22.) A Bow to the Bow

One of the things I appreciate most about the way this boat was built years ago is the craftsmanship that went into the construction of the rails at the bow. The photo above gives a bird's eye view, looking straight down at it.

The detail of how to build this part of the boat was specified on the architectural plans. But it's different than the end result. So it might be that the woodworkers at Zephyr Boat Works came up with a better way to do it.

I want to document it here--and note how great it is--before I destroy it. Unfortunately, I am not going to be able to preserve this part of the boat.  There has just been too much damage and stress on this area over the past 65 or so years (some of that presumably from hitting other Interclubs on the race course).

Check out the construction, though.  As the rails come around the starboard and port sides, they need to be connected somewhere.  The method employed avoids having them all joined at one point, which would lead to a potential weak spot at a place in the boat that can't afford to be weak.  Instead, the rails are split and interconnected so that some parts of them wrap all of the way around the boat to the adjoining side.

You can see this better in the photo below, for which I removed the center fitting and sanded off the finish.  Note how only some of the strips meet in the center; the rest continue all of the way around.  Two types of wood were used in the construction of the rails: mahogany and spruce.

The final photo is a shot of the starboard rail about 24 inches back from the bow. It shows the starting point for the thin strips of mahogany that wrap around the front of the bow.  The two larger strips that continue toward the bow are gradually tapered to the points you can see in the photos above.

Pretty groovy, huh?