A Shipwright in Training

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.

Oakum, as you may recall, is hemp fiber that’s been rolled with pine tar to make it both waterproof and amenable to rolling into a loose cord.  It has the consistency of a horse’s tail hair… kind of stiff and very strong.  If you’ve ever dealt with hemp rope, you know what I’m talking about. 

When a seam is caulked, you get strands of oakum that come out of the seam like frizzy hair.  You have to tuck those puppies back in for both neatness and to rob water of an avenue into the seam.  Having a strand of oakum leading from the interior of your plank seam to the outside world is just an invitation for water to come in.  And, besides, it looks like ass to have your seams all hairy.  They should be neat and smooth, like a bald head.

So, to get your oakum to fall in line you can either a) paint it in with paint, or b) paint it in with kerosene.  The only difference between the two methods is that one involves paint, and the other involves… yes, kerosene.  Kerosene is a solvent, so when you brush it on the oakum, it softens the pine tar, and allows you to brush the stray fibers back into the seam, where they will merge with the now sticky pine tar and stay where they belong until you paint over them with actual primer paint.  You can also skip that step and just coax them into place with your thinned primer paint, but the more stubborn fibers may not find the paint alone to be enough to convince them to stay home in their caulking bevel. 

Painting in with kerosene.After your hairs are all in place, you’ll want to prime your seams of course. Rob showed us the slick trick of applying primer using an oil can.

Dilute your primer by a third with paint thinner (so it will run easily through your pump and absorb quickly into the oakum) and squirt your paint right into the seam followed by a quick brush in with your paint brush.  You can do this in one easy motion.  Nice.

While we were doing this, Jeff finished up the hole in the mast partner.

Excellent.  Ready for a mast almost.

While waiting for the paint to dry, it was back to lopping off excess bolt ends and peening them over.

Lopped (blurry)

Peened

Be still my beating heart.

But then, just as it looks like this boat is going to present an endless series of mundane jobs, Kevin (not my boat partner from IYRS, this is Mystic shipwright Kevin) gave me a new challenge:  fair out the aft end of the stern post and horn timber. 

Now this is an interesting task.  The challenge is to try to make these parts match, as closely as possible, the original parts.  Sorry, no photos of the originals right yet, I’ll try to get some later.  This isn’t a thing where you have drawings and measurements to work off of, it’s something where you have to judge it entirely by eye.  If you get it right, it’ll look like the stern post and horn timber just flow into the planking. I decided that I needed something a little more rounded than a slick, something that would let me lop off big chunks of wood with a curved surface.  I needed a huge gouge.  I can’t remember who found one for me, but it was perfect.

The only problem with it was that it was dead dull and didn’t have a handle.  So,  the next morning’s job was to turn a handle.  I made this one out of oak.

The whole thing is a little over 3′ long to give you some perspective. A lot of sharpening to get it close to razor sharp, and we’re in business.

Here’s what we’re starting with.

You’re looking at the bottom aft section of Roann.  The large metal thing at the bottom is called the stuffing box.  It surrounds the propeller shaft (you can see it gleaming there on the lower right) and forms a watertight seal around the shaft as it enters the boat.  The propeller is just out of the frame to the right.

The first task was to take the sharp edge along the horn timber and round it over, while also making a sweeping curve between the horn timber, stern post, and planking.

Starting to work in the curve.

Looking aft after doing a good bit of sculpting.  You can see the prop right there with the rudder coming down behind it.  It was a pain in the butt to work around these things.

Port side rounded over. 

And working on the starboard side to match.

Done.  I’ve shellacked the whole thing to help keep the exposed cut surfaces from drying out.

Fairing this out required a slick, the gouge, a spokeshave, power planer, 4″ grinder and an 8″ grinder.  It’s been very hot and very very muggy lately, and I was covered with saw dust and wood chips that stuck to me like glue.  Yug. 

The challenge when doing this or any kind of fairing is to trust your eye and your touch.  You’re touching the wood all the time, running your hands down it feeling for lumps and hollows.  It looks sensuous as hell, and it is.  You’re also looking at what you’re doing constantly and trying to get that soft vision that tells you when everything looks like its in harmony.  This is one of those “do it a hundred times until you get a feel for it” skills, and while it’s definitely not perfect, it’s not too bad.  I think I’m slowly developing my eye. 

Kevin’s help was invaluable on this project.  He has an exceptional eye, and he helped out with the power planing on the port side.

Next up, we  began putting marine putty into the seams that we’d painted a few days earlier.  Squish it  in good with your putty knife,

and make sure you’ve gotten putty all the way into your seam by watching for squeeze out on both sides of the knife when you press down.  When you scrape the seam flat, scrape towards the putty you just put in, not in the direction that you’re going.  This helps to compress the previously laid putty in the seam just a little bit more.

Our putty was a bit on the hard side, so we softened it up by putting the cans in hot water.

The putty was the consistency of thick mayo when it first came out of the water bath, but soon firmed up to almost play doh thickness.  The trick is to work with it in small batches out of the warm can, and work quickly.

With a number of us working along, we’ve made very good progress. I gotta tell ya though, holding the putty knife the way you see in the photo above… it tires out your first two fingers.

As Chris said, after he’s been caulking for weeks and taking Ibuprofen like candy: “Cry me a river, buddy.”

And finally, a little vocabulary lesson.

I was made aware last February that the term “shipwright” is not something that I’ll be able to apply to myself for some time.  In the past, this term was reserved for those who could not only do every operation involved in the building of a ship, but who could also plan and oversee the entire construction process.  A shipwright was a builder, a project manager and the big cheese boss on a building project.  Under him were ships carpenters (the folks who do much of the actual hull and deck building), the caulkers, the riggers and the joiners (the folks who would do the more complex joinery work on a boat such as the frame and panel bulkheads, the tables and anything fancy).  He was the conductor who kept everyone busy and organized, and was the go-to guy for any problem relating to the construction of the boat.

I’m in training to be that guy in the same way that a freshman business major is in training to be the CEO of Hasbro.  SO, if I was going to be really accurate, I’d call this blog “A boat carpenter in training.”  Tough nuts, though.  It is what it is.  If it’s too cocky for your blood, you really should go have a single malt with George Will and commiserate on the sorry state of language in America.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 8:52 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.