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.

We’re also building this boat right side up, and that means that we’ve got a forest of supports that are always in our way as we work. It does make it easier to rivet the hull I think, but the molds often end up being in the way for fastening all sorts of things. Case in point, those nice rivets you see in the frames above were pretty tough to sink, particularly when there was hardly any space to drill the holes because of the closeness of the molds.

And if you really want to know how hard this boat is to build, look no further than Mike’s garboard. This plank has been giving him trouble for weeks.

There’s a number of factors involved in these problems.

• First, it’s a tough plank. It has backing out that reverses along its length for one thing. In other words, you have to scoop out the inside of the plank in the forward and mid-sections of the boat, but at the aft sections, the curve reverses and you have to scoop out the outside of the plank. All the while, you have to keep the plank thickness the same along its length.
• There’s a lot of twist to this plank, particularly in the aft end.
• We set our plank thickness at 7/16,” the thickness we measured on the Whitehall at Mystic. That’s a pretty thin plank. It was only later that we realized that over the 120 years of this boat’s life that it’s probably been sanded down a few times, and that the original plank was probably 1/2.” The thinner plank is more fragile.
• Mike’s plank faced the windows, meaning that it got sunshine on it daily. The sun is likely to have dried out the plank even more than the usual drying we get from being in a heated shop in winter.

The problems Mike had with his garboard mostly involved the plank splitting. First it split at the hood end when he tried to attach it. The bend was quite severe there and the wood couldn’t take it. He was able to fix it with epoxy.

Then it didn’t fit quite right as he tried to attach it near the aft end. This is a really tough plank to spile and he didn’t get it exactly on the first shot. As he worked on it, it dried out more. When he tried to attach the aft end it split very badly.

So, he cut off the plank about 5 frames forward of the transom and scarfed a new end onto the plank, while the plank was fastened to the boat. It seemed like it’d be a challenge, and it was.  I don’t recommend that you try this at home.  It’s way hard to do and it’s a testament to Mike’s skill that he was able to pull it off.

After fine-tuning the fit of this bandaged plank, he attempted to fasten it again to the transom. It split again. This time he worked out a way to clamp and glue it up.

Getting that plank to make the curve into the transom while also being clamped down to close up the split (it was also glued with epoxy) was quite a feat. This is a forest of clamps and special blocks to hold things in place here.

Mike’s garboard adventures makes my work with the sheer look like a walk in the park.

And speaking of the sheer, it’s finally hung. After all that work, it went on like butter. I clamped it in place all along it’s length to get the placement exactly right. I also wanted to make sure that the lap was closed and tight before drilling any holes. I like the long wooden clamps from Woodcraft for getting right onto the lap. They do an excellent job to providing decent pressure while being relatively unobtrusive, and as an added bonus, you don’t need to use clamp pads with them.

We drilled the holes for the frame-to-plank rivets with a #30 (number sized drill bits give you far greater control over hole size than standard fractional bits) drill bit and a flat countersink.

This gives us a nice tight fit for the #10 copper nail and the countersink allows me to get the nail head flush with the surface of the sheer. I don’t want to go very deep here because I’ve already sanded the sheer to its final finish, so I won’t need to account for any future sanding taking the wood level down. At least, not from me.

I was able to make a nicer fit on the hood end of the sheer than I did on the binder.

Luckily, since the sheer is bright finished and the binder and lower planks are painted, I’ll be able to fill the gap at the hood with more putty without it looking bad. A little bit of putty, a little bit of paint, makes a carpenter what he ain’t.

We used a lighter gauge nail (I think a #12) for the plank-to-plank attachments between the frames. Remember, the sheer and binder are lapstrake fastened, so the planks are riveted to each other along their length as well as being attached to the frames. After drilling and countersinking everything, I drove in the nails, and fastened them with roves. A rove is a special type of copper washer that fits tightly over the end of a copper nail when riveting. The nail is clipped close to the rove, and then peened over to lock the rove onto the nail, essentially making the nail a 2-headed nail with the attached planking in between.

As you can see here, I got too close to my bead a number of times when drilling through from the outside. The holes are nice and evenly spaced on the lower edge of the sheer, but I didn’t pay enough attention to the angle at which I was drilling. As a result, some of the nails come through about 1/8″ below the bead, others right at the edge of it.

Peening copper nails over cedar is very tricky. The rove wants to sink into the soft cedar, and it’s easy to damage your plank.

Every day I get a little more impressed by the original builder of this boat. We’re making this boat the best we can, and we have these little goof-ups here and there. I didn’t find Any of these mistakes in the original boat. It’s not that we can’t make the boat, we just can’t make it perfectly yet.

When all was said and done, the seam along the lower edge of the sheer came out nice and tight all along its length. No water getting in here kiddo.

It’s been getting crowded on the port side of the boat. Mike was working on his garboard and Tom G’s been working on the plank just below my binder. Lots of folks in a small area, but we worked together well. Here’s the inside of the boat showing (from top down) the sheer, binder, and Tom G’s plank being temporarily held in place while he fine tunes it.

With the sheer done, it was time to turn to Madcap. We’ve put a few coats of varnish on her interior to encapsulate the remaining pentachloraphenol. She’s pretty shiny inside now, although this photo doesn’t really do it justice.

And it case you’re really astute, you may ask, “where has all the staging gone?” We’re going to have a guy come in with a laser measurement system in a couple of weeks to make sure here hull shape is still right on. We won’t install the new deck beams until that’s been confirmed since the deck beams help to lock in the hull shape.

In the meantime, I patched up the 3 through-hull openings that had been in the boat before. I’m not sure what all of them were for, but I’m sure that at least 1 was for a bilge pump. Perhaps 2 for the head?

After talking with Warren, we decided to make up a jig that would allow me to make a shallow, scooping cut into the hull with the router. This has the advantage of making a nice, long, smooth surface to glue a patch (also called a graving piece) into. It’s also handy when doing multiple scarfs: since each cut out is identical then you can make up a series of identical graving pieces at the same time.

In this case, I worked out a radius that would give me about a 9″ long cut that would just clip the edges of the hole at the depth of the mahogany outer planking. I made up a little jig that had that curve and attached it to the boat with a couple of screws (we’ll fill those holes later).

I positioned it so that the bottom of the cut would just run along the plank line. No use in cutting more than 1 plank if you don’t have to.

I made a matching sled for a laminate trimmer with a flat cutting bit to ride on this jig.

The little runners on either side keep the router bit from hitting the sides of the jig.

You can see that as you run the router along this jig, you make a scooping slot in the hull. The depth of the slot is controlled by the depth that you set your router to. Here’s the cut just starting out.

And then finished.

I made up a trammel (it’s like a compass arm) that attached to the band saw that would cut a radiused chunk of mahogany to match the curve of this slot exactly. Here’s what I ended up with.

Just a little touch up on the sander to make it fit exactly right and it went in with a press fit. I added in a mahogany butt block on the inside of the boat to fasten this to, and glued it all up with thickened epoxy.

I made the graving piece just a little thicker than the slot so that we can fair it out to exactly the hull shape later.

It worked out well. There are 4 screws in the center to hold the patch to the butt block, and 4 screws that go through to the frames. Those outer screws were mostly there to clamp the edges of the patch down tightly while the glue dried. Later, they’ll be removed as the patch is faired, and then re-drilled and countersunk to make room for bunging.

Lastly, Scott has been working on a large bronze patch for one of the floors that had cracked but was too much trouble to replace. Much easier to make a big patch and through-bolt it to the floor. The end result is a much stronger floor.

It’s a little hard to tell that that piece on the right side of the center floor is bronze, but in the right light, that thing shines like gold.

And that’s all the news that’s fit to print for now. We’re on break for 2 weeks and will get back to work on January 2nd. Ahhhhhhhhhh.

Oh, wait, that just means more hours available to work on the Aurora (where I’m now the ships carpenter).

Oh well.

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 10:50 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.