A Shipwright in Training

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;

1. Find something interesting to do that will save you time and materials, and then do it.
2. Find something sort of hard to do, do it right, and then keep doing it all day.
3. Take time out to enjoy it when things go just right.

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:

1. Repeatedly go over the fact that you are doing a slow difficult thing when there is an easier fast option
2. It will become highly creative in examining the easier option and will soon spawn off a whole series of variations all clustered under the heading “Better Options”
3. It may play out conversations it could have with people about your predicament. It may think about blogging your predicament to complete strangers. The goal of these conversations is to get responses like, “Oh, that’s just ridiculous! You are completely and utterly right in all that you say” and so on.
4. It may reconsider the blogging option, as there’s always the chance that a) a supervisor will read your blog, or b) someone more experienced than you might respond with a well-reasoned and snarky explanation about why what you’re doing is in fact the ONLY reasonable option. Either of these would lead to more unhappiness.

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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 3:58 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.