A Shipwright in Training

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. 

And then I re-faired my sheer lines and made sure they matched the starboard lines.  Wasn’t going to have that mistake happen twice. 

And at last, it was time to start making the sheer.  The sheer plank defines the top edge of the hull.  The shape of the sheer is what people notice immediately about a boat.  In this particular case, the sheer is bright finished (i.e., varnished and not painted) so it has to be perfect.  It’s the part that people go “oooh, nice boat!” as they run their hands across it admiringly. 

Am I getting my point across here?  It’s a really important plank. 

This particular sheer incorporates all kinds of little oddball elements.  Probably just as easy to list them as write about them.

Here’s the sheer at the transom.  It’s upside down, and it looks black because after 120 years, the varnish got pretty dark.  You can see in this photo:

• It laps onto the binder, and the binder has a feather edge at the transom.  This means that the sheer eases over the binder at the transom, and doesn’t have a stepped shape to make the lap like normal. 
• The sheer does have a stepped shape at the front of the boat.
• The point of the step, or the feather transition, is to make the lapped planks form a smooth, continuous surface like a carvel plank.  See how the sheer overhangs the binder plank forward of the transom?  It eases down to the same level as the binder by the time it gets to the transom.  The area where it eases down is called the Gain.
• There’s a decorative bead on the sheer.  Not normal.
• The sheer is rounded to match the shape of the transom.  A typical lapped plank is flat, and this plank is flat except at the transom.  Most lapped planks are flat in cross section, like the cedar shakes on a cedar sided house, and they stay flat even at the transom.  Not this one, no no no.  You have to ease in that round shape by hand.
• The area beneath (or in this photo, above, since the boat is upside down) the bead is beveled to make the reveal at the bottom of the lap smaller and more delicate looking.
• The inside edge of the sheer is also beveled to match the bevel of the top of the binder plank.  Most lapped boats simply have a bevel on the lower plank that the upper plank rides straight over.

Ok, all this stuff happens at once on this plank.  If you mess up any of them, you have a garbage plank.  If a bevel is wrong, the seam leaks.  If the forward or aft end don’t fit, it looks like ass, and it leaks.  Mostly it looks like ass and Warren gives you the “I get heartburn when I see your work” face.

The cliff notes version is:  this is a weighty plank and it really requires all your woodworking mojo to pull it off.  Personally I think the guy who made this boat back in the 1880’s did all this to show off.

So, the first order of business was to find a good board.  I found an excellent 21′ long oak plank that was thick enough to resaw.  Resawing is cutting the plank in half to get 2 book matched planks.  You start with a 21′ long plank that’s 2 1/4″ thick and you end up with two 21′ long planks that are each 1″ thick and have identical grain patterns.  This makes for nice symmetry in your boat.  It also puts pressure on each person making this plank to Not Mess Up, or you have to get another board and lose the grain matching.

I was extra extra careful in my spiling, and copied the plank shape over as accurately as I could.  It faired out perfectly on the first try, always a good sign. 

Quick, coat that sucker with shellac.  The last thing we want is for this nice plank to blow up in the dry shop.  Here it is, marked for the inside bevel.  The left-right line marks the top edge of the bevel.  The vertical line on the left marks the end of the transom, and you can barely see the word “gain” on the right, indicating where to start the ramp for the gain.  You can’t see it here, but I’ve also marked how far down to plane the bevel on the lower edge of the plank.  We’re measuring in 16ths of an inch, but I’m trying to work to pencil width accuracy.

Two thirds of the battle is just getting your material marked accurately.

You can see in the above photo that I’ve just begun to plane the bevel.  The planed wood is lighter colored than the shellacked wood. 

Once you get your bevel planed, it helps to back it out just a tiny bit.

Here I’m using a model maker’s plane with a slightly convex blade to take a small rounded cut out of the center of the bevel.  This little concavity will make the edges seal tightly when I fasten it to the binder’s bevel with a rivet.  IT’s like when you cup your hand and press it on the table, the fingertips and palm and pressed down extra hard onto the surface.  You can see the effect of the convex blade here:

Before planing, I made a pencil mark across the bevel.  The plane just takes out the center of the line, indicating that it’s cutting a little hollow there. 

To get the shape of the plank at the transom, I used a patterning gauge.

The little wires push back and leave me with the contour I’ll need to fit this space.  Now I can trace the shape onto some scrap stock.

And cut out both a positive template.   I fine-tuned the positive shape to make sure it fit the transom properly.

And then I used the positive to create a negative to use for checking the plank shape as I worked on it. 

It was about that time when I realized that I’d cut the gains on the front and back ends of the plank exactly the same way.  I made a step in the aft end like I did the forward end, and that was wrong wrong wrong. 

Luckily, I could sister in a patch of wood and no one would be the wiser since what you’ll see at the transom is end grain, and most end grain looks alike.  Still, I lost a chunk of time waiting for the epoxy to dry.

La la la, waiting for the glue up to dry.  la la la.

Here the patch is glued on, faired into the bevel above it, and the whole thing has been re-shaped to fit the little gauge in the photo above.  It required backing out that faded to nothing over about an 18″ span and cutting a slight gain.  You can see the ramp of the gain just to the left of the patch.  The plank here is still extra long, and the bottom section with the cruddy glue on it will overhang the transom and eventually be cut off.

Ok, now we’re done with the inside face of the plank.  Now for the outside.

Scrape in a bead, 5/8″ above the lower edge.

Add a bevel from the bottom edge of the bead (in this photo, the left side) so that the bottom edge of the plank is 1/4″ thick.

Fine tune the shape of the hood end (the forward end) of the plank.  Make sure you clamp on a backer board here so that you don’t tear out the bottom edge of your plank as you plane downwards.

And when you’re finally all done, scrape and sand the shellac off of the inside face and coat it with varnish.  The shellac was only a temporary thing to keep the moisture in anyway.  I did that at 6 pm last night.

This morning I came in all ready to hang my dry plank, and the varnish was still wet. 

Dammit.  Cold shop, and I should have thinned my varnish for the first coat as well. 

So, I put all the drying forces I could command at work to dry the varnish.  Halogen lamps, heat guns, bright lights…

Yep, they were on 2 separate circuits.  I blew the breaker using 2 heat guns and 1100 Watts of halogen lighting.

And there they stayed all damn day while I worked on installing new frames in the 6 meter. 

By 7 pm tonight it was dry. 

tomorrow, I will finally hang this dang plank.  Sheesh!!  And then Mike gets to make the starboard one to match.  He’s really good, and I’ve made most of the newbie mistakes already, so I think he’ll get his out in far less time than I took.

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Tags: planking, shipwright, whitehall, boat building

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 11:07 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.