32.) Weekend Among the Mystics

Marisa, Cosette, and I attended our first ever Wooden Boat Show at Mystic Seaport this past weekend. No, we didn't go to Mystic Pizza, but we still had a great time and even learned a few things. If you are interested in boats made out of something other than plastic, I'd recommend you do it at least once. There are a lot of great vessels—from dinghies to ships—to look at and, if you are inclined, interesting workshops to attend. Virtually all the advertisers in Wooden Boat magazine, which co-sponsors the event, set up a booth on the Seaport grounds, so there are a lot of experts around if you have questions. West Systems was in the house: so was Lee Valley, Jamestown Distributors (promoting their Total Boat line), Mas Epoxy, Chesapeake Light Craft, and many more. A marine lumber supplier was there with some very luminescent slabs of mahogany and spruce. The restored shipyard also functions as a mill and was selling some of their surplus, as well. There was even a guy selling a portable sawmill you could take home.

Four of the workshops interested me in particular (not so much Marisa or Cosette, who spent most of the time on a park bench fielding compliments. I am pretty sure the two got more than any of the boats.)  The workshops that I had scribbled on the program as MAs, or MUST ATTENDs focused on sharpening, lofting, steam bending, and vacuum bagging. I don't want to sound conceited, but the main thing I digested at these workshops is that I am much more informed about these subjects than 96.2% of the other folks present.  Another thing I learned: the apparent target demographic of this group is a 63-year-old, white, very nerdy male wearing sandals. All apparently were sussing out retirement options. Boy, did I ever feel out of place! I'm only 59.

A few tidbits from the classes:

—The biggest difference between furniture makers and boat builders is that furniture makers like a straight edge on their planes and chisels, whereas boat builders like theirs curved.  Makes sense when you consider that there are very few 90 degree corners on a boat.

—When you are using a batten to draw a curve on a layout board, there's a cool device you can use to pin the batten down at various spots along the curve that doesn't distort the shape and allows you to position the batten precisely.  It's called a spline weight. It's made of lead and kind of looks like a little whale with the top of a coat hanger for a head. (The are also sometimes referred to as spline ducks.) You can see some in the foreground of the photo below. This tidbit comes from the lofting class. The term "lofting" comes from the place where boatyards did most of this work because it was the only place around that was even remotely clean.  The attic or—ta da—loft.

—You need freshly sawmilled green wood for steam bending, especially in the case of white oak. Steam for about an hour per inch of thickness up to about 3 inches thick. The wood needs to be free of knots and the grain needs to run straight the length of the board. If the grain curves and runs out of the wood, it will probably break when you bend it.

—Vacuum bagging is pretty easy and can be done with inexpensive materials like Mortite (a clay-like substance that's mostly used for insulation), cheap plastic drop cloths, mosquito screen, and an air pump taken out of an old discarded refrigerator.

I'll be doing some steam bending and vacuum bagging as part of the project to restore #48, so you'll get to see whether I do it right or foul it up. I might even see if I can get or make some of those spline whales and try out that technique, too.

I bought a book at the show that I'd never seen before (Preliminary Design of Boats and Ships), but my biggest splurge was for two old wooden blocks that I got for $40 each from an antique tool vendor. I probably could have negotiated a lower price, because it turned out the vendor has been drowning in the things for years. When I asked how he got them, he described an anxious phone call he received a few years back from a family whose patriarch had died. Their panic related to what they had uncovered in the dead man's basement. Are there antique tools?, the vendor asked hopefully. Not really, the family replied. When the antique guy arrived at the house and went down the basement stairs, here's what he saw: a huge pile of more than 1,000 old wooden blocks saved from old ships. It had apparently had been the primary life mission of the deceased man to rescue these old blocks.

Now, I have two of these rescue blocks in my shop, right along with my rescue dog, rescue boat, and the rescue project that is yours truly. The blocks are really nice, still work, and it's easy to tell that every bit of them was crafted by hand. You can still see the marks the blacksmith made when he pounded out the iron parts. I wish the next picture was a little better (There's too much red in it for one thing: the block is just a dark wood. Damn iPhone.), but I think you'll get the idea.

Several people have asked me if I am doing a "museum quality" restoration of #48. After looking at many of the many boats at Mystic, I can now answer that question with a resounding conviction: NO. My restoration is going to be vastly superior to the work done at Mystic in attention to detail, in finish quality, and in on the water performance. I'm not saying the Seaport workers don't do a good job, but I think they have to work quickly on a budget and simply don't have time for a lot of truly fine work. They want the boats to look presentable and to retain the materials and methods used in its original construction.  So they don't use a spray gun, for instance, for painting. Everything is done with a brush, just like the old days.

My goal on the other hand, it to try to produce a truly beautiful boat. The only boat I saw at the Wooden Boat Show that met the standards I hold for myself was a homemade DN Iceboat. It had been expertly crafted by a very nice young guy from New Jersey. I took a bunch of pictures of it and will show two. One is a close-up of the boat's head support for the reclining driver. The other shows the strut that supports the rear runners.

Nice, huh? I was really impressed with the DN, a boat I've always wanted to try and may yet make myself. They've been North America's most popular ice boat class ever since 1953, when the Detroit News sponsored the design contest that launched the boat. I also like the fact that the DN is named after a newspaper, blending two areas of personal interest. They race over on Lake Hopatcong in Jersey (when there is enough ice and not too much snow.) They go 60 mph in 20 knots of breeze. Talk about frostbiting!

31.) Working on the Patch

Here's the beginnings of the patch for the big hole.  (The photograph makes it look so much like an art object that I am almost tempted to hang it.)

It was made from a single piece of mahogany, re-sawed into strips (the same as the planks*), and shaped with a bandsaw. I used the Sparkman & Stephens plans as a guide, rather than the boat itself. I'd rather adjust the boat to the patch than the other way around.

I haven't staggered the ends yet to fit into the ladder (which is almost finished and will appear in an upcoming post), nor have I planed or sanded the sides.  I also haven't glued them together in the curve they will need to follow. This photo just shows the flat pieces stacked up on top of each other in the reverse order that they will go in the boat. Below is a photo showing how the pieces were sketched out one by one. They had to be designed to taper quicker toward the bow and more gradually toward the center of the boat, to match the shape of the hull. The S&S plans don't specify how to do this. They just show the thickness of the keelson, it's width at the top, and the angle of the hull at various stations from bow to stern. I presume that sorting out the remaining details was left to the builder. I am still trying to figure some of them out even as I write this, and I can foresee all sorts of ways that I could seriously and completely foul this up.

*I used a different, much cheaper bandsaw blade on these pieces. It was a Wood Slicer, available from Highland Woodworking.  It costs a third of the Lennox carbide-tipped blade I used, but it produces fewer deep saw marks than the Lennox Tri-Master.  Highland sells both the Wood Slicer and the Lennox. I got the Lennox because it was billed to last a long time.  One of my shop mates ripped a third of the teeth off the blade within a few weeks.

30.) Stairway to ?

Below is a close-up view of the steps I am carving into the keelson as it rises up toward the bow. I thought it was worth showing. This project at times is sort of like the woodworking version of an archaeological dig. The original boatbuilder assembled the keelson by gluing together thin strips of mahogany (like plywood) to make a single piece 9/16ths of an inch thick that curves around the bottom of the boat from stem to stern. My plan is to rejoin these strips one at a time, making a laddered scarf joint.  (It will require a corresponding flight of steps, or ladder, on the other side of the hole.)

It's not especially easy to make this particular ladder.  I'm carving it out with a paring chisel and small rasp while sitting awkwardly in the boat instead of at a workbench where you can see what you are doing and get the right leverage. See the brownish blob on the right side of the photo? That's epoxy fairing compound. See the blob on the left? That's a pool of my sweat.  (I suppose I also could have done this excavation work with a small power tool like a Dremel, but that just seemed too, well, unmanly.)

The other reason it's not easy is that the stairs can't be straight but instead need to follow the downward curve of the keelson.  The only good solution I could come up with to make this happen was to gradually carve and file away tiny bits of material until I hit the thin glue line between each set of mahogany plies. Once the glue line was exposed, I could then just gently remove it to expose wood only.

The photo shows this work in progress.  See how one of the steps in the middle looks black?  That's because I've cut it down so that just the old glue is showing. The stairs above it have all the glue carefully removed.  The ones below it are unfinished.  (I still have some final trimming and sanding to do to square up and complete all of the stairs.)

The unfinished stairs show just bits of the glue line.  That means they are cutting through multiple plies and not yet in line with the slope of the keelson.  No black stripes means the step is confined to one of the original mahogany plies.

I hope the above explanation is clear.  If it's still a little fuzzy, it should become more understandable as I forge ahead.

29.) Cosette Ponders the Keelson Conundrum

28.) The Hole in the Boat

The photo above shows what may be the single biggest challenge I face in restoring #48. See the big hole in the boat?  That's right where the mast is supposed to be supported.

Holes are almost never a good thing in a boat.  But this is truly the last place you'd want one.  So....how did it get there?

This area of the hull probably absorbs the most stress of any spot in the Interclub. The mast in anything more than a light breeze pushes down into the boat, especially when the crew is hiking over the side. I found this out on my first day of racing, when the mast step on my virtually new fiberglass Interclub cracked and collapsed, forcing me to stop sailing for a month while I repaired it.

I don't think the original Sparkman and Stephens design fully recognized how much stress this area of the boat must handle (nor, for that matter, did the builder of my fiberglass boat: Karl's Boat Shop).

When I began working with #48 I realized I was going to face this problem. The area was cracked and showed lots of evidence of rot. I started chipping away at the bad wood and the next thing I knew I went right through the bottom. When I had finally removed all the unsalvageable material, I was left with the very un-hydrodynamic void you see in the photo.

There are several factors that make this especially challenging to fix.

First, the repair has to be super strong.  That should be obvious because this was the part of the boat that held up least well over time.

What's less obvious is that the repair area is a very complex shape. The keelson—or backbone of the boat that joins the starboard and port halves—starts at around two inches wide at the bow, gradually widens to 5 inches at midships and then tapers to four inches at the stern. The angle of the hull changes as it intersects the keelson, from around 90 degrees at the bow to something like 160 degrees three feet back from the bow. And, of course, the whole piece has to bend to conform to the shape of the bottom of the boat. So we're talking about a patch that constantly changes form through three dimensions.

Finally, the damage also extended into the planking, making matters even more troublesome.

For months, I have been tempted to remedy the problem in a radical way. I'd saw the boat in half right down the middle, remove the entire keelson (also ok to spell it "kelson") and make a brand new one from stem to stern. Then I'd join the two halves to it.  I was convinced that this was not only one of the easiest ways to fix the problem (the keelson is cracked in other places as well and has another big hole back where the skipper must have stomped his feet a lot) but also would create the soundest repair.

Here's what a keelson looks like when a wooden boat is being built (upside down).  It is, for all practical purposes, the spine of a ship.  And mine has a big chunk of its backbone missing in probably the most critical area of the boat.

What stopped me, though, was that I realized that by the time I had finished removing the keelson, the remaining two hull halves would weigh less than a total of 70 pounds. To reduce the hull to less than half its original weight (minus spars and racing equipment) seemed to me to violate the whole spirit of a restoration project. I would, in effect, be building a new boat using little more than scraps from the original one. I decided this would run afoul of the spirit of the class rules prohibiting construction of new wooden boats (something I wrote about earlier in this blog. See Holes and Loopholes).

So....what to do instead?  

I've got another plan. And you can see the first stages of it if you enlarge the picture at the top and inspect the keelson just in front of the hole. There, I have started roughing out what looks like a flight of stairs that gradually ascend toward the bow.

I'll explain more about how (I hope) this is all going to work out in upcoming posts.

Below is a photo of what the area around the mast step looked like before I started chopping away at it:

Some people might have try a different, quicker approach than removing the rotten, cracked wood. They'd undoubtedly use a penetrating epoxy product that is supposed to infuse the wood with its original equivalent strength. I don't believe the hype and think diluted epoxy is a half-assed fix.  I am only up for complete-ass fixes.

27.) Battening Down the Hull

 

I've been doing most of the fairing inside the hull with a flexible spruce batten wrapped in 60 grit sandpaper. I don't always try to cover the whole batten, but use different lengths of sandpaper depending on the size of the spot I am smoothing out. The bare parts of the batten don't remove wood I want to stay on the boat, but help bend the batten to the shape of the hull. I thought of this technique on my own for fairing an inside curve. I highly doubt I am the first to come up with the idea; I won't be applying for a patent anytime soon.

The photo above shows the third and last coat of fairing material (epoxy plus filler) on the inside of the hull. It's much thinner than the first two coats and went on very smooth.  The density of the epoxy paste can be controlled by adding more or less filler to it.  For the first coats, I aimed for a thick peanut butter-like paste that wouldn't run. For the final coat, I mixed the epoxy to the consistency of mayonnaise.  I had to throw out one batch because I didn't like the way it turned out.  It's far better to make this call early than end up having to remove a big mess later.

Nobody asked about it (I don't have that many readers), but if you thought the little hand plane I showed in my last blog entry was as small as it gets, think again. This one is an instrument maker's plane sold by Lee Valley.

26.) Highs and Lows

>>>>>  I've been using this Lie-Nielsen convex sole block plane to help make the inside of the hull fair. This is a tiny tool, but it works great so long as the blade is sharp. The bottom of the plane is rounded from side to side and front to back for working on an inside curve.

I'm using it to take off high spots, feeling them with my hands, circling them with a pencil, and then taking some shavings until each bump feels mostly gone. (In woodworking, it's amazing how touch is often much more reliable than eyesight.) I don't yet want to remove the highs completely because I know from experience that sometimes a high spot just feels high if it's surrounded by low spots. The black squirrel tail of the plane rests in your palm as you wrap your fingers on the body, giving you more power and control.  I do wish the plane was a little bigger because I developed an ugly blister after a couple of hour using it. It was one time I have been glad the Interclub is only 11 and a half feet long.

For the low spots, I used the same method—feeling them with my hands and circling them with a pencil. I mixed West System epoxy with a combination of mahogany sawdust saved from sanding the boat (I have a whole gallon paint can full of it) and microfibers.  The saw dust colors the mixture and microfibers thicken the epoxy so it doesn't run. I made the first coat pretty thick and will make the next coat much thinner. The best way to apply is with a plastic spreader. Plop a small batch on to a piece of cardboard or plywood and use just like a painter's pallette. I don't usually worry too much about getting the first coat down perfectly smooth, but I also try not to put too much on—because that means I'll end up having to sand more off.  It takes practice to find just the right balance. In the very upper right corner of the bottom photo, you can see that the rail is completely gone.  (Click on the photo to expand.)