A Shipwright in Training

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.

So, while Kev’s been working on his side of the boat, I’ve been seeking out other projects to stay busy.

I worked on the mast a bit, although I didn’t want to finish it so that Kev could have some practice working on it. Here’s what it looks like, though, when you plane off 3 corners on the way to an 8-sided mast.

You can see here how I used the lines that had been constructed earlier to guide how far down I planed when cutting off the corners.

Here, I’m almost to my lines. A few more strokes and it’s right on.

By the way, there had been a little confusion about what I meant when I said that the circle you draw is essentially a cross-section of the mast. Here’s the circle again, along with a circle drawn as a true cross-section at the end of the mast.

Those circles on the side are just there to show us where to put our marks for the 8 & 16 sided mast, but they represent the true cross-section that you see on the end there. Clear? No? I recommend a gin & tonic and a good adventure book.

We’ve steamed and clamped on the sheer clamps.

They’ll eventually go inside the boat, but we clamp them to the outside just to give them a general form to shape them on.

What will the sheer clamp eventually look like? Well, here’s a boat from past years with the framing members exposed for illustration:

It’s a little hard to read these, but you can see the sheer clamp running along the inside edge of the boat there, just below the … sheer. It’s, um, clamped to the sheer. Sheer clamp.

I spent the last few days cutting out parts for the class in an effort to help everyone get more or less caught up (and as mentioned before, to have a project for my little border collie brain while Kev worked on his shutter). I cut out breast hooks, yokes and mast steps (that’s the solid chunk of wood with the rectangular cut out in it beneath the breast hook). For fun today I built a snazzy little tool for sanding the mast (or any round spar). It’s not completely finished, and I’ll post a photo when it’s done.

Another day, another part.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 8:55 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.