Lots of Little Boats. . . and Bronze!

As promised, we had a launching last week. All the new kids finished their Susan Skiffs, and the "seniors" completed the 2 fancy small boats started last fall. Unfortunately with 6 boats being launched there are a lot of people around, so I never got a good shot, but they looked great all sitting there on the beach.

All the builders (except Jamie, who graduated last december). From left to right, we have Doug, Josh (along with Jamie, my partner on the Twin project), Thor, Sarah, Andrew, Jeff, Matt, Hobbes, Phil (the intern. . . who built his boat alone as quickly as everyone else built theirs in pairs), Adam, and Drew.


Soon after that shot was taken. . . boats in the water. It's like a little armada out there.

The Whitehall. . .

And the A&R. . .
Back in the shop, I've been doing some shopping.

The collection of fittings has started. Besides these pieces (only about 1/3 of the fittings we'll buy), we've also had the the rudder post system fabricated (pics next time) and I've bought some bronze plate for fabricating some of the easier pieces. About $5,000 worth of bronze on this little boat (not counting the fasteners already in the boat). This is probably a good of time as any to talk about the economics of wooden boat building. I've kept a semi-close eye on expenses for this boat and here is my estimate of raw materials. . .

Bronze fittings $5,000
Sail (incl. rigging rod/track) $4,000
Wood $5,000
Mold/Jigs $800
Fastenings $3,000
Paint/Epoxy/Varnish $1000
Other $400

Total $19,200

Now add in depreciation costs for tools, the cost of heat, leasing a building, etc. . . and we haven't even gotten to labor costs yet. Sure, we are apprentices and it is taking us a year to do what the pros could do in a few months. But I'd imagine they would still like to get paid a little bit so they can eat and build another boat someday. Price on the mermaid today (from the apprenticeshop, where labor is free and fixed costs are subsidized by donations) is $30K. A steal at twice the price. My guess is a real boatyard would have to charge around $70K for this boat.

Back to the shop, and the business of making stuff. I've been varnishing the spars, so not much happening there. In the meantime, I've been working on the chainplates and their blocking. The chainplates are little bronze straps attached to the hull which you attach the shrouds to. The shrouds are the wires that run from the side of the boat to the top (or near top) of the mast, holding the mast in place. When going upwind, that's a lot of stress transferred to the hull, so things need to be solid.

Here is a quick shot of the actual chainplate. Just a piece of 1/4" bronze plate with a hole in the top, bent to the shape of the hull. No big deal. The real fun is the blocking.

Here is my first attempt. Seemed reasonable enough. I made a pattern of the shape of the hull, and cut out the block to that shape. It's subtle, but the back face of this piece is curved. . . think of the side cross section of the boat. Flat up top near the sheer, then curving down to meet the keel. Then I cut out the block so it will fit snug between the sheer clamp and the planking. Now it is just a matter of slipping this block under the clamp up and flush with the bottom of the clamp, bottom of the deck and inside of the planking. By the way, the slot in the deck in the upper left corner of this picture is where the bronze plate comes through.


See the problem yet? This block is impossible to install. It will fit, but to slide it under the clamp I have to start 4" below where it eventually will reside. The boat really starts to curve towards the keel there, so the block gets pinched between the clamp and the planking. If the frames weren't in the way we could go at this sideways, but, of course, they are. The correct answer is to install these things before the sheer clamp (i.e. 4 months ago). A bad solution is to shave off the top of the block until it fits, but then you don't have much of a backing block, do you?

Here is the actual solution. . . cut the block in half.

After a little bit of futzing and slotting out the back of the blocks to accept the plate. . . voila!

The bronze will bet clipped off at the bottom and the holes (just screw holes to hold the pieces together while I shaped them) will be filled and painted over, so these should look like solid blocks when all is said and done. The wedging action holds everything in place tightly, so installing the fasteners will be a breeze. One final shot which should give you an overall view of what is going on. . . keeping in mind the cockpit combing is causing a little illusion. The chainplates and their blocking are about 7 or 8 inches behind the combing, more or less parallel with it.

Next up. . . the rudder.

Spars

Short entry this week. We were on spring break for a little bit, so I got to go home and put some holes in one of our walls. They look nice, but again I have the camera issues, so no pictures. Same issue with the boat. . . not a lot of pictures.

I did get the camera working for this post, however. The mast is all put together. Looks pretty simple, just a long box, but there is internal structure (forever hidden) and a cool glue up jig that has now been taken apart. Oh well. The result is nice.

I took this picture of the bottom of the mast to give you some idea how this thing is put together. The bottom is actually the most complicated part, with internal blocking on all 4 walls as well as a center piece. About 80% of the mast is completely hollow, and only the very top and bottom foot of the mast are completely solid. Ignore the screw, as that is just for hanging the mast while I varnish it.

The 2 side pieces (call them the walls of the box) have a 1/8" rabbet in them which give a good glue surface / alignment aid for the top and bottom pieces. Before I glued up the box, however, I glued pieces onto the inside of the walls at the bottom of the mast, about 15' up (to support the spreader), and about 23' up (to support the jumper). At the very top and bottom I put in a center piece to make the mast solid.

To glue up the mast I built a 30' long bench. I use the term bench loosely as it was only 2" above the floor. That was all we needed to get a clamp under it for the glue up. The bench also gave me a surface to draw out the shape of the mast (it is curved from bottom to top) so as we glued it up we knew we were gluing it up correctly.

Inside the boat, the seats and sole are coming along. There will be little storage shelves behind the seats, underneath the combing.

The Haj is starting to look really good. This is the view from our boat. Pretty nice work environment.

Next post. . . Launch day! No, not for me, but the small boats are getting thrown in the water.

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.

A few days of preparation

The boat doesn't look all that different from last time.
Except, of course, it's up in the air.


We finished up the 2nd layer of decking, but didn't have the Dynel in, so we shifted gears and started working on the keel. Before I get to that, here is how the Dynel will fair into the boat.


Look closely, and you can see a 1/8" X 3/4" rabbet cut into the boat. Starting at the edge of the boat and going down you see the 2 layers of plywood, then a light strip which is actually the planking, and then another dark strip, which is actually a corner. I used the fancy plane modeled in the picture. I never got to use all the depth and width fences before. Works really sweet. The Dynel will be put onto the deck and wrapped around into the rabbet. It will be wet out with epoxy which will hold it down and seal the deck.

But no Dynel yet. So we put the boat up on popits and started messing with the deadwood. The first step is to fit the top of the deadwood to the bottom of the boat. It took me about 10 fittings before I was satisfied. Getting that wood clamped into position was not all that much fun, but it was a good workout. The deadwood weighs around 80 - 100 lbs.


Next we gather all the pieces together.


The deadwood pattern is back, and screwed to the boat. At this point we have drilled small holes (8 of em) through the bottom of the boat and just barely into the deadwood where all the keelbolts will go. We then stick a long drill bit through the holes while the pattern is in place. We mark where the drill bit wants to go on the pattern, line up the pattern on the actual deadwood and now know where to drill the big holes in the deadwood. It takes 3 of us (1 to drill, 1 to sight left and right and 1 to sight fore and aft), but we can then drill an accurate hole through the deadwood.

One reason we drill the deadwood first is that it is the easiest to fix if we screw up. The landing pad for the longest bolt (33") is about 1 1/2" square at the top and the bottom. And the bolt is 3/4" wide. Not a lot of room for error. But if we can get the deadwood drilled correctly, it will be pretty easy to drill thru the floor timbers and lead, using the deadwood as a guide. And if the deadwood is not drilled correctly, you just tap a dowel into the errant hole and do it again the next day.

Here the deadwood is set up for drilling out the lead. You can see the lines that indicate where the holes are. We clamped these together and Pat spent a couple days drilling lead. Once the lead was drilled out, we put the deadwood onto the boat and drilled the other direction, up through the boat.




The bolts are ready. . .


The deadwood and lead are now temporarily bolted together. This will allow me to fair the oak into the lead. I have to take off about 1/8" on one side.


Today we thought we were pretty much ready to put the keel onto the boat. Unfortunately, when Pat drilled out the last hole, we found a huge void in the middle of the lead. Oh well, we'll have to do a miniature lead pour on Monday. But after these few days of preparation, the keel and deck should be on next week.

"The boat just got a lot smaller"

Lots of boat stuff this time, but first, some atmospherics. I woke up to light snow, fog and low tide last week. None of which is surprising, but when they happen all at the same time (especially first light) the effect on the waterfront is striking.

Inside, there are a few more things to do before we put on the deck. First up, the knees. The big ones are located at the front of the cockpit. These are traditionally constructed knees. One piece, taken out of a piece of hackmatack with the proper grain direction (see the pre launch post from June 2009). These guys were a challenge to fit. They fit tightly against the deckbeam, the sheer clamp, the frame, and, since they are quite a bit thicker than the frame, the planking. A total of 6 faces to get right.


There is also something called a "web knee" in the center of the cockpit. This one is made out of plywood. It serves two purposes, to strengthen the boat as a knee or bulkhead would, and also to act as the center support for the seats. We think they look like toilets.


The last pieces to make before decking are for the cockpit combing, which surrounds the cockpit and helps keep the sailors dry. These pieces are 14' x 8" x 3/4" oak which takes a big bend and twist at the front. So we'll need to steam them. They will not be installed until after the deck is on, but right now we have a lot of things to clamp to which will be covered by the deck. So we set up a bending jig right on the boat (note the carlin is the back 1/2 of the bending jig). . .


Gather a bunch of friends. . .


And voila! The next morning we can take of the clamps. Since these pieces (we did 2 separate steamings to avoid conflict at the front where the 2 combing pieces come together) won't be used for a week or so, we'll clamp them to the bench with some blocking and tensioning devices which will help them keep their general shape until we can get them permanently installed.


While the combings pieces were the last pieces to make, the last thing to do before decking is fair the top of the boat. We aimed to have all the deckbeams and blocking be a little proud of the final deck location. This way, we can put the camber gauge on a beam or a block, see where it hits, shave off a little wood, and repeat until the camber gauge sits nicely across the boat. The one rule is that you can't shave off the sides of the boat, the all important sheer line. This keeps the boat fair going fore to aft as well as side to side. A few places we had a gap in the center of the boat when the camber gauge was resting on the edge. In that case, the deck beams were too small (or we were too aggressive in our planing) and a little shim is required (see the foreground of this picture).


Once we are satisfied the plywood will lie fair on the beams and blocking, it is time for the deck, which is extraordinarily simple after all those fussy knees and bulkheads. You just lie the plywood on the boat, have someone sit on it, and mark out the edges of the boat, the cockpit, the blocking, and the beams from underneath. We can trim it later, so we don't even have the cut out the pieces all that accurately.

The deck will be built of 3 layers. 2 layers of 1/4" plywood covered by a coat of Dynel wet out with epoxy. The Dynel is the petroleum age version of canvas. Very non-traditional. One might ask after all that plank on frame stuff why switch to a more modern construction method? Turns out traditionally build decks simply do not last that long. They leak and cause problems with all those pieces we just installed (deckbeams, blockings, etc. . . ) Since these leaks are invariably fresh water in tight spaces, they lead to rot. So the decks often become the place of compromise for even the most fervent traditionalists who scoff at the idea of a cold-molded boat being called a wooden boat.

Back to the first layer of decking. This layer will be temporarily screwed down while a flexible marine glue (we use sikaflex) sets up. First we paint the bottom of the deck (much easier now than later, especially in the watertight compartments fore and aft). Remember how we scribed off where the deckbeams were? These marks allow us to tape off the deck support locations so we have a good glue surface (which paint is not).


And now some before and after pics, which caused our instructor Kevin to give me the title for this weeks post. . .