A Shipwright in Training

On Saturday, May 17th, Roann was relaunched after more than 3 years of steady work.  

Everyone said it, and I said it too… you can’t believe how different she looks outside when you’re used to seeing her inside.  In the shop, you never get to back up and see her completely… you only get to see sections at a time.  Outside, you can step back and see her for the big, saucy, shapely craft she is.

Who’s a pretty boat?  WHO’S a pretty boat??  You are!

Walt Ansel, the lead shipwright, described her aft end as “bodacious.”

Absolutely, Walt.  You can’t describe her without moving your hands as if you’re running them along her. Read the rest of this entry »

Ok, it’s been 2 weeks since my last entry. The following have happened in the following order:

• I made a lot more splines to fit between the stringers on Roann
• I made a new set of pads to go over the stairs leading down into the hold of the Charles W. Morgan
• I packed up my tools and said goodbye to Mystic Seaport
• I packed up my car and said hello to Merck Forest for 4 days
• I unpacked my tools and said hello to IYRS for another year

Wow. When you put that in a bullet list, it just doesn’t seem like 2 weeks worth of events, but I have 4 loads of laundry that will argue otherwise.

Mystic seaport… after 3 months working there full time, I can say with complete confidence, that, yes, I’ve used lots of really old, really cool tools. I thought it was high time that I gave a little behind the scenes workshop tour for folks that care about that sort of thing.

And, really, if you’re reading this kind of blog, you just get all breathy over this sort of thing. Fess up, it’s ok. Me too.

Our actual workshop space is a little cramped with machinery, but it’s long and we’ve rarely felt crowded.

The space is old, and steeped in history. For instance, this photo on the wall shows a group of shipwrights here quite a while ago… maybe 1940’s or 1950’s?

You can’t really see it in that picture, but above their heads on a rafter is a sign that says “THE MAN WHO LENDS TOOLS AIN’T HERE TODAY!!” That exact sign is still on the wall today.

It’s little bits of history all over the place that makes the shop feel different than any other shop I’ve been in.

Most of the tools around the shop are older than I am. However, they were built to last, and with good maintainence, they continue to work beautifully. Here’s just a sampling.

The wide belt sander. It’s a beast.

The disc sander.

Just look at the size of the control wheel to adjust the table angle. This was before companies started combining disc and belt sanders into one machine.

Yes, under those piles of wood is a very big lathe. The headstock is to the left, buried within the wooden box. The tailstock is visible near the middle of the picture. Those giant beams there that the various wooden parts are sitting on… that’s the base of this beast. As you can see, we don’t use it much. There’s a much smaller lathe to the left of this one. Thing is, this isn’t the largest lathe in the shop. There’s a spar lathe that’s essentially set up on railroad rails and can turn spars over 70′ long. No photos right now… sorry.

In the main shop area are 2 monstrous thickness planers.

The whole place shudders when you turn them on. One of the guys in the shop is deaf, and he is aware when we run that first one… he can feel the vibrations in his body.

Of course, no shop runs without a planer.

And there’s the table saw of course.

However, this one is unique. Notice the huge height adjustment wheel. On this particular saw, the blade doesn’t move. Instead, the entire table top goes up and down. It has a huge motor fixed to the floor, and this thing has more torque than any saw I’ve ever used.

Naturally, every boatyard has piles of band saws. We live on band saws, and over the last 3 months I can say that my skills have really improved on these guys. When the saw is well set up, I can now split a pencil line reliably for most of the length of a cut.

Here’s the big ships saw.

The table of a ship’s saw doesn’t tilt like a normal band saw table would. That’s because the designers assumed you’d be sending huge chunks of wood through this puppy, and they’d just slide off of an inclined table. Instead, the entire blad support and motor unit tilts. It’s really quite dramatic to see it in operation. And, it’s surprisingingly quiet.

Here’s a beast you don’t see every day: a dedicated resaw band saw.

This band saw is designed to take wide boards and cut them into slices. Sorry for the lousy photo, but you’ll just have to take my word for it. I’d never seen another machine like it.

So, that’s where I’ve been spending my days for the past 3 months when I wasn’t inside the boat.
When I left, we’d made a good dent on putting in the splines between the stringers.

The ceilings have been painted white, and the white patchy stuff in between the stringers is the 5200 that glues in and covers over the splines.
At the shop we use wood scraps in lieu of paper for notes. When I measure out the width of the gap that the spline goes into, I’ll jot down the width and where along the length of the spline that width occurs.

I mark the width’s in 16ths of an inch. In this photo, the widths are marked across the top right edge of the scrap, and the distances from the end are at the bottom left. You can see that I started measuring from the right side of the spline, and that the gap was 7/16ths wide at the zero point. By 8 3/4″ from the end, the gap had narrowed slightly to a little more than 6/16th’s (the 6+ mark), and by 16″ from the end, it was down to exactly 6/16ths (or 3/8″ if you want to use normal terminology and reduce the fraction).
Armed with this information I’d mark out a spline, cut it to width on the band saw, and tune it up with a hand plane to get right on my line.

In this photo, the lighter strip of oak is the spline. It’s sitting on a yellowed pine shooting board. If I measure and cut everything right, the spline slides into the gap with just moderate tapping from a hammer. Here’s a good one.

No gaps and an even bead of 5200.

The last 2 days at Mystic were spent making up new stair treads for a set of stairs leading down into the hold of the whaling ship, Charles W. Morgan. No photos, sorry bout that. Not really stunning work anyway… just the basic maintainance stuff that needs to be done when thousands of folks come walking on the ship throughout the season.

It was fun to be down there screwing things in with a hand brace

(no, I’m not trying to be “traditional,” it’s just that the damn batteries on my drill crapped out.) and hearing the kids come down into the hold. This conversation happened a lot:

“Mom, there’s a guy still working on the boat!”

“No, honey, they’re not still building the boat.”

“Yes they are!”

“Oh, ok, well keep away from the nice man and don’t interrupt him.”

At this point, I’d say “Hi” to the kid to indicate that I am in fact Three Feet Away From Them and can hear their entire conversation just fine. The kids would usually ask questions and eventually the adults would get it that this is a museum and that the staff doesn’t mind answering questions. NOTE TO PARENTS: I think it’s a good thing for kids to ask questions when they don’t understand something. If the workman is tired of answering questions, it’s his responsibility to indicate this. It’s not the kid’s job to rescue the adult from this responsibility by shutting up, and it’s not the kid’s fault if the adult is uncomfortable with assertiveness. There are many perfectly polite ways of telling someone that you’re not going to talk with them any more.

Yow, is it obvious that I was a child psychologist?

I’ll miss Mystic. There’s a really nice camaraderie there, the pace is relaxed, and skill level of my colleagues was truly impressive. It’s on the list of possible places to land after school is done.

However, I haven’t had a real vacation in a long time, so I took off to Vermont for 4 days and stayed in a beautiful cabin at Merck Forest.

Quiet, no electricity or running water, inexpensive, organic produce at the visitor’s center, beautiful views every morning, lots of trails to hike…

big enough for a lot of friends if you like…

It’s perfect for a winter xc ski group as well.

It was just the right place to land after a summer of 6-day work weeks. Next Tuesday it’s back to IYRS… but that’s a story for another time.

Bruno Dawg here.

I was not happy yezterday.  Rainey hed mi chew toy.

So i askd for it. I wuz nice.

She sed no.

So I sat awn her.

What?

Sumtimez you have to wate a wile.  And den…

She jus fergets.

I dont ferget.

Thiz is my secret to happynez.

Sit on problemz until they go away.

Jus cuz im dawg doznt meen im not smart.

A while back, I wrote about the secrets to happiness. There were 3 things I’d noticed that kept me feeling happy that day. They were;

1. Find something interesting to do that will save you time and materials, and then do it.
2. Find something sort of hard to do, do it right, and then keep doing it all day.
3. Take time out to enjoy it when things go just right.

Recently I’ve been unhappy, and, being an ex-shrink, I decided to think about why I was feeling that way, rather than simply throw a board across the room like a normal person. Let me just say this before going any further: both are perfectly viable strategies. Psychologists and spouses will tell you that you should think about things rather than throw boards, but throwing something feels wonderful, and many women are impressed if you just do it every now and then. It shows that you’re passionate. Too much, and it shows that you’re a jerk with no self control.

So, unhappiness. I think it was Solzhenitsyn that said that a man is happy as long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him. The same is true with feeling miserable.

The secret to unhappiness these days is to spend hours doing slow, careful, frustratingly difficult work, when there is another solution available that is faster, simpler, easier, uses fewer materials, and will look consistently better in the end. When you’re in this situation, your mind will tend to do at least one of these things:

1. Repeatedly go over the fact that you are doing a slow difficult thing when there is an easier fast option
2. It will become highly creative in examining the easier option and will soon spawn off a whole series of variations all clustered under the heading “Better Options”
3. It may play out conversations it could have with people about your predicament. It may think about blogging your predicament to complete strangers. The goal of these conversations is to get responses like, “Oh, that’s just ridiculous! You are completely and utterly right in all that you say” and so on.
4. It may reconsider the blogging option, as there’s always the chance that a) a supervisor will read your blog, or b) someone more experienced than you might respond with a well-reasoned and snarky explanation about why what you’re doing is in fact the ONLY reasonable option. Either of these would lead to more unhappiness.

If you allow your mind time and space to do any of the above, you will achieve unhappiness. Blissful, tar-baby like unhappiness. People may sense that something is going on, and ask if you’re all right. If you have any tendencies towards being a drama queen, this will kick them into high gear. If you’re passive aggressive, you’ll do your best Eeyore, release a little deflated sigh and say, “Oh, no, it’s nothing really.” If you enjoy anger, you may take this as an opportunity to magically transform your unhappiness into outrage and vent a little spleen.

Or, if you’re an ex-shrink with a tendency towards over achievement, you may bend to the work and think about your blog.

There, that’s it. That’s all I really had to say about unhappiness.

Work has been interesting. Let’s talk about that.

Last week was filled with interesting, useful work. Since the boat has been planked for some time now, the planks have been slowly drying out in the shop. Drying and shrinking. The caulkers have been working diligently trying to get the seams all filled up, but there are some seams that had opened up way too much. When that happens, we make wooden splines that fill the gap, called feathers.

The feathers are thin strips of wood, tapered at the outer edge, that slide into the gap between the planks. They are just thick enough to close the gap on the inside edge of the plank, but thin enough so that there is still space for caulking. We glue them into place using thick shellac.

You can see a section I’ve worked on here.  We hold the feathers into the seams using little wedges.

Some of these end up being quite thin at the feather edge in order to make sure that there’s still space left in the gap for caulking.  This one is thin enough to be almost translucent at the edge.  I had to make sure my plane was razor sharp for these guys to avoid tear out.

Here’s a shot of the slot with a feather in it.  The light is from a flashlight.  There are 2 wedges holding it in the slot, and you can see a thin black line above the feather.  That’s the tiny gap left between the planks because the feather wasn’t absolutely perfect.  It’s well within tolerances though, so no problem.

There was quite a bit of feathering to do, but it was calm and meditative.  The weather had been quite warm and humid last week as well, so it was nice to be doing something outside the boat in what little breeze came through the shop. 

This week it was back inside the boat.  At least the weather’s cooled down, so it’s not a little oven in there.  Shawn and Barry did an excellent job finishing up the lower course of ceilings there.  Here’s a view looking forward.  The ceilings are the lighter wood, the stringers are the gray painted wood.

The stringers were installed a long time ago, and they’re oak, so they’ve shrunk over time.  They used to be tight up against each other, like the ceilings are now, but now there’s gaps.

Lots of long, wavy, undulating gaps.  Some are very thin, and some are as wide as 5/8″. 

It was decided that the gaps should be filled.  With wood.  Not with putty.  I’m just sayin‘.

Have I mentioned that there are a lot of gaps? 

So, the way to fill said gaps is to cut a thin strip of oak, plane or sand it along its length so that its width matches the undulations of the gap, and fit it into the concave curve of the hull so tightly that it doesn’t spring out of its own accord.  We do get to use 5200 to help glue them in place.  Of course, 5200 is the Oobleck of the boat building world (Dr. Suess ref there:  it gets on and sticks to everything), so it’s just more fun than words can convey to work with.  If your strip doesn’t match the gap exactly, part of it will pop out, and there’s really no way to clamp it in place while the 5200 sets up. 

Of course, you could just press in some foam backer bead between the stringers and fill the gaps with latex caulk or something, but I’m sure it wouldn’t work nearly as well as making thin shims.  No no no.

Really, it’s more fun to do this in the cramped confines of a boat with no real flat work surface to work on.

Shawn, ever resourceful, brought a portable workbench down into the boat, and clamped it into place so that it wouldn’t move when we planed the thin oak strips on it.

The workmate benches also have the excellent feature of having a table top that opens and closes.  Essentially the whole table top is a giant clamp.  That’s extra handy when trying to hold a thin strip of oak in place as you plane here and there to match the waves in the stringer gap.  That one idea made a world of difference.

Next, it was my turn to be clever.  Rather than try to estimate the changing gap width and then painstakingly fit each strip, take it out, plane, re-fit, take it out… ad nauseum, I thought it would be prudent to come up with a way to accurately measure the gap in the first place so that we could cut our strips close to the proper width the first time.  So, I made up a taper gauge. 

If you don’t know what this is, it’s a strip of wood with a consistent angle ramp cut into it.  You measure the thickness of the strip along the ramp and mark it.  When you insert the gauge into the slot, you can now read the precise width of the slot by how far the gauge goes in.  I’ve got it marked in 16th’s of an inch. 

Mark the thickness as you go along the gap, and now you can know how the slot opens and closes along its length.  It’s a simple matter to transfer that information to your strip, and then cut the wavy thickness on the bandsaw.  A little tapering on the inside edge to make it slide easily into your gap, a little fine tuning with a power planer, hand plane, or stationary sander, and you can often make them fit just about right with only a little more test fitting.

And then the unhappiness goes away.

Still, the caulk would have worked fine.  I’m just sayin. 

Here’s some new strips waiting to be pounded into the gap (so they don’t spring out).  The glued strips are white. 

Sorry about the photo quality, camera phone.  I keep saying I’ll remember to bring my real camera.

I’ve been thinking; this blog has taken an almost exclusive turn to documenting my daily work with boats.  It’s not a bad direction, and I think it’s far more interesting than boat school gossip or attempts to wax philosophical about the place of the craftsman in modern society.  I’d run screaming from that blog. 

Nevertheless, the initial point of this little exercise was to track how one person manages a fairly radical career shift in late mid-life.  I should probably talk about that too.

Lots of folks have written to say how much they’d love to do something like this themselves and that they harbor a not-so-secret fantasy of ditching it all and running away with the circus, or to boat school.  So far no one has fessed up to wanting to run away with Paris Hilton, and really, if you want to do that it’s best to keep it to yourself.  I realize that I haven’t mentioned that from time to time I stop and say to myself:

“What the hell was I thinking?  This is hot and dirty and tiring work, promising only more of the same for hardly any money.  I’ve got to run back to a nice little office job while I still can!”  Usually there are more expletives, but you get the idea. 

These kinds of thoughts usually crop up when I think about the money side of things. Thinking too much about the money is a real a soul killer.  I find myself radically shifting away from my initial goals and going towards things that I have no interest in at all, other than they may pay well.

So, the exercise I’ve been doing while working on difficult or boring tasks is this:  I ask, “what’s the good in what I’m doing?  If I only had to do it for a little while, and then do something really dull, what would I miss about this?  Is this a part of the path towards what I really want to be doing?’  Sometimes I realize that I’m in totally new territory and that I have no idea if what I’m doing is part of what I want to be doing eventually. 

And then there are times, like today, when I realize that I’m more skilled now than I was a year ago.  I was doing a simple thing this afternoon, putting feathers in between planks.  Feathers are thin shims of wood used to close up gaps when the planks have shrunk open too much.  I realized that as I was shaving these feathers down to fit that I was moving quickly and only using my eye to gage how much to plane off after each test fit.  I wasn’t worried about getting it wrong or obsessing about getting it perfect.  I just knew what to do to get them the way I wanted. 

And that’s the kind of thing I’m shooting for with this career change.  It’s not that it’s essential that I end up a boat builder, or restoration specialist, or furniture maker.  It’s that I have a greater percentage of my time where I feel fully engaged in and able to handle the work at hand.  It’s the same thing I love about being relaxed and present with other people.

So, the state of the state is this: As I get more clear about what I value, I’m less wedded to the initial goal of building boats, but still committed to working primarily with wood.  The most valuable things these days are:

Working with people I enjoy

Generally interesting problems to solve

A mix of strenuous and detail-oriented tasks

The opportunity to do something approaching art, something where I have to trust my eye.