A Shipwright in Training

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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 16th, 2006 at 7:41 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.