A Shipwright in Training

Inside the Aurora it’s not exactly balmy, it’s ambient air temp with no wind, so it’s tolerable if you dress right. 

Looking aft, towards the fore mast.  This is where we first noticed the problems with the old mast wedges.  As I took each wedge out and replaced it with a new wedge it became immediately clear just how much we needed new ones.  Here’s a sampling:

They all are worn, some are rotted.  The one up top is just a scrap of pressure treated 2×4.  You can also see that there’s next to no uniformity in the wedges.  Not that that’s essential, but I think it shows that the maintainance was spotty and sometimes just plain stopgap.  Here are the new ones installed.

I think it’s an improvement, and these are going to last a long time.  You can see that the wedges are riding a little high above the ring.  This is the aft face of the mast.  The wedges against the forward face sit about half as high as these do.  This means that the mast is leaning just a little aft, opening up the gap between the mast and the partner just a hair more on the forward edge.  We may want to keep it that way, or we may want to straighten it.  Once we are happy with the orientation, I’ll plane the wedges down just a bit to get them to all sit at about the same height.  This will also put more wood in contact with the mast partner (the structure built into the deck itself) and not so much on this ring that’s built up from the deck above the partner.

I’ve also finished building the gaff jaws for the Aurora as well.  In case you don’t know what gaff jaws look like, here are the jaws from the beetle cat. 

 

Now let’s scale up a bit to a 100′ long boat.

These jaws are about 5′ long.  The new one is to the left, and the original is on the right.  The original jaws were made of red oak, just like the mast wedges, and the rot is pretty clear.

It’s even more pronounced in the other jaw. I don’t think I have to tell you which one is the new one.

This is why you inspect your boat. 

The new jaws are white oak.  The original builder also cut corners by using threaded galvanized rod to connect these jaws to the gaff.  The threads helped to wick moisture into the heart of the jaw.  You can see, particularly in the 2nd jaw, how the rot is centered on one of the through holes.  Tsk tsk tsk.  He cut a corner there, but now we’re buying silicon bronze rod and just threading the ends where the nuts will attach.  Essentially we’re making giant custom bolts.  We’ll coat the rod in primer and pack in bedding compound under the nuts and washers to help seal the wood.  This will not come cheap.  The rod, nuts and washers for the 8 bolts we’ll need will cost almost $600.  Silicon bronze is not just the bomb, it’s the bombshell. 

The upside is that, with yearly painting, no one will have to replace the bolts or the jaws for a very long time. 

Oh, and today’s safety tip:

If you’re grinding out metal screws above your head, wear safety glasses over your regular glasses.  I know, it’s dorky and cumbersome, but a speck of metal in your eye the size of the period in this sentence will be really irritating.

And the follow-up to today’s safety tip.  If you do get an irritation in your eye after grinding screws, sure, it could be just a little scratch on your cornea and it’ll feel better in a day, but it could be a piece of metal the size of a period.  And that little bit of metal will irritate your eye, and get it infected if you wait too long and then where would you be?  In a bad bad place, that’s where.  SO, what do you do?  You find a friendly eye doctor who takes walk-ins, and pay him about $60 to look at your eye to see if it is just a scratch.  And if you’re lucky, he’ll remove a little bit of metal (about the size of a period, perhaps) and you can go home saying to yourself “wow, am I lucky to have friends who convinced me to see the doctor rather than waiting!”  And you’ll feel really good about spending that money. 

I’m just sayin’. 

And to my friends, I’m just sayin’ “thank you.”

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Newport Life. 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.