A Shipwright in Training

There’s a few folks around the shop who just love to come up with simpler, faster ways of doing things.   Usually this means coming up with jigs and other fixtures for holding oddly shaped parts while you’re working on them.   A lot of times when you see a good jig, you say, “Oh, of course, that’s the obvious way to do it.”  Take varnishing spars for instance.  Last year we just hung the spars in an almost haphazard way upstairs while we worked on them.

Moving around in there required ducking and dodging.  We were forever brushing against someone’s wet varnish and leaving marks.  The first year students this year came up with a much better strategy.  They started by setting up a couple of benches dedicated to varnishing spars.

The lights at the end of the spars give you a way to check the quality of your work as you go.  As anyone who’s done much finishing can tell you, it’s hard to see minor problems with your application without checking the reflection of the finish using a strong directional light source. 

The spars are suspended by these cradles that are screwed down to the benches.

The cradles had a former life as the forms for gluing up the spars, that’s why they have the tape on them (prevents the glue from sticking).  With a little screw eye in the end of each spar, you can rest the spar on the metal tabs fastened to the cradles.

This allows you to turn your spar as you work, keeping a wet edge all the way around your spar as you go.  Nice. 

After varnishing, the spars then get stored at one end of the shop out of the way.  Those little eyes at the ends of the spars become the attachment points for the lifting lines.

Bungee cords at the bottom of the spars keep things from swinging around.

It’s a good system.  Now folks can move around the shop easily even with a whole lot of wet spars.  Two benches are set up, allowing up to 4 people to work at a time.   We can thank John from the first year class for this whole set up.

On the other hand, there are some jobs that you really can’t make easier with a jig.  You just take a big breath and accept that it’s time to get in there and do it.  Scraping a boat is one of those jobs.  Fairing a hull is another.  Fairing is made easier when you can work on an upside down hull, and when you can’t… well, you just tough it out and do your time.  Get out your plane and man up, podner.

After installing the garboard and broad, it was time to blend them into the overall shape of the boat.  I’d already curved the outer face of the garboard to match the curve of the frames, but that was just the beginning.  There’s always fine tuning that can only be done in situ. 

Looking forward from behind the rudder, you can see where I started fairing out these two planks.  The lighter wood is where I’ve been working.  What I’m trying to do is blend in the curve at the keel with the existing curve of the hull above these 2 planks. 

There are a couple of ways to measure your progress.  You can run your hand along the planks as you’re working on them to feel any subtle bumps and hollows.  You also use a batten to both check for small spots of unfairness and make sure that what you’re doing blends harmoniously with the rest of the hull. 

Using a thin batten here, you can see I’ve got a high spot in the middle of the left plank.  You know this because you can see the small gaps under the batten on the left and right side of the plank.  When everything is fair, a batten will lay perfectly snug along the plank surface. 

The first choice to make when fairing a hull is which plane to use.  Every one has their advantages and deficits.  This is one of the reason that folks in this biz tend to accumulate a lot of planes.

From left to right we’ve got:

• Wide bladed smoothing plane, about the size of a #4, but wider. Good for smoothing wide, flat runs.
• A scraper (with the black handle)… not really a plane, but it helps to get rid of sticky goo that you’d rather not have on your plane, and can clean up blade marks.
• A wooden coving plane with a moderately round bottom, about 1/8″ camber. Nice for getting into places with a tight radius.
• A wooden flat bottom plane that I made last year.  It’s thin so it’ll get into places where the plank is curvy. It’s moderately long so I can even out humps and dips along the length of a plank.
• A small #102 that can get into tight places
• The old reliable bronze #4.  It’s heavy, and that’s good when you need a little momentum to carry you past a patch of reversed grain.  It’s also a bear to hold overhead while you’re working.
• My backing out plane with a 1/16″ camber. 

I generally like working with the wooden planes because they’re lighter and easier to work overhead.  My favorite for this task ended up being the backing out plane because I could take thin scoops of shavings with it’s curved blade.  It acted a bit like a scrub plane, only taking a much finer cut.  The curved bottom fits nicely into the curve at the base of the garboard, but I ended up using it to take most of the meat out of the plank even in the flat sections.

You can see the tracks that this plane makes as I work along the planks.  One of the big advantages of using this plane is that the small cut it takes means much less work to do… big cuts mean big energy used.  I can easy vary the depth of the cut by how much pressure I use when planing as well.  After I get things close to where I want, I follow with a flat bottomed plane to take the ridges out.  I like the thinner wooden one for most of this work, although it leaves small grooves.

Sanding will complete the fairing process and make it all curved and smooth.  I’ll do that once the whole length of the plank is faired out. 

It took a day to do about 2/3 the length of the boat.  In the meantime, I’ve sealed the wood for the weekend to keep it from cupping… I remember the cupping. 

I’m happy with the shape of these planks so far.  If you look along the edge marked by the arrows, you can see how the line of the planks flows from the existing hull neatly into the lines of the keel and deadwood.  That’s what I was shooting for.  Another half day of this and It’ll be time to sand it… again by hand. 

All this working overhead or in other odd, awkward positions has left me with some sore sore shoulders and pecs.  If I did this every day for 6 months I’d look like a bodybuilder, at least from the waist up.

Tags: fairing, six meter, boat building

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 11:14 am 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.