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

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 10:06 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.