A Shipwright in Training

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.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 13th, 2006 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Classes, Sailing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.