A Shipwright in Training

Last week I signed up at the local Y because they have really good rates for full time students. So, every day for the past week or so I’ve been doing something over there… yoga, aerobics, step, spinning. I try to mix it up with yoga every other day and something that feels more like actual exercise on the other days. It’s been wonderful, even though I have to get up at stupid o’clock in the morning most days. and I keep running into these guys. They really should get a life.

But, I know, you really want to hear about the boat.

Dark night of the soul is over. No worries, folks.

The Beetle Cat has 8 planks / side. Numbering from the keel out, you’ve got: Garboard, 1st Broad, 2nd Broad, Planks 3-7 and the Sheer. Yesterday plank 7 went on like a glove. Here’s the initial fit:

And a little close up:

The stuff that looks like paint in the seam is paint in the seam. We back prime the planks with red oxide primer before installing them on the boat.

Now, the astute reader will pipe up with some smart ass comment like, “Hey boat guy, sure that’s a wicked tight seam, but where’s your caulking bevel??” Look, I haven’t put it on yet in this photo yet. And yes, I did eventually put it on, and it was wonderful in every way. Geez, don’t you have a hobby or something?

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That pretty much sums this week up. No chicken soup in sight.

Things started badly when I went to do the final fitting of the plank that I fitted and steamed, but didn’t fasten before Christmas. For the past month it’s been lightly clamped to the boat, moving moving moving. The little bastard. When I went to fit it, it had warped about 2 inches along its length. What was once a nice, easy-fitting plank was now a plank that had to be wrestled into position with an obscene number of clamps.

What this means for fitting is that everything slows to a crawl. See, to fit a plank, you hold it up to the plank it butts up to (the marrying edge), look for light and dark where they planks meet, take the plank off, lightly plane the dark patches (because they’re where the planks are touching), hold it up again… repeat. When you have to do an elaborate clamp up for every one of these fittings you can see how long this takes.

It’s very frustrating and it reminds novice boat builders just how much skill is involved in this enterprise.

I also can’t believe how much I’ve forgotten in the 4 weeks since I was planking last. Wood isn’t bending the way I remember it bending, and that’s because I forgot to thin out the planks properly. I remembered to back out the planks by making little templates of the curves of the frames and then hollowing out the inside of the plank to match those curves.

I forgot that we were also supposed to sand the inside of the planks to make them look nice.

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When you put the last plank on your boat it’s called the shutter plank or the whiskey plank. Done. Grab a drink. There’s really no formal name for finishing the last line on a drawing, but Mike called his the Whiskey Line, and I couldn’t have said it better. So, Prost! I completed my whiskey line right at the bell on Friday. No more drafting for a while…

So, here’s the sequence. First, the lines plan, showing 3 views of the boat along with 2 diagonal lines used to see if your other lines are fair. The top of the paper shows the Plan View, essentially a contour map of half the hull looking down. Underneath that are the 2 Diagonal lines. At the bottom of the page is the Profile View (a side view with contour lines called Buttocks), and a Body Plan superimposed in the center. The Body Plan is a head on view of the boat, again showing the boat sliced like a loaf of bread.

The Lines Plan was developed from the measurements we took off the boat directly. It’s really just a smaller copy of the lofting that we did on the floor.

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Over the Christmas holiday, I visited with my friend Lyons and we worked on his boat, a Townie that he bought last year and has been gradually restoring. We’d tried to bend in some frames a week earlier, but were blocked by a couple of problems: the steamer box didn’t have a good enough source of steam and the ribbands were too thin. It took hours to get the box up to 200 degrees using a tea kettle and a pressure cooker as steam sources. Once we got the ribs good and hot, we bent them into the boat. However, since the ribbands were too thin, the ribs ended up deforming them. So, back to the drawing board.
We spent the rest of that day putting in much thicker ribbands and over the week, Lyons worked out a far better steam source. Here’s what he came up with after doing a little research.

What we’ve got here is a double walled stove pipe. At the bottom of the stove pipe is the burner from a hot air balloon and it’s connected to a propane tank. It blasts heat up through the inner pipe. Air is drawn down through the space between the inner and outer pipes. In the inner pipe is a length of copper tubing that’s coiled from the bottom to the top of the pipe.

You hook up the lower end of the pipe to a hose, let water trickle in and by the time it gets up to the top of the tube it’s pure high pressure steam. Read the rest of this entry »

What a week!

When I got back from visiting friends and family over Christmas, I moved into the polar opposite of my little rabbit hole. I’m now in a wonderful place that takes up the entire 3rd floor of a house. It’s a converted attic so the ceiling slopes down to the knee walls, limiting the usable space, but it’s open, airy, has 2 skylights, and gives me room to do yoga in the morning. My 2 house mates are great and we get along famously. Bliss.

This week we continue the fine, detailed work of lofting and drafting. It seems almost ludicrous to be working at the level of detail where half-pencil-width lines matter when you step back and take a look at the condition of the boat you’ve been taking measurements from. The wood straps in the foreground hold this old dog together. It’s an original Lawley tender, a rowboat

used to service larger boats. It would be stored on deck or pulled behind. Read the rest of this entry »