Getting up to date
There’s quite a backlog of photos to share, so let’s just get right to it.
Planking continues steadily up the hull with Jeff & Chris on port, and Barry and Trevor on starboard. Here’s one of the aft port planks going up into the tuck just below the transom.
These get lifted up and held until the aft butt is locked in place.
Maggie and Sean are up top standing by with a block and tackle, ready to haul as soon as the aft end is secured.
Once they get it started, the rest of the crew moves up and helps out.
On the other side of the boat, Trevor has laid out the plank lines for the whale strakes and is patterning for the next strake.
As the planking goes up, the staging has to be re-worked to go with it. Here’s the new level on port. You can see the previous level below it.
This gets tricky, because there’s still a level above, and it’s now a lot closer. Easy to bonk you head. Reason #23 why we wear hard hats around the boat.
And, in case you were wondering about the massive clamp to the left in that photo, here’s a close up.
There’s three things going on here. To the right is a ring staff, you’ve seen a lot of these. The big screw clamp has a lag screw going into the dark frame just to the left of the ring staff. There is a block just above this lag that keeps the clamp from bending up when the clamp is operated. The clamp screws down onto a wooden pad, and produces tremendous force to hold the end of the plank tight against the frame. Just above the screw, you can see a little yellow box with a hose coming out of it. That’s a hydraulic ram pressing the plank end down against its lower mate. A little piston comes out of that yellow box and pushes down (ok, technically, it pushes up and down equally, but we want the plank go go down…) when the base unit is pumped.
All those blocks above and below it are just spacers since the throw of that that ram is quite small. There’s nothing more powerful in our arsenal than the hydraulics.
Just above this area, Jon has now paired up with Jamie to finish up the port side waist planking.
Here, he’s creating the spiling for the lower waist plank.
The beaded strake is finished, as is the upper waist plank. Jamie will work down while Jon works up.
In some areas, work had to continue while the staging additions were being finalized. Here, Walt is tethered into a safety line while he removes a section of rotted frame.
Luckily, Bob is on the job of finishing up the safety railing, and soon everyone can be done with their harnesses in this section.
After getting the frame out, Walt cuts a pattern for its replacement.
Down at the keel, Phil, Bob, and Ryan have finished installing the worm shoe. It’s the lighter piece at the base of the keel.
Next up, they’re setting up for the copper sheathing that will wrap around the worm shoe and keel.
Ryan and Phil are using a laser level to establish a consistent line for the sheathing.
And Ryan strikes a manly pose by the laser line with a nail for no good reason at all.
Phil is a tolerant man.
Dean has been working on the details of installing the copper. He’s worked out the nailing pattern and built a brake for bending the metal. Here, he’s putting on the first section at the keel.
The wood beneath the copper is bottom painted, tarred, and finally given a layer of Irish felt before the copper is nailed in place.
It’s looking very nice. It’s a shame that the only ones who’ll really enjoy it in the future will be fish.
While there’s a lot of banging and hammering and sawing around the boat, some of the work is calm and meditative, like spinning oakum.
Although “spinning” is the proper term, the actual process involves pulling and rolling the oakum by hand across your thigh. A cloth protects Evie and Ali’s clothing as they work the oakum into long, consistent cords.
The starboard bow waist planking is Still almost finished. It’s been faired and bunged, though, and that’s something. Matt is cutting off the tops of the bungs using a Fein tool, a kind of vibrating Japanese saw.
Soon after this photo was taken, the final plank for this section was brought up and clamped in place below the opening where it would go once it cooled. Alas, all the bending was too much for it, and it pulled apart.
Back to the drawing board.
John continues to work the planking down the transom. Here, he’s bunging the existing planks.
I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s still a little amazing when it happens. We get wood that sometimes has a lot of tension locked up in it, and when sawn, it moves like crazy. Here’s a recent example.
That was pretty much a straight cut. The stick coming out from the main board was put there to keep the off cut from crashing to the floor when the cut was complete.
And that’s not the only way that wood moves. Here’s a very thin (about 1/8″ thick) off cut from the end of a length of beaded strake. The dark color in the center is moisture… this was a very green piece of wood.
The left side should be straight, just like the right side, but it came off of the saw just like this. As the wood had dried from the outside in, the cells shrunk and pulled in on the left side leading to that curved shape. I’m not sure why they didn’t do this on the bottom or right side. The full piece that this came off of looks perfectly normal, with straight sides.
Sometime we just shrug our shoulders and say, “Wood, dang.”