A Shipwright in Training

Over the past week I’ve been on vacation from IYRS, so naturally that means I’ve found a boat to work on!  My old boss and friend Walt from the Mystic Seaport recommended I work with a fellow named RJ Burns over the week, and as fortune would have it, the job was just down the street from my sweetie down in Stonington CT… so I packed up a couple of riggers bag’s worth of tools and headed down to work on a sweet little boat named Ezili.

Ezili’s the sailboat, just in case you had any doubt.  She was designed for the Chicago Yacht Club and is known as an Eagle class boat.  There were seven built for the club in the late 1920’s, and this may be the only one left.  The Wrigley family (of gum fame) owned her for a while, and she even made a stop over at IYRS some years ago before coming to her current owner.  We won’t talk about what happened to her at IYRS because it was before all the current instructors were hired.  Let’s just say it involved 5200 adhesive and that removing the garboards was quite a chore.

Ezili required a complete reframing job along with 3 new planks / side. She also needed new knees and new fasteners throughout. 

By the time I arrived on the scene, RJ and Jen (a former IYRS student by the way) had replaced all of the frames, fabricated new knees, and were in the process of refastening the sheer clamps (she actually has 2 clamps… one that goes the length of the boat and another that only extends from the bow along the underside of the cabin top). 

My job was to fair the frames where necessary, re-fair the rabbet, and make whatever planks I had time for.  Cool.

RJ and Jen are a blast to work with.  Walt Ansel (head shipwright over at Mystic Seaport and good buddy) joined us for a few days as well, and that made us all a little smarter.  It felt like we were over in RJ’s back yard working on his boat… just a week of steady, relaxed  friendly work.

So, here’s the boat as she looked when I got to the shop.  That’s Jen in the foreground.

The garboard, first broad and part of the second broad have been removed.  The orange is red lead paint. Nothing works better to protect against rot and nasty bilge problems than good old red lead.

And there’s the rabbet beneath the frames.  You can see the line of white epoxy that someone once decided to inject into the seam there at the base of the keel.  Not a good idea.  Epoxy doesn’t give when the wood expands.  It’s like sticking a rock in the joint.

Sidebar here:  the owner didn’t want RJ to remove the deck so he had to install the new frames with the deck still on.  Since the frames are socketed into the keel, he had to install them from the same side of the boat as they went on.  This meant that they had to steam the frames, insert them up into the boat super fast, bend them to the shape of the hull, slide them under the sheer clamp, keep them lined up exactly to where they needed to be, and bang them up to fit into the keel sockets before they cooled.  If they could have removed the deck, they could have slid the frames, already pre-bent, down between the sheer clamp and sheer, and right into the keel socket.  Once they cooled they could cut the excess off at the top.  As it was, they had to get the frame lengths just right before they bent them in.  Whew.

So, a day of spokeshaving and shimming got the frames all faired up with each other.  Then it was on to the fairing out the rabbet. 

The rabbet on this boat appears to have been a rush job.  Maybe they were on a deadline to make a whole pile of boats in time for race season, maybe the yard underbid, who knows?  What I do know is that they forgot to put in 2 stopwaters (Walt fixed that problem) and they hacked out the rabbet  in a pretty rough manner.

Here’s the aft end of the port rabbet.  Pretty rough work.  In the photo above this one, you can somewhat get a sense of how rapidly the rabbet turns up at one point.  If you’re going to have the garboard lay fair and secure, it helps immensely to have the rabbet make a smooth, fair line.  My solution for both checking and fixing any unfairness was to batten out the rabbet. 

Starting at the forward end, I used a good long batten along the edge of the rabbet and nailed it in as I went.  I stuck to the original rabbet as much as possible, but the batten identified where there were humps and hollows.

It’s a little hard to see here, but if you click on the photo and go see the larger sized version on Flicker you’ll see how the batten reveals a hump in the rabbet.

Ah, a rabbet humping!  Who’d have guessed??

I roughed out the humps with a slick, and finished up with a rabbet plane.  Took about a day to do that, and the result was a smooth, fair, clean rabbet.  Ah, happiness!

After that it was time to line off the planks and get to spiling. 

Lining off the planks was a little more time consuming than I’d originally anticipated.  I started by making up a planking scale as I’d been taught in Barry Thomas’ book, “Building the Herreshoff Dinghy.”  I think that the method he describes really works best for boats that don’t have planks that go to a feather edge.  The lower planks on this boat all taper to zero as they rise along the stem and aft section of the keel, and there was just no way to make Barry’s method work for that situation. 

So, I fell back on the old builder’s adage:  Make it Look Nice. 

That’s good advice for anything to do with boats really.   Assuming that the builders were trying to knock out these boats as quickly as possible, I surmised that they would have made the planks as simple as possible.  One way to do that is to make the broads the same width as each other.  When you line off the broads that way, the garboard takes care of itself, since it simply occupies the space left over. 

Duh.  This is what I ended up with.

Warren, my instructor at IYRS, likes to line off every plank that needs to be made all at one time on the boat.  That way you get a good idea as to how all the planks will look when the boat is finished.  I like that Idea and used it here.  The open space is now evenly divided for the garboard, first, and second broad strakes.  When I’m happy with how it all looks, I mark off where the battens cross each frame, remove the battens, and I’m ready to spile the planks.

They say that a good builder will install 2 planks / side in a day.  I made the 2 garboards in a day and a half.  Guess I’m improving!

By Friday we had them both steamed and clamped to the boat. 

They both went on very well… hardly any fitting problems at all. 

This Sunday we fastened them and cut out the first broads.  Since I’m back in school, I’ll have to wait to hear from RJ how well they fit!

I mentioned that Ezili needed new knees… here are the old ones.  You can also see the double sheer strake clearly as well.

Here are the new ones.

They’re a combination of laminates and solid wood.  The laminates give them strength through the curved grain while the sold wood provides a strong foundation for the laminates.  It’s an elegant solution to the problem of not having grown knees (i.e., knees that came from parts of the tree where the grain grew in the shape of the curved knee) at your disposal.   As an added bonus, these will be left bright finished and they’ll add a real elegant touch below decks. 

That’s it for now.  Back to school bright and early tomorrow!

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Tags: knees, ezili, planking

It’s handy to get feedback no matter what you do.  It’s a good reminder that no matter how clear and / or clever you think you are, there’s always that time when you point into the forest and start merrily chatting away about that tree you’re looking at, while the person you’re with blinks and wonders how best to say “which damn tree are you talking about??”

Confronted with this situation, you can either give an exasperated sigh, roll your eyes, and point in exactly the same way as before… or man up, admit that you were being less than clear, and figure out a better way to point.  The former gets you a glare and maybe a punch.  The latter allows the other person to actually see what you’re getting at and you can get on with the business of showing how insightful and clever you are.

Why look, I have just the example to illustrate that little lesson!

In my last little missive, I mentioned that I’d finished the caulking bevel, showed this photo

and went on my merry way.  It seems that not every person on the planet knows immediately what to look for when they hear the words “caulking bevel.”  Who knew??? 

Sorry about that folks.  Here’s what I was talking about.

That’s the photo I should have put there in the first place.  No such thing as a stupid question.

So, after fitting the forward section of the garboard, I put it in the steamer for a couple of hours, and put it on the boat.

Um, rather, I came close to putting it on the boat.  The forward end fit nicely,

and it got worse from there back.  It looks like it fits from this photo

but in fact, it overlaps the liner by about an eighth of an inch near the end of the plank.

Right up along the top edge there… see?

There’s no way that puppy’s going to fit.  The culprit? 

Of course, you saw that one coming from a mile away.  Clever duck, it was that the kiln dried sapele swelled while in the steamer.  Since the plank is so narrow at the forward end, the swelling effect was minimal.  As the plank grew quickly wider, the effect multiplied until it got to what you see here. 

It was annoying, but I’m glad to have found it this way.  If I’d installed the plank as it fit before, when it eventually swelled it would have put tremendous pressure on the cedar liner that it butts up to, and may have caused it to buckle.  As it is now, I can trim it to fit, and when it swells again after the boat is in the water, it will probably not swell a lot more than this, and the cedar will be able to absorb the compression.

So, with that plank clamped on to the boat to help it get comfortable with the fact that it will spend the rest of its life in that curved shape, it’s off to work on the aft section.

I’m reminded of the line from James Taylor’s “Millworker,”

Testify James.  Backing out 16′ of bone dry sapele is long, tiring, dusty work.  The consolation is that I think I’m going to be kick ass in any job that requires long hours of pushing.  Anyway, it should be finished by Monday afternoon, then it’ll take a while to fit it to the boat (this time with a little more room for expansion). 

As always, drop me a line if I blithely walked right past something that needed explaining.

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Ah, working with wood.  It’s been over a month since I’ve actually needed to hold a plane and use it with any degree of skill.  I volunteered to make one of the garboards for the six meter so I could get back into the swing of things last week.

It was weird.  I felt like taking a nap.

Creating the spiling for the plank was easy… simple, accurate, repetitive work.  But when I got the spiling down onto an actual board suddenly it all came home how many little things I needed to take into account.  The garboard is very long.  Do I do it in 2 parts joined by a butt block or make one long plank by scarfing two planks together?  Make sure I remember to add bevel wood… oh, wait, the rabbet bevel is actually smaller than 90 degrees… subtract bevel wood from the outside face of the plank.  Does the fact that the plank gets hollowed on the outer face have any effect on the way the plank should be oriented (sapwood side in or out?… it will naturally cup up towards the sapwood)?  Since the plank is backed out on the outer face at the aft end and on the inner face at the forward end, the thickness reference marks on the edge of the plank have to be battened out rather than simply scribed.  And then there’s the matter of adding in the rabbet to the plank.  To top it all off, we’re using good wood here, sapele (a close match to mahogany) and it isn’t cheap.  So another level of complexity is working out the best use of the materials we’ve got on hand.

The mantra for all woodwork is the same mantra that I think makes life manageable:  Slow down, take it one thing at a time.  I know, you have to plan for all these things.  However, if you do your layout just thinking of one step at a time and draw each layer, the ways that they interact and the order in which to do each one will become obvious. 

So,

• despile the pattern onto the board.
• Mark where the butt joint will be after looking at the boat (you want to be at least 3 bays and 3 planks away from any other butt joint).  Yep, decided on a butt joint instead of a scarf.  The scarf would have made for a very long, very unwieldy 22′ long plank.  Fitting it would have been a bear.
• Lay out the usual frame locations
• Lay out the rabbet (I’ll get to that)
• You can’t lay out the thickness reference lines until the plank is cut out and planed to the pattern lines
• Make your backing out templates
• Take the bevels and make up a bevel board for your bevel wood subtractions

That’s it to start.  Here we go.  Spiling batten laid out on the sapele.

The plank is in 2 sections, a 6′ and 16′ section.  The 6′ section is in the forward end of the boat.  The 16′ section looks pretty dang long.

And you can barely see that it overhangs this board by about 4′. 

I started by cutting out both the forward and aft plank sections, leaving a little extra length for fine tuning the butt joint later.  I decided to start working on the shorter plank since I figured that if I bollix it up, there’s less wood wasted. 

Even though it’s a short board, there’s almost 3/8″ backing out to do. 

This makes for a lot of shavings.

Sapele is kiln dried, and it works far easier than I’d been told.  Everyone said that it would get a fuzzy texture from the planer, but it machined and planed quite smooth as long as I paid attention to the grain direction. 

My favorite tools for backing out were these 2 planes.  The smaller radius plane did a good job of hogging lots of wood out of the middle, and the shallower backing out plane cleaned up and smoothed the grooves left by the first plane. 

As I said before, the hollow changes along the length of the plank.  That means that there is a small flat spot in the area where the hollow shifts to a bulge on the face of the plank.  A little tricky getting that transition nice and smooth. 

Everything goes better when you lay out all your lines.  It gives you time to think about how you’ll each step, and makes it easier to construct the plank in your head first.

In this case, after laying out the rabbet, Warren and I decided to radius the corner of the rabbet to reduce the tendency of the first broad to split in the forward end.

What the hell is he talking about?? 

I promise, I’ll try to make this rabbet stuff a little more obvious as time goes on. 

The top 1 1/16″ of the plank is rabbeted down to the level of the inner planking (also called the liner).  The first broad sits on top of the liner, and laps over the garboard at the rabbet. 

Here’s the rabbet after being roughed out with a router.

I like this router, it’s a laminate trimmer with an offset base.  This allows you to support the weight of the router on solid wood as you cut out the rabbet. 

I freehanded the cut, giving the rabbet lines a wide berth just in case of a slip up.  Routers make big mistakes in an instant if you’re not careful.

Then, on to hand tools to finish up.  The Veritas rabbet plane on the left does a nice job of making the vertical face of the rabbet.  The LN #140 makes a nice wide cut.  It’s a rabbeting plane as well, and has a skewed blade which helps slice the fibers where you run into little grain reversals. 

Getting close to my line.

One thing to pay attention to is the slope of the rabbet.  If this were a flat board, the rabbet should just be level with the surface of the board.  But this plank’s face rolls along its length.  It starts by curving up where the outer face is hollowed out.

I need to make the base of the rabbet mirror the curve of the plank face beneath it.  It’s easy to see how to do this at the end where there’s a cross section of the plank, but you can’t see the curve changing anywhere else without cutting the plank and getting another cross section.  One way to deal with this is by using calipers.

Here I’m measuring the rabbet to plank face thickness.  The caliper holds this measurement.  Then I pull the caliper out towards the edge of the rabbet.

See the gap?  Now I know that the rabbet thicker near the middle than at the edge.  If the rabbet mirrors the opposite face of the plank the thickness will be consistent.  So, I plane down the inner edge of the rabbet until the 2 faces are parallel. 

While you’re doing all this planing, don’t forget to clear your plane. 

You can get so carried away by what you’re doing that the chips will compress as tight as book pages in there.  I had to pry them out with a screwdriver. 

So, plane along, check your work, and after a while you get a nice rabbet.

In fact, at the forward end of the plank, the whole plank is rabbeted down to liner thickness.  The first broad will notch around that curved tall part there and rest on top of the rabbeted part of the garboard.  When the boat is done, that raised area will be all you’ll see of the garboard from the outside, and an amateur (like me) will think that they’re looking at the end of the plank.  Au contraire!  As you can see, the garboard extends a good ways beyond what you’ll be able to see on the finished boat. 

It’s handy to leave notes for the person who comes along after you making the first broad.  In this case, they’ll know that the rounded edge here is a 1/2″ radius.  They’ll be able to used a 1/2″ drill to make that curve exactly right.

After the rabbet is done, just add the caulking bevel to the lower edge of the plank

and you’re done.  Tiny bevel eh?  Only 3/32″ off the face, extending down about 2/3 the thickness of the plank.

I made some clamps to hold the plank in place as I was fitting it to the boat.

The clamps have a little base that I screwed through the liner into a frame.  I’ll fill these holes when I’m done.  The clamps also are grooved to allow them to spring a little bit, like featherboards (for you woodworkers out there). 

Perhaps I can do a little explaining about what you’re looking at here.  The liner was patched after someone put their foot through it.  It’s only 1/4″ thick cedar… pretty delicate stuff.  So, don’t be confused by the different colors and the sloping shape.  It’s just a repair.

You can see that the liner sits below the level of the planks above it.  That’s because this is a double planked boat.  Cedar liner on the inside, mahogany planking on the outside.  The garboard is a special plank because it’s as thick as  both the inner and outer planking combined.  There is no liner underneath the garboard.  The garboard butts up to the liner on it’s top edge and sits in the keel rabbet on its lower edge. 

The rabbeted edge is as thick as the cedar liner.  What I’m doing here is fitting the garboard so that it snugs right into the keel rabbet and tight against the cedar liner.  When this plank is hung, there is a space left for the next plank above it, the first broad, to be installed over the garboard rabbet and the cedar liner.  The first broad is about half as thick as the garboard, just like all the other outer mahogany planks.

A picture’s worth a thousand words?  Hmmm.  Explaining a picture takes at least 200. 

So, that’s been the last few days.  Tomorrow I’ll steam this puppy into place and begin working on the aft section of the garboard.  There’s gonna be a big pile of shavings…

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Yes glasshoppah, many weeks of screw off, screw on.  Your training is going well.  You are now ready for next level.  The level in which the worthy can be called…
Bung master.  

First, you must make many many bung. 

A true bung master is the master of his machine.  Are you the master of the machine, or is the machine master of you little glasshoppah?

Ah, so, truly you are boss of machine.  You have make fence for neat rows.  You have make holder for chip collection.  No chip in your bung, young one.   The master is pleased.

And have you make many row of bungs little one?

Yes, neat rows I see.  However, the do not break off easily I fear.

Yes, they break off, but not easily.  A true bung master does not despair at such trivial matters. He uses his hands, or takes his small pliers and breaks off the bungs no matter how thick their base.  A bung master moves forward, always forward.  There is no obstacle, there is only the bung seeking the bung hole.

And have your bung found your bung holes young glasshoppah? 

Good, many bung hole, many bung. 

And still more bung hole with more bung. 

Your work is good.  You used slightly thickened epoxy as you have been taught.  You inspected for overlooked screw as you worked.  You found old bung that had not been removed by previous student.  Bad, lazy student.  You work hard, many days. 

You are ready.
You are… bung master.

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