A Shipwright in Training

Wow, what a week. I’m exhausted, but in a good way.

And this just in: this little blog is featured at the bottom of the opening page of Wooden Boat’s website! I have no clue as to how they found it as my publicist eloped with a Masai warrior a week ago and they’re opening up an espresso and charred lizard shop down under last I heard. It’ll probably only be there for a week or two, so if it’s not there when you visit, you’ll just have to trust me. If you’re here from there, hi.

A week ago Friday I flew across the country to visit with Emilie and contra dance for 3 solid days. It was a great way to spend the weekend, and we even made time to hike in the research forest near her house.

You just gotta love the way moss and lichens cover everything out there. It was an exhilarating, exhausting, ecstatic weekend. If you go contra dancing in the Corvallis / Eugene area, you’re bound to have a good time.

After a little flight snafu (ok, I missed my flight), during which I had a long enough layover in Seattle to head downtown and check out the Bodies Exhibition & eat at a vegetarian Internet cafe called Cyber Dogs, I headed up to Maine for a week of talking to boat builders and touring their shops. I thought it would be a nice little casual tour, but it was a lot more involved than I’d bargained for. Usually I’d spend an hour at least talking with folks at a shop, then drive for 30 - 60 min to get to the next one… Each day was incredibly full.

I spent a night in Portland, in part so that I could visit Portland Yacht Services where they hold a huge boat show every year, and where the Alden schooner Tar Baby is stored. The owner of PYS bought her a few years back hoping to attract a buyer who would pay for her restoration (Patton owned her at one time), and I needed to get the measurements of her boomkin for Jim. The boomkin is like the bowsprit, only it’s on the back of the boat. Here is is:

Tar Baby is an amazing boat. I hope someone buys her.

I visited a whole range of shops, from little places like Richard Pulsifer’s 2-man operation, to Lyman Morse’s 30+ million / year operation. Richard builds and restores a particular type of Hampton work boat in his small shop in the woods.

There’s chickens nearby and he’s got a pair of corgis that guard the place… barely.

The Hampton work boat is a tough little strip-built power boat that he’s been building for years. The owners usually bring them back to him for winter storage and to prep for the upcoming season. It’s steady, straightforward work, and Richard is a decent, easygoing guy. I could see doing this sort of work.

I stopped into a dozen places on this little tour. Most were mid-sized shops with crews of about 20-30 folks.

Rockport Marine was one of my favorite places. Very talented crew, interesting projects, good workshop space… I might see about doing my independent study there.  The boat above is “Bernice.” That’s Glenn Pease working on her there and Peter Simpson up on the mezzanine above her.   Below is  “Mary Rose,” and I forgot the name of the builder working on her.  (Thanks to Priscilla for giving me the heads up on the boat and shipwright names).

Up at French and Webb they were restoring 3 (count ‘em, 3) Buzzard’s Bay 30’s to as near original as possible. They have Maynard Bray (writes the “Save a Classic” section as well as regular articles in Wooden Boat Magazine) consulting on this project in order to make sure it’s dead accurate. Here they are all lined up pretty in a row:

They do very nice work up there as well.

So, here was the itinerary:

Tuesday:

• Crocker’s Marine, Manchester, MA

Wednesday:

• Portland Yacht Services, Portland, ME
• Chip Flannigan, Portland
• Richart Pulsifer, Brunswick
• Edgecombe Boatworks, Edgecomb
• Hodgdon Yachts, East Boothbay

Thursday:

• Rockport Marine, Rockport
• Lyman Morse, Thomaston
• French & Webb, Belfast
• Seal Cove Boatworks, Harborside

Friday

• Brooklin Boat Yard, Brooklin
• Brion Rieff, Boat Builder, Brooklin
• Ralph Stanley, Boat Builder, Southwest Harbor

I was fortunate to have my friend Terry put me up in Thomaston during this trip. That made things infinitely easier. Thanks Terry!

And today, when I came back to the shop, my shutter plank magically fit.

Well, not magically really. It shrunk. Like a raisin. That sexy light tight seam that I’d been working on all the week before I left, well, you can put a credit card through it now. So, the last 2′ aft that needed final fitting now slides in as easy as you please. To make sure that everything continues to fit nicely when this all swells up again, I took a few swipes off of that section to even it out with the rest of the plank.

Look, all planked up!!!

No time to sit and get all moon-eyed though, there’s lots of work yet to be done before we flip this puppy. The task right now is to fair the hull. That means lots of planing, lots of sanding.

If you build wooden boats, you must love sanding. it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.

But planing comes first. You start by planing the edges where 2 planks meet to get them even. Here’s how it looks.

You see those vertical pencil lines? You make these little marks across your planks and then get to planing. When your plane stroke takes off marks on both sides of your plank joint, you know that you’re even. You can see here that the lower plank’s pencil marks have been planed off, while the upper ones are still there. Thus; the lower plank is higher than the upper plank and needs to be planed down. Easy, yes?

Your boat is filled with land mines. They’re called screws. As you plane happily away, you may forget that you’re getting closer and closer to those screw heads. Those hard, unyielding screw heads. Those plane-blade-chewing screw heads. When you get close (note how close the top screw in the lower plank is to the plank surface), you take the screw out, deepen your countersink a bit, re-drive the screw in so that it sits lower, and get back to work.

Once your edges are nice and even, it’s time to begin fairing the hull diagonally. You do this, strangely enough, by making diagonal, sweeping cuts along your hull. This helps to make things fair. You can sort of see the diagonal plane marks left here.

One thing you don’t really want to do is have a huge caulking bevel. In the above photo, you can see that the caulking bevels (i.e., the grooves between the planks) are pretty much even. Except that one on the left… what’s going on with that. Why, it’s a huge giganto gap! Somehow I made that bevel too wide in the center area of the boat. The actual joint where the planks meet is at the base of the caulking bevel, but that bevel is there to put the oakum in as a joint sealer. Make the bevel too big and the oakum just floats around. You want that bevel tight.

Did I just say oakum? I must have been on paint thinner. We use cotton. Oakum is tarred hemp, also used for caulking, but usually in much larger boats. And it’s tarred with pine pitch, by the way, not black road tar. Just thought you might want to know.

So, the solution is to shim the bevel with a thin strip of wood that will close up a bevel a bit. Here’s one such shim on my boat:

What you mostly see here is the tape that masks off the upper plank so that the epoxy that’s gluing the shim to the lower plank doesn’t fuse these two planks together. It’s not a good idea to glue your planks together. Here’s a close up:

The shim is the lower strip of wood sticking up. It’s held in place by wedges (also with tape on them to keep them from being accidentally glued to to the shim). Tomorrow I’ll remove the wedges and tape, plane down the shim, and have myself a nice, thin caulking bevel again.

Night night.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 9:55 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.