A Shipwright in Training

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. Somewhere along the way, someone thought they could give it a few more years of life by fiberglassing it.

Not much left of the glass now, but that treatment just accelerated it’s already declining condition as the glass traps water next to the hull. Fiberglass is a death sentence to these boats.
The holes in her hull made the lofting a bit more of a challenge. You can see the metal strapping through the holes. Yep, they hold her together. She really wants to be a pile of sticks on the floor.

Nevertheless, we lofted the old girl and amazingly, her lines were still in good shape. Not a lot of unfairness to deal with despite having holes in both sides and severe hogging along her keel.

You can see how the keel collapses down just behind the stem here

Amazingly, the scribed water line is still intact (it’s the line going back along the hull to the left of the pencil mark on the stem). That was handy, as it gave us a reference for leveling the old girl.
It’s getting lighter. Up on the lofting floor we get to see the sunsets better.

I love how the different glass works with the light. Even if you dropped the obvious cross symbol, this could easily be a church window.

Life is good.

On the work front, I’ve been moving quickly on a variety of little projects for the 12 1/2. The stem has been repaired, new parts have been made for the rudder and after doing a little searching online for photos of the type of boom crutches that these boats employed, I designed up a little sweeping one for this boat. I like how it came out. Simple, and with varnish, it’ll look quite nice. Sometimes designing the simple pieces are harder than the complex ones…

That’s all the news that’s fit to print.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 11:54 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.