A Shipwright in Training

For folks interested in the background of this particular boat that we’ve been lofting, here you go.

This particular Whitehall rowing boat was built by Stephen Roberts, probably around 1870-80 in Manhattan.

His stamp on the inside of the planking. It reads “S. Roberts, Builder” I can’t exactly read the 3rd line, but it says something about Harlem, and then NY.

As far as we know, this is the only true Manhattan built Whitehall in existence, and as a result, this is the boat that anyone doing research on these types of boats goes to.

And we get to spend 2 days with it.

Bob had asked about stem construction. The stem is connected to the keel via the forefoot, in the manner described by John Gardner in his chapter “A Whitehall Pulling Boat” and you can see the joint faintly showing through the paint and grime here:

It almost looks like a gripe, but you can see how long it extends back. A regular gripe, for those of you who don’t know, is a triangular piece of wood that connects the stem to the keel. Here’s an example of one:

In our case, the stem drops down, almost to the lowest level of the keel, and then curves back towards the keel. The forefoot provides a large, solid connection between the stem and keel.

So, back to taking the lines off of this particular gem. We started by leveling the boat over the lofting grid that we’d drawn up at school the day before. We level fore and aft as well as athwartships. Next, we plumb down from the center of the stem and stern, and line the boat up on the grid fore and aft.

We have a measuring jig that we built the day before at IYRS, and we place it at various intervals along the length of the boat so that we can measure the hull at each of these locations.

We also stretch a string above the keel that will act as a baseline reference point when we transfer our measurements to the lofting floor back at IYRS.

We move the measuring jig down the boat at each of those taped off lines, essentially taking cross-sectional measurements of the boat all along its length.

While some of us are doing this type of measuring, others are making note of her scantlings, or the dimensions of each of her component parts.

Like I said, she’s a beautiful boat. Here you can see how her sheer is curved to match the shape of the transom

But it flattens out forward to match the flatness of the intersection with the stem:

We end up detailing things like the ways in which the frames are set into the sheer clamp

Here, you’re looking down into one of the thole pin (i.e., oar post) holes, and you can see a frame coming up and angling into the clamp at 45 degrees. Every frame is pocketed into the clamp this way.

We also trace the lines of things like the seat knees

and the transom.

We also just do a lot of admiring.

There are other boats with fancier soles

and they’re very nice in their own way. But the simple elegance and precision of this boat’s construction makes her truly stand out.

Earlier yesterday, I stopped by the Mystic Shipyard to say hello to old friends, and they were getting ready to take Annie out sailing.

Annie’s a sandbagger, meaning that she has a HUGE sail area relative to her hull size. Sandbaggers are so named because sand bags were used to help add weight to counterbalance her incredible heeling forces as she sailed along. You can see a modern yellow sandbag on her side deck (ok, they now use water bags) and a few more tucked inside on port. She uses about 20 of these at 35 pounds each… Along with a full crew of sailors, there’s a lot of weight holding this boat down.

She raced that day against 2 other sandbaggers, Bull & Bear. I found out later that they did quite well.

Annie was restored here at Mystic. Nice little tiller detail, eh?

If I hadn’t been committed to doing the lofting I would have been out with those guys in a heartbeat.

You just can’t do everything.

It’s a good argument for cloning.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 10:12 pm and is filed under Classes. 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.