Too long indeed!
Boy, joining up with the Y put a crimp in this little blog.
Typical day: up, head to the Y, go to school, grab some dinner at home, head into work at Jim’s, bed. Sometimes I mix it up and do yoga after school, and those days I get to sleep in until 8. Woo hoo! Since the last post, we had actual snow!! It lasted a few hours, barely, but for a little while our street was a little wonderland.
Home sweet home.
I could also go on about the 4 days we were without heat when the temps were in the teens, but really, enough jibber jabber. Let’s talk boats.
I made myself a new spiling block / thingy out of a chunk of scrap bronze the other day. As you get closer to the shutter plank, the spaces you’re spiling in get smaller and tighter. My wooden spiling block was too big, and it had other problems too that you may or may not get in a minute. So here’s the little feller.
You see that little nubbin that comes out on the lower corner? That hangs over the edge of your spiling stock and sits right flush up against the bottom edge of your installed plank. Thusly:
Once you get that tang to touch the bottom corner of your plank, you trace this block the same you’d do any spiling block. You can see the outline from this operation already done in the first photo. I put the little divots in the sides of the block to make it clear which side I was tracing for de-spiling, but they really weren’t necessary.
Still, this little puppy was fun to make because I got to use an acetyline torch to bend the metal. Way cool.
Plank #5 was pretty easy to spile and cut out. I’ve fallen in love with the tool I’m using to cut planks these days: the worm drive circular saw.
Everyone in the housing trades know these guys. They have the torque of a locomotive and are substantially heavier than the normal circular saw. And, they have the blade mounted on the left instead of the right, which takes some getting used to. However, after using one for a couple of months now, I’m a total convert. They’re smooth, powerful, and I like the blade on the left. So, this fellow cuts out the planks, keeping about 1/8th to 1/16th away from my line. After that, I plane to the line. Then bevel the marrying edge so that it matches the angle the plank it will meet up with. Then I back out the plank, round the outside, put on a caulking bevel, and send it to the steamer for 45 minutes. After that it gets clamped to the boat and I have nothing to do for a while as it cools.
Ok, off boats for just a second. While I was waiting for my #5 plank
to cool, I had some down time, so I built another plane. It’ll be used
as a fairing plane to smooth the hull of the boat. This one is made
from a single block of tesota, the same stuff I made my high angle
plane from back last summer. I pirated the little curly wedge I’d made
before for another plane (the “gay plane”) when that plane developed
some splits. I like it.
Plank #5 went on with only a modicum of cursing and sweating. I simply cannot predict at this point, when I’ve got a plank spiled so well that it’ll just sweetly nestle up to its neighbor. This one took a bit of shoving and persuading, but I didn’t want to do too much edge setting because that leads to unfairness in the other edge of the plank. And the other edge of the #5 plank mates up to the infamous shutter plank. The more fair you make the edges of the planks bordering the shutter plank, the easier it is to fit the shutter. So, I spent a lot of time carefully fitting #5 to #4 so that there would be a minimum of edge set. After quite a bit of work, I was satisfied. So I promptly forgot to back-prime the board (i.e., paint it with primer so that the plank will have primer between it and the frames) and happily installed it. La la la…
It looks good anyway.
All that’s left is the shutter plank. Insert ominous music.
I spiled away using my nifty new spiling block, was ever so careful, and cut out the shutter with great precision, right to my spiling lines. The next morning, I had a revelation about bevels and spiling. Here’s a drawing to help illustrate what I’m about to try to explain.
What you’re looking at is a cross-section of planks, lying on a curved frame. When you spile, you measure where the plank touches the frame, as illustrated by the arrow. The problem is, if you draw a line straight up from that point, which is equivilant to cutting a plank at that line, you don’t meet the plank next to you. You come up short. This is illustrated in how the 2 planks go together on the left side of the drawing. They meet at the base, but not at the top. The solution to this problem, of course, is to bevel the edge of one plank so that it fits up nicely to the one next to it. However, this beveling is a Subtraction of wood, which means that you have to Add wood ahead of time so that when you bevel, you bevel down to your original spiled line. Get it? In other words, you have to figure out the bevel as it changes along your plank, and then figure out how much wood you’ll need to add to your original spiled measurements to allow you to make that bevel. This is called “adding bevel wood.”
I had been neglecting to do that.
I wondered why my planks always seemed to be just a little skinnier than the lines I’d spiled to! It was because I spiled accurately, and then took off a small amount to make the bevel, which made the plank skinnier. Ah. All clear now.
I could get away with this up to now because I was only mating one side of a plank at a time, but now it’s shutter time and both sides have to mate. That means I have to add bevel wood to my spiled shape on both sides. And I didn’t do that with my nicely cut out first attempt at a shutter plank. My pretty little shutter plank was cut to the spiled line, not the spiled + bevel wood line. Too skinny. Start over.
So, to take bevels you use a bevel gauge. This is a cool one because it’s long enough to span 2 planks. .
You take a bevel at the top edge, and a bevel at the bottom edge. No, they don’t always match.
Then you transfer this information to a bevel board. This is just a scrap of board with straight edges. No, that’s not blood. Taking bevels is generally a low-injury task.
Now here’s something telling. Notice how the bevels on the left side of the board are pretty much even, while those on the right side of the board are all over the place? The left side measures the bevels from the #7 plank, a plank that went in with zero edge set. The right side measures the #5 plank, which had some edge set. See what edge set will do to you? Now I have to account for all those variations when beveling my shutter. Sheesh.
To do this, I made witness cuts in the edge of my shutter plank to guide how I’d cut the bevel. A witness cut is simply a cut made to the depth that the bevel will eventually end up at. Say you want to dig a wide hole 3′ deep into the snow. You could drill 4 or 5 little holes using a 3′ long bit in the area you wanted to make your big hole first, and then dig down until you just ran out of evidence of your smaller holes. There, you’re at 3′. To make the witness marks, I calculated the distance that the bevels would go down the edge of the shutter plank at various locations, and then carved out those areas with a chisel. Here’s one:
the pencil marks provide a visible guide to the edge of the witness mark. Then, I started planing down to the witness cut.
Part way there.
Almost perfect. One more swipe of the plane and I’ll have erased the divot left by the witness mark, and I’ll know I’ve got the right bevel.
That was a slow day.
Fitting the shutter has taken almost all my time this week. Now, granted we did have a snow day, and I’m taking Friday off to fly out to Oregon to meet my good buddy Em and dance dance dance, but still… 3 days and it’s almost done. It’s very slow work.
Here’s why. You fit your plank in at the front, or hood, end. It’s too wide, because you were smart enough to leave it a tiny bit wide so that you could adjust it by planing wood away. Good for you, gold star.
So, you plane away a few shavings, test fit again. Hold a light behind it. If you take off too much, you’re toast. You don’t get to add wood. So, you make light cuts, and test over and over and over and over until it fits just exactly right. All the while, you’re trying to fade these plane swipes in with the next area of you’re plank that you’ll be adjusting so that you don’t take too much wood off there. It’s like taking a little pyramid that goes into an upside-down, pyramid-shaped hole and gradually trimming the sides until it slides in exactly and the base is flush with the edges of your hole. So, you just slowly work your way up the plank, using your light, taking small cuts, pressing and working the wood around to make sure you have a good fit. Oh, and trying to keep your cuts exactly the same angle as the bevels you worked so hard to make.
Have I mentioned this is slow?
I think another 45 minutes, and I’ll be able to fasten this dog. Hopefully I’ll remember to back prime this one. Right now it’s clamped to my boat, and looks almost like it’s ready to be fastened. No photos yet, sorry.
But for now, it’s off to bed, and in about 7 hours, up into the western skies. Ahhh, sleeping on the plane will feel wonderful.