Looking back towards the wood storage sheds across the sawmill

Snow starting to cover the wood piles in front of the paint shop.

I decided to head home about then. Good decision as the governor closed the roads 30 minutes later. By noon the next day, the power was out and there was about 2′ of snow to contend with.

Some hardy souls came in over the weekend, and they did an astounding job of creating access paths to all of the critical areas of the museum. Fire truck access is critical in a museum filled with irreplaceable artifacts.

On Monday morning, we came in to see their handiwork.

Nice.

There was still a lot of clearing to do, so we all grabbed shovels and set out like the seven dwarfs.

All of the larger vessels needed to be shoveled out and shoveled off. The LA Dunton was coated in a thick layer of snow and ice.

The Morgan’s cover held up remarkably well considering the massive amount of wet, heavy snow piled on it. Even so, strong winds blew quite a bit up and under ridges in the cover.

Knocking snow off of the cover and shoveling off the deck were top priorities. It’s now raining hard, and that will probably freeze up tonight, so we’re all thankful for everyone who plowed and bulldozed to keep our roadways from becoming a 2′ thick ice-encrusted barrier.

When most people think of wood shavings, they think of the sexy ribbony things you see in woodworking tool catalogs. The folks at Lie-Nielson Toolworks, for instance, are crazy for showing these kinds of shavings.

They conjure up images of master craftsmen making beautiful things. Mmm.

The detective brain will soon be bored with that golden-lit vision though, and start to wonder, just what were they actually doing? The shavings can tell you a little about this.

Around a modern shop, you’re likely to see lots of shavings that look like this.

These are a little crumbly, and the grain usually runs perpendicular to the long edge. They’re often found in great quantity. Sometimes they’re small and broken up.

They come from this tool (or one that works like it):

Yep, a power planer. The power planer has a pair of blades on a rotating shaft that just nick the wood as the tool passes over them. The shape of the shaving comes from the scooping action of the blade as it rotates down into and then up out of the wood.

Here’s another shaving, that’s just about as opposite the power planer shaving as you could imagine. That’s a planer shaving on the left for comparison.

You’ll often see these in large piles too.

These big shavings come from a ship’s adze.

That’s Walt shaping a curved stern plank. You can see how close he’s getting to his layout lines. In the right hands, an adze can be a very precise tool. He’ll finish with a hand plane, but this tool will do almost all of the work.

And on a side note, he’s not using the adze to be old-timey or traditional. He’s using it because it takes off a large amount of wood quickly, efficiently, and accurately. In other words, it’s better than any other tool we’ve got, modern power tools included.

The shavings that most people think about come from planes.

(I know, not nearly as sexy as the catalog photos!)

What you may not know is that the same plane can make very different looking shavings. When you see round, curly shavings like this, you know that the plane has been pushed straight down the work with the blade perpendicular to the direction of travel. Like this:

However, if you skew the plane a bit, like this,

and push the plane along the wood with the blade now slicing the wood at an angle, you get long spiral shavings.

This is called a skew cut, and it adds a slicing component to the normal paring action of a plane blade. It’s a useful technique for dealing with tough woods or end grain.

Some planes have the skew built into them, so you get a skew cut even with the plane body held parallel to the direction of travel. Here’s an older rabbet plane set up like that,

and a modern side-rabbet plane.

Lastly, you may see shavings that are rather flat. They’re very thin, and if you handle them, they fall apart. That’s what end grain shavings look like.

The Renaissance Woodworker

If you think of wood as a bundle of straws glued together, the end grain is where all the holes are. It’s very tricky to plane, and your tools need to be razor sharp to get these kinds of shavings.

So, there you go. Piles of short, broken shavings: power planer. Big chips: an adze (or broad axe). Curly shavings: a plane running straight down the wood. Long twisted ribbons: a plane with the blade skewed. Flat shavings that crumble easily: a plane working on end grain.

And lastly, a little something to tweak the jealousy of any woodworkers reading this. Sometimes we can’t help but marvel at the absolutely beautiful wood we are working with. This is the edge of a section of white oak that became a bow plank recently.

The ray fleck pattern lets you know that you’re looking at a quartersawn section. The light and dark coloring show the differences in moisture content. This is very green wood, and you can see how it’s been drying. You’re looking at the edge of the plank, and the light areas are the top and bottom faces that are drying as they’ve been exposed to the air. The darker inner wood hasn’t dried yet, and it’s moist to the touch. That darker color is close to what the wood would look like if it were oiled after drying.

We’re pretty lucky around here.

That’s the foremast of the Joseph Conrad, the ship we use for overnight programs here at the seaport.

As you can see, she’s been hauled out for maintenance.

It’s always amazing to me how huge many of the boats in our collection look once you get them out of the water.

There’s one on the front of the Morgan’s shed as well.

This tradition isn’t specific to the Seaport, or even the United states. Here is a coaster from the Netherlands called the ANDA.

If you’d like to read more about this, here’s an article.

10/29/12

While the real storm surge isn’t expected until tonight, the effects of Sandy are clear around the south end of the Seaport. High tides are at 9:15 am and 9:41 pm. By 7:30 this morning, water was starting to rise to the edge of the dock wall.

The low spot in front of the Galley is usually first to flood since it drains into the river.

The Sabino dock was just about at water level at this time.

By 10:00 this morning, the water level had crested and appeared to be slowly receding.

The Sabino dock was just barely under water

and the flooding area in front of the galley had expanded.

Still, all our preparations were holding up well, and the vessels tied up along the docks were all in great shape.

We’re closed today. Tomorrow we’ll be back in to for cleanup and to better assess the impacts of the storm.

Over the past few days we’ve been buttoning up the Morgan.

She’s shored up very well so we’re not worried about wind, so we’re tying up anything loose and doing a lot of rain-proofing. Most of our energies around the museum grounds have been focused on securing anything could float away or be damaged by high water. Luckily we have lots of heavy things to help with this.

Yep, those are anchors. We tie long straps to them that go over the wood piles and fasten into rings set in the ground on the other side. It’s a simple and effective system.

Our boats are all breasted off to give them a little room if the wind and water gets rough.

Breasting means that we tie lies in such a way as to hold the boat in position a little ways away from the dock. If we can’t breast to pilings on both sides of the boat, we’ll set anchors out away from the dock and tie into them.

The research vessel Connecticut came up river to tie up at our lift dock.

With the lift dock lowered, this is a great place to ride out a storm. There are lots of strong cleats for tying down on both sides of the boat.

Small boats that had been pulled for the season were all moved to higher ground. A group of Williams Mystic students came by to help and made the task infinitely easier.

I guess that higher ground is a relative term, but we do the best we can.

More coming when we’re on the other side of this. For those of you in harms way, we hope that you and your loved ones pull through safe, dry, and intact.

The head is made of a very hard wood, and a good mallet will have a distinctive sharp ringing sound when striking the iron.

Next to the mallets picture above are a variety of caulking irons. Although they look like chisels, their edges are in fact shaped to drive the caulking material into the seam rather than to cut it. This is just a small sampling, there are many many sizes and shapes of caulking irons.

There are two layers of material we use for caulking. The inner layer is cotton. This is what Gino is driving in here. If the preview below is not visible, try this link.

Oakum is next driven into the seam on top of the cotton. Oakum is a coarse hemp fiber that’s been treated with pine tar. Evie is driving oakum here. If the preview below is not visible, try this link.

Caulking is only part of what keeps the water out of a boat’s seams. The first layer of defense is a tight wood-to-wood joint along the plank seam. That goes up about 1/3 of the plank width. There is a V-shaped caulking seam in the outer 2/3 of the plank. Into this seam is driven cotton and oakum as you see above. Finally, the outer seam is packed with seam compound, a flexible, sticky substance. In the old days they might use tallow and rosin. Modern boats will likely use a product specifically designed for this purpose such as the ones pictured here. We’ve often used a home-made mixture of roofing tar and portland cement for the larger boats here at the seaport.

If you’d like to peruse some panoramic photos from the various construction areas on the boat, you can find them on the Interactive Panoramas page (or follow the link at the lower right of any page.)

– Tom