A Shipwright in Training

Woah, whirlwind past month! 
Not that I’m complaining, but I’ve come to really love having unscheduled time to read or make cookies in  animal shapes.

Angry chicks are particularly fun (I can’t claim credit for this one… that’s my sweetie’s creation)

Right before I left for Christmas vacation, the cover over the Aurora (the schooner I’m ship’s carpenter on) collapsed, so we had to re-engineer the whole thing and get it redone.  When you put a cover on a boat, you really shoot for a calm day, because otherwise the plastic acts like a giant spinnaker.  This particular type of plastic is very thick, but it still shrinks with heat like the stuff you put over your windows in the winter.  If the wind is blowing, the plastic will just stretch when you heat it.

So, you want a calm day to put the plastic on is all I’m sayin’ here.  Warm is nice too, but that wasn’t an option.

However, I was on a schedule.  Between leaving for the holidays and finishing up school, time was limited.  James (the captain) and I managed to do a huge amount of work in just a few days, and we were lucky enough to get one that was only mildly breezy.  The final product was quite satisfactory.

Now we can work on deck in cold weather and it hardly bothers us at all.  Amazing what trapping a little heat and blocking the wind can do.

Once I was back at IYRS it was time to get to work refastening the six meter.  I chose to start by replacing the floor-to-frame bolts.  I also chose to start up at the bow.  I knew it would be particularly difficult, but really, this is school and the whole point is to learn how to do hard stuff on someone else’s dime. 

Well, my dime really.  But it feels completely different when there’s someone else wanting the boat yesterday, or a boss tapping his foot and asking you when you’ll be done.

So, here’s the layout.

You’re looking at the bow of the boat.  The floors are the curved chunks of oak with the bolt in the center.  They provide support for the frames, and are an additional structure for the planks to fasten into.  Essentially they hold the 2 sides of the boat together at the keel.  Each floor has 4 bolts that attach it to the frame.  These are fancy bolts called fin heads.  They have to be custom ordered, and they’re not cheap.  People like them because they sit flush against the wood and look very nice. 

Here’s a close up from the photo above.

My job is to remove these bolts and replace them.  Seems easy enough, yes?

You could see this coming from a mile away, couldn’t you?

Let’s look at how these bolts are set in place.  They are set in facing the bow.  Taking them out requires that they come out backwards, towards the stern.  Unfortunately, these bolts were installed before the boat was planked, and the guys who drilled the holes drilled them at an angle from outside of the boat.  As a result, the bolt holes angle up and in.  That means, when you try to remove them, they slide back, and run into your planking after about an inch.

Hmmm. 

If we don’t remove the planking, we have to get them out another way.  AND we have to install them from the opposite direction, since a new bolt can’t fit into the old angled hole without coming through the planking. 

Ok, we can do that. 

Now, we just have to get the old bolt out.  Here’s the process. 

First, take off the nut.

There’s years of grime, pentachorophenol and varnish on those nuts.  They don’t come off easily.  Notice the 2 nuts at the base of the floor?  Yep, they’re basically buried in old junk.  This is because they forgot to put a limber hole (a hole that allows water to escape from the frame bay) in this floor and things tended to build up here.

But, persevere my son, and eventually you’ll succeed.

Now drive those bolts into their holes to push the fin head out a little ways. 

Oh, did I mention that the floors are 6″ apart.  It’s a very very very tight fit there.

There’s about 1″ to swing a hammer, particularly with the lower bolts.

Aside from that, those bolts have been sitting there for 84 years.  They don’t move easily.  I became fond of my spring punch, because it would deliver a sharp tap in a small space.

With quite a bit of effort and concentration, eventually the head pushes out as you pound the end of the bolt flush to the floor.

This gives you room to cut the head off with a fein tool.  I love this tool, and it totally saved our bacon here.  It allows you to plunge cut into metal.

And voila!  You now have a headless bolt.

Now for the fun.  Time to drive that bolt forward again, since that’s the only direction that it can come out.  Again, you’ve only got 6″ to work with on this side of the floor as well, so progress is slow and things can get messy when you miss the bolt. 

If you can get it pushed out by even a half inch, you’re halfway there.

At this point you can grab it with vice grips and start to turn it back and forth while you lever it with a pry bar.

You can see how tight this is.  It’s like surgery.  But work work work and eventually you’re rewarded with this.

Woo hoo!  One bolt down.  Over 200 more to go.

Then you get your new bolt, dip it in varnish, and drive it in from the front.  That’s usually pretty easy. 

Throw a nut and washer on it, and you’re done. 

Luckily, things got easier in the center of the boat where the garboard and first broad were removed so we had access to the bolts from outside of the boat.  This allowed us to simply drive them straight back.  We came up with some gadgets to help us when we were unable to drive the bolts out, and I’ll post those soon. 

More progress this week, but now it’s time to go contra dancing!

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 6:32 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.