A Shipwright in Training

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.

But because I forgot to round over the outside face of the plank to match the concavity I’d just created, the plank was much thicker than it should have been. Therefore, when I steamed it and put it on the boat, it was excessively hard to bend into shape, and it tended to spring back at the front, where the curve is most severe.

Kev also had to re-make the plank he installed before Christmas because it split at the front. Here he is cutting the new one out… again.

And then there was the issue with the frames. Apparently when we bent in the frames, they tended to either bulge out or not bulge out enough at the turn of the bilge. This means that any plank riding along those frames will look like a little roller coaster as it passes from high to low points on the frame. Dammit.

So, the solution is either:

1. replace the frame
2. try to force the frame into position
3. steam the frame in place and then try to re-bend it to the proper curve.

I opted for #3.

The method is called Bag & Steam or Spot Steaming. It’s pretty complex. You make a bag around the offending frames, and then put lots of steam into said bag. Here’s 2 frames all bagged up and ready for steam.

Here’s a single frame being steamed. You can barely see the steam hose sticking out of the top of the bag. That hose runs to the industrial steam generator we use in the shop.

You know how your space heater

might use a 1500 Watts or so? The steam generator uses 40 Kilowatts. That’s 40,000 Watts. About the amount of energy your whole house uses. It really can crank out the steam. So, you steam the frame for about 45 minutes, put a jack at the end of the frame and press up. This causes the frame to bend up and out at the place where it’s unsupported. Try it: take your finger and point to the floor. Now take your other hand and press up on the tip of your finger while keeping the pointing finger’s hand stationary. You’ll start to bend that finger up and out. Or you’ll break it, but if you do, it’s your fault, not mine.

Afterwards, you clamp the frame in its new position.

Oh yes, really afterwards, you realize that you should have had some extra ribbands laid across the top of the frames so that you could clamp the frame to them. So, you do the whole thing over a second time and you stare blankly out into space wondering if an office job was really such a bad thing.

But there were moments of great beauty too. Like when Kev was taking a frame that we eventually replaced out the steamer.

And there was always our talking pirate and Christmas star on the end of the boat, that was pretty great. He tells you to walk the plank.

And Jamie and Dave found a use for discarded frames.

You can shoot a pointed sick straight into the ceiling where it sticks. That was pretty great.

But, at the end of the week, we looked about the same as we did at the start of the week, with the exception that one of the planks (my 2nd broad) was now fastened on.

In this photo you can see the extra ribbands that we attached to the boat. They’ll be the clamping points for the frames we’re steaming here. By the middle of Friday, there were so many clamps holding newly spot steamed frames that I couldn’t do any more work on my side of the boat. So, I spent the 2nd half of Friday working on a plane with some success.

Just about every time someone came in the door on Friday, they said some variant of “JESUS it’s COLD!” And that’s because it was in the single digits with a 20+ mph wind screaming around the building all day. The drafts around our boat were so strong that there were wood chips skitting across the floor, and paper would blow off the bench. It was VERY cold at our boat all day, and let me tell you, that just added to the generally foul mood.

So, that was the first week back on the boats.

Meanwhile, over at work, I started on a project that promises to be interesting and tricky. I’m replacing the hounds on a S boat mast, and this is not a simple thing.
First, here’s a model of an S boat. They were made by Herreshoff as a one-design racing boat.

Where the rigging goes up to the mast, it’s attached by looping over the mast, and then resting on the hounds to keep from sliding down. Here’s the hounds I was working on. The top of the mast is to the left.

Most of the mast’s varnish has been stripped off, except at the hounds. You can see how the hounds are curved pieces of wood that are wider at the top (the left) and taper down to nothing at their base. Think of them like sections of a solid ice cream cone that have been attached to the mast. The loops of rigging rest on top of the ridges formed by the hounds. These hounds, however, are quite old, and are wearing down. this means that the rigging can slip off.

That hound just won’t hunt.

So, my first job was to carefully chisel off the old hounds after documenting their position and orientation. It was a bit tricky, because you don’t want to go chiseling off bits of mast, and if you chisel too deeply, that’s exactly what you’ll do. In some places the hound’s grain was so close to the grain of the mast that was almost impossible to tell where one part ended and the other began.

Making the new hounds is going to be interesting. It requires constructing a hollow section of spruce that will slide down the tapered mast until it’s just at the point where it should be, and then it will jam / be glued into into place. This is really really tricky.

I’m still finishing up little detail work on a Herreshoff 12 1/2 at work.

I’m very grateful for the flight suit that Michelle bought me before I left. It helps keep the cold at bay when working in either Jim’s shop or IYRS.

Phew, that’s it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 27th, 2007 at 9:41 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.