Wrong time for a re-do
And… painted.
There’s a couple of ways to cope with the impending launch day when you’re not at all certain the boat will be ready.
- Obsess, fret, stay anxious, be a generally annoying person to be around.
- Take an “It is what it is” attitude.
- Run away.
- Keep reminding yourself, “This is fun. I paid for this” and get back to work.
But, really, why do just one? Why not get the sampler plate? Mmmm mmm, I’ve tried them all.
In keeping with #3, this particular entry is being written from the lovely borough of Stonington CT on a school night. I actually have an excuse for that. I was asked to drive Olin Stephens, yes, THE Olin Stephens, down to Mystic on Thursday for a party in celebration of his 100th birthday. It was a nice ride, and we were able to talk a bit about the six meter I’ll be building over the summer… Olin designed Cherokee in 1930 when he was 22 years old. So, I’m taking 2 days off from school to be down here, generally not thinking about school. On Saturday, Roann will be launched at the Mystic Seaport. That’s the beautiful eastern-rig dragger that I worked on last summer at the seaport. It’s been a long time coming, and the party after the launching should be a big one. I’ll try to remember to take some photos!
At the beginning of the week I made up the T-shaped toe rails. The final product looks like this:
Ok, it looks like that when it’s upside down.
It fits into the dado we cut into the cap rail some time ago.
Making these long things was fairly easy. First, you get as long a board as possible (I needed a minimum 16′ for these guys) and thickness plane it to 15/16″ thick (no magic in this dimension, it just looked good when I made up a test piece).
Next, cut the radius on the shaper. You can do this on both edges of the board in order to get 2 pieces of molding while working with this one board.
Cut the lip that forms the underside of the toe rail on the table saw.
Cut, flip, cut the other side. Flip the board end over end, repeat. You get this:
The tenon on the toe rail is only 3/16″ tall, so a 2nd pass on the table saw with the fence bumped over a bit less than 1/8″ should do the trick.
One last pass with the fence bumped over a bit and the blade raised cuts off the toe rail.
By the way, it helps a lot to use a couple of feather boards to guard against board wiggle.
Installing these guys wasn’t particularly hard. The miters at the aft corners were tricky (turned out to be 34 3/4 degree bevels) but the real work was making the connecting piece at the forward end. If the toe rails came together in a simple miter, that would be one thing, but this connector is another thing entirely. The idea is to make a piece that looks like the toe rail flows around a tight curve. Here’s the area we’re working with. The blue tape is there to protect the cap rail and to give me something to mark on.
You see the dado running in a curve there? The front piece has to connect to a long piece of toe rail coming forward, curve around over that dado, and connect to the other piece of toe rail. All the while, it should have the same profile as the toe rail… it should appear to be a single, seamless rail.
First step was to pattern it out. In order to get the shape of the dado on paper, I did a rubbing, like people do with tombstones.
This gave me an accurate picture of one edge of the dado.
The canvassed edge was too soft, so it can’t be rubbed well. No matter, the dado is 1/2″ wide, so I can use this one line to create the inside line. After that, it’s time to draw up the pattern for the whole thing.
With this glued to my stock, I can begin to rout out the tenon.
Ah ha! Did you notice that you can’t rout the tenon from this side of the drawing?? This is looking down on the dado, and if you put this on the bottom of the stock in this orientation, you’d cut the mirror image. Now, hopefully the dado is exactly symmetrical and that doesn’t make a difference, but really, why tempt fate? In this case, trace the lines through the underside of your drawing first, then glue it onto the underside of your stock with the original drawing facing up. NOW it’s time to rout out the tenon.
Oh, wait, gotta hold this piece somehow and provide a stable base for the router to ride on. Cut out the middle section, screw it to the table, and use scrap wood to press up against the outside edges.
Those thin strips of wood sticking out between the stock and the scraps wedge and hold the stock in place. Here I’ve routed out the tenon.
Now, the tricky bit here is that this piece has to fit like a glove on both the deck and the covering board. The thing is, this isn’t a flat surface. The whole thing slopes down to either side and the decked section is higher than the covering board.
Granted, these are small deviations, but this is one of those fine woodworking joints that owners look at, so I want it to fit like a glove.
I say this to make the next sentence understandable.
I threw the first attempt away after working on it for 5 hours. I’d managed to get it to fit against the deck and covering board well, but by that time I’d removed too much wood and it was no longer thick enough to make the transition to the toe rail Wrong time for a re-do. Time is precious.
But, when life hands you lemons, you cuss out life for a bit, throw the lemons in the fridge to make lemon chicken later, and get back to work.
So, attempt #2 started the same way as #1, but a little more efficiently I think. Trace the dado as before,
and lay out the outer edges where the toe rails will meet up with this piece. That gives me very accurate lines to use when patterning out the inner and outer edges of the transition. A compass is set to make the curves at the apex of the transition piece, and it’s all drawn.
This time, I did some primary shaping on the underside the block before applying the pattern. I was thinking that this would save me time, but it didn’t do that much.
Then, mark through the paper with little holes in order to make the pattern available on the underside of the stock. Once it’s glued on, connect the holes to get a full transfer of the pattern on the underside of the paper.
I cut close to the pattern lines, and as before, I routed out the tenon. This time, however, a little work on the piece showed me that it was a real pain in the neck to work on the fit while the tenon was in place. It would be much easier if I was just fitting a somewhat flat piece to the boat. So, I marked out the inside and outside edges of the piece on the blue tape so it would always be in the right orientation when I fit it,
and then cut the tenon off.
Now I could fit the tenon independently from the main body of the piece. When both were right, I’d screw and glue them together, using the tracing I just made to orient them.
The tenon is quite fragile because of the grain orientation at the apex… you could snap it easily. It fit the dado well, but it was a little tall and needed to be planed down to fit just to the surface of the dado. I could have planed it in place, but that would have risked me planing into either the covering board or the canvas, so it was a better idea to make a holder just for this piece. That was easy. Trace the tenon on a scrap of wood, and then rout out the groove to about the depth of the dado on the boat.
Now you can plane the tenon easily, and the tenon is well supported in all directions.
Lastly, I made a stand to work on the transition piece. This has to be shaped by hand to match the profile of the toe rails, and I needed to be able to move a tool all around the piece as I worked on it. An elevated stand seemed to be the best solution.
Here it is with just a little bit of the shaping going on. This attempt only took a couple of hours. But, by the time I got to this stage, it was the end of the day on Wednesday and I needed to drive up to NH to pick up Olin for the drive down on Thursday. Hopefully Mike will have been able to finish it up while I’ve been gone. I feel rotten about dropping this in his lap, but he’s talented and very precise, so I know he’ll do an excellent job. We’ll see how it’s looking on Monday morning!�