A Shipwright in Training

This past week has been devoted to getting the deck on the six meter.  Day in, day out, precision drilling and fitting parts.  More on that in a bit, though, because I want to finish up showing off the metal work I’d started on last week. 

Before making the swallowtails, I fabricated 4 bronze plates that will become the base of the U-shaped running back stay anchors.  The trick was to make them all exactly the same without the benefit of a CNC or other automatic milling machine. 

Thank god for copiers.  I did the same trick with the plates as I did for the swallowtails:  draw them up, xerox the drawing, glue the drawings to the stock, and then carefully cut, drill, and grind to the lines.  The result was 4 identical plates. 

Now the tricky part was making 4 identical U-shaped, threaded bolts to fit into these puppies.  Luckily, IYRS came through again with the perfect bending machine from their systems program.  It’s really a pipe bender, but we modified it a bit to work with the bronze rod stock we’re using for the bolts. 

First I threaded each end of a 15″ length of straight 3/8″ bronze rod.  Then I put the rod in the bender.

To make sure that the bend was even (i.e., that both ends of the rod ended up the same length) I started the bend with the centerpoint of the rod just touching the middle bending surface.

In this case, that surface is a socket from a socket wrench set that gave us just the right bend diameter. Next, bend the rod to 90 degrees, take it out, reverse it so that the leg on the right is now on the left, and complete the bend. 

Not bad, the legs are almost exactly the same length.  No problem, because it’s a little long and they’ll get trimmed down when they’re installed. The legs are still just a little splayed out though.  Seems that bronze has a bit of springback to it.

That won’t do.  So, over to the vise with it.

The wooden pad protect the rod from getting scraped up. 

Overbend it a little more…

And voila!  It fits the plate just right.

We’ll weld the plate to the U bolt soon, but in the meantime, I wanted to fit it in the boat to make sure that I had the right lengths for the legs. 

Not bad.  You can see here how the bolts come down through the sheer clamp and into the swallowtail.

The problem was that they came down a little farther than I had originally thought, and I ran out of thread. 

Hmmm, this creates a bit of a problem.  How do you put more thread on a U-shaped thing?  Normally you’d use a die cutter to cut more thread.  However, the handles bump into the other leg of the bolt when you try to cut one leg.

Luckily, Lew had the perfect solution:  Hex Shaped die cutters.

Hey hey hey.  Check this out.  Put a 1″ socket on the die and you can now use a ratcheting handle to turn it!

The handle doesn’t get in the way of the 2nd leg.  Problem solved.  I cut another 3/4″ of thread and everything fit like a glove. 

Now, on to the deck! 

The astute observer would have noticed that the deck was being started as I was doing the test fitting with the bolts a few photos back, but here’s another view. 

Four deck strips (technically “planks”) laid.  Many more to go.  Mike contemplates the task. 

The process is simple really.  Start from the inside edge of the covering board, and screw and nail each plank in place. 

Screw and nail?  Why both? 

Well, you screw them down to the deck beams, but you nail them to each other to help stiffen the whole affair up.  After all, these planks are only 1/2″ thick.  The nailing is the tricky part.  We nail sideways through 2 1/2 planks to tie them together using copper nails.  These all get pre-drilled because otherwise the nails would split the thin planking.  However, there is very little room for error, and if you’re not careful, you’ll angle your drill up or down just a hair too much and blow out either the top or underside of the deck.  Like this, for instance.

The red lines show the path of the nails inside the decking, going from bottom to top.  You can just see how they’ve emerged at their tips. 

Each plank gets 2 nails in the middle of each bay (the space between the deck beams).  There are 51 bays.  I think we used about 2,500 nails.  That’s a lot of chances to blow your angle by a degree or so.  It also gives you a lot of practice getting it just right.  By the end of 4 days, my Drill Fu was very strong.

Mike and Phil made up some nifty metal jigs to make the drilling process easier. 

They discovered quickly that while it gave them a good, consistent, side-to-side spacing for the nails, it didn’t stop the driller from blowing the up/down angle.  Oh well.

Sometimes we’d drill a hole and find that we’d bumped into a nail from the previously installed plank.  So, we’d leave that hole alone and drill next to it.

My technique was to make a little mark at the location of every nail as I set it in.

That way I knew exactly what was in the way, and it pretty much eliminated hitting any embedded nails. 

The deck curves in, so we herringboned the planks where they met in the middle. 

We got pretty quick at making those cuts, but they did tend to slow things down a bit. 

Ok, Ok, enough on technique!  Here’s the progress with 3-5 guys working solid:

Monday.

Tuesday.

Wednesday.

And finally, today.

Done!  Now we fair up the deck, trim around the cockpits, and get ready for canvassing. 

It seems like we’ve done a lot, and we have, but there’s LOTS more to do, and only 4 weeks left. 

For one thing, there’s the mast.

That’s the setup for the 60′ long mast.  it’s made up of 6 staves and will be oval and tapered.  It’s not easy.  Looking at it up on the catwalk, it seems to go on forever.  Hard to believe it will stick out of that little boat.

I’m making a point of staying at least an hour or 2 late most every night to help get this project in on time, but we’ll see if it’s enough.