A Shipwright in Training

In order to get that joke, you need to know that IYRS is pronounced “Iris” and Spiling is pronounced the same as Smiling but without the M.

Any joke you need to explain is not a good joke.

If you’ve tried to access this site recently you’ve probably gotten a number of errors. It seems that bad people were trying to hack into my account and caused some havoc. Luckily the folks who host this site are super-wonderful and blocked them. I’ve now updated the software on my end to make sure they’re blocked for the foreseeable future.

Ok, here we go. Words of the day: Spiling, and it’s counterpart, Despiling. Spiling is a fancy way of saying “copying,” but it refers specifically to copying the shapes of planks. You see, planks are nice smooth things that wrap around a boat, and in order to make them functional as well as pretty, you need to have a way of making them fit tightly as they bend and curve around. When you spile a plank, you copy the plank’s shape onto a thin strip of wood called a spiling batten. When you Despile, you take that information from the spiling batten and transfer it to your new plank. The thing that makes this soooo coool is that you’re taking a shape that curves throughout a 3-D space and transferring it to a flat plank that will fit when it too curves through space. Nifty, yes?

Here are 2 pictures showing the spiling process. First, you take the pointy end of your compass and put it up against one edge that your plank will eventually butt up to. Then you trace a little arc onto your spiling batten that you’ve tacked onto the boat more or less where the plank will go. Here’s the arc being traced from the rabbet.

And here’s a 2nd arc being traced from where we know the bottom edge of the plank should lie. How do we know where the bottom of the plank should lie? Boatbuilder’s secret. If I told you, I’d have to take you sailing.

Now look what we’ve got: a couple of arcs. If you remember your geometry, Read the rest of this entry »

It really helps to have a certain amount of OCD when doing this work. Not all the time, granted, but when you’re getting set for planking, you bet. Case in point: fitting the wedges.

In this photo you see that the frames go beneath the keel. The planks ride on the frames, but the astute boatbuilder will notice that the rabbet is up there above where the frame goes beneath the keel. Now, the garboard plank goes into the rabbet… how does it get from the frame up to the rabbet? Why, with a wedge of course. We’ll get to that in a second. The other thing you’re probably dying to yell out of course is, What About The Angle Of The Base of the Rabbet??!! Good question. Let’s look at that one.

You’ll see that when the plank comes up from the frame and meets the base of the rabbet, the plank is at a slight angle, but the rabbet base (made up of the plane defined by the bearding line and apex) is flat. If the plank rests on this flat base, it will only touch at the outer edge. Observe:

See, you knew that wasn’t right, and you were correct. A bad boatbuilder will fill this space with 5200 and hope that Read the rest of this entry »

When there’s not much to do, those of us who tend to be industrious get busy and start up on personal projects, help out other people with their boats, and generally become border collies in search of a herd. Those of us who aren’t built that way hang out and chat, and are often mocked mercilessly by the border collies. I’m sure we get mocked back, but they know we’re right so they do it quietly.

So, we’ve got the boat all nice and framed up. Here’s what it looks like:

We got bored so we looped all the cable ties back onto themselves for a neat appearance. Looks kind of like an old lady in a beauty parlor to me. All those nice dark red things under the white ribbands are the new frames. We tie them to the ribbands / planks to keep them stable, and put a screw into them where they meet the keel. It’s a special deal where the frames meet the stem. Observe:

You can see the frame in the upper left goes under the keel. It gets a screw there. The two frames to the right of it butt up against the stem and putting a screw there is a little trickier. The aft frame has a clamp on it to hold it solidly to the little lip under the rabbet (when it cools, it’ll stay there by itself) and the forward frame just rests right up against the rabbet. If you recall what the rabbet is for, you’ll remember that the planks will curve right up into that slot. Therefore, if the frame is above the level of the bottom slope of the rabbet, it’ll get in the way of the plank. The solution is to fair (i.e., plane down) the frame to keep it just below the plank. That way the plank can rest solidly on the frame as God Meant It To Be. Problem is, if you go and put a screw into that frame to attach it to the stem, you’re likely to plane right into it. Dang, hitting a screw with your nice plane will just ruin your day. So, we simply leave the frames unattached to the stem at this point, maybe we put a dab of hot glue to hold them in place. When the planks are attached, we’ll put a screw through the plank and frame, right into the stem. There you go, solid connection, everybody’s happy.

Once the boat was framed up, it was thumb twiddling time.
I chose to twiddle my thumbs by making another wooden plane. This one is made in the style of James Krenov out in CA. It’s made of Ipe (also called Ironwood or Greenheart), a very hard dense wood. Here’s the initial cut out.

The bottom plane is a backing out plane I made a while back out of Beech. The Ipe plane is made of 4 parts: two side pieces and two middle pieces that form the ramp where the blade goes on (the slope on the left side) and the ramp where the chips come out (the slope on the right side). There’s a dowel in the center that will eventually help hold the blade down.
The Beech plane is constructed quite differently. First of all, it’s made of 2 symmetrical pieces (a left and right side) that are then glued together. There’s no dowel to hold the blade down, instead, there are 2 ramps (called cheeks) cut into the side of the plane that hold the wedge (the light wood on top of the blades) down. These are trickier planes to make. The Krenov style planes are much easier, and as a result, you can knock them out quicker if you need a couple of different types.
You’ll notice that the Ipe plane has a diamond inlaid on the side. Normally, there’s a hole there where the dowel goes. As I was drilling the hole, Jen came up and talked to me, and like a bonehead, I looked up. That made me lose my concentration for just a second and the plane lifted up into the drill, and boom… a lot of tear out where the drill exited the side. Rather than remake the side or live with a crappy looking plane, I decided to make an inlay piece that would cover over the damaged wood. It would also have the advantage of making the plane look nifty.

Kevin says it’s the gayest plane in the world, but that’s ok. My next plane will be pink with little hearts and his name carved inside one of them.

So, that’s the Ipe plane rough cut out on the bandsaw. here it is after a little spokeshaving and scraper work:

It’s getting a little smoother and more rounded. Today I made the wedge. Just to tweak Kevin, and to try out a little carving, I made it in the style of an English planemaker named Bill Carter. It needs tweaking but the basic form is there.

Well, once everyone else got their boats framed up, it’s now time to seriously think about planking. Dang, about time.
In preparation, we will be making little wedges that span about 1 1/2 plank width from the frames to the bottom of the rabbet. This will give the garboard a nice gentle slope up to the rabbet and will keep it supported throughout its width. The garboard is the plank that butts up against the keel.
Here we’ve taken off one more old plank in preparation for making and installing the fairing wedges.

Tomorrow we have boat work to do, so the plane will probably have to wait a while.

Before we get on to the rebar ties, it seems prudent to do a little catch up.

First off, the half model is now carved out and looking nifty. Here we go. It looks a lot more like a boat when you band saw the side profile in. Now you can see the rake of the transom and the sweep of the sheer. It’s still a little blocky as I haven’t smoothed out the transitions between the lifts (the layers).

Much spoke shaving later, and the lift lines are gradually disappearing and the whole thing is looking smoother.

And finally, you can see the shape coming together. The band saw marks in the top still need to be smoothed out, but it’s pretty close.

Next up, steaming frames! We like steaming frames. It’s fast and frenetic and it requires teamwork and speed to do it well. Here’s how it goes: We first mill 3/4 x 3/4 lengths of Read the rest of this entry »

Boat builders love wood. We see a nice, long, clear board of 1 3/4″ thick pine and we get all dreamy eyed thinking of the great things we can make with it. That’s why ribbands are just painful, pure and simple.

Ribbands (pronounced Rib Ands) are long boards, roughly 1 1/2″ x 1 1/2″ square that go from the stem to the transom. They form a graceful, sweeping, twisting curve from bow to stern. They’re strong as hell, and without steaming, impossible to bend around the somewhat awkward sharp curves of the Beetle cat. We put them on over the planking to support the relatively fragile cedar planks when we’re bending in new oak frames. We drive bunches of screws into them, and when we’re done and all the frames are in, we take these beautiful things off our boat and throw them away. It’s enough to break your heart… 10″ wide, 1 3/4″ thick, perfect clear pine, sawed into strips and then thrown away. This stuff is begging to be flooring, a table, a beautiful chair seat. But nothing else will suffice for the job that the ribband has to do, so we suck it up and saw away.
Here’s the first 3 ribbands on our boat. 2 near the top, one near the bottom.

We’ll also cut off the long bits sticking out over the transom… these were 14′ long boards. Sniff.

It’s a little hard to see in these photos, but the top ribbands twist from near vertical at the stem to horizontal at the transom, and most of this twist takes place in the first 4′ of the boat. It’s a wicked twist coupled with following the curve of the boat. Even with steaming, we had to taper the first 5′ of the ribband from 3/4″ thick at the tip to the full width of 1 1/4″ so it could make the bend. They’re screwed in place using square wooden washers to keep them from pulling out of the screws. The bottom ribband on the right wasn’t so bad. There’s very little twist to it, just the curve of the boat. We didn’t need to steam that one at all.

Sometimes we have other wood woes at the shop. The dust collector, for instance, is prone to clogging when there’s lots of planing going on. This means you have to climb up on a ladder and poke at the clog with a long stick (yes, after the machinery is off… jeez) until a mountain of sawdust falls on you.

Adam demonstrates proper unclogging technique. This is just too much fun for words.
Meanwhile, the 2nd years are moving along nicely with their 12 1/2’s. The molds are just about finished, and they’re fairing them out now.

You can really see how the boat will look here. They’ll bend new frames over each mold station once everything is faired. By faired, I mean that they take long battens and stretch them along the stations to see if the batten has a pleasing curve and touches each mold. A mold that’s slightly out of shape or improperly beveled will cause there to be lump or dip in the batten.
We love battens. They show us nice smooth curves. They show us where to make changes.

I remain flu-ridden.  Bleh.  At least I didn’t have to clean out the friggen dust collector.