A Shipwright in Training

Looking back on when we first started the Whitehall project, I had no idea how much harder it would be than the Beetle cat. I’ve built a lot of things over the years, and my sense has always been that if something looks particularly hard, that just means that it’ll take more time than an easier project. Everything seems possible, with the only real difference being the levels of complexity involved.

I still think that’s true, but the Whitehall has been a very humbling project. We looked at the way the frames are shaped and told ourselves that they’d be a little tricky, but the fact is, they were downright hard. We looked at the fact that the boat had no limber holes and we told ourselves, “we can put our own in!” and then later realized that doing this made it hard to attach the garboards right at the base of the frame (now there’s a hole along the base of each frame where you would normally put a fastener).

This has the advantage of allowing water to flow down to the lowest point in the boat for bailing, but it may mean that our garboards aren’t fastened as tightly to the keel as they could be. We’ll see if that’s a problem later :-o.
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Progress on the Whitehall has been quite slow lately, in part because it seems that every time I move towards making visible progress, some thing from the past shows up that needs addressing.  Clearly one of the advantages of building a boat either by yourself or with a team of highly skilled folks is that you rarely have to double check the work that’s been done before.  Building a boat with students means that you can’t always trust that the lines that were laid down by someone else are actually right. 

In my case, some of the lines that defined the binder plank (the one below the sheer) needed tweaking.  So, I spent some time doing that, particularly since I’d made 2 (count ‘em 2) binders spiled to the earlier lines and they looked awful.  But, after lining off this plank again, all was good and right.  I riveted it onto the boat in an afternoon and it looked great. 

And then, Phil put his binder on the starboard side, but didn’t check that his lines matched mine just right, and it was about a 1/4″ below mine at the front of the boat.  It would have looked awful if he left it that way, so off it came, all the screw and nail holes had to be filled with donkey toothpicks, and back it went. 
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