A Shipwright in Training

I got back on Monday and the toe rail transition piece was… exactly where I left it.  Warren put most of the crew on other jobs, so here we go.

Armed with (left to right) sandpaper, a good rasp, a pattern for the profile of the toe rail, a spokeshave, and sandpaper pressed up against a concave profile sanding head (the yellow sandpaper) I worked on the shape of the transition piece for about an hour.  As I started to get close, I used thin battens to make sure the inside and outside curves were fair.

It came out nicely I think.

But that’s just the transition.  I had to scarf the transition piece into the toe rail.  We used a nibbed scarf for this so that there wouldn’t be a feather edge.

Here you can see how the scarf doesn’t go right to the top (or the bottom in this photo since it’s upside down) of the transition piece.  That vertical edge forms the nib of the scarf.  The holder I made to work on the transition piece right side up works just fine to work on it upside down.  This part was easy as long as you mark your layout lines accurately and plane right to them.

The scarf in the toe rail is a bit harder.  On the way home for lunch it hit me how to make it… create a holder for the toe rail that holds the rail just low enough to plane the scarf and cut the nib at the same time.  Here’s what I’m talking about.

The holder (scrap 2×4) is routed out to make a slip fit for this scrap of toe rail.  The top of the rail protrudes above the holder by 1/8″, the depth of the nib.

Next, cut a ramp in the end of the holder that corresponds to the angle of the scarf in the transition piece.  Now, measure and saw your nib until the saw just touches the holder.Â

You’ve now sawed the nib at just the right depth.  Slide the rail to the edge of the ramp and plane it down to match the ramp.

And there you go, a nibbed scarf.  The vertical bit that you sawed will butt up against the vertical bit on the transition piece. 

A little fitting and fine tuning, and they fit together quite nicely.

That’s Lew’s fancy forestay fitting there by the way.  Nice, eh?  Here’s a close up of the nibbed scarf fit.

So, a coat of varnish last night

And ready to install today.

One of the toe rails has a knot in it that I’ve been very very careful with.  A knot makes the wood weak in case you didn’t know, and in something as thin as this, it’s extremely weak.  I made sure to put fastener holes on either side of it to make sure it was well supported when it was installed.  As I was just about ready to install it, people hammering inside the boat vibrated the deck, and the rail fell off.

See what I mean?  Very weak.  Goddammit. 

Luckily it was a clean break, and it went together fairly well.

A little magic with sanding and CA glue (super glue) should hide this.  Varnish will protect it as well.  The whole rail is bedded in 5200 (the stickiest stuff on the planet) so there’s no fear that the rail will be a problem here… the real problem is aesthetics and making sure the grain is protected from water. 

So, this is what all the fuss has been about.  Making it look like the toe rail makes a continuous curve at the front of the boat.

It came out well I think. 

And then I tightened the screw at the farthest right.  That screw goes right through the short grain of the wood, and I heard it make a little crack sound.

Oh triple goddammit.  Split right at the apex.

As of this writing, it’s clamped together, and I’m hoping that by tomorrow the 5200 will have bound it so tightly that the break can’t be seen.  Again… more CA and sanding to hide it.   Not the way I wanted this to go, but I don’t think any of it is serious.  It just sucks to have to repair something that you’ve worked so long and hard on.

It was 7 pm by that time and I thought it was a better idea to go home than to keep working and break something else.

11 days till launch, if you count the memorial day weekend and the last day of class (which is simply clean up). 

Deep breaths.

Tags: toerail, deck, repair

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 9:31 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.