A Shipwright in Training

The angels must have been lonely after you fell from heaven.

Now I can say I’ve actually met the girl from Ipanema.

Ok, enough before breakfast comes up. Not THOSE kind of sweet lines. These kind of sweet lines:

We’ve finished the ceiling planks, and it was fascinating how something that looks so straight is in fact so curvy. Anyone with a decent exposure to topology I’m sure would give a big eye roll and a DUH, but for the rest of us, it’s just cool. Here’s my ceilings in place. Remember, they’re the boards that go up the inside of the boat. Notice how, with the exception of the lowest one, they seem to be straight…

However, the boat is bowing outwards, curving up, and making a very subtle sweep up as well; those features change everything. So, to get those straight lines, you end up with boards with that subtle sweep that you see in the top photo.

One tricky thing about working with these planks is that they need to be bowed into place to work out the fine fitting. Granted, your spiling should get you pretty close, but if you want that nice even seam line all along the length, you need to fine tune. You could hold it in place by nailing it in place with finish nails, but that’s a pain. I discovered that you can hold the board in place by wedging a board down from the carlin onto the plank where it bends the most.

It’s easy to mark your ceiling plank, take it off, shave it, put it back on…

Half of any type of woodworking, and I think boat building in particular, is figuring out how to hold oddly shaped things securely while you work on them.

By the end of the day, our little boat was looking more and more like a little boat. She’s painted the standard Beetle Grey inside. All the color will be on her decks and hull.

It’s probably worthwhile here to talk a bit about The Beetle Way. When you restore a boat, there’s always some tension between building the boat exactly the way it had been originally built, and building it in a way that corrects flaws in the design or previous builder’s methods. This restoration in some way improves on the standard way that Beetle Cats are built. To understand that, you have to remember that wooden boats are not all carefully crafted by thoughtful shipwrights who read philosophy in their spare time. Many boats were designed to be whipped out in a production facility like so many Big Wheels. The Beetle Cat is one such boat. This is not to say that they’re badly designed or built, they’re just not designed to last for multiple generations. Where we take the time to carefully fit the deck beams to the sheer, they just screw ‘em in. We back prime the inside of every board in the boat; the folks at Beetle only paint the surfaces you’ll see. We spile every plank, they cut to a template and edge set them in place. We dip our screws in paint to make sure that the screw holes are sealed… the Beetle folks would roll their eyes at that one. There’s more, but you get the idea.

But then there are times that we do something like fair the deck slightly differently than they do at Beetle, and we have to do it over. Why? It’s an observable detail at odds with the original boat. It’s not The Beetle Way. You have to say this, by the way, in the same voice as you would say, “It is not the true Buddha Way, my son.”

In effect, what we’re doing is making the most perfectly crafted hand made Big Wheel ever. It’ll last a good deal longer than your average Big Wheel if built to the standards that we’re shooting for. Later generations of Big Wheel historians may puzzle over what appeared to be a splinter sect of Big Wheel builders obsessed with details that emerged in the early 21st century.

Yow, got off on a tangent there.

After the ceiling, it’s time for the deck. We’ve cut the boat free from her supports, and faired out the top of the transom (it was left tall before so we could screw in supports without damaging the transom). We’ve cut off the top of the stem to flush it up with the underside of the deck.

when we planed it down to the deck level and revealed the rabbet, we could really see the difference between Kev and I’s work.

This is a cross section of the rabbet where the planks come in. All I’m going to say about this is that I’m very happy with my rabbet, and Kev was just starting out doing any kind of woodworking at all when he cut his rabbet. Personally, I think he was the braver of the two of us.

You can also see the stem laminations nicely too. Sorry, we’re covering this up with deck soon.

In the meantime, how about a parade?

Police on parade. Took almost 2 hours, and it was a fine parade. Lots of police

Naturally, I liked the dogs the best.

But the bands were pretty great too.

Oh, decking. Right.

Decking is where you get to take all the garbage scrap cedar that was too short, too knotty, too thin, with too many splits, and work out enough decent strips to make a deck. The deck will be covered with canvas eventually, so you don’t have to make the planks symmetrical or anything. You just have to make them butt up to each other closely, and have a nice fair curve to them. It feels good to be using some of the wood that it looked like was going to just go to the fire.

We went from no deck to a deck in 2 days. I didn’t bring my camera in today, but here’s one day’s work. Starting out…

The mast hole is bored now… Every day it’s feeling more like a boat. We left the king plank (the center plank on your deck) long for as long as we could just because we liked the idea of having a bowsprit. Or a plank to walk mutinous crew off of.

More tomorrow…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 7:26 pm and is filed under Classes, Newport Life. 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.