The days here have been sunny and slowly slowly getting warmer.
It's a real pleasure to have the grounds dry and free of ice.
Corsair's hull has been faired and primed, and she's back upright now.
Getting her upright looked like it would be a fairly dramatic event. The guys got a few chainfalls set up on the I-beams next to the boat, and looped some long, wide straps underneath her.
The other end of the straps were tied to the forks of the shop forklift. As the forks were raised, the boat would be slowly righted.
A students set up a transit level to check the final leveling adjustments after the boat was set up and on her keel blocks.
In the end, the process was careful and quite un-dramatic. That's a good thing, really. Nobody wants drama when they're moving a boat.
Here are a series of photos showing the process in Quicktime movie format.
Double click to start the movie.
Single click to pause it.
The teak sole (in a boat, the floorboards are called the sole) boards are being milled up and sanded now. Corsair is a pretty big boat, so there's a lot of this type of work to do.
The tongue and groove bulkheads have also been milled up and are waiting to be cut to length and installed.
Corsair's mahogany transom has been sanded down in preparation for refinishing. You can see the new wood above the old wood here.
These will be bleached and then dyed to make a seamless match. That's important since the transom will be bright finished. It has to look perfect.
With the hull all primed now, you can really see how nice a shape she has.
Corsair has a large engine that's supported by long timbers that are let into the floors. Here you can see the jig that's being used to mark the dados for the engine bed. The ones on the left side have already been done.
Over on the 12 1/2, the coamings are being fitted.
They get marked, and then fine-tuned off the boat. It's always easier to work on things on your bench if you have the opportunity.
No, that's not the laundry, that's the other oak coaming. The wet rags have been hung on it to help keep it moist in order to prevent it from drying out and checking (i.e., splitting). When it's ready to be installed, they'll seal and varnish it to slow down the rate of moisture transfer in and out of the wood. It's the rapid moisture transfer that causes wood to check. That's why lumber that's been slowly air-dried has fewer checks in it than wood that's been rapidly dried out in the sun or a hot room.
Meanwhile, the first year class has finished planking their boats.
The next step is fairing the hull. They start by planing off the high spots where the planks meet.
The trick is to take off just enough at the seams to get a nice, fair curve, while leaving the middle of the planks basically untouched.
People use all kinds of planes to do this. You may recognize this one as one of the
"transitional" planes that were made between generally between the 1870's and 1920's. Stanley claimed that the wooden planes were easier to use, and people who were used to wooden planes liked the precise adjustment that the all-metal planes offered. Since it involved less casting than an all-metal plane, the transitional planes provided a way to produce a cheaper, easily adjustable plane for the masses. These planes were also easily modified by the users, something that craftsmen of the day were used to doing.
From a hull-fairing point of view, the wooden and transitional planes are lighter than their all-metal cousins, so they're very nice to use.
This is about the time that a lot of students realize that they should have set their screws a little deeper into the hull. As you remove small amounts of wood, you get closer and closer to your screw heads. When your nice, sharp plane blade whacks into a bronze screw, well, there's often coarse language. Then it's off to your sharpening station for a bit.
Ok, he's not sharpening a plane iron that he dinged on a screw, that's a slick (essentially a very large, heavy chisel), but you get the idea...
After the high spots are planed off, the hull shape is refined by sanding it with a longboard.
It's a slow, dusty process, but the end result is very nice.
Remember those repairs that were being done on planks earlier? Here's a plank that's been scarfed together from 2 shorter ones and has a dutchman repair as well.
The scarf shows up as that curved vertical line. When it was originally made, that line looked straight. However, the plank has been faired and it now is slightly round on top, giving the scarf that curved look. Just below it, you can see the triangular dutchman.
Here's another one.
Those are nice, tight joints there.
The screw holes are filled with epoxy mixed with fairing compound. Thicker planking is usually bunged, but filling the countersinks with epoxy on a boat this size is just fine.
These get sanded down as well, leaving a perfectly smooth surface.
Next up, it's time to caulk all the seams.
This is a traditional caulking mallet, along with a couple of caulking irons. You can see a little strand of the cotton caulking over to the left. On a boat this small, we just caulk with cotton and not oakum. Oakum is a tarred hemp that's used for caulking larger vessels.
After the caulking is in, we paint the cotton in the seams. This helps to waterproof the cotton and it stiffens it as well. We use different paints for above and below the waterline.
When the caulking is driven home and painted, it essentially becomes a stiff gasket. The planking will swell up against the caulking and actually crush around it once it gets good and wet. If you remove a plank from a boat like this, take a look at the seam area. You'll see a little channel that's been formed by the wood swelling around the stiffened cotton.
After the paint is dry, it's time to seal up the seam using seam compound. Again, we use different types above and below the waterline.
The underwater seam compound is foul stuff, hence the respirator. This is one time when it's not a lot of fun to hang out near the boats as they're being worked on.
Here you can see a couple of things going on. The red seam compound (below the waterline) has been applied, as has the white paint for above the waterline.
The waterline is the scribed line going across the photo. The white seam compound hasn't been applied yet, and you can see how deeply the cotton is driven into the caulking bevel. If you look closely, you can see a little nail hole and a small pencil mark on the right side at the waterline. That pencil mark was where the students had measured for their waterline, and the hole is from a batten that they nailed onto the hull to guide their saw while they scribed the line. That little hole doesn't go all the way through the hull, and it will be filled with epoxy later. It's nice to see the waterline going exactly through the measured mark.
More students are working on their spars now.
Here are 2 students sighting down the batten that they've attached to the spar to draw out the guidelines for rounding.
They've marked the spar at different points along its length to guide them in making the marks they'll use to plane down this 4-sided spar into an 8-sided, 16-sided, and finally round mast.
Once the mast has been planed down to very close to round, the final rounding is done using a sanding box.
No, not a sand box. That has little cars and buckets in it.
A sanding box is a 3-sided box with sandpaper loosely stapled across the open side. We like to back the paper up with canvas for strength.
This is slid up and down the mast with a combination of straight and spiraling strokes.
The sandpaper wraps around the spar and evens out any little ridges left by the previous planking. This is where practice and a good eye count. Too much sanding in one spot leaves you with an obvious hollow or divot in your spar, too little leaves a hump.
One student has made time to work on a personal project during off-hours at the school. This is a cradle made using lapstrake construction.
Just because it's small doesn't mean its easy. There is a huge amount of twist in that first plank, and it took a lot of tries and steam to get this little garboard to make the bend without shattering.
And speaking of steam, in the last blog entry, I neglected to include one of the greatest tools a boat shop could ever have.
An industrial steam generator.
This beast will deliver massive volumes of steam in a very short amount of time. The cord for it is thicker than a garden hose... It's truly impressive. As an added bonus, it delivers the steam through a hose, which means that you can bring a steam hose right over to your boat and spot steam a part that's being particularly resistant to bending. Very very convenient.
I said we were spoiled. I've never seen a boat shop with anything as nice as this.