A Shipwright in Training

Working on Roann is wonderful and hard and dirty and interesting and boring. When you’re involved in a big boat project, particularly as low man on the totem pole, you tend to get assigned jobs that are necessary and repetitive. That’s ok, it’s always been that way, always will.Here’s today’s free Tip for Job Hunting: Interesting work is good and important, but good co-workers is better and more important. I really like the folks I’m working with at Mystic. They’re smart, skilled, not petty, and they’re willing to teach me things when I ask. They remind me a bit of the crew that Tracy Kidder followed in his book “House.” I don’t even mind coming in at 7 a.m. to work.The week started out below decks in Roann.John, a part time guy a the shop, and I started by cleaning out the bilges. This wasn’t quite as nasty it sounds. Remember, this is essentially a new boat, so there wasn’t years of dirt, rat poop, lead paint, fish oil, and cigarette butts down there. Just water, wood shavings and mold.That’s looking down towards the keel inside the boat.The spaces between the frames are packed with old burlap sacks. A few times a week we spray the inside of the boat with water and soak the bags. The point of this it to slow down the drying out of the oak planking. You wouldn’t believe how much it shrinks. And when the planks are 1 7/8″ thick, and 5″ wide, they can shrink quite a bit. The downside is that water collects in the bilges, as do wood shavings, pencils, and anything else that gets dropped from above while folks are working on the deck beams and hatches. This all forms a nice stew that wicks up through the burlap bags. It looks a lot like chewing tobacco. Yum.So, first morning was spent shaking out the bags and vacuuming. The afternoon was much more fun as we rebuilt the staging.Looking aft from the foc’sle (pronounced “Folk sel” for those of you who want to sound salty). It’s a bit hard to get a sense of scale here, but perhaps the yellow circular saw on the left will give you an idea. We’ve set up staging (the planks along the sides) to give us a stable working surface to stand (ok, crouch) on when installing the ceiling planks. If you recall, the ceilings run up the sides of the boat and are attached to the frames. They’re just like the planks on the outside of the boat, only they attach to the inside edges of the frames and the seams don’t need to be watertight.The staging used to be set up down the middle of the boat and was used by the crew when they were installing the deck beams. John and I took part of it apart and re-built it along the sides.After that, it was time to prep the ceiling planks themselves. BUT before we could get into that, we had to lay out where the planks would go, how long they’d be, where the butt joints would be, etc. We had 24, 21, and 18′ planks of beautiful 3 1/2″ wide 1 3/4″ thick Douglas fir to work with. Clear as a bell with beautiful, straight grain. Mmmmmm, sexy. I don’t want to think about how much all this cost, but I guarantee you, it’s A LOT.You see the little white patches on the frames in the photo above? Those show where the ceiling planks will butt up to each other (we have to use multiple planks for each course of planking since we don’t have 60′ long boards to work with). The goal was to not have any 2 adjacent planks butt within 3 frames of each other. The boat gains strength from these long, thick planks being attached to the frames. However, butts are weak points, so you don’t want too many butt joints on the same frame or too near to each other. In the past, this boat would haul huge amounts (20,000 pounds…? I think that’s right) of fish in its center hold and it needed to be as strong as a tank. It’ll never do that again, but we’re building it as if it will.So, a morning measuring and marking out ceiling placement, then finally OUT OF THE BOAT (phew, stand up straight!) to tally up how much wood we’d need and to put a little chamfer on the edges of each plank. This chamfer (a little 45 degree angle, maybe 3/16″ wide) just classes things up a bit. That’s it.What next? Why back prime of course! This is the equivalent of painting the face of drywall that butts up against the studs, but when you’re dealing with a boat it’s a good idea. The side of the ceilings that face the frames will never see the light of day again until they need to be replaced, so its good practice to give them a little coat of primer for protection and to even out moisture transfer.2 days later… the planks are back primed. While I did that, Walt went down below and ground off the tips of any bolts that had come through the frames from installing the planks. Good fun.Now if this was a Beetle cat, you back prime a total of 10 ceiling planks. There’s a pile of repetition in big boats. Let me say that again… nah, you get the picture.Today, I tightened all the stringer bolts since they got loose as the stringers slowly dried.Yes, by the way, those are huge boards. 3″ thick oak. I can’t imagine how they bent those suckers into the boat. Afterwards I trimmed the ends of the bolts protruding through the stringers to a consistent length and peened the ends over. Peening is the act of mushrooming the ends of the bolt over by tapping them with a hammer. Have you ever heard of a ball peen hammer?Ball on one end, the other end is used for peening. There you go.These nuts will never ever work themselves off of these bolts no matter what happens now. Peening all those bolts is LOUD, particularly inside a boat. Particularly when the hull of the boat acts like a sounding board. Thank god for ear protection. A few times I had to stop while the other shipwrights were installing the rudder because I was making too much noise. Yow. Peening all those bolts takes a long time, and I’m still not completely done.So, there you go, first week in a restoration shop. The pace is steady but relaxed and I love it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Mystic. 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.