My 1:52 of fame. 13:08 left.
Oh yes, now that I’m on YouTube, it’s going to be party over here, party over there, woop woop. Everyone knows that once you make it to YouTube, the Celebrity Star Machine cranks up full bore.Ok, now that the meds have kicked in again, here’s the story. Gina works as an editor for Fine Woodworking magazine and does a lot with the on line side of things. Some time back she asked me to review a book for the FW blog, and we’ve been in contact off and on since then. Gina’s taking a class in video production, so a few weeks ago she asked if she could interview me about life as a newbie boat builder. Here’s the result.It’s a sweet little piece that manages to steer clear of the less savory aspects of this line of work (i.e., low pay, tough on the old bod, that kind of thing). But, as she says, people’s attention span on the net is pretty dang short, so you’ve got to edit quite a bit.This past week on Roann at the Mystic Seaport has been, well, more of the same. I’ve probably said it before, but when you work on a big boat, you don’t see a lot of rapid progress. In my case, as we’ve been working on the ceilings now for 3 weeks or so, it’s really tough to see progress on a daily basis. It helps to have a little time lapse photography to see that in fact things are changing.As an aside… here’s a tool we use a lot, that doesn’t get a lot of play in the normal woodworking world: the slick. 
A slick is just a big, heavy chisel, and we use it to chisel away larger chunks of wood than you would be able to do with a plane (ok, you could use a scrub plane, but you’d get a scalloped cut). The slick is a paring tool, meaning that you push it through the wood rather than whallop it with a mallet. The blade is sharpened to a shallower bevel angle than a normal chisel, and as a result is a little more susceptible to being chipped at the edge if you beat on it too much. When it’s well-sharpened, the mass of the tool helps it to take heavy shavings off with almost no effort.Here I’ve used a slick to take off a little wood on the backside of a ceiling to make it fit up tight against the knightheads. Folks who regularly work with large timbers, such as the people who make timber-framed houses, use slicks as well.We’ve been gradually working our way up the hull this past week, and the end is starting to come into view. Here’s a look at the port side of the boat, around the aft 1/3 of the boat.
Getting the bevels right is a little tricky. We measure them out as well as possible, and lately have been making a test piece to check our fit. The thing is, and you can barely tell it from this photo, the ceilings are curving up into sheer clamps. The beveled edge lies more or less flat against the sheer clamp, but the underside of the stringer is gently curving upwards. Oh yes, and it’s also curving inwards and twisting a bit, but that’s not the point right now. So, when you cut the taper, you’re cutting a flat taper on a straight plank, and you have to make sure that your flat taper will fit into a curved space. It’s a little harder than it initially seems. Oh, and that taper that you see on the top plank is almost 4′ long… that’s a lot of distance between the tip and the end of the taper to get right.As you install it, the plank starts out flat. As you bang the end with a sledge hammer, the taper gets forced into a slight curve, and this thing jams into the tapered space and becomes, for all intents and purposes, a sprung wedge. What this means to us is that it’s nearly impossible to get out. The friction forces holding it in are just tremendous. That means you’d better get it pretty dang close to correct the first time, or live with the gaps.Here you can see the sweep of these planks a little better. This is looking aft along the starboard side.
The test piece is only a little longer than the actual taper and as a result doesn’t have nearly the spring problem that a 10′ - 24′ plank has. This allows us to slide it into place and see where we need to make adjustments. After that, we just copy the shape to the actual plank stock.In the 2nd photo above, you can see the locking scarf joint in the sheer clamp. Here’s a closer view of the end of the same joint on the starboard side.
You can see two holes at the base of the joint that look a little rough. When you make a locking scarf joint, you bolt through the joint from top to bottom to help hold it together. Before this photo was taken, the bolts stuck out of those holes just like the bolts sticking out of the inside face of the sheer clamp. When they rebuilt this sheer they didn’t countersink for the nuts on the underside. This meant that either
- The ceiling would have to incorporate cut outs to go around these bolts
- We countersink them in place.
The latter option seemed the most feasible, but it’s not easy, particularly in the aft end of the boat where the ceilings had already been installed to within a few inches of the bolts. Nevertheless, we like things looking nice, so we stopped installing ceilings for a morning and started countersinking bolts.Doing this with the bolts in place is NOT recommended, but we didn’t have a choice. Here’s the sequence we devised:
- remove the nuts
- cut the bolts down to flush with the underside of the sheer clamp
- where possible, use a hole saw to cut a circular groove around the bolt rod to the depth of the nut and washer
- chisel out the waste from this hole to expose the bolt threads
- install the nut and washer.
Where it was too tight to get the hole saw in, we just chiseled out a countersink by hand. Where it was too tight to chisel out an entire countersink, we just chiseled enough to seat a washer, and then we peened the bolt over it.This little operation took the better part of the morning. However, when we were done, we had made countersinks like this:
Not pretty, but they allowed us to get the nuts recessed into the sheer clamp so that we could butt the ceiling smoothly up against it.We don’t use wimpy tools here. Check out the right angle drill with the hole saw attachment.
This thing is a 1/2″ right angle drill and it’s built like a truck. Rrrrrooowww.I think I’d mentioned using wedges a lot before. Here’s a few examples.
The wedges here were forcing a ceiling plank down against the next lower plank to hold it in place while we screwed it in place. It’s a little hard to tell here, because all the members are red, but there are frames to the left and right of the wedges, and there is a freestanding board that looks like a frame that’s on top of the wedges.Here’s another one, sort of.
Just aft of the light, you can see where we’ve got a couple of wedges in between the sheer clamp and the ceiling to hold it down. And just aft of that, you can see a metal thing with a hose coming down from it. That’s a hydraulic piston. Here’s a closer look.
The piston is taped to a wedge-shaped block with duct tape. This makes the piston point closer to the angle of the big board you see coming down from the upper left. That board has a notch cut in it to hold it against one of the deck carlins (a fore-and-aft beam). When you pump up the piston, it expands out and presses against that board, and shoves the ceiling against the frame. It was a total kludge, but it did the trick.Here’s the aft starboard side coming along.
And the forward end. We’re now running the ceilings up against the knightheads.
So, compared to a week ago, we’ve made some progress.We love us some Red ‘n Tacky too. This is a general purpose marine grease and we use just a dab on the screws to help them go into the oak. The other thing that helps tremendously is a having a good drill bit. We’d been using Blue Mol bits from the local True Value and after the 3rd one broke, we switched to Fuller bits. Night and day. The Fuller bits cleaned out the hole better and our screws went in a lot easier.
Right tool for the job makes all the difference.