Slow Progress

The other title for this post could be "Lots of little jobs that don't add up to much"

I've switched gears into hardware / mast mode while Pat and Phil have been working on the interior, so the boat looks a lot like it did 2 weeks ago. The annual boat show in Portland was this weekend, so we cleaned up the boat and work area for a photo shoot. Still no takers, so the boat can still be yours! Buy now and you get to pick the color.

I went up to Sommes Sound on Mt. Desert Island to look at the original mermaids again. Spent a couple hours measuring the locations of fittings on the mast, cleat sizes, line sizes, and talking to an owner about how he set up the running rigging (sheets / halyards). Pretty exciting stuff, as now I know how the rest of the boat is going together. There is nothing left but to buckle down and finish her.

To that end, here is a preview of the cockpit layout, which in my humble opinion, will be nicer than the original mermaids, as the sole and the seats follow the curve of the combing.

One interesting problem is how to make the hole for the rudder post perfect. It is a 1 1/2" diameter hole which angles thru the keel in such a way to hit the back edge of the lead. There is about 3' between the bottom of the keel and the lead. Here is the solution.

I start by drilling a 1" hole as best I can, with help from my partners sighting the virtual line from the bottom of the keel to the lead. Then we put a 7/8" rod into the hole and line it up using the bearings you see in the pictures clamped/screwed to the boat. The trick is the rod has a place to hold little cutters which you can stick out anywhere between 0 and 1/2 inch. Once everything is lined up, I can slowly push out the cutters, do a little drilling, and make the hole larger, so even if the original 1" hole was off center, or at an incorrect angle, by the time I've expanded it to 1 1/2" it is perfect.

I'm now waiting for a bronze fitting to continue with the rudder work, so I've switched gears to the spars. The spars are pretty simple on this boat. They are not round, which was a little bit of a disappointment to me, as I have yet to make something round, but I still have the tiller and the spinnaker pole. The boom is a simple T shape.

The mast is a hollow box, which tapers from the bottom to the top. I spent a few days laying / cutting these side pieces out, much like I would cut out a plank from a long piece of cedar. These are sitka spruce, by the way. The side pieces are only 11/16" at the top, and I had some bad grain run out, so as I was planing down to the final thickness, one of them snapped off. Bummer. Oh well, better to find out now than at the launch. I chopped off the one that made it thru but still looked sketchy and scarphed on new pieces.

Not too exciting yet, but I now have all the pieces, so this should get glued up next week.

I also awoke the inner engineer and made a spreadsheet of all the fittings we are going to need. In total, there are about 100 individual pieces. A couple will require the services of a welder, 2 will be custom castings, several will be homemade, and the rest will require a lot of cold hard cash. Almost everything will be bronze. There is a salty old collector (and I mean that in the kindest of ways) nearby who has almost everything we need. He collects old hardware, cleans it up and resells it. His property is something straight out of a Wooden Boat feature. . . a small cedar shaked house on the ocean, a large workshop with hardly any space to walk thanks to years of not throwing anything away that could be useful, and a 40' trawler in the "temporary" attached shed which has been in the works for 10 years and launches this summer.

In other shop news, the Haj is all buttoned up and they have begun fairing. They replaced the rudder post, which (knock on wood) should be the last backwards movement on this big renovation project.

The boat just got a lot bigger

I thought a lot about how to get this ungainly piece of lead and wood aligned properly underneath the boat. Having a couple of bolts in the keel at the start, just barely sticking out of the top seemed like the best way to align the thing with the holes in the bottom of the boat. At first, I thought we'd roll the keel under the boat, align it, and jack it up until we could tighten the bolts. The last step is easy, but how do you roll and align the keel without tipping it over at some point and crushing the volunteer who is helping you out?

The solution was to leave the keel in place, and align the boat to the keel. We've got video of this process, but I haven't been able to upload and edit it. Hopefully I'll have it for the next post. But this picture should give you the basic idea. . .

We used a chain hoist to position the boat above the keel. Side to side alignment was easy since the chain hoist could be moved along its support beam left and right (relative to the boat). We were about 8" off front to back though. No problem. . . just put the boat on the popits, move the straps to change the center of balance and then lift the boat again. The boat moves forward or back to balance depending on how you move the straps. We did this twice and got within 1/2". At that point, we just asked a bunch of folks to push the boat into position while we slowly lowered it onto the bolts.

Things are moving swiftly now since last time was a bunch of prep work. The dynel for the deck went on pretty easily. The only part which took a little patience was the wrap around the deck.

The one thing I forgot about when we started this process at 4 in the afternoon is that you want to trim the excess cloth off about 4-5 hours later when the epoxy starts to set, but is still "green." Otherwise you have to grind it off the next day when it is hard as plastic. So we had to head back to the shop around 10 at night to clean everything up.

To finish off the edge of the deck we fill in the the rabbet (along the side of the boat) with thickened epoxy (the rabbet is 1/8" deep and the dynel does not fill it in), sand it fair and then round it over.

Remember the cockpit combing? Time to get that in position. Clamping it to the carlin and screwing it into the cockpit area is easy enough. But what about the big curved and twisted area up front? Sure we steamed it, but that was a couple weeks ago, and 3/4" white oak likes to be, well, straight. After trying to wrestle these pieces together with big bar clamps that stretched into the cockpit as well as over to the sides of the boat, we finally gave up and spent some time to set up a proper clamping jig, braced off the ceiling.

The last step was to drill 3" screws up through the deck into the combing. That went o.k.

A little paint, and now she looks like a real boat!

This shot gives a little hint at the next step. Look behind the keel and you'll see a little sighting set up we used to drill the hole for the rudder rod. This is a 1 1/2" hole that has to be angled perfectly to hit the back of the keel along the centerline of the boat.

Before I sign off, just a couple updates on the rest of the shop.

Susan Skiff land is cranking. . . all the boats have their planking (sides and bottom) completed.

The A&R tender and Whitehall are almost done as well.