A Shipwright in Training

Wow, it’s hard to believe that it’s been over a week since my last entry. Sorry about that folks.

I blame contra dancing in New Hampshire,

Cooking,

Fire on the water,

and the fall colors.

Yah, right. Whatever.

So, we last left Madcap, the beautiful 1924 six meter, with the deck just about to come off.

Here’s Warren working off the decking. He began by cutting with the sawzall, but graduated to a more sophisticated method. He cut in an entry hole, and then used the router with a straight cutting bit and a guide bushing to cut right up to the deck beams. This allowed him to take out the chunks of deck between the beams without touching the beams themselves. It just left a layer of decking on top of the beams, and that was easily pried off.

The deck was fiberglassed a long time ago. Luckily for the owners, and not so lucky for us, they did a really good job. The fiberglass did a great job of protecting the deck from the elements, and the decking was in excellent shape. Unfortunately, that made getting the deck off very slow work.

But slowly and surely, off it came.

As the boat opened up, the quality of the original construction became more and more apparent. For instance, take a look at the frame and stringer connections here.

First of all, notice the metal part at the upper right. That’s part of the support for the deck. It attaches to a frame that’s extra thick to support it. However, that creates a problem when you run a stringer (the horizontal wood strip) along the frames, because the frames aft of the support are normal thickness. To keep the stringer running fair, they put spacers between the frames and the stringer. You can see them there.

However, what that photo doesn’t show is how they gradually decrease in size as you go aft so that the stringer gently eases down to connecting directly to the frames. This one shows it.

Nice, eh? And they rounded them to boot. Pure elegance.

And then, one day, the deck was gone.

I’ll write a lot more about this when I’ve had more sleep. Promise.

Blogged with Flock

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 10:04 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.