A Shipwright in Training

There was an excellent April fools NPR episode some time back about maple trees exploding in Vermont because the maple syrup farmers hadn’t tapped the trees enough and they exploded from the sap buildup. When we say a board blows up, it’s a little more subtle but damn frustrating. For instance, our breast hook exploded the other day.

Ignore the holes, those were something else. Note, instead, the massive cracks (called checks) at the end of our board. This happens when your wood dries too fast. We had to re-make this part and scrap an otherwise beautiful chunk of 1 5/8″ thick premium red oak.

Our mast has been drying too fast.

The mast I’ve been carefully planing down, and the same mast I spent the past day and a half sanding to get it exactly round. Rather than do a clever little build up about how great everything was going and then jerk the rug out with a picture of the cracking, I’ll just cut to the chase.

It’s been splitting right next to the seam. Our solution has been to fill the split with epoxy to stabilize it, but today two more splits opened up, and an old one almost doubled in size. I filled those too, but she desperately needs to be shellacked. I’ll do that tomorrow, but I wasn’t able to do it today because we had to wait for the epoxy to cure. Shellac will slow down the transfer of moisture across the cell walls of the wood and allow things to slowly acclimate (and not bust apart).

Here she is, sad little thing.

The check looks darker because it’s filled with expoxy right now, but that’s about a 3′ long check. I think we’ll be able to salvage it, but what a PAIN.

Read the rest of this entry »

Once we flipped the boat over, painted her, and had time to really look hard at her, the problems started to become apparent. So apparent that even the instructors noticed. Woah, that’s pretty big.

The main thing was that Kev had not fit a couple of planks up against the frames very well, and as a result, they were faired down too thin. One we decided we could fix with a little epoxy and fairing compound (West Systems 410 for you boat geeks out there) but the shutter was just too thin. So, over the boat went again, and off came the plank.

You can also see a line of puttied screw holes at the location of the #2 frame. Turns out that frame wasn’t fitting well either, so before we flipped the boat we replaced that. I was concerned that I might have had a few thin planks as well, but we used a giant pair of calipers to reach around the hull and measure the plank thickness and I was fine.

So, for the past couple of days, Kev has been re-making his shutter. He popped the new one in today and we faired it down, put fairing compound around the low spots, and tomorrow we’ll finish fairing and caulking it. Hopefully we’ll have the boat back right side up in a day or 2 so we can get on with interior work.

The boat looks eerily like it did when we first got it. Compare:

Off by one plank. Creepy. Read the rest of this entry »

Once the boat is flipped, the next batch of things just comes along. It’s almost anticlimactic. But, still, I like having a boat-shaped hull right there in front of us all day.

Painting it is a pain, but I’ll get into that later.

Parts parts parts. While Kev was working on making the mast into a nice, tapered rectangle, I bent and cut out the gaff jaws. These are the things that attach to the end of the gaff (that rod that holds the top edge of our rectangular sail up in the air) and slip around the mast.

And then I milled up sheer clamps for everyone. The sheer clamp is a long rectangle of wood that… wait for it… clamps to your sheer. It helps to stiffen the upper edge of your boat so that it holds it’s homely little catboat shape. Here you go, a pile of sheer clamps!

Ok, it’s just the bundle of wood there on the right with blue tape around it. Read the rest of this entry »

I love having skylights in my attic room. I can stand with them open like a meerkat poking out of his burrow and get a fine view of the snowy street.

+ =

Something about the snowy / sleety day and a few people being absent that just sucked the energy right out of the room today. People were standing around in a fog or just hanging out and talking. Kev read the paper. I did what I always do… worked along, looking for that happy little groove when it’s just me and the work. We did manage to flip the boat but my camera battery crapped out just as we were about to start. Dopey got some nice pics though, and I’ll post them soon. In the meantime, here she is, all sleek and sassy.

We’ve removed the molds and installed cross-spalls to help keep the hull shape. Read the rest of this entry »

This week has primarily been about paint. Or, to be more accurate, it’s been about primer paint. The Beetle Cat gets 2 kinds of primer, red oxide below and white primer above the waterline. After Kev finished caulking and puttying his side of the boat, we were ready to go.

In order to conserve brushes and rollers, it seemed like a good idea for him to paint his white section while I painted my red section. Then we’d switch. One set of red brushes, one set of white.

Guess how many times people came over and said “Hey Kevin, you realize that you’re going to get white paint all over yourself when you lean over to paint your red section, don’t you?” The answer is, “many, many times.” People are just So Helpful, don’t you think? Still, it helped Kev practice his eye rolling, and that has to be good for the ocular muscles. Read the rest of this entry »