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.

Once the spine was done, we were adrift, lost, looking for a project. That’s no problem. Our project was to take the oak offcuts from the keels and turn them into 3/4 x 3/4 frame members of various lengths. Later on, we’ll steam these frames and bend them to the inside of our hulls. Seemed easy enough, but the offcuts were really odd shaped things.

That’s the oak on the right. The trick when making frames is to follow the natural pattern of the grain as much as possible, while at the same time keeping a fair curve.

What’s a fair curve, exactly? Well, it’s a curve that pleases the eye. Here, this is a frame we cut out early on that followed the grain pretty well, but had a lot of thickness variations. You can see that the curve on the left side (we’re looking at the long skinny stick now to the left of the drill) is relatively fair… it’s smooth, and other than having a bit of a flat spot near the drill, it looks ok. The right side of the same stick is not fair. All kinds of wiggles and bumps. We can mill some of that out. What we can’t mill out, we toss.

The board on the left is where that strip came from. We cut the curve in order to follow the grain. We can get at least one more long frame from it, and possibly some shorter frames.
So, why follow the grain? Man, this is sounding like a Donald Rumsfeld interview where he asks and answers all the questions himself. Think of wood like a bundle of straws. The straws are the grain. You take a fist full of straws and bend them as a group, and you get a nice little curve there. Now, imagine that your fistfull of straws has some that are shorter and end along the edges of your bundle. Bend it again, and those short straws won’t bend, they’ll stick out straight in their original direction. Grain runout is where some of the wood straws end at the edge of your board. When you bend that stick, it’ll most likely split and shatter there. You have continuous grain, you have a nice even bend. Simple, see? We don’t want our frames to split and shatter… oh the cursing you’ll hear.

Here’s Kev working on a featherboard to hold the frames tight against the table saw fence. Oh, I’m not going to tell you what a featherboard is just yet. If you must know, here’s one for sale that will cost you money and you won’t have the satisfaction of making it exactly like you wanted from a bit of scrap wood lying around.

And then on Monday, I finished the glue up for my half model… the final step in the process that we started by taking the lines off of the Beetle cat way way back. It’s actually a working backwards process… normally someone would design a boat, make a half model, show it to a client, get an order, loft the boat, and build the boat. Here we have a built boat, loft it, scale it down to a design-sized drawing, and then make the half model.
By the way, you do a half model because boats are symmetrical. See one side, you’ve seen both sides really. Here’s the glue up. it’s like a topo map of a beetle cat, but in wood. This seems like a simple thing, but the glue is slippery, and you have to glue up these layers very exactly… it’s a pain really. Like clamping bacon.

The lines correspond to the stations that the boat is laid out on. Next step is to shape this to a beetlecat shape.
But, it’s not all sawdust and grain runout at the shop these days. We have chili cookoffs too.

Hey, anything that gives us piles of food… we’re on it like white on rice. Starving students don’t ask twice. My chicken chili won for hottest, and the prize was a pirate doll that tells you to walk the plank over and over. I think it’s a dog toy, and I’m just glad that Penny’s a pit bull mix… she’ll take out the voice chip on the first chomp.
It’s been a slow few days here because I now am proud host to the flu that every other creature on god’s green earth has. I just want to sleep all day. Still, I managed to finish one last thing to rid my life of clutter: the paper is now attached to the lamp and it’s all hung up. Phew, check that baby off the list and go to bed.

Oh, and in other news, I’ve got my first published book review! Well, published in a blog, but it’s a Fine Woodworking blog… not bad, eh? It’s for a fun little book on boat building, and you can find it here (it’s the Oct. 30th entry).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Classes. 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.