the hordes of tourists will soon blanket the town.  Sure the streets will be a log jam, but they’re here to see and be seen, and they’ve got money to burn.  Shops are opening back up.  Everyone’s sprucing up their store windows, and Ben & Jerry’s is open again. 

But the best part of all this is the biking.  I headed down to the south of the island today

 

and spent some time reading Atwood Manley’s wonderful book on the canoe builder J. Henry Rushton.

 

All over the boat

I mentioned the jumpers and half beams before. Well, this is what I was talking about.

You’re looking at the starboard side of the boat here. The quarter knees are in the foreground, and the mast partner is that big hunk of oak at the top of the photo. The jumper is also white oak, and it braces the mast partner against the bronze strapping that runs from the sheer clamp to the mast step.

THere’s the strapping, right under the end of the jumper. You can also see the metal knees that brace the oak deck beams attached to the mast partner. You bet, it’s a ton of bracing all in this small area of the boat. Good thing, too. The amount of strain on the partner is huge, and this is a race boat, it’s meant to be driven hard.

 

Goo yes, gap no.

Turns out that the little tiny gaps in our covering board joints won’t be filled with varnish so that they disappear. They won’t ever be filled with anything ever again in fact, because we coated every joint with 5200. It makes sense really, and I’m guilty of hubris for thinking that somehow my nice joinery would be impervious to the forces of sun and salt water with the addition of a few coats of varnish and a tight fit.

Warren gave me the sour milk face when I suggested that we didn’t need to bond those joints with that permanently adhesive and flexible stuff, and that’s all I needed to go back and coat the both sides of the joint liberally before jamming it back together and screwing everything down.

You can see a little squeeze out here. We cleaned it up and that joint is now impervious to the elements. For that advantage, we lose a bit of glamour as you can now see a tiny line of 5200 along the joint. The pragmatist in me says that’s excellent, it shows that the joint is sealed. The furniture builder in me says it looks like an open joint that someone fixed with putty.