Bruno Dawg here.
I was not happy yezterday. Rainey hed mi chew toy.
So i askd for it. I wuz nice.
She sed no.
So I sat awn her.
What?
Sumtimez you have to wate a wile. And den…
She jus fergets.
I dont ferget.
Thiz is my secret to happynez.
Sit on problemz until they go away.
Jus cuz im dawg doznt meen im not smart.
A while back, I wrote about the secrets to happiness. There were 3 things I’d noticed that kept me feeling happy that day. They were;
Recently I’ve been unhappy, and, being an ex-shrink, I decided to think about why I was feeling that way, rather than simply throw a board across the room like a normal person. Let me just say this before going any further: both are perfectly viable strategies. Psychologists and spouses will tell you that you should think about things rather than throw boards, but throwing something feels wonderful, and many women are impressed if you just do it every now and then. It shows that you’re passionate. Too much, and it shows that you’re a jerk with no self control.
So, unhappiness. I think it was Solzhenitsyn that said that a man is happy as long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him. The same is true with feeling miserable.
The secret to unhappiness these days is to spend hours doing slow, careful, frustratingly difficult work, when there is another solution available that is faster, simpler, easier, uses fewer materials, and will look consistently better in the end. When you’re in this situation, your mind will tend to do at least one of these things:
If you allow your mind time and space to do any of the above, you will achieve unhappiness. Blissful, tar-baby like unhappiness. People may sense that something is going on, and ask if you’re all right. If you have any tendencies towards being a drama queen, this will kick them into high gear. If you’re passive aggressive, you’ll do your best Eeyore, release a little deflated sigh and say, “Oh, no, it’s nothing really.” If you enjoy anger, you may take this as an opportunity to magically transform your unhappiness into outrage and vent a little spleen.
Or, if you’re an ex-shrink with a tendency towards over achievement, you may bend to the work and think about your blog.
There, that’s it. That’s all I really had to say about unhappiness.
Work has been interesting. Let’s talk about that.
Last week was filled with interesting, useful work. Since the boat has been planked for some time now, the planks have been slowly drying out in the shop. Drying and shrinking. The caulkers have been working diligently trying to get the seams all filled up, but there are some seams that had opened up way too much. When that happens, we make wooden splines that fill the gap, called feathers.
The feathers are thin strips of wood, tapered at the outer edge, that slide into the gap between the planks. They are just thick enough to close the gap on the inside edge of the plank, but thin enough so that there is still space for caulking. We glue them into place using thick shellac.
You can see a section I’ve worked on here. We hold the feathers into the seams using little wedges.
Some of these end up being quite thin at the feather edge in order to make sure that there’s still space left in the gap for caulking. This one is thin enough to be almost translucent at the edge. I had to make sure my plane was razor sharp for these guys to avoid tear out.
Here’s a shot of the slot with a feather in it. The light is from a flashlight. There are 2 wedges holding it in the slot, and you can see a thin black line above the feather. That’s the tiny gap left between the planks because the feather wasn’t absolutely perfect. It’s well within tolerances though, so no problem.
There was quite a bit of feathering to do, but it was calm and meditative. The weather had been quite warm and humid last week as well, so it was nice to be doing something outside the boat in what little breeze came through the shop.
This week it was back inside the boat. At least the weather’s cooled down, so it’s not a little oven in there. Shawn and Barry did an excellent job finishing up the lower course of ceilings there. Here’s a view looking forward. The ceilings are the lighter wood, the stringers are the gray painted wood.
The stringers were installed a long time ago, and they’re oak, so they’ve shrunk over time. They used to be tight up against each other, like the ceilings are now, but now there’s gaps.
Lots of long, wavy, undulating gaps. Some are very thin, and some are as wide as 5/8″.
It was decided that the gaps should be filled. With wood. Not with putty. I’m just sayin‘.
Have I mentioned that there are a lot of gaps?
So, the way to fill said gaps is to cut a thin strip of oak, plane or sand it along its length so that its width matches the undulations of the gap, and fit it into the concave curve of the hull so tightly that it doesn’t spring out of its own accord. We do get to use 5200 to help glue them in place. Of course, 5200 is the Oobleck of the boat building world (Dr. Suess ref there: it gets on and sticks to everything), so it’s just more fun than words can convey to work with. If your strip doesn’t match the gap exactly, part of it will pop out, and there’s really no way to clamp it in place while the 5200 sets up.
Of course, you could just press in some foam backer bead between the stringers and fill the gaps with latex caulk or something, but I’m sure it wouldn’t work nearly as well as making thin shims. No no no.
Really, it’s more fun to do this in the cramped confines of a boat with no real flat work surface to work on.
Shawn, ever resourceful, brought a portable workbench down into the boat, and clamped it into place so that it wouldn’t move when we planed the thin oak strips on it.
The workmate benches also have the excellent feature of having a table top that opens and closes. Essentially the whole table top is a giant clamp. That’s extra handy when trying to hold a thin strip of oak in place as you plane here and there to match the waves in the stringer gap. That one idea made a world of difference.
Next, it was my turn to be clever. Rather than try to estimate the changing gap width and then painstakingly fit each strip, take it out, plane, re-fit, take it out… ad nauseum, I thought it would be prudent to come up with a way to accurately measure the gap in the first place so that we could cut our strips close to the proper width the first time. So, I made up a taper gauge.
If you don’t know what this is, it’s a strip of wood with a consistent angle ramp cut into it. You measure the thickness of the strip along the ramp and mark it. When you insert the gauge into the slot, you can now read the precise width of the slot by how far the gauge goes in. I’ve got it marked in 16th’s of an inch.
Mark the thickness as you go along the gap, and now you can know how the slot opens and closes along its length. It’s a simple matter to transfer that information to your strip, and then cut the wavy thickness on the bandsaw. A little tapering on the inside edge to make it slide easily into your gap, a little fine tuning with a power planer, hand plane, or stationary sander, and you can often make them fit just about right with only a little more test fitting.
And then the unhappiness goes away.
Still, the caulk would have worked fine. I’m just sayin.
Here’s some new strips waiting to be pounded into the gap (so they don’t spring out). The glued strips are white.
Sorry about the photo quality, camera phone. I keep saying I’ll remember to bring my real camera.
I’ve been thinking; this blog has taken an almost exclusive turn to documenting my daily work with boats. It’s not a bad direction, and I think it’s far more interesting than boat school gossip or attempts to wax philosophical about the place of the craftsman in modern society. I’d run screaming from that blog.
Nevertheless, the initial point of this little exercise was to track how one person manages a fairly radical career shift in late mid-life. I should probably talk about that too.
Lots of folks have written to say how much they’d love to do something like this themselves and that they harbor a not-so-secret fantasy of ditching it all and running away with the circus, or to boat school. So far no one has fessed up to wanting to run away with Paris Hilton, and really, if you want to do that it’s best to keep it to yourself. I realize that I haven’t mentioned that from time to time I stop and say to myself:
“What the hell was I thinking? This is hot and dirty and tiring work, promising only more of the same for hardly any money. I’ve got to run back to a nice little office job while I still can!” Usually there are more expletives, but you get the idea.
These kinds of thoughts usually crop up when I think about the money side of things. Thinking too much about the money is a real a soul killer. I find myself radically shifting away from my initial goals and going towards things that I have no interest in at all, other than they may pay well.
So, the exercise I’ve been doing while working on difficult or boring tasks is this: I ask, “what’s the good in what I’m doing? If I only had to do it for a little while, and then do something really dull, what would I miss about this? Is this a part of the path towards what I really want to be doing?’ Sometimes I realize that I’m in totally new territory and that I have no idea if what I’m doing is part of what I want to be doing eventually.
And then there are times, like today, when I realize that I’m more skilled now than I was a year ago. I was doing a simple thing this afternoon, putting feathers in between planks. Feathers are thin shims of wood used to close up gaps when the planks have shrunk open too much. I realized that as I was shaving these feathers down to fit that I was moving quickly and only using my eye to gage how much to plane off after each test fit. I wasn’t worried about getting it wrong or obsessing about getting it perfect. I just knew what to do to get them the way I wanted.
And that’s the kind of thing I’m shooting for with this career change. It’s not that it’s essential that I end up a boat builder, or restoration specialist, or furniture maker. It’s that I have a greater percentage of my time where I feel fully engaged in and able to handle the work at hand. It’s the same thing I love about being relaxed and present with other people.
So, the state of the state is this: As I get more clear about what I value, I’m less wedded to the initial goal of building boats, but still committed to working primarily with wood. The most valuable things these days are:
Working with people I enjoy
Generally interesting problems to solve
A mix of strenuous and detail-oriented tasks
The opportunity to do something approaching art, something where I have to trust my eye.
Bruno boxr dawg here. Tawm not know I cn blawg. If steke selling man red this blawg, pleeze send over sum stekes for me to eet. Yu cn send an xtra wun for tawm to. He’s ok.
Roann is getting close to being completely caulked at this stage.
Monday, Chris and I started priming the caulked seams with thinned primer paint. This serves to seal the wood in the caulking seam as well as to waterproof and stiffen up the caulking so that it’s more likely to act like a rope gasket and not crush completely flat when the planks swell around it. The primer also acts as another line of defense against water infiltration. When the seam putty eventually dries out and cracks, and water starts to get in, the paint will be another thing for the water to get past on its way into the boat.Before painting, Rob asked me to go along the seams and clean up the wild hairs of oakum.
Sounds like a sequel to the Bridges of Madison County, doesn’t it? The Wild Hairs of Oakum, the story of a boat builder with Einstein hair, who falls in love with the sultry, yet unfulfilled, wife of a cruel shipping magnate. Read the rest of this entry »