A Shipwright in Training

Installing the jib car track should be a simple deal.  Get track, cut to length, bolt it onto the boat.  Soooo easy.

Well, the folks who made the track we need went out of business, but, hey, lucky us!  Someone bought all their stock, and now they will sell it to us.  All we had to do is have Warren meet them at a rest area by the highway so the truck could stop on it’s way to somewhere else and drop off the 2 lengths that we needed.  “So, youse showed up?  Well my pal and I was thinkin… the price of gas bein what it is, we thinks the items you wants now cost twice as much.  Youse gots a problem with that?  That’s a nice car you gots there.  Shame if someone was to drive a truck into it and break the drivers legs or somethin, know what I mean?”

Ok, so we get 2 lengths of bronze track, a total of 20′ 2″ for over $700.

Cutting it to length was easy.  At that price, I should save the shavings.

Now, comes the fun part: shaping it.  The boat is curved, so a straight length of track stuck on it would look awful.  So, it has to be curved to match the sweep of the boat.  The curve goes side-to-side, through the thickest part of the track, so there’s no way to do it by hand.  The track is way too thick for that.  No kinks, and no mess-ups, because bronze can break if you bend it back and forth too much.  No pressure, but hey, don’t screw up.

So, I templated out the curve of the cap rail where this will go, to get the proper curve, and made up a jig to bend this sucker. 

This is the same metal bending press I used earlier for shaping the swallowtails that brace the running backstays.  In this case, the jig has to hold the track vertical, and not dent the soft bronze while it gets pressed.  Here’s a close up.

The blue arrow points to the wiper that presses down on the track.  The black arrow points to a plate I welded to the wiper that spreads out the pressure to keep the wiper from making a dent on the top of the track.  The track is the gold colored stuff by the way.  The red arrow points to one of 2 square lengths of steel that hold the track straight up and down.  The green arrow points to one of 2 rods on either side of the wiper that hold the track up.  When the wiper pressed down, the track bends between these 2 rods.  The plate resting on the rod distributes the pressure, just like the one on the wiper. 

The whole process started out as trial and error:  bend a bit, put it on my template to see what that amount of pressure did, adjust, bend again.  After I while I got pretty good at it.  Here’s the tracks sitting on top of the template before being bent.  You can see the slight curve in the template on the right. 

One section of track had a twist to it that needed to be straighted out.  The only solution we could come up with was to clamp the track to a bench, attach a big clamp to the end, and use that as a lever to twist it. 

It worked surprisingly well.  But again, it was hairy… what if I snap this stuff??!!  Fat chance of that really, it’s 1/2″ thick and strong as hell.

In the end, it followed the sheer very nicely.

There was a 2nd set of tracks by the mast, and those had to be straight.  Naturally, the track that was left over after cutting the long curved tracks was… crooked.  So, back to the press with that stuff, and another chunk of time learning how to un-kink track. 

Then it was under the boat to caulk the garboard / keel seams.  This is the only place in the boat that gets caulked.  The rest of the planks on double planked boats have inner and outer seams that don’t overlap, so the inner planking seals the outer planks seams. 

In some areas, folks that had patched up dings with epoxy didn’t bother to wipe the epoxy out of the caulking seam while it was wet, so I got to dig it out wth a reefing hook.  There was cursing.

There was also squeezed out shellac in the seam at places.  Not clearing that out was my fault.

I didn’t realize that this stuff would get on your caulking iron and make it all sticky… it grabs hunks of cotton and generally makes a mess.  Ok, reef that stuff out too.

But, once the seam was clear, it was back to re-learning the art of caulking.  I was happy that it came back pretty fast. 

Put you caulking iron up against the cotton vertically,

twist couterclockwise while holding it against the cotton,

this gives you a length of cotton to whack in.

Whack it with your mallet, and you’ve now tacked a section of caulking into the seam.

Do a series of these and you get a nice line.

It feels like sewing.  Then come along in a second pass and hammer it all home.  

Good caulkers sound like metronomes.  I did not sound that way. 

In the meantime, the painter, Tim Conway, came and hand painted the names on the big boats.

He said that most boats now get vinyl stick on letters, but this was all done by hand with gold leaf, sizing and paint.  It was very impressive to watch him work.

Madcap before the letters were outlined

And after.

Wow.

I’ve been at the school late most nights, and right after launch day will head up to Maine to bring a 40′ Concordia down.  I’ll be living on that boat for the next 6 months or so while we build Cherokee.  In other words, the blog may suffer from a combination of fatigue and lack of time. 

I promise, I’ll update as much as possible.

Launch day and graduation is 4 days away

HOWEVER, I’ll be doing the blow by blow at the Museum of Yachting’s web site to track Cherokee, and you can follow it here.  And this little blog will probably keep going too.

Tags: caulking, jib track, painting

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 5:59 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.