A Shipwright in Training

Madcap, in case I haven’t made it abundantly clear before, is really a stunning boat. We’re returning her deck layout to original, but I haven’t really mentioned what else we’re doing to her I think. Well, in order:

1. Replacing her deck
2. Removing and replacing her garboards and 1st broads
3. Refastening the planking

Now that seems simple enough. But, one thing I’m really coming to appreciate is that nothing, absolutely nothing, is simple on a restoration. I know, we all probably hold out this ideal of the perfect restoration where we know ahead of time what’s wrong, we accurately estimate it, and then we just do the job. Like changing batteries in a flashlight. When the inevitable snag hits, we are filled with despair and mutter things like, “Dammit, why does it always happen this way?”

I think it always happens this way. I think I’m coming to the light.

So far, removing the deck has been just about textbook. Things came off well, there was no unexpected rot. There were some instances of iron sickness (places where iron fasteners had rusted and ruined the surrounding wood) that will require replacing deck beams, but all in all, it’s been good. The beams on there now are sufficient to hold her hull shape, so we don’t have to worry about her distorting while she’s in the shop. So, crossed fingers, but this one seems to be ok.

Removing the garboards and 1st broads. These are the 2 planks closest to the keel. We’re removing the garboards because that’s the only way to see the ends of the frames as they are socketed into the keel. If they’re going to rot, the rot will start there.

Now, this particular boat is double planked. Here’s a rough sketch of what that means. You’re looking at a cross-section of the keel and lower planking.

The garboard is solid mahogany with a little rabbet at the top edge. The 1st broad (and all the outer planking) is also mahogany, and it fits into that rabbet. The inner planking is all cedar, and it butts up against the top of the garboard. The planking continues in this way all the way up to the sheer, where the final plank is a full thickness of mahogany.

The inner and outer planking are glued together with thickened shellac. There’s also many many screws fastening the 2 layers together. Here’s a close up from inside the boat.

That’s a lot of screws. Very small screws. Very small screws with the slots filled with shellac and 80+ years of pentachloraphenol. That stuff is like old oil now… resinous, sticky, yuck. It also attracts and bonds all the years of grit and dust that have entered the boat. The upshot is that you have to clear out the slot of any screw you want to unscrew.

The good news is that the vast majority of these screws were set with their slots running horizontal. This is just a little classy thing that builders who are proud of their work do. This makes it a little easier to know where to dig when you’re looking for the slot.

Since we’re removing only the garboard and 1st broad, and leaving the inner planking alone, we have to be very careful in how we remove the broad. After all it’s stuck to the broad with shellac and screws. So, we carefully work our way through the inside of the boat cleaning out screw slots, and unscrewing the screws that affect the garboard and broad. Many of these screws snap when we turn them.

Then, we enter the terrarium.

Under the boat, it’s humid as can be. We’ve got a vaporizer working full time there. We gave up on the lake idea as the little dam leaked water all over the place. Now it’s just filled with piles of wet sawdust and water vapor. Oh yeah, and all the penta that we’ve been washing out of the boat? it falls into that space too. Nice place to work.

To add to the fun, we’re working on the bottom of the boat. That means bottom paint. More fun toxic stuff. This is just getting better and better.

Here you can see we’ve chiseled out the bungs along the garboard. We’re exposing the screws that hold the garboard to the frames and floors. Sometimes it’s not easy to find where these screws are, because they were bunged very very well. Just like everything else on this boat, the level of craftsmanship is impeccable.

For example: find the bungs in this photo. You can just barely make out a few little circles indicating bungs about 2/3 the way to the right, above the lower plank line. Most are very very subtle.

So, there’s often a lot of hunting around to find them. Sometimes you can see them easily when you chisel out a bit of plank. That dark circular area is the bung.

And then you hunt where you know they typically put the rest of the bungs. Since these guys were such pros, you can figure out their system pretty quickly. False lead on the left. The bung ended up being there on the right.

So, off you go, down the length of the boat.

By the way, all that green junk is test patches of paint stripper. We initially tried to find the bungs by removing the paint. It didn’t work at all… thus the chiseling.

There are 5 large screws to remove per frame / floor combination. Even though they’re bronze, they’re also very old, and many just snap or strip out when you try to remove them. Damn. Bring out the unscrew-ems (a tool that helps drill out broken screws).

We unscrew both the garboard and 1st broad.

Then it gets hard.

I’ll tell you about it tomorrow. Tonight I’m going to bed. HA!!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 9:28 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.