A Shipwright in Training

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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This entry was posted on Saturday, February 9th, 2008 at 4:12 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.