A Shipwright in Training

These last few days it’s been back to setup work in preparation for building the Whitehall.  It’s times like this that I’m glad I’m part of a team.  While I’ve been working on my particular project, other folks in the team have:

• Attached the stem to the forefoot and apron
• Attached the stern post to the hogging piece (like the forefoot, only in back) and attached them both to the transom.  All together, these parts make up the Deadwood. 
  
• Beveled the front face of the keel
• Cut, tapered, and steam bent the frames
• Cut the rabbet on the stem and deadwood
  

That’s a lot of work.  It seems like I’m just puttering away here sometimes.  My job this week has been to build the strongback and work out the keel rabbet.  Seems simple, yes?

The strongback is the foundation upon which we’ll build the boat.  Last year we built our Beetle Cats upside down, and that’s a common way to do it.  When they built the Whitehalls, however, they built them right side up.  Lots of boats are built that way in fact, and there’s good reasons for it.  Big big boats are always built right side up because it’s just too difficult to flip them upside down.  However, many builders choose to build smaller boats right side up as well. 

In the case of the Whitehalls, the builders would have a stem pattern, a transom pattern, and a mold to define the shape of the boat somewhere around the middle.  All they’d need from the customer to get going was the length of the boat they wanted.  They’d whip out the keel, stem, and transom, put in the mold, and spring some ribbands along the length to guide the frames.  They’d have most of the frames steam bent beforehand, so they could just plop them in as they went.  But the main thing to remember is that most of these boats were built by eye.  No plans at all.  Lord… how did I get off on this?  Ah yes… and they built them right side up.  When you do that, you can see the shape of the boat much more clearly than when the boat’s upside down.

So, we’re building this one right side up too.  The whole boat will rest on the strongback, so this puppy’s got to be strong (Duh) and extremely rigid.  You don’t want it moving while we’re wrestling planks onto the boat. 

Here’s the strongback, AKA, the tiki bar. 

The strongback is the beam with all the bracing on the floor.  This puts the keel up about 2′ from the floor.  That sucker is NOT going to move.  We’ve all taken turns walking on it like a balance beam.

Above the strongback is a long beam supported at either end by posts.  There’s also diagonal bracing between the beam and a metal I-beam above the windows.  That bracing gives it the feeling of a little hut roof under construction (hence the tiki bar). 

The whole point of constructing this beam is to provide way to brace the molds once they’re set up on the keel.  The molds will want to flop fore and aft, and we’ll screw bracing down from this beam to the molds to hold them in place.  In boat shops that build right side up, the usual thing is to drop this bracing from ceiling joists, but our ceiling is just too high for that.

The tough thing about making the strongback was making it dead straight and level.  I used a gluelam scaffolding plank (also sometimes called an OSHA board) that we had lying around as the central part of the strongback… not the best idea.  It was hard to get it dead flat, and I ended up attaching that light pine rail along the upper side to provide a crisp edge.  The bracing helps to hold the strongback dead straight.

Good thing, because our keel has moved since we cut it.

That long square piece of oak curving up along the top of the strongback… that’s our keel.  We’ll attach it to the strong back to keep it straight and true while we build the boat.

We temporarily clamped the stem / forefoot assembly to the keel to get that joint just right yesterday.

And then took it off to cut the rabbet in the stem.

Oh, and the transom looks nice, all attached to the sternpost and hogging piece.  Like a whale’s tail. 

Yesterday, we noticed that there was a slight impossibility in the way that some of the rabbet and apex lines were running in our lofting, so I spent the morning chasing that down and fixing the lofting.  The problem was primarily in the body plan.  You can see my corrections in red.

What do you mean it looks like a rat’s nest?  Really now, it’s all quite…

Ok, it’s pretty damn close to chaos.  That’s what you get when you have a flat keel… lots of stations end up with the rabbet coming in at exactly the same place.

But after a long morning and part of an afternoon getting it all sorted out, I marked out the rabbet and apex lines on our keel, and cut out the rabbet.   It took about an hour. 

So, all this work, just to get to the point where I could say with a high degree of confidence:  “Our planks will land here, and rest flat on this miniscule bevel when they’re installed.  It’s important, but it’s about as sexy as paying the water bill.

Yesterday part of the crew built a little dam around the six meter and sealed it with silicone caulking.

The boat has been drying out, and unless we got a way to get the planking swelled up with humidity again, it’ll pull itself apart.  The shop is heated with radiant floor heating, and it’s a very dry form of heat.  All the sawdust under the keel was put there to provide a big sponge.  We soaked it at night, and the wet sawdust wafted moisture up around the boat all night long. 

The moat was a more drastic measure.  We filled it up today.

And now our little six meter appears to be floating in a lake about 1″ deep. 

To really concentrate the moisture, we tented the whole affair.

That oughta do it.

Next step, assembing the backbone and setting up the stations. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 9:17 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.