| PITTI OVA

Foreword

When I was very young, I built for myself the best boat in all the world. It was a fat dory, designed to fit a secondhand sail, and not very impressive to other eyes. What matter? It was a brave thing and, to me, beautiful—and I have never since lost my vision of the Best Boat in the World—always just a bit beyond the present one, and always there to strive toward. Maybe this background will help explain the chapters that follow. I hope they convey some of the feeling of joy I have had from a lifetime of boatbuilding. I hope they may encourage you to gather a few ancient tools and natural materials and build for yourself the best boat in all the world—a thing of perfect beauty, which will guard and preserve you wherever you want to go on the vast ocean seas. The voyaging may be mostly in the imagination, and this, the best boat in the world, may seem less than that to other people. That really doesn't matter. It will be your own, born of study, toil, and sacrifice; and you'll get from it a continuing emotional experience almost unique in this modern world.

Critics may well point out the narrow scope of this book: what amounts to one builder's techniques (and prejudices?) applied to one very special (shall we say, limited?) type of boat. You won't find here complete discussion of your favorite hard-chined skipjack or lapstrake surf- boat or sawn-frame schooner or featherlight canoe—any one of which, I'll grant, may be the best boat in the world. You can buy a book that treats all of these, and more, too, in one volume—a book written by a yacht designer of great skill and experience, who knows all about

the parts of the finished boat; but that designer doesn’t know (or perhaps can’t be bothered to tell you) the basic techniques, the inch-by-inch marking, cutting, and fastening that get all of these parts together in the proper order.

Here, if you will pardon me, is where I come in. I am opinionated, lazy, plodding, timid about trying anything new, and I have built about 500 deadweight tons of sailing yachts— largely with my own hands, and perhaps half of them to my own designs. And over the past 50 years I have tried, earnestly and constantly, to borrow, steal, invent, or develop by trial and error the best and easiest way for me to perform each of the several different operations involved in the building of a wooden boat.

I apologize to all the old pros, who have their own different and very satisfactory ways to do the same things. I say only that these tech- niques have worked for me and that if you will stay with me patiently, I think I can, in the following pages, explain to you how I set up, frame, plank, and deck such a boat, with maybe a centerboard trunk and a rudder thrown in. MERRYWING, the boat shown in most of our illustrations, poses almost all the problems you are likely to meet up with, whatever you build, and I hope I can convince you that there's no great mystery to boatbuilding after all.

I'm sure that the boat of your dreams is the best and most beautiful boat in the world. If you don't go ahead and build it, you will miss one of the most exciting and satisfying experiences left to us today. You'd better get going!

—Bud McIntosh

ing about boatbuilding—from his own strictly practical point of view and experience—with little or no attention to the theoretical, except where it mattered absolutely.

Thus, the series of articles by Bud McIntosh began in WoodenBoat. There was a certain irregularity to it, and a certain absence of method to the order in which the chapters appeared, but we were happy. The material was being published, and the readers were finding it both informative and inspiring. For, in Bud they found a real educator—one who wasted little time on the nonessentials, and who encouraged his readers freely to see both the basic simplicity of each step in wooden boat building, and its relationship to the whole.

There was, however, an element not yet well expressed in the series: illustration. We had begun with a few photographs and a few sketches, but we knew we were not doing enough to convey directly the essence of what was being said. And it was not possible to assign just any illustrator to the task of bringing these ideas to the printed page, because a thorough understanding of the process was essential to conveying it.

'Thus entered Sam Manning, a uniquely capable artist and writer, and an accomplished boatbuilder himself. We had worked before with Sam, and knew well his ability to translate abstract ideas into comprehensive drawings. He had demonstrated it clearly in numerous maga-

zine and book illustrations over the years, and he appreciated the simplicity and directness with which Bud approached this subject. When he consented to collaborate with Bud on the series, and to aim toward the publication of a book, we were thrilled at the prospect. Over the years, the collaboration between these two extra- ordinary individuals has yielded a body of work which we believe sets a new standard in the field.

It is by no means a text on building all manner of wooden boats; it is by no means a general treatise on the subject. Rather, it is an attempt to convey, in detail, the processes by which Bud McIntosh has successfully built so many boats over the years. It is an attempt to convey the spirit and the philosophy behind these processes. To the extent that it succeeds at this, the reader is treated to the rare experience of wisdom acquired firsthand—and to the inim- itable pleasure of understanding what seemed to be complex and mysterious procedures.

This book is a celebration of the wisdom of one New England boatbuilder. In a culture where fewer and fewer items are constructed by hand, and where too little time is spent preserv- ing process itself, and the lasting pleasures such process can bring, we are honored and proud to be able to offer it at last.

— Jonathan Wilson, Editor WoodenBoat Magazine

MERRY WING

Designed by David C. McIntosh Sail plan redrawn by Dave Dillion

LOA LWL Beam Draft

39'0" 27'6" 100”

5/6”

Preface

I had heard about Bud McIntosh for years before I met him. Among the cognoscenti in the field of traditional wooden boats, his name was uttered with a special kind of awe: not the mys- tical kind, but the kind that is characterized by utter amazement. Here was an artist and crafts- man, I heard, who could not only design and build beautiful boats but who could build them quickly and cheaply—in the best sense of that word. Here was a man who knew from expe- rience how much and what kind of wood to use where, and how to fit it so well that it seemed to have grown in place. Moreover, here was a man who was remarkably erudite—well read, well spoken—but without an overbearing nature. It was the stuff of legend, all right, and I was certain that our fledgling magazine would find a way to do an article on this unusual man. But time and money passed quickly in the early days of WoodenBoat, and somehow that goal seemed to elude me.

One day, my friend Randy Peffer called to say that he'd just been to visit Bud; he'd discov- ered that the boatbuilder had been working on writing a book about boatbuilding, and that this was no ordinary work. I would see for myself, he told me, because he had put copies of a couple of chapters in the mail.

When they arrived, I read them eagerly, hop- ing that I might have come upon something new and useful for the magazine's readers, but expecting nothing special. After all, the builders

of traditional wooden boats in this country had not, up to that time, been given to writing much at all, and certainly not with the clarity and style desired in magazine journalism. Yacht designers wrote about boatbuilding, and sometimes very well; historians did, too, and preserved thereby some very important information. But one did not hear much from the boatbuilders who trudged off to their shops every day to coax even more beauty from that most lovely of natural materials. Making a living at it was—and is— challenge enough; it would be difficult to find oneself inspired, upon arriving home at the end of the day, to sit down and write freely about it. I was, therefore, unprepared for the elegance of Bud McIntosh's writing.

Indeed, I was truly moved by a clarity and style which seemed unmatched in the litera- ture of boatbuilding. Here, in one chapter, was a profoundly clear blend of solid experience, literary style, and a measure of wit and humor unlike anything I had ever encountered. I wasted no time in arranging to publish what- ever Bud could write, whenever it could be writ- ten. And I dreamed that, if it could become a book, we would be the ones to publish it. That was 10 years ago.

The boatbuilder had been able to write, it turned out, because he had found himself suddenly rendered infirm by an injury to his foot. To prevent himself from being over- whelmed by boredom, he decided to begin writ-

ONE: Two: THREE: FOUR:

FIVE: SIX:

SEVEN: EIGHT: NINE:

TEN:

ELEVEN: TWELVE: THIRTEEN: FOURTEEN: FIFTEEN: SIXTEEN: SEVENTEEN: EIGHTEEN: NINETEEN: TWENTY:

Appendix A.

B.

C.

Contents

Laying Down

The Making of Molds

The Ballast Keel

The Backbone:

Keel and Sternpost

The Backbone:

Stem, Rabbet, and Frame Sockets The Backbone:

Tail Feather, Transom, Molds, and Sheer Ribbands and Timbering Off Floor Timbers

'The Planking Process:

From the Sheer Down

'The Planking Process:

From the Garboard Up

A Smooth and Fair Hull Ceilings

Fitting the Deck Framing Laying the Deck

Building the House

Hatches and Other Deck Joinery Fitting Bulkheads

Spars

The Rudder

Tools and Devices

Fitting a ballast keel

to an already built hull A ballast keel filled out with deadwood Centerboards

Index

104 116 128 136 150 164 180 194 200 216 226

232

238 244

252

3 4 5 6 7| 8 transom

336 [31-2 | 2-06] z104% 300 | 5-00 | $3-6 | 55

A

HIAISINIS lS

v posed No p MM

Halfhreadths from centerline

Offsets for sloop Merryuinn. Read feet. inches, and eights of an it

2-10-4 = MELIA

Chapter One

Laying Down

Our title would at first glance appear to suggest a confusion of bad grammar and bad taste. In truth it is an old, proper, and excellent def- inition of the first task in the art and craft of boatbuilding: the lofting process. In simple terms, the operation consists of drawing (“lay- ing down") an accurate, full-sized picture on the floor, from which patterns are “‘taken off." The process is neither mysterious nor difficult, but there are some simple and essential truths. (In the learning process, there are one or two shocking truths, as well!)

When I was very young I held most naval architects in awe, and considered myself very smart indeed to have mastered the mechanics of lofting those sacred and untouchable draw- ings—waterlines, buttocks, magnificent diag- onals, finally the body plan—and I crawled reverent miles on hands and knees, correcting tiny (and not-so-tiny) errors committed by men who had mastered the greatest and most thrill- ing of all arts: yacht design. It was an honor anda privilege to be chosen as one who would, however inadequately, bring this vision to being in wood, metal, paint, and whatever else the specifications called for (most of these items bought by the Designer at one-third off, and furnished to me, or our common victim, the Owner, at list price, as I finally learned)—and it was wonderful.

Time passed, my work improved, my knees

and my faith became worn and battered, and I discovered a shocking truth: Practically anyone who can read the figures on a yardstick can lay down a body plan and a profile; and that’s all you need to lay down, anyway. If the designer howls betrayal for some reason, there are two suggestions you can make about that set of lines and offsets. The polite one is that he take them back to his drawing board and correct them himself. If he can't develop a curved tran- som, he shouldn't expect you to do it for him. If he says you can't get the angles for the stem rabbet from the scale drawing, he needs further education. And finally, if this lofting were half as difficult as you have been led to suspect, some of us old pros would still be chopping dugouts out of tree trunks, and managing to make that look like quite a mystery, too.

So let's lay down what is strictly necessary, and no more; build a set of molds; make two- dimensional patterns of stem, sternpost, tail feather (the late Sam Crocker's term for the keel-of-the-counter, usually called the horn timber), and transom knee; and make the pat- tern for the ballast-shoe casting. This last item is the only difficult one of the four, and will be treated separately and at length later.

The basic grid

For this laying-down business you need a reasonably smooth floor, slightly longer than

2

the boat and slightly wider than the total of maximum draft plus greatest freeboard—in the case of our example, 10 by 40 feet. You can manage on half this length or even less, but you'll have some confusion of lines-over-lines to cope with. If the floor is good enough, and the owners don't object, give it a coat of flat white paint, and work directly on that. If it's the floor of your living room, orasrough as my shop floor, cover it with light-colored sheath- ing paper (40 inches wide, 500 square feet to the roll, available at any lumberyard), which you spread out and let lie for 24 hours before you stretch and tack (or tape) it in place. Don't worry if the experts tell you this is all wrong, and that you'll never be able to do accurate work on a surface that changes dimensions every ume a cloud goes by. You're going to have expert trouble from now on, anyway, and you might as well get used to it. (One of them used to haunt us with the threat that he'd get out his astrolabe and prolapse and show us the scientific way to figure out the shape we were seeking; and for a while we wondered that one small head could carry all he knew.)

Get yourself a 10-foot straightedge. A 4- inch strip off a '/2-inch plywood panel makes a good one; or you can true up the edge of a dry board with your jointer. While you're at it, make a 6-footer and a long one— maybe 16 feet long. Stretch a string (nylon is best) the length of your loft floor, far enough from the edge to allow for the full draft of the boat, plus 2 or 3 inches. Do not chalk and snap it; instead, crawl along and mark where it lies at 3- or 4-foot intervals. Take up the string, mark this line with a good black number 2 pencil, using your 10-foot straightedge, and you have the load waterline, from which everything else devel- ops. Using the same technique, mark the other full-length lines (three above, four below the load waterline, and exactly 12 inches apart) parallel with the load waterline. Now mark on the load waterline the locations of all the per- pendiculars shown in the lines drawing—face of stem, station numbers 1 through 8, intersec- tion of the sheerline projected through the cen- terline of the transom, and all the buttock lines you'll need on either side of station number 5. Draw these lines in, exactly at right angles to the load waterline. The safest way to do this is to erect station number 5 by the old high-school- geometry method of swinging intersecting arcs above and below the line, marking station number 5 through these intersections, and then working forward and aft (with your 50-foot steel

d

tape) from station number 5 along the 36-inch load line and the 48-inch waterline. If your straightedge, joining these new marks, passes precisely through the corresponding marks on the load waterline, you will know your mea- surements were correct. All this is dull business, and perfectly obvious, I'm sure.

The diagonals for the body plan are only a bit more complicated (see Figure 1-1). Notice that in this design they all start at points where station number 5 (the centerline for the body plan) intersects the horizontal load line and waterlines, and they all pass through intersec- tions of buttock lines with these same horizon- tal lines. Thus, diagonal D1 starts 12 inches below load waterline at centerline, and passes through the intersection of the 24-inch buttock and the 36-inch waterline; and diagonal D5 starts 36 inches above the load waterline and intersects the 12-inch load line 5 feet out from the centerline. Draw them all in, then, forward and aft of station number 5, and you are ready to start working from the table of offsets. The hard work is over, and the fun is about to begin.

The table of offsets

Ihave known bright people to whom a lines drawing resembled a cross section through a barrel of frozen angleworms, and meant but little more; and these same people thought of a table of offsets as something you might expect to come from the maw of a mad computer that had been fed on Pictish runes, rock and all. Both these conceptions are faulty and exagger- ated. If you have managed (as I did, rather late in my childhood) to master the technique of drawing a line from 1 to 2 and so on in proper sequence to 87, and got for your diligence the picture of a nice horsie, you should have no trouble with a table of offsets. Any figure in any one of the little boxes simply tells you to start from a known point, proceed along a carefully labeled line for an exact number of feet, inches, and eighths of an inch, and there put a pencil mark. For heights, you start at the load water- line and measure up or down, as common sense and a glance at the scale drawing indicate. For breadths, you start at the centerline and mea- sure out horizontally. For diagonals, you start where the diagonal starts (at the centerline of the plan) and measure along the line of the diagonal. When you've located and marked all these spots, you draw a fair curve (or sometimes a straight line) through them, and get, full-size, a line that I hope looks amazingly like the

Seure 1-1 The grid

Waterlines

Butt 12

Diagonals

corresponding line on the scale drawing. Occa- sionally some sadistic N.A. will take all his vertical measurements from a base line, or something he prefers to call the designed water- line, but he usually gives you a hint that you’d better watch out.

Now that the above is all clear in your mind, you are probably itching to get at the body plan and make the molds. For these, how- ever, you need to know the exact height of the top of the backbone (keel, stem, stern knee, tail feather) where each mold stands, the corrected height of the sheer at each station, and the half-widths of the backbone, from the center- line to the rabbet, where the molds straddle it. So curb your impatience, and lay down just enough of the construction profile to show the shape of each piece of the backbone assembly, the line of the rabbet, the exact location of the shaft alley and rudderport, and the line of the sheer in profile. Indicate (and label, lest you mistake these lines for something else later) the positions of the principal fastenings in the backbone. If these are not shown in the scale drawing of the construction plan (as they cer- tainly should be), demand them from the designer. Finally, lay off from one of the full- length horizontal lines (assuming it, for the purpose, to be the centerline of the keel in plan view) the half-breadths of the rabbet, for each station, as given in the table of offsets. The load line 36 inches above the load waterline is the best one to use for this particular half-breadth, because it’s in the least-cluttered section of the floor. If you want to lay down the sheerline in plan view, use the waterline 12 inches below the load waterline for your theoretical center-

Ma. lines

| fl

perm PERS a — a MANNS = E M LLAME | [| xx p

Trammel-drawn perpendicular set to the LWL. All station

lines are made parallel to it. (shown on station 1 for clarity;

Station lines 4 3 2 1

i

Butt 24

Butt 12

line, lest you measure yourself right off the side of the floor.

So much for the general plan of attack. Now let's choose weapons and carry it out.

The construction profile

Start with the rabbet line on the keel (see Fig- ure 1-2). You will observe that this is a straight line from station number 3 to and through sta- tion number 6, and that the table of offsets there- fore omits the height of the rabbet on stations number 4 and 5. This straight section of rabbet is the most important line of reference in the entire laying-down and setting-up processes, so get it right—and extend it to station number 2 forward, and to station number 7 aft. Use your nylon string all the way, and be sure. Now note that the top of the wood keel is exactly parallel to, and 3!/2 inches above, this straight rabbet line. Mark this in, all the way from number 2 to number 7; repeat the performance for the bot- tom of the wood keel, exactly 1!/2 inches below the line of the rabbet. This last line is also, of course, the top of the ballast keel. It might be worth your while to use a red pencil for these last two lines and all other construction (as distinct from design lines) details. Note, finally, that all the heights in the boat are based on the line representing the top of the wood keel: the stem, the stern assembly, the four principal molds, and, eventually, the underside of the cabin sole. Check the offsets, check your mea- surements, check your youthful exuberance, and get it right.

While your straightedge is still warm, and before we get to the subject of battens, mark

5

— ERE ANNE a S — 248

do on station 5 for best accuracy)

112A LWL

368 48B

figure 1-2

Construction profile

Centerline of rudder stock

YP Fld | | Gx

RN Half-breadth of the sheer in plan (centered on 12B)

Half-breadth of the rabbet in plan (centered on 36A)

Pee

=a

Half-sidings of the stem and sternpost

Sheerline in profile

2M NEN ACES INC E

A CL MINN AVAN

Centerline of propeller shaft

some more straight lines: the centerline of the transom; the profile of the tail feather, from its intersection with the transom, across the top of the sternpost; the lines of the rabbet on the tail feather; the centerline of the rudder stock from the deck to the heel of the sternpost; the center- line of the propeller shaft; the straight portion of the profile of the bottom of the ballast keel; the straight portion of the rabbet line on the sternpost. These straight lines, each joining two points exactly located (by measurements on the lines drawing or from the table of offsets), will precisely determine the starting points of the curves you are about to draw.

Now about battens. You'll be using these in practically infinite variety every time you turn around on this job, and for a long time to come, so you’d best start your collection now. You'll need two immediately, at least 22 feet long, about 3/4 inch by 1 inch in section. These will overlap to mark the sheerline, here on the floor, and, later, on the planked-up hull. One of them will do for marking long planks. The curve of the stem requires a limber one, !/? inch square and at least 16 feet long. The rabbet on the sternpost, and the forward end of the ballast keel, must be marked with very limber battens indeed—straight-grained oak or ash, less than ?/s inch square. These will do also for the body plan and molds, and at least two of them must be over 8 feet long. And when you come to the outline of the curved transom, you'll be an old hand at this business and be able to judge for yourself what's needed.

If you don't already have your ribband

Rabbet line in profile

cq... prd 48B E Outer face of the

stem in profile

Inner face of the stem

stock, pick itout now (2-inch by 4-inch, 6-inch, 8-inch, 10-inch clear fir, if you can get it, at least half of it 22 feet long or better) and steal your battens out of it. Clear white pine is the best and most pleasant to use, but you'll not be likely to find a board over 16 feet long. Saw out half a dozen of them anyway, from 10 feet up, and about 3/4 inch square. Build a batten rack on the wall, out of reach of young fishermen and your own big feet.

So now you are equipped to finish laying down the construction profile. Do the face of the stem first: height at the sheer from the offset table. All other points (measured horizontally on the waterlines from the forward perpendic- ular) are taken from the scale drawing. Start a fivepenny box nail at each point, pull your 16-foot limber batten in against this curved line of fence posts, ease it in or out where necessary to correct for slight errors (holding it in place with nails driven against, not through it), and mark. Move in and mark the rabbet line in the same way, with your batten flowing into and following the straight line previously marked. Now draw, on the floor, the inside face of the entire stem, the scarf joint, and the jog at the forward end of the wood keel. You will have to scale some of these dimensions from the plans. Go aft now and do the same job on the entire stern assembly—the main and outer sternpost, the tail feather, the knee to the transom, the completed rabbet line, the aperture for the pro- peller, and the bolt pattern.

If you are still able to bend over, mark the height of the sheer at each station (dimensions,

from the table of offsets, up from the load waterline), correct with long battens until fair, and mark. Do the same for the half-breadth of the sheer (working from the assumed centerline 12 inches below the load waterline—remem- ber?) and for the half-breadth to the rabbet. Note that this width must be exactly 2 inches at the point where the rabbet leaves the keel and goes on to the stem, and exactly 21/2 inches where the rabbet intersects the sternpost—these figures being the halfsidings, of course, of the stem and the sternpost, respectively. While you have them fresh in mind, draw them in as they must appear in the body plan: stem siding 2 inches forward of the station number 5 ordi- nate, and sternpost siding 21/2 inches aft of it. Be very careful henceforth, when laying out half-breadths on the body plan, that you do not mistake one of these for your centerline. (Actu- ally, when you get into the swing of it, you'll find that you match the 3-foot mark on your rule with the 36-inch buttock, or whatever, and ignore the centerline altogether except when laying off distances on diagonals. Thus you avoid errors and save yourself much crawling.)

Now for the molds

Now is the time to lay down the body plan, which gives the exact outlines of eight cross sections through the hull, and from which (after subtracting the thickness of the planking) you will derive the shapes of the eight molds. (See Figure 1-3.)

Start with station number 5. Find the point where the straight line of the rabbet in profile intersects the station number 5 ordinate. Get the half-breadth-to-rabbet distance from the

figure 1-3

line you laid off, above, from the 36-inch load line. Square out this distance, forward, from your point of intersection, and mark the spot. This one is sacred and final. Locate the upper- most (sheer) point in the same way—out, for- ward, from the intersection of the sheer profile with the station number 5 ordinate, to the dis- tance shown on your plan view of the sheer- line—or the breadth called for in the table of offsets, which should be thesame thing. Be sure that this point is at the correct height above the load waterline, as taken at the station number 5 ordinate, and not as it appears so attractively before you where you squat 5 feet forward of station number 5. (I hate to belabor the obvious, but I have fallen into this error myself.) Now, working from the table of offsets, mark dis- tances out on all horizontals; heights above or below the load waterline on all buttocks; and distances from the centerline on all diagonals.

Set up your row of fivepenny-nail fence posts, and with trembling hand, bend your best oak batten in to the curve... Take a deep breath, calm yourself, make sure that you haven't made any mistakes in reading or mark- ing those offsets, and proceed to move this or that nail to get a fair curve on the batten, bear- ing in mind that of all the offsets, the diagonals are most likely to be correct. When you are satisfied that the curve is fair and yet as near as possible to the original offset points, draw it in and go on to the next one, and the next, until you have all eight done, with no more help from me. I can do this whole body-plan job in less than three hours, which indicates not that I am a fast worker, nor even a very careless one, but simply that it's a quick and easy business after all.

Sectional curves of the body plan and the principal fastenings of the backbone

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Chapter Two

The Making of Molds

Following the lofting process, you'll no doubt be anxious to set tools to wood and begin to shape your dream. Heaven knows you'veantici- pated it long enough! Well, the making of molds is as critical to the success of the project as lofting, since the molds are but perfect reproductions (in three dimensions) of the sta- tions we've laid out on the body plan. Station number | becomes station mold number 1, and so on.

When the molds are all set up, and espe- cially when the ribbands are bent over them, you'll have the distinct pleasure of seeing before you the shape you've longed for, all these weeks and months of planning. Keep in mind, though, that although the shape is per- manent, the structure is not. As planking goes on, ribbands come off, and when planking is done, the molds come out. But by this time, of course, the hull will be built and you'll be feeling like ten million dollars. (It used to bea million, but inflation changed all that.)

Materials

For molds, we always use white pine round- edged box boards, 1 1/4 inches thick, which come wide and crooked, withstand any amount of nailing, and cost less than any other lumber we can get. Run the batch through a surface planer. Pick out the straight ones and saw them for cross spalls—4 inches wide, one for each mold, and absolutely straight on one edge. Saw out another 40 to 50 running feet of 4-inch stock, also absolutely straight, and a like amount 2 inches wide. You'll need great quan- tities of this stuff in the setting-up process, so

don’t worry about extravagance. Lay in six or seven pounds of eightpenny common nails, a 2-foot steel square, a good hammer, a good crosscut saw, a set of dividers with a soft, soft pencil for one leg (set the gap to the thickness of the planking), a good bandsaw (or a better sabersaw than I’ve ever owned), and you're ready to begin work. (Youcan, of course, doall this cutting out with an assortment of good handsaws, but it sure takes longer!)

Marking and putting together the half-molds

To make the number 5 mold, first subtract from the laid-down body plan outline the thickness of the planking, using the dividers to mark short arcs, at about 6-inch intervals, from the rabbet to the sheer. Now mark a line square across the centerline exactly 31/2 inches above the rabbet height, to represent the top of the wood keel (and, of course, the flat at the bottom of the mold). Take a wide and crooked board, about 7 feet long, and lay it on the half-section so that it covers all the inside-of-planking marks from the rabbet toa point above the load waterline, and extends at its lower end past the centerline and the top-of-keel mark. This posi- tioning is shown in Figure 2-2. Now, very care- fully, turn that board over, toward the center of the drawing, as if it were hinged to the floor along its upper edge. If you have not already seen the next operation, the results of which are shown in Figure 2-3, you’re going to think boatbuilders must be somewhat primitive in their thinking, but don’t be too hasty; this is undoubtedly the greatest invention since the wheel.

figure 2-1

pencil compass set to

mold #5 to inside of plank |. ——

CSF E

figure 2-2

10

Faired outboard edge of

24A

Arcs swing with "i

plank thickness

LWL

= Section #5 to outside of planking

Imprint of the nails when the board is flipped

You lay eightpenny nails flat on the floor, pointing inward, each with its head precisely located on the high points of the arcs you have drawn to indicate the inside line of the plank- ing. Give each head a hammer-tap to set it into the floor and make it stay in position. And now, very carefully indeed, turn the board back over on its invisible hinges—and walk the length of it until you think it has felt the imprint of every one of those nailheads.

Turn it back again, and you'll discover that most of the nails are clinging to it. Stand them upin the dents their heads have made, spring a limber batten to the curve, mark it with a pen- cil, and saw to this line on the bandsaw. The nailhead impressions on the cut edge will match those on the floor, and enable you to locate them precisely where they were during the "printing" process. Now mark the center- line, the horizontal cut at the bottom, and the scarf cut to be made at the upper end. Back to the bandsaw for these cuts; and, while you have thesaw going (some builders don't do this, but it does produce fuel for the stove!), cut the inner edge, roughly parallel with the outer, leaving atleast6 inches of width all the way, and plenty of wood to rest on the keel. (And when you do the next one, having become convinced that this walk-about printing process really works, mark for all those straight cuts before you tip

Eightpenny nails with heads hammered into the lofted line of the mold

edge

Trim line parallel to the exterior edge. Make a duplicate mold futtock during this cutting.

board over to get at the clinging nails.) Back the floor with it, for a moment, to mark on floor the scarf line for the upper section. ake the piece up, trace an exact duplicate of it another piece of mold stock, go through the whole positioning-printing-scarfing process with the second piece of the mold (allowing it *o extend about 6 inches above the sheer), mark a duplicate of this second piece, and then tack the two pieces of this half-mold in their proper positions on the floor. And when you tack them (two eightpennies in each), consider that there will be a 4-inch cross spall with its upper edge at the 2-foot waterline, a cleat 8 inches wide across the bottom, and a doubling piece to join two parts of the half-mold. Keep your tacks clear of all these.

Fit the doubling piece, keeping it below the place where the spall will land, and fasten it with plenty of eightpenny nails. Now, with the mold still tacked in place, mark on both the face and the edge the sheer, spall, and LWL heights.

Now for the other half. Pull the four tacks, turn the half-mold over, doubling side down

Nailhead imprints & faired outboard

Upper futtock (flipped)

24A

LWL

d

Nailhead imprints in the sawn edge of

the mold match the nailhead imprints left on the floor. Helps reposition the seam futtock.

and with a wood scrap of the same thickness under each end, so that it will lie comfortably. Saw out the traced duplicates and tack them back-to-back with their already joined mates on the floor (as shown in Figure 2-4). Join them with a doubling piece, and transfer all edge-marks from the first half-mold to the mir- ror duplicate. Separate them, tack the first half to the floor through the original nail holes, and drive a nail (fence-post style) on the 24-inch load line, and to the left of the centerline exactly as far as the first half-mold lies to the right of it. Lay the second half in position against the nail, and check to see that it matches the proper heights at the keel, load waterline, and spall. Tack it to the floor.

Completing and setting up the mold

Now to join the two halves, The cross spall is the key to accuracy in the setting-up process, and must be applied on this and all the other molds at exactly the same height (top edge at the 24-inch waterline) and exactly level across.

11

figure 2-4

Lofted waterlines and top of keel are squared 145 upward and marked on edges and upper face. |

I 24A

| Port-side duplicates are tacked atop starboard futtocks. //

Doubling piece is fitted and fastened. `

Starboard futtocks are sawn, fitted, and tacked in place on the lofted line.

NER uui. / 5 5 ! li À f= =a — i 24A Port and starboard mold futtocks are flipped over i to opposite side. Waterline marks are brought around to this face, and doubling piece applied. Ji

ET cms

f

/

Cutit to length, fasten it to each mold with five nails, and mark the centerline (squaring up from the floor) on the top edge and the exposed face. Go to the bottom, and fit and fasten a wide cross-cleat, with a straight lower edge to bear on top of the keel. Mark the centerline on the face of this cleat. Now fit a 4-inch vertical post, flat on the floor, bearing against (under) the cross spall and the top edge of this cleat, and off center so that one edge lics exactly on the verti- cal centerline. Check to make sure that the cross spall is precisely at the 24-inch height at its midpoint, and fasten this post in place. As shown in Figure 2-5, brace the mold diago- nally with two 2-inch pieces from the top of the centerpost (under the spall) out to the mold below the doublings, and it's finished, ready to be raised up and make way for the next. Write the number “5” all over it in big black letters, because you'll be peering at it from strange angles when you get to planking.

You could make each half of the number 1 and number 2 molds out of single boards. The forwardmost mold will need a second cross spall, about at the sheerline, fastened with

12

screws so that it can be removed temporarily in the setting-up process. Number 5 will stand on the keel with its after face on the station line, which requires that its contact surface with the keel must be beveled upward, or else be 37/s inches above the rabbet, instead of the 3!/2-inch height that is proper for mold numbers 3 and 4. Lacking wide and crooked stock, you may have to use three pieces in each half of the big molds. When measuring for the height of bearing sur- face (landing place on stem, sternpost, tail feather) on the other molds, allow for a little more height than the construction profile shows. It's easier to fit wedges under them than to cut more wood away.

With the molds out of the way, you should now take off exact profile patterns of all the pieces (except the keel) that will make up the backbone of the vessel. Use pine boards or cheap plywood, and the same tip-over, nail- head, walk-about technique to mark the shapes that you used for the molds. These are much more complicated than the mold prints, of course, since you must get, in one operation, the shapes of both edges, the line of the rabbet,

the scarf lines. So place the nailheads care- ly, lay the stock tenderly, and do a quiet ble shuffle over all. Turn it over, mark the ves (including the rabbet line) and straight 15, saw to theoutlines, and return the pattern the floor. Tack it in place and mark, on the posed face, waterlines, load lines, stations, *ickness of stock—and the name of the boat, if “ouve got that far. (You realize, of course, that *5e name must never be mentioned aloud, near *5* boat, until the moment she starts down the ways. Fortunately, the evil spirits that lurk weed to know the name of the vessel in order to work their spells, which take time to prepare; Sut it's a well-known fact that they can't read. ‘This may illuminate some aspects of the snobbery of education.)

Well, back to business. The sternpost tem- plate must show the centerline of the propeller shaft and the shape of the aperture, because

figure 2-5

This half is carried out to an equal distance on waterline 24.

Sheer

The cross spall is placed with its top edge on waterline 24.

Diagonal brace

Wide cross-cleat is positioned to bear on the keel.

(Waterline 24 will be used for spalls throughout the boat.)

you'll bore the first and cut the second before assembling the members of the backbone. Do not delude yourself into the belief that you can omita template for the tail feather, just because it'sa parallel-sided five-by-seven with one sim- ple cutat theafter end and a hole through it. Do your thinking and make your mistakes on the template, before you start cutting a valuable piece of timber.

Incidentally, this whole operation of mold- building and template-shaping should be completed in 24 man-hours. Since the boat, ready to sail, will represent about 4,000 hours' labor, it might be worth squandering three or four more at this stage, trying to find any mis- takes the designer might have made. Believe me, he can make them. As for me, I’m heartily sick of this stage, and will leave you scrabbling about while I try to make sense out of the next one.

This half of the mold is

i "RII replaced on the lofted sanon, ON TM

13

24A

LWL

ne of the most fascinating and heartwarming whings about the boatbuilding business is the wmiversally friendly helpfulness of the many visitors we have. They are not, for the most part, people with, as you might say, an axe to erind—or a plane to be adjusted, or even a check to press into our embarrassed hand as down payment on a new design. Not at all. They come because they like us, and they like the smells around the shop that speak of cedar shavings, wood preservatives, and certain little creatures who have discovered good digging under the boiler.

These visitors are not ignorant. They are keen students of yacht design and boatbuild- ing, ever willing to help with a bit of friendly advice, or a quick demonstration of how Manny ‘whose shop they visited on last week's day off) fits a beam in less than half the time we're likely 1o need for the same job. And when they say, "Do you really think this stuff is fit for planking’’—or, My gahd, don't tell me you're still using iron keels and galvanized bolts!" — we feel properly grateful and almost at a loss for words. Almost, but not quite.

Therefore, having arrived at the subject of ballast keels, and in full awareness of my vow to avoid contention concerning matters of design, I'd like to attempt to justify that hunk of weight, to describe what it's made of and why it's shaped the way it is.

Chapter Three

The Ballast Keel

Outside iron

There are still some who, steeped in the lore of Friendship sloops, sandbaggers, Brixham trawlers, and seasickness cures, maintain that all ballast should be inside, anyway. I have given up fighting the battle of sail-carrying power ("After all—admit it—if you want to go to windward, you turn on the engine"), and have even stopped pointing out that lead inside is fully as expensive as lead outside, and terri- bly dangerous if the boat rolls completely over. I even dare suggest that some of those encap- sulated-birdshot ballast systems in the plastic boats will bear watching, too. All I do now is give the inside-ballast man a flatiron and sug- gest he hit the bench with it, twice—once with his hand on top of the iron, and once with his hand underneath. If you have never run a boat aground and feel completely confident that you never will, then this demonstration does not apply; but if you are half as timid and bumbling as I am, you'll be happy in the thought that the weight is already at the bot- tom of the pile.

So we'll put the ballast outside and keep the bilge airy. But why iron? You can melt lead yourself, in an old iron bathtub over burning automobile tires, and ladle it into a wooden mold. If a foundry casts a lead keel for you, ina sand mold, you need only provide the wooden

15

figure 3-1

Half-breadth of sternpost

3

Rabbet

Rabbet at 5

Rabbet at 6

Cardboard template for half-breadth of ballast keel at 5

7 6

45

c Top of casting at 11/2” below rabbet ~“ Half-breadth of top of casting at 5

Half-breadth of stem face

Enlargement of body plan

NA

——L

Profile of the ballast keel in the loft plan

pattern and more money. The weight can be lower, less bulky, more easily located at the correct fore-and-aft position. It won't rust. The bronze bolts through the lead shoe are more reliable than the steel bolts you'd use through iron (and just to be cautious, Ill include stain- less steel in my doubts). And, as someone always points out, you can take lead ballast off anytime, sell it for scrap, and get your money back.

In the face of all this undisputed evidence in favor of lead, what can we say in favor of iron? Well, first, it’s less expensive, if compared to the foundry’s price fora lead keel, or if youadd your own extra labor cost in making a negative pattern or mold and doing your own melting and pouring—which, incidentally, can be somewhat hazardous, if you get careless; I have scars to prove it. But cost is a poor argument. The best money in the boat is the money that buys outside ballast, so don’t begrudge it. Get the best material, and get enough. In my case, get iron. Design the boat so that only iron can hit those adamantine ledges—and slide smoothly off, undistorted. Design it, further- more, so that you don’t have to carve out large mounds of outside deadwood, where vile worms will dwell soon after you scrape the paint off.

16

Think how strong the boat must be, with stem, sternpost, and all points between tied directly to that unyielding base. Neither thrust of mast nor two-point support from a storage cradle will ever bend that foundation.

The solid pattern method

Whether your design calls for lead or iron, slabsided or streamlined, someone has to make a pattern for it. Patternmaking is a craft that demands a very high degree of skill, precision, and ingenuity—if you're dealing with some- thing like a matched pair of water-jacketed engine manifolds, or a massive frame whose finished dimensions must be accurate to tiny fractions of an inch. But such skill is not essen- tial to the making ofa ballast-keel pattern, and you have to make a pattern anyway—so let's get at it.

If your design calls for the simplest form— parallel-sided for the greater part of its length, tapering very slightly from top to bottom to give the pattern "draft" soit can be lifted out of thesand—then the problem is very simple. You can make the pattern solid, preferably of white- pine timber sawn to the maximum thickness requiredat the top of the casting. Pileitup, and

cut it to the profile you laid down on the floor. Taper the pattern for draft by running it through a single-surface planer, with a batten tacked along its lower edge. Double the thick- ness of the batten, of course, when you turn the pattern over to do the other side. (Or lacking a surface planer, you can do this tapering by hand plane. A taper of !/: inch to the foot is enough.) Taper the ends of the pattern as necessary, and shape the entering edge as shown in the

Pine log is sided to maximum width of the ballast keel (and then some).

Station lines and profile of the ballast keel are laid out along one side.

Perimeter is cut straight through, square with the flattened face.

Top surface is hewn flat, planed straight, and given a centerline. Station lines are run across.

Top of ballast keel is laid out and faired through with half-breadths taken from the body plan.

Hewn bottom surface is similarly marked with centerline. Station lines are run across. Bottom edges of the ballast keel are laid out and

faired through.

Sides are hewn straight down between the perimeters laid out for the top and the bottom of the ballast keel.

Templates trom the loft plan are tried along the station marks in spots cut by chisel to light-tight fit.

Areas between the station spots are hewn off and planed to fairness. Trying batten is app along the pattern to check for high spots.

lines drawing. If your designer has been paying attention to the findings of the tank-research men, he will be very fussy about this, probably demanding a curve like a snubbed parabola, rather than the flat-with-rounded-corners, full half-round, or blunt knife-edge that were con- sidered proper by various designers at various times during the past hundred years. Laminar flow, width and location of maximum chord, acceleration of water particles, minimization of the areas of turbulence—these are all sud-

17

figure 3-3a € The “lift model" method

Strip of building paper is laid parallel 1 2 3

to the top of the ballast keel in the 6 718 45

loft drawing profile. /] ) à UN :

A centerline ( € ) is laid on it.

1 Ends of the casting (rz and the station lines are projected squarely to it from the top of the ballast keel in

the profile.

—

L C L———77

E ——— = —_ zT di E dB———— 7 62 5 E Lift thicknesses are marked Ns

into the loft profile of the At 6, 4, and 3 the heights of ballast keel. lift lines crossings must be projected back to the centerline before the half-

3

Where the marked lift lines

cross the centerline at 5 in the loft body plan, their half-breadths for 5 may be taken directly with

breadths of the lifts can be taken in the body plan.

and applied to 5 on the

paper strip.

figure 3-3b

denly very much to be considered, and you can be sure that your designer had them in mind when he shaped those lowermost waterlines. For the moment, let's ignore the problem of core prints, lifting eyes, and surface finish, and discuss instead the building of a more compli-

18

Lofted top surfaces of each lift in the ballast keel

cated pattern—for instance, the one required for our example.

There are at least three ways to do this job. The first and most primitive (and by far the most difficult, in my opinion) is to start with an enormous baulk of timber and whittle it to

figure 3-3d

hm, —— Gouge adze for roughing | S

figure 3-3e

Smoothed to the bottoms of the valleys, and faired fore and aft with plane

shape, using templates lifted from the section lines in the body plan as guides. (Figure 5-2 illustrates this method step by step.) An old- time sparmaker, good with broadaxe and adze, could possibly do an acceptable job by this method. So could Michelangelo.

Lifts sawn out and fastened together

The lift model method

Instead, suppose we build this pattern as if it were a lift model—using layers of 2-inch plank, sawn to shape, pinned together, and faired off with adze and plane, as shown in

19

figure 3-4a

Ballast keel pattern—framed and planked

Keel and station frames molded from the loft plan

figure 3-4b

False nose

figure 3-4c

False nose

Nosepiece

Figure 3-3. This makes much more sense. This method will eat up a lot of good pine plank, and will require some additional lofting and much hand planing, butit’s simple, foolproof, and entire satisfactory (and the molders in the foundry can ram the pattern to their hearts’ content and never dent it a bit).

Back to the lines on the floor, then. Tack down a fresh piece of building paper—longer than the pattern you're going to make, clear of the casting in the body plan, and parallel to the keel. Draw a centerline on this strip, exactly

20

parallel to the top of the casting (Figure 3-3a). Mark this line where each station ordinate crosses it, and at each end. Draw a line square across at each mark. Now lay off and pencil in the half-siding of the rabbet line in the plan view, and extend it all the way to the after face of the sternpost. You will not use this rabbet line in shaping the pattern, but it will serveasa guide to the lines you are about to develop inside it. Each one of these lines will represent the top surface of one of the lifts that will make up the pattern.

Go back to the body plan; intersect each ion line 1!/2 inches below the rabbet height that station; take these widths out from the terline; then lay down this line in plan , as you just laid down the rabbet line. is line you have just drawn, of course, repre- s the top of the casting, and the top of such wood as may be used to continue the shape the casting all the way aft. Now go through is process again to get the shape of the top of second slice down from the first exactly the ickness of the stock you are using. (This ickness is purely arbitrary and depends solely what you can get. Probably 17/s-inch thick- is the likeliest.)

You will, of course, note that the forward after ends of each lift are determined by ir intersections with the profile, except at top of the forward end of the pattern, where lifts are cut off square to butt against a ll fairing piece. All lifts will have the same alf-siding at the line of the rudder stock, even —* their points of intersection move progres- wxely forward (Figure 3-3b).

Continue this laying down, then, until the einth, tenth, or whatever slice appears as a short little pad at the toe of the profile, and prepare to reproduce all these flats, double, in wood. You can use the nailhead walk-about system for printing the half-width and center- Tine, and develop the other half with measure- ments and a batten on the other side of the -enterline. Be sure that the centerlines are exactly right, and mark at least one station on each lift so that you can locate them in their proper fore-and-aft positions.

Saw the lifts out right to the line. Pile them up, upside down, holding each lift to the one 5elow it with glueand plenty of 3-inch number 12 screws. The pattern should now look like Figure 3-3c—corrugated, but showing prom- ise. All that remains to be done is to work the pattern down to the lines until it is perfectly fair and smooth, when it will be ready for core prints and three coats of shellac.

Right now, with this rough thing confront- ing you, you need a shipwright’s lipped adze and some confidence in the use of it. If you can't find an old adze, complete with handle, order a new one from your ship chandler and fit a handle yourself. (I know of one book on boat- building that discourages any amateur's hopes of mastering this tool; but the text's accompany- ing drawing, depicting this strange and won- derful instrument, shows the handle in back- ward. If theauthor attempted to use it like that,

he comes by his pessimism naturally.) Actu- ally, a good adze is one of the easiest of all tools to use; it is precise, powerful, fast, and far safer to use than a hammer. So get one—or three or four assorted sizes and shapes, if you can; Fig- ure 3-3d shows how a gouge adze is used for roughing, and a lipped adze for smoothing— and practice with it for a few minutes. Sit down, holding the end of the handle so it is anchored in your left hand against your tummy. Lift the handle with your right hand and chop down gently. Cut across the grain, seldom with it. Slide your left hand down your front as the cut moves down the timber.

But shun the broadaxe, my son, because that is a tool that's hard to master. I can still recall the dismay I felt, at the age of six years, when my father gave me my first real chopping axe and told me that you have to start really young if you're ever going to be a good axe- man. A fine thing to spring on me at that late date! There I was, practically grown up, and just starting to learn. And I was right. I never did become a good axeman, but I can cut out wooden gears for an alarm clock with an adze. So can you, by the time you've got that pattern roughed off to the hand-plane stage.

The frame-and-plank method

I promised three ways to make this pattern. The third way is to build it like a boat— framed and planked, as in Figure 3-4.

The top of the pattern should be cut from 2-inch pine plank, just as you laid out and cut the first lift in the above process. Mark the centerline and stations on its under face, and lay it upside down on at least three horses. This represents your keel, so be sure it’s straight. Clamp the plank to the horses so it will stay that way from now on.

Go to the body plan, and there lay out the shapes of the stations in way of the ballast. From these you will make up solid bulkheads, cut to shape from heavy pine boards. Each one will be 2 inches short at the top and bottom, and 7/s inch scant in width on each side. The top edge of each will be cut to the angle of the drag (downward slope aft) of the keel. Set these upon the upside-down top so they are centered exactly, toe-nailed in place, and braced at the correct angle.

Now fit, brace, and fasten a false nose, as shown in Figure 3-4a, so it is roughly parallel with the forward profile of the ballast casting and about 6 inches aft of it. You must cut off the

21

Core print placed at the upper end of each keelbolt hole to be molded through the ballast keel casting

(set in exact alignment with the centerline of each bolt)

figure 3-5

Set in exact alignment with the centerline of each bolt

" 15/2" diameter

"d

Core print—upper face of the ballast keel casting

"

These produce 11/2

depressions in the top face of the sand

mold to receive the pipe cores extending upward from the lower part of the sand mold during the casting

process.

number 3 bulkhead to allow the passage of this false nose from the underside of the plank top to the straight line determined by the bottoms of the bulkheads on stations number 4 and number 5. (‘‘Bottom’’ here means, of course, the true lower ends, which are at the moment facing upward as this pattern is being assem- bled.) This false nosepiece will be straight sided, and its taper determined by widths at its intersections with the number 3 bulkhead and the plank that forms the inverted backbone. Allowance must be made, of course, for the beveling of that plank, as shown on station number 2 of the body plan, and for the 7/s-inch boards that will be bent around, outside the frames and the nosepiece, to constitute the side planking of this pattern (Figure 3-4b).

Before planking, however, you must fit intermediate frames a foot apart, between the station frames already in place (Figure 3-4b).

These either can stand plumb to the backbone, or be raked to match the station frames. To get their shapes, you will, of course, work to two curves, determined by battens bent around the station frames, top and bottom. When you fasten them in place, align their center marks exactly to a straightedge tacked to the lower ends of the station bulkheads.

Now to plank the sides of this pattern: Start with a straightedged board, about 10 inches wide and 16 feet long, and clamp it to the number 4 bulkhead, with its lower edge up 3 to 4 inches from the backbone. Do the same on the other side with an identical board. Pull the forward ends together until you can clamp across and squeeze the false nose between them, with their lower forward corners almost touch- ing the backbone. Go aft, and pull the after ends together. The lower after corners should be just clear of the backbone, if your guess at

Minimal depth to hold the block

Core print—on the lower face of the ballast keel pattern

These produce depressions in the lower part of the sand mold to accommodate the square head of the sand core, which aligns the pipe core within the sand mold.

number 4 was right. This is, of course, too much to expect; so loosen the clamps at number 4, and move the clamped-together after ends up or down as may be necessary.

The purpose of all this double-action bend- ing is to maintain equal pressure on both sides of the bulkheads, and thereby avoid pushing anything out of place. Now set your dividers as wide as they will go, and scribe lines on these two boards exactly equidistant, at all points, from their final resting place on the backbone. Reverse the clamping-on process, and saw one out. Theoretically, the other one should be an identical twin; if a great discrepancy appears, try to find out where you went wrong.

Bevel the edges of the boards to fit against the backbone; reclamp; mark for alterations in the fit, and for the cuts to be made flush with the forward face of the false nose and in the same plane as the bottom ends of the bulk-

heads; take it all apart again, and alter and cut; reclamp, and fasten the boards to the bulkheads with 2-inch number 12 screws. The second boards, which will cover the remainder of the sides, go on next. Dress off the edges so they are exactly straight, right to the nosepiece, and fit to them the 2-inch plank, which will eventu- ally be rounded off as the underside of the pat- tern. Cut its forward end flush and in line with the forward face of the nosepiece (Figure 3-4c).

Now build up the laminations of 2-inch plank, against the line of the false nosepiece, until you have enough material to make the shaped entering edge and toe of the pattern. When fastening these one to another, bear in mind the shaping that is to be done, and try to keep the screws clear of the danger areas. Usea drawknife, planes, and Stanley 'Surform" wood rasps for this final shaping, getting the contours from plywood templates taken off the

23

figure 3-7a

Loose holes reamed with galvanized 20d spike

Scored centerline

1” auger hole

20d spikes, shanks (bright) driven flush into tight holes

figure 3-7b

One-half of the finished core box

24

lines on the floor. Cut the after end to the exact line of the rudder stock, leaving the jog at the bottom as shown in the construction plan.

We still have to fit core prints and lifting eyes, make a core box for the bolt heads, and apply the final finish.

Core prints and the core box

The core prints, of course, leave their marks in the two parts (“‘drag’’ and “cope”) of the sand mold that will be packed and rammed around this pattern at the foundry. (This explains the use of heavy scantlings for pat- terns. Foundrymen will not accept a pattern made of thin plywood, which will bulge inward under the pressure of the ramming.) These prints must match exactly the cores they are to accommodate—in this case, standard 1l-inch iron pipe, which measures 15/16 inches outside diameter. For the top prints, therefore, plane out a 2-foot length of round stock, of this diameter, and cut it into 2-inch lengths.

Turn the monster right-side up, and lay out the locations of the bolts, as shown on the construction plan. (In this design, all bolts are on the centerline, and all but the aftermost one are square with the line of the keel.) Bore a shallow hole, about 1/2 inch deep and 15/16 inches diameter, at each mark; tap one of your round pegs into each pit, and fasten the peg with one 3-inch number 12 screw right down

Sand core made with the combined halves of the core box

figure 3-8

Lifting eye, —— — —

bolted through pattern

—_—

the middle (see Figure 3-5). There's a good chance that the foundrymen will want these top prints out of the way during the first half of the molding, and the screw fastenings can be removed and later replaced without tearing anything up.

Now turn the pattern over and fit the bot- tom prints (Figure 3-6). These are blocks 2 inches square, to take the square cores which will form the pockets for the bolt heads, and, of course, center the lower ends of the pipes. They must stand up straight on the hillside— that is, their sides must be precisely parallel to the line of the bolts—and they must be carefully located, on the centerline, directly under the top prints. If you start with stock 1!/4 inches thick, you will have enough wood left after fitting to the slopes.

«c»

Sees ——

st

Now for the core box. Cut two pieces of pine exactly 1 by 2 inches, and about 8 inches long. Cut a groove about !/16 inch deep by 1⁄3 inch wide lengthwise down the center of one face of each piece. The easiest way to do this is on a table saw. Clamp the two pieces firmly together, groove to groove, with their edges matching exactly. Start the worm of a sharp l-inch wood auger in the double groove, and bore length- wise (with the worm following the groove) a distance of 2 inches. Without disturbing the

25

figure 3-9

Upper core print impression

1" pipe core

Sand core from the core box

Lower core print impression

Cross section of the founder's sand mold

clamps, drill four 3/16-inch holes squarely through the two pieces to take slip-fit pins. Remove the clamps and spin a headless 20- penny galvanized spike through the pin holes in one of the two pieces. Cut lengths of plain 20-penny spikes for the pins, 1'/ inches long, and drive them through the tight holes in the other piece (Figure 3-72). Clamp the two pieces together and build a wall4 inches high around the bored end, made up in two parts that sep- arate on the same plane as the first two pieces. (See Figure 3-7b.) Take the core box apart, smooth all the inside surfaces, shellac, smooth some more, fill any crevices with beeswax, shel- lac again, and it's done.

The foundryman will very likely snort and tell you he has a much better core box in the core room, but don't let that bother you. If you hadn't brought this one, you would have been treated to a demonstration of shocked pity for

26

your ignorance. Quite seriously, though, if you don't know much about this business, make friends with the foundry boss and watch the molders at work. Theirs is a fascinating art, and they'll teach you some things you'll need to know hereafter about patternmaking.

And, although they won't expect it, they'll be happy to see the pair of lifting eyes you are about to install in the top of your pattern. Remember, however, that if one of these eyes pulls out, after the crane has lifted the pattern clear, and the heavy end drops down and ruins a day's work, you will wish you were not around to hear the comments. So install the eyes this way: Bore a 7/16-inch hole all the way through the pattern, from top to bottom; coun- tersink at the bottom to take a washer and ?/s- inch nuts; countersink at the top so that, with the top of a ?/s-inch threaded bolt just flush, there'll be room to drop over it an upset shackle

figure 3-10

ZU M

A

Open female ballast keel mold for lead

made of !/s- by 3/4-inch flat stock, with a hole drilled through its crown, anda full nut to hold it on (or buy a pair of 3/s-inch eye nuts). This assembly is pictured in Figure 3-8.

Female mold

A female mold, shaped, rounded, and flared, into which you can ladle your own bathtub lead, is built by the same contour system as described in the second method above, but re- versed, with wooden walls, well-bolted top and bottom, surrounding the grand canyon, whose sides you will pare smooth with an adze, gouges, round-faced planes, and a disc sander. Make the mold in two halves, split vertically, so you can lay each on its side and really get at it for shaping—and so you can get it off the cast- ing without breaking it to bits. Set the mold level, on a base that will support all those tons

without subsiding or leaning. Use dry hard- wood dowels for bolt-hole cores. Set the dowels in shallow holes at the lower end, held by well- fastened cleats around the mold at the top (see Figure 3-10). Remember that the dowels will try very hard to float when the lead is poured. Paint the cores and the interior with something that will prevent charring of the wood. We once used ordinary waterglass, on somebody's recommendation, and it certainly didn't do any harm.

If I were doing the job, I'd pile and pack sand all around that mold, so that if it sprang a big leak, or a lot of small ones, I wouldn't lose the whole damned shooting match.

Right now (never mind what I said at the beginning of this chapter), I'm beginning to think fondly of a good sailing dory with beach stones under the middle thwart. I heard some- where that the pink ones are the heaviest.

27

Chapter Four

The Backbone: Keel and Sternpost

Your designer probably calls for a white oak keel, properly air dried. This is good; he could have been much more specific, and gotten us all in trouble. He might have inherited from his Naval Construction days one of those little electric moisture-content indicators, and got- ten all excited about what it told him. ‘Although, confidentially, I’ve watched him read the shielded dial, nod with satisfaction, and mark “OK” on a timber that had been swaying to the summer breezes three weeks before.) He might even have been able to rec- ognize white oak when he saw it, although this is unlikely. But he has fulfilled his duty by the book, and said, ‘‘white oak, properly air dried." We can take it from there.

Good timber

The keel for the boat in our example will spend most of its life in the water, and will never, except by awful accident, lose much of its moisture. It should therefore be at its maxi- mum size when fitted to the ballast casting (lest, if dry, it swell its normal 5 percent, hang out over the metal, and strain the floor-timber

fastenings), and should be kept at that size, throughout the building process, by liberal doses of sealer. I favor a mixture of linseed oil and kerosene, witha slug of Cuprinol for luck. If the wood will take a pencil mark, it’s dry enough. If it’s too wet for that, use a rase knife, which marks the wood by scoring it.

And if you can’t get white oak, the wood most favored by designers and builders, what then? Longleaf hard pine, if dense and heavy, is as good in almost every respect, and somewhat better for a boat that’s going into southern

figure 4-1

AN LZ ed

Flitch cuts

29

Boxed heart

figure 4-2

waters. ‘‘Spar-quality’’ Douglas-fir (which becomes ‘Oregon pine" on its way to the boat- yard) is magnificent timber, good enough for any part of a boat except bent frames and fancy trim. If you were in England you'd sigh with ecstasy over a bit of American elm, which we use for flooring horse stalls. And then there are other varieties of oak, which we won't mention by name, but which get whiter and whiter as they travel from the mill to the shop. I could bear the thought of teak, if someone gave me a piece. If I were in Norway, or Australia, I'd ask a local builder what he'd use in his own boat and do likewise.

A flat keel such as this one—5 inches deep

figure 4-3

Centerlines matched

Temporary bolts

Centerlines on the casting and keel flitch

and 14 inches wide at mid-length—should come out of the log entirely clear of the heart, and lie small-face down. This gets you away from possible cup shake, porous pith, and the tendency to check open at the ends, where stem and sternpost must attach with absolute integ- rity. Figure 4-1 shows the "flitch" cuts that yield the best timber for the keel. Obviously, the tree that produces this off-the-side timber will be much bigger than you'd need if you were satisfied to take a boxed-heart keel. (Just as obviously, there will be a twin on the other side, which gives you a choice, and the problem of what to do with the second keel. If you share my passion for good timber, you'll buy it,

Perimeter of casting marked on the keel flitch

Bolt holes through the keel flitch

figure 4-4a . Lofted keel in body plan at station 45

Exterior of planking at station #5

Rabbet line

Top of ballast keel

along with all the other full-length pieces out of that log. You never know when you might want to build another boat—and clear toerail stock 22 feet long is hard to find on short notice.)

Marking method

Let's mark this keel and cut it to shape, before we take up the various problems and possible alternatives in the other pieces of the backbone.

Iassume that the ballast casting has arrived, or has been revealed behind the bathtub, and

figure 4- 4b

Keelbolt holes

(bored from casting) Marked underside

of the keel flitch

Top of casting

Width of timber keel is twice the offset of the rabbet line from the centerline at that station.

31

figure 4-4c

Rabbet

Loft drawing (half-breadth view) where the rabbet reverses its curve

figure 4-4d / j

that you have it lying comfortably on its side, on 8-inch blocking, with the plane of the top face clear of obstructions, and room to get a long auger through the core holes from the bottom. (I am assuming, furthermore, that you and I are talking about the full-length casting as shown for our example; or that you have, while my back was turned, fitted deadwood to a scarfed casting to achieve the same full-length, under-the-keel, flat-on-top shape, all the way back to the rudder stock. I'll have something to say about this later, in defiance of strict chronology.) What you are after right now is the exact Filler block shape of the top of that casting, with bolt loca- tions marked on the bottom of the wood keel, so that you can make the proper allowances The "Inok uta fait rabbét (for widening to the rabbet width, because of whee the buige of the the flare of the wineglass sections) and cut it eel meets the paralle recisely to shape. eom ý Mark a centerline on the top of the casting— from center to center of the two ends, of course—as shown in Figure 4-2. If the top of

Stem knee

Keel

Casting

Unfair rabbet at the junction of keel and stem —as would result if

this portrayal in the half-breadth plan were followed.

32

zure 4-5a

Skilsaw cuts finished with hand ripper

^

ll

‘he casting shows a slight discrepancy in width em either side of this line or through the mid- dle, ignore it, and don't tell the owner. It's too Tate for tears, and the lack of perfect symmetry *on't do any harm. (We always judged the Umbre of an owner by the way he phrased the ‘evitable question at the end of his first sea- son. It might be “Why does she sail even better on the starboard tack?’’, but it was more likely 15 come out “Why the ---- is this thing slower with the wind on the left-hand side?” We never tame up with a really good answer, but we propounded some wonderful theories concern- ing the strange behavior of sails, and the clockwise rotation of objects in the Northern Hemisphere.)

figure 4-5b

Timber turned over with chain and bar

Now mark, with great care and considera- tion, a centerline on the lower face of the wood keel. Get from the loft floor the "expanded" locations of the stations, and square them across on this lower face. Gather rollers, pea- veys, a toe jack, wedges, bar clamps, and friends, and get the wood against the ballast, solidly, with centerlines matching, and pre- cisely located fore and aft. Think hard, and then bore two bolt holes, one at each end of the casting by way of core holes, through the wood keel, as shown in Figure 4-3. If the casting was cored with l-inch pipe, it's likely that your 7/s-inch auger is the tool to use, unless you've done a painful lot of reaming. Make up two temporary */4-inch bolts, and set them up through keel and casting. Now you know that nothing will shift, and you can proceed to mark the outline of the casting on the wood, and bore the other bolt holes. Measure for the lengths of all keelbolts (bearing in mind, and allowing for, the extra lengths needed at the

figure 4-5c

(= =>

Rase knife

33

figure 4-6

Flitch

after and forward ends, where they must reach through the stern knee and forefoot, respec- tively), and order them now, if they are to be made of galvanized steel. Take out the tempo- rary bolts, lay the timber bottom-up, and mark for the outline cut, which will be exactly in the vertical plane of the rabbet line. Perhaps we should rephrase that, and get the horse in front of the cart where he belongs: The flaring sides of the casting, if continued smoothly upward to the height of the rabbet as shown in the body plan, will dictate the width from the centerline to the rabbet at each station throughout the length of the keel. Join these points with a fair curve, and you are ready to cut. If the rabbet width does not agree exactly at all points with the widths originally laid down, don’t worry too much about it. Later on, you can alter the lower ends of the molds, within reasonable limits, to allow for this shrinking or swelling of the casting.

Now, the bottom face has been marked to

34

match the top of the casting; bolt holes have been bored; and the corrected line (to the width of the rabbet) has been drawn in way of the cast- ing, and continued forward to join with and fair into the rabbet as marked on the stem (Figures 4-4a, 4-4b). You will have noticed, long ago, when laying out this half-breadth of rabbet on the floor, the slight reverse in its curve just before it reaches the stem (Figure 4-4c), and the manner in which it straightens out and follows the parallel sides of the stem thereafter (Figure 4-4d). Pardon me if I seem to doubt your apti- tude in the spatial relationships test. I know of three designs, one of them widely built to, all of them done by designers who should have known better, and all of which contain this glaring fault—the assumption that the rabbet line can show an abrupt change in direction as it leaves a swelled keel and encounters a parallel-sided stem. I built one of these boats, when I was very young, and it was a painful and costly experience. I hadn’t then learned to think like a garboard (that has an unflattering connotation) or to look for possible errors in every set of plans that came along. I finally got smart; and you are expected to become so, now that I’ve told you how.

The keel is cut

So we have a fair line to cut to, but a thick timber to cut through. Take your portable electric saw, with its sharp, well-set 8-inch blade at full cutting depth (23/4 inches, that is) and check to see that the blade stands precisely square to the shoe. Try a practice run, around a similar curve, to learn the proper allowance to make from the guide mark on the front of the shoe. You'll want to leave the mark, but just barely. Cut with the wide part of the shoe inside. Don't push too hard; have a small assistant sweeping and blowing ahead of the cut. When you've gone the length, both sides, get out your extra-long 5/s2-inch drill, and shoot holes down through the saw kerf and out the other side—one at every station, one or two between, | footapartat the forward end, where the reverse comes. Turn the timber over. (If you can'tdo this with a peavey, chain a 6-foot bar to it, as shown in Figure 4-5b. Take the slack out

figure 4-7

|

|

Pattern board laid over the nails and tramped down

Perimeter of template marked on sternpost stock—rabbet line pricked through drill holes

of the chain by driving wedges under it.) Stand tenpenny nails ın the postholes you just punched through, spring a batten to them, and mark for the cut. Your saw should follow the bottom kerf with no more than '/s-inch error either side. (And what if the keel is 6 inches thick, and the saw cuts don’t meet? Pray that they line up, and finish the job with your handsaw.)

Set your locking bevel to the angle between the perpendicularstation ordinates and the top of the keel, on the laid-down profile, and trans- fer the station marks up the sides and across the top of the keel. Runa true centerline along the length of it, using string, a straightedge, anda rase knife, so that you’ll be able to find the line through the sawdust and sealer. Look to the profile, and score the rabbet line (Figure 4-5c), but stop short of the forward end until the stem (whose lower-end rabbet is also left unfinished) is in place, and you can flow a true curve through the intersection. Leave this now and

Pattern picked up by imprint of nailheads

— Template cut to size and rabbet line drilled through

consider the remaining members of the backbone—stem, sternpost and its knee, and the tail feather.

And now, the sternpost

The sternpost, like the keel (and for the same reason), should be cut from a timber that is not thoroughly seasoned. The perfect cut, as shown in Figure 4-6, would have through its middle a radius from the center of the log, with the growth rings crossing it almost at right angles—“‘rift sawn,” or "edge grain," in the purest sense—clear of the heart on one edge, and stopping inside the sapwood on the other. It is unlikely that you would find an oak butt big enough to provide this ideal sternpost, which must come from rather less than the half-diameter of the log. The next best choice is a flitch like the keel, off the side of the log, well clear of the heart. I would avoid a boxed-heart timber if possible.

35

figure 4-8a

Lofting drawing of the sternpost

LWL

— Sheetrock nail with edge of its head driven into the lofted line

Rabbet ——

"gpre o o The problem of transferring a rabbet line

from a pattern is solved thus: Drill small holes clear through the pattern at 6-inch intervals along the penciled rabbet line; prick the timber through these holes in the pattern while it is in place, for marking the outline. Saw the timber to shape, plane all faces square and exactly to the marks, then place the pattern on the reverse side, and prick through the same holes (Figure 4-7). You will, of course, use a batten to draw a curve through all these pricked spots on both sides to guide later on in cutting the rabbet. (The casual "saw-to-shape" above will have been done with the 8-inch portable saw, just as you did when you cut the keel. One cut in the propeller aperture is inaccessible to this treat- ment, however, and you'll need to make this one with a series of overlapping auger holes, square through, just clear of the line. Clean off the rough points with an adze and a plane.) Let's bore the shaft alley before we go on to making the stem. You will have transferred, from the sternpost pattern, the line of the shaft in profile—marked on both faces of the timber and squared across its forward and after edges (see Figure 4-8a). The shaft line terminates on the aft face of the sternpost in way of the pro- peller aperture, where you can prick-mark its

Boring from both directions, freehand

figure 4-8c

Single cutter

Single lip Straight core

| Ra

exact center, and start a hole for it with your expansive bit. At this point I usually get impa- tient, clamp the timber where I can aim along the line comfortably, and proceed to bore half- way through it, freehand, with a barefoot auger (if I happen at the moment to have an electric drill with enough torque to handle it). Then I flip the timber over, cut enough of a flat (with gouge and chisel) to starta hole on the forward face, and bore back through the tunnel. This is a bare 15 inches of hole, and no great feat. You may feel better boring more slowly by hand with an auger whose shank is running in a notched guide, precisely located by a straight- edge, in line with the desired shaft hole (Figure 4-8b). With such a guide, you should be able to bore true, all the way through from the aft to the forward face, in one operation. Turn the boring tool with a 3-foot cross handle, or a 30-inch pipe wrench. But if-you are using a worm auger (which has a lead screw) instead of a barefoot one, beware: it will crawl to the

Double cutter

Double lip ^ Single cutter

Single-twist bits

Double-twist bits

figure 4-8d

Long shaftlog bored in two halves

starboard every time. (Figure 4-8c depicts the variety of drill bits available to the boatbuilder.)

While we’re on this subject, let me tell you the only easy way to make a long shaftlog, bored exactly on center from end to end. Plan the log in two halves, one above and one below the centerline of the shaft. Score both halves, dead center, full length, on their contact faces (Figure 4-8d). Clamp them very firmly together, groove to groove, and follow the groove from end to end with the worm ofa ship auger. Don’t worry about splines, feathers, glue, or outing flannel when you join these together. Oak casks don’t leak; neither will these, if you put enough bolts through them.

37

Chapter Five

The Backbone: Stem, Rabbet, and Frame Sockets

The stem

I'd like to read from my Ode to the Black Locust, but fortunately it’s still all in the head, and hazy at that. The subject is the Stem. Out front every time; first to take the brunt, whatever that is; symbol of Man’s conquest of the unknown; stark in the cresting seas, the boiling sun, the creaking frosts of high latitudes. And not always up to facing these responsibilities, either, unless it’s a pretty good piece to start with, and capped at the top to keep fresh water out of the end grain.

So, for the stem, you want the best cut out of the best tree that ever grew. This is where the old pro has the advantage over you. For years, he’s been pushing choice bits of timber under the shop—crooked, curved, too rough-looking to suit the visiting N.A.s—waiting for that slack spell when he'll build one for himself, or for a friend who’s going winter fishing. He might even have a piece of black locust, grown to the sweep, clear of the heart, and seasoned all the way through. A piece of really good, genuine white oak, grown and seasoned as above, is not to be sneered at. Dense hard pine would do, but you’d likely have to accept

straight grain. Just don't give up the search too easily. And if all else fails, you can cold- laminate the whole length, on a form, with no scarf, out of 3/4-inch hard mahogany—and with plenty of through-rivets to quiet my doubts about the glue. We'll consider this pos- sibility later.

Let’s assume that you plan to make the stem in two pieces, as shown in the present plans. It’s permissible to shift the location of the scarf up or down, to suit your timber. Don’t shorten the scarf, or I'll be disappointed. Don’t put jogs, hooks, or keys in it. Keep the lower end of the scarf below the waterline. Make the whole assembly of three pieces, as shown in Figure 5-1a, if necessary. Leave plenty of wood on top of the keel, far aft enough to take that forward- most ballast bolt with plenty to spare. You can cut all these parts, even some portions of the inside curves, just as you cut the keel and the sternpost; although with these lighter-weight and easier-to-carry timbers, a big bandsaw does it with less fuss. Dress off the matching faces of the scarfs with great care, square to the sides and right to the template outlines, light-tight when you put them together. Use a rabbet plane across the grain in the corners, and a

39

figure 5-1a

Rabbet

Loft drawing of the stem profile

36A 24A 12A LWL

ae EX ae 24B

Filler block LE Filler block | 36B

smoothing plane and a foreplane in the open stretches. Transfer waterlines, sheerline, and station lines to all four faces of each piece they cross; prick in the rabbet line (but do not mark it yet) on both sides, as you did on the sternpost. Lay them out on the full-sized lofting, and notice what happens to the height of the sheer when you change the angle of that scarf at the fore end of the keel.

40

——À—— "

Alignment of forefoot and keel is established by laying a long straight- edge along the side of the forefoot timber. Distance away from the centerline aft should be that of the half-siding of the timber.

Joining it all together

My first move, at this point, is to set the wood keel level, on timbers, and fit the forefoot (lower part of the stem) toit. Usea tackle from overhead, unless you have a strong and patient helper to hold it while you scramble for clamps. You were probably timid in cutting the end of the keel and the matching jog in the forefoot, so you'll probably need to make saw cuts up the joint—several of them— before the reference lines (marked on each piece at station 3) match up. Set your clamps so that they tend to pull the two pieces together lengthwise, tightening the scarf as you tighten them. As shown in Figure 5-la, check with a long straightedge against each side of the forefoot to points 2 inches off center, back on the keel top. Now, if you have absolute confidence in your clamps, you can lay the assembly on its side, counter-

figure 5-1b

Stempiece hoisted into position

bore for heads, and bore up through them from the bottom of the keel. The two forwardmost counterbores must be nicely calculated for depth, to allow for final fairing and shaping of the keel. For strength, the ideal is to set the heads barely below the surface (not enough to hold an honest bung) in order not to remove too much wood by counterboring. You can thicken epoxy resin with sander dust and get a paste that will stick to anything, anywhere— including the sunken bolt heads. Note the angle of the bolt holes, as shown in Figure 5-1b. They are laid out to range forward of a line perpendicular to the top of the forefoot, so that they will tend to pull the stem aft, against the end of the forefoot, as the nuts on top are tightened. Bore half of them square to the joint, if you want to, but never on a line that will

=

The ends of the scarf are kerfed with a handsaw

to bring station and water- line marks into alignment.

Bolts set normal to the face of the scarf

bring them out at right angles to the top of the forefoot. Start them all dead center at the bot- tom, but angle all but the end bolts alternately portand starboard—enough to come outat the top | inch off center. Square off a flat, with gouge and chisel, to take a washer and a nut, where each bolt hole breaks through at the top. Notice the bolts through two floor timbers, to be put in later. Lay out the fastenings with care, to avoid interference with these floors. For material, use silicon bronze, !/2-inch diameter, for these wood-to-wood scarf bolts—and 1/s- inch galvanized steel, of course, for the after- most bolt, which passes through the iron bal-

41

Bolts slanted to pull scarf together

figure 5-2a

Rudderpost

figure 5-2b

Loft drawing of the sternpost assembly

Sternpo

LWL

— Rabbet line

a ae

Sternpost and knee

figure 5-2c

last casting. Remember thata giant (the outside ballast keel) will plant one foot on this scarf and try to tear the planks and the stem away from it, with a strength that might produce 9,000 pounds of pull, so it’s wise to keep this earnestly in mind when you're putting these parts together.

Very well, then. Stand it up, unclamp, soak the contact surfaces with your favorite poison, reassemble, drive the bolts, and set them up

are joined together first.

os

Meet aa mt um uoo P ds = Sternpost assembly is set on

ena ed

The matching of the rabbet line locates the position of the sternpost on the keel.

a

the keel and aligned to the centerline with long straightedge.

with nuts and washers. Counterbores should be 1 inch deep, and bolt heads can be made by threading on a standard full-depth hex nut of the same bronze as the bolt.

Hoist the top piece of the stem, and sag it into place on the forefoot with two clamps to hold it there. Run your saw blade through the butt joint at the top and bottom of the scarf, and let itslip down (with, maybe, someone ona stepladder gently tunking it at the top) to make an airtight fit. The load waterline marks should run together as reference marks when fitting is complete. Lay out the lines of the bolts; coun- terbore for same (1/2-inch bronze); bore end holes to center, and the two in between aimed to port and to starboard, and slant them all as before— to pull the two pieces together when the bolts come tight.

Sternpost next. This is a tricky bit of busi- ness, because you must fasten it first to its knee, then—knee and all—to the wood keel, while leaving room for the bolts from the ballast, and for the fastenings from the outer sternpost. Take a good look at Figure 5-2. Bolts 1 and 2

figure 5-3

Lofted keel in body plan at station 3

Exterior of planking

A bevel square is applied

to the side of the lofted keel and along the planking normal to the rabbet line.

Wood keel

Rabbet line

Ballast keel

“Clean little board"

hold the knee to the post; bolt 4 and drift 3 hold the assembly to the keel. Bolts 1 and 2 are 1⁄2- inch bronze; bolts 3 and 4 are galvanized steel, Vs-nch and 5/s-inch diameter, respectively. Locate and mark the after end of the rabbet line on the keel from the profile drawing, and bring the rabbet line already drawn on the sternpost to that mark (Figure 5-2b). Check that things are in correct fore-and-aft alignment by using a straightedge to the side, justas you did with the forefoot. Clamp as best you can, and have your helper support it tenderly as you lay the whole assembly on its side once more. Pray, and bore. Bolt and drift.

How good are drifts?

Drift, did I say? The word is out at last, and open to suspicion and attack. Drifts will be coming up (or if you care to be precisely literal, going down) very frequently from now on; so I'll say grace over the pork barrel right now, and sanctify all our meals for the next six months. We've had drift trouble. Once we tried boring for them a sixteenth scant, according to the book—in hard, dry oak, mind you—and had them fold like spaghetti before they were halfway home. We cured this by using a slightly worn V?-inch auger for a fat !/z-inch galvanized rod—and reamed the floor timber with a new barefoot auger, so that there'd bea

fighting chance of driving the drift all the way. The head swelled nicely to fill the clinch ring, no fear. The big trouble comes from the owner. “For goodness’ sake," says he (or words to that effect), “you don't really think those things will hold, do you?" So we start one for him (with no grease on it), hand him a hammer (not the best-balanced one we own), and invite him to drive. That's all it takes. Half an hour later, he has been converted to drifts; we saw off the battered remains, and tell him these things really get set after they've been in the wood a few months. Drifts are good fastenings. But don't use cast-iron clinch rings; they're brittle and they'll burst at the last blow, every time. Flat steel washers can take it, so use them instead.

Cutting the rabbet

Here we are now, with keel, stem, and sternpost assembly fastened together and lying on its side, waist high, with room around it. This is the backbone of your boat, and now,

43

figure 5-4

The wood keel ee wer

before you set it up in final position for build- ing the boat, is the time to cut the plank rabbet and frame sockets. This operation terrifies some amateurs; and I’ve even known pros who dared not do it before the molds were up. Be not afraid; it's simple. Be not timid about it, either, comforted by the thought that you can always increase the angle and finish to full depth as you go along. The frame sockets derive their precise depth and angle from the rabbet cut, and you'll compound a windy night with a rainy morrow if you lack bold confidence. So get a clean little board—say, 4 inches wide, 18 inches long, straight on both edges—and a bevel gauge, a pencil, a steel tape, and the lines draw- ing of this boat. We'll try to lay and cut this rabbet.

Draw a straight line down the middle of the board, parallel to the edges, as shown in Figure 5-3. This represents a horizontal line along the flat side of the stem or the sternpost (any load or water line), or it represents just as well the vertical side of the keel at any station mark. And I mean vertical, allowing for the drag of the keel, and not simply square with its top. Go now to the body plan in your lofting on the floor, and set your bevel gauge to the angle made by the intersection of the outside of the planking and the side of the keel at the rabbet mark for station number 3. Transfer this angle to your board—edge of board to centerline— and mark the point of intersection “R” (for rabbet line—representing, on your board, the outside of the planking). Square in from this angled line, at “R”, the thickness of the plank-

44

Bearding line ea (established H here)

Rabbet line (as marked on the timber from the lofted profile)

ing you intend to use (in this case, 15/16 inch). This new point, labeled “M” (for middle line), represents the inside corner of the rabbet cut, and is a cinch to locate in this view (body plan), but not so apparent when you look at the side of the keel, as in the profile. But we'll dig to it, unerringly. Draw a line from this point, paral- lel to the "outside of the planking” line— exactly 4/16 inch from it, of course—and note the point of intersection with the centerline (side of keel), which you label “B” (for beard- ing line). The distance from "B" to "R" is what you get from all this, and nothing more. Mea- sure it. I get 21/6 inches. Measure up from the rabbet line—along the vertical station line, on the side of the keel—exactly this distance, and make a mark. Now go through this whole pro- cess for all the other stations along the keel. You'll find that “B” is somewhere above the top of the keel, at station number 6 and beyond. Clamp or nail a square block flush with the edge of the keel at station number 6, and mark the correct height for "B" on it (see Figure 5-4).

So far, so good. A fair line through these points (marked with a batten, of course) will give you the bearding line (see Figure 5-4.) Don't mark it yet. Finish up the stem, by using waterlines instead of body plan section lines. You are now working in a horizontal plane, but the method is exactly the same. Take the angle at the sheer from the full-size half- breadth you laid out on the floor long ago. Get the angles at the load waterline, 12-inch and 24-inch waterlines, from the half-breadth plan in the scale drawing of the lines (Figure 5-5).

(minimal loft drawing) Keel in body plan at station 6

€ -—— ——— Exterior of planking

Rabbet line

Ballast keel

Tec

You'll be told that this is impossible, but pay no heed—angles stay the same, even though the scale of the drawing changes. Develop the dis- tances from “R” to “B” on your board, just as you did it for the vertical stations, and lay these distances off along the horizontal lines—never at right angles to the rabbet line. You'll get a nice check for accuracy at the load waterline, because you already have a mark on station number 1, only inches away. Go back to the sternpost, and do what you can from the water- lines provided. Here's the place to be timid.

Save most of the marking and cutting here until you have the molds set up, battens to go by, and adze in hand. This is not merely the safest way, but also the easiest.

pu -— line " d

Angle taken from the loft plan with folded paper or protractor, applied here

Use of a temporary block to extend the bearding line to enn the side of the keel, for accurate "T ENERO of the chisel when cutting trial spots for the rabbet

Rabbet line on wood keel

Out with your battens, then, and mark the bearding line. It should be a fair, logical curve, with no abrupt changes. Cut yourself a gauge stick—exactly the thickness of the planking, about 2 inches wide, 1 foot long, and square at both ends. Sharpen your !/4-inch and 11/2-inch chisels.

Now lock your bevel gauge to that first angle you took at station number 3, and stand the gauge alongside the station mark, so that its blade represents the garboard plank (Figure 5-6). Start a chisel cut just clear of the rabbet line, and precisely at right angles to that line of the bevel blade. Start another cut near the bearding line, and try to visualize the point "M" waiting for you down there in the heart of

45

wa

Drawing, figure 5-5 with waterlines, station lines, and the stem detailed Section of the stem where it is cut by the load waterline in the profile Te S Angle taken from half-breadth load waterline to mark on the “clean little board" kn S

AN iw > R

—— —————— B Fully developed loft drawing — ^^ mei M

also gives bearding and middle lines 7 along the planes of the waterlines.

LX gue "d

This is not the same angle as that of the bevel more easily applied perpendicularly to the run of the rabbet.

timber.

12B

the oak. The cut from the bearding line to “M” will, of course, be parallel to the line of the bevel blade. Make the cut wide enough, fore and aft, to take your gauge stick—and keep cutting, with many trials for depth, until the stick is flush at the rabbet, resting firmly at the bearding line, and butting square against the face where the lower edge of the garboard will bear. You have found "M". You'll be quicker on the next spot, and the next—until you havé proved the rabbet at every station, and at every checkpoint on the stem (Figure 5-7). Now fin- ish cutting the rabbet between spots. I usually rough out most of the wood with a big chisel, and finish with a rabbet plane. Friends will

46

Rabbet bevels taken from the waterlines at the stem must also be measured along the waterlines marked on the face of the ste

M

Rabbet bevels on the

stem and sternpost taken directly from the half-breadth waterlines of the lines plan

or the lofting drawing

urge using a power saw and a router to speed it up, but I'd stick to hand tools, myself. Those bevels change very subtly, and take some watching and feeling out.

Sockets for the frames

Shall we cut the boxes for the frames? This is something more than a formal invitation to the dance. No one is going to change my mind on this question, but you may waver to argu- ments from the opposition. The Herreshoff boats, the Concordia yawls, and Bill Simms's ocean racers are all built with frames fastened to floor timbers only. This is a mighty trium-

figure 5-6

plan.

ee,

7 ri vA

Chisel entry at the bearding line is parallel to the rake of the garboard.

Bevel square is set to the rake of the garboard at that station on the loft

Trial spots of the rabbet

M Chisel cut at the rabbet line is at right angles to the rake of

the garboard.

Middle line “M” is found when your gauge stick is flush at the rabbet line, rests firmly at the bearding line, and butts square against both faces of the rabbet.

virate to go against. There are those who will tell you this boxing-in of frame heels is a sheer waste of time, an open invitation to dry rot, a poor subterfuge to hide the lack of properly fitted (and properly numerous) floor timbers. With this I disagree, maintaining steadfastly that direct fastening of the frames to the keel is a fine thing, adding tremendously to the strength of the boat, and fully justifying all the time it takes. So make up your mind; but as long as you're with me, you may as well learn to mark and cut frame sockets. There’s a trick to it. Run to your table saw and cut out two or three frame heel facsimiles (gauges 1 and 2 shown in Figure 5-8). For this boat, they will

be 15/s by 13/4 inches, with sides exactly square to faces, and about 1 foot long. Make them of hardwood, because they'll be treated roughly. Saw their ends square. Set your locking bevel to the rake of the station marks down the sides of the keel. Mark, on the flat side of the keel above the bearding line, the exact center of each frame—one 6 inches to each side of the station mark, and another 18 inches to each side. Be sure to take these distances not along the slop- ing run of the keel, but rather, parallel to the waterline—square to the station marks on the sides. Be precise about this. You'll mark the other side by the same system, and you want to wind up with matched pairs. Mark one forward

47

figure 5-7

Cutting the rabbet (with an adze)

CA

Ame

-

vt

of station number 1, and one aft of station number 6. There'll be no more boxes forward of station number 1, and those aft of station number 6 can wait until you've finished the rabbet there, with the keel up.

Start with a frame between stations number 4 and 5. Mark a plumb line, with a pencil and pre-set bevel, on the flat above the bearding line, half the frame width aft of the center mark—in this case, ?/s inch. Now lay one of your marking pieces against the back rabbet, as if it were the rabbet gauge, and with its after edge precisely in the same plane—square athwartships—as the vertical line marked on the keel. Mark each side where it bears against the back of the rabbet. Hold it still, and slide its twin down the inner face to contact with the keel. Mark the line of contact, which gives the neces- sary depth ofthe cutat that point. Slide the first piece up !/2 inch clear of the middle line, and mark across its bottom edge. This is all very simple so far. Mark for the forward edge of the cut—up on the flat side of the keel—and pro-

Finishing the rabbet

Test spots obtained Y with waterlines 77

e Obtained with : station lines a

CESAR n es P Lu.

ceed to remove most of the wood inside the marked socket outline with a ?/s-inch auger, boring exactly square to the surface of the back of the rabbet (which is how the frame will naturally lie). Count the turns, and you'll soon learn just how many will give you the proper depth— which will be 11/2 inches, leaving 1⁄8 inch for cleaning up with the chisel. Square the socket, also with a chisel, to a good drive fit for your marking piece.

Now move to the mark on the stem forward of station number 2. Mark your vertical line, ?/8 inch aft of the frame center, on the flat above the bearding line. Hold the marker against the back rabbet, as before, with the after edge in an imaginary athwartships plane that passes through that vertical line. Use a square from the side of the stem, at the line, to touch the edge of the marker at the top. Now sight along the side of your marker, and notice (and mark) the direction the cut must take, in order that the frame may stand plumb when in its socket. This line leans away aft at the top, and bears no

Finish up with 2897

rabbet plane

48

figure 5-8

pesee

Sockets for frames 7 — 4 ————— J E ee

exact relationship whatsoever to the vertical line. You must project the planes of the sides of your marking gauge onto the flat, and cut out to those marks. They may look crazy, but they are right. Slide the second marker down the inner face of the first one, as before, parallel to the rabbet, and touching the flat of the stem with its inner, lower edge. Mark that line. Mark around the bottom and sides of your marker on the back rabbet, with its corner at the bearding line. Believe those marks, even if they happen to look all wrong. Bore square to the back rabbet, clean out the socket with a chisel, and try the marker for a fit. I trust that it fits well and stands true, and that you now know how to mark frame sockets. Every one will be a sepa- rate problem; every one must be projected from the flat sides of your marker. Once you get the routine established, you’ll mark one in two minutes, and cut it in ten. Six to the hour—but don't hurry the first few.

Turn it over and finish the backbone’s other side, and we’ll set her up in the next chapter.

“ALLY [hn

LE Z

NS 3 Nase Mark alongside

Rabbet line of the box

A

«S

t

ulii SN

49

Chapter Six

The Backbone: Tail Feather and Transom,

Molds, and Sheer

Getting it upright

Let’s assume that this keel is on its side, with stem and sternpost in place, and with ballast keel bolted on. Chain a timber to the exposed side and stand it upright to rest on two wide 10-inch blocks—one way aft, and the for- ward one at the toe of the ballast casting. The vessel is obviously down by the head. Secure it at the after block so that it cannot possibly slide backward or tip sideways. Now clamp a straightedge from the side of the sternpost to a temporary upright on the keel, forward, so that its top edge is exactly parallel to the designed waterline as marked on the sternpost and the stem (see Figure 6-1a). Go to the lofted profile, on the floor, and determine how much the top of the keel rises from, say, station number 6 to station number 4, and be sure that the straight- edge approaches the keel by the same amount in the same length. This, then, is your built-in water level. Jack up the forward end of the casting until the straightedge is truly level, and build up under the ballast keel with firm block- ing. You'll wedge up three times before you

overcome the settling of the blocking when the weight comes on it. Be patient and get it right, or you'll be in a mess from now on. Level the top of the keel athwartships, and brace it; plumb the sternpost, and brace it with diago- nals, from the floor to the after face so that they'll be well clear of therabbet. Now stretch a tight line from a midpoint on the after face of the stem at the sheer, all the way back to the middle of the sternpost at its highest (after- most) point. Hang a plumb bob from this line to hit the top of the keel just aft of station number 3, where the centerline of the keel is still visible (Figure 6-1b). Push the top of the stem sideways, as necessary, until the plumb bob hangs exactly over the centerline, and secure it there, preferably with a horizontal brace from the top of the stem to the side of the shop. Brace it from forward also, trying to estimate and overcome its tendency to droop. You'll have a final check on this height when you have established the plane of the cross spalls on the molds and can project it to the 24-inch waterline marked on the stem.

figure 6-1a 8

Fitting the tail feather

We've still got the tail feather to fit before the molds go up, and the transom frame must be in place before the ribbands go on. Let's get these two settled.

There are those who will argue that the tail feather as I show it is all wrong and criminally weak as compared to the old system, wherein the central member butts against the after face of the sternpost and is locked there by the twin horn timbers (Figure 6-2a). The old system is good indeed, especially if you bring the top of the post all the way up and tie it to heavy deckbeams. The system I show gets worse and finally becomes very poor as the angle between the sternpost and the tail feather approaches 90 degrees—as, for instance, in a normal power- boat or a motorsailer. But it is a perfectly good system in the present instance, where the joint amounts almost to a long scarf, so long as the bolts are big enough and properly located. It has to be strong. The backstay pulls upward at the end of the counter, and this normal load of a ton or so can increase to a frightening amount when a sea breaks into the foot of a big jib. But don't worry about that joint. The mast will explode before it pulls apart.

So much for that argument. Here we havea flawless piece of timber, 5 inches deep and 7 inches wide, which must be bored for the rud- derport, rabbeted on both sides, and fitted at its after end to the transom frame.

Start with the rudderport. Same auger, same technique as for the shaft hole—we are not going to thread a tube through the timber in the usual way, and therefore we need only be sure of proper clearance for the 1!/2-inch rudder stock through the wood. You can line the port

52

LWL 12B 24B 36B 48B

Leveling the backbone assembly by use of the lofted waterlines

Spirit level

with a thin-walled copper or lead tube to keep the worms out, if you want to do the best possi- ble job. You will eventually make a pattern for a bronze casting, which will be tapped to take the bronze-pipe rudderport and stuffing box, and which will be bedded and through-bolted to the top of the timber. Save this job for later.

Now the rabbet. Get the angles from station number 8 on the body plan; note that the rabbet lines are exactly 5 inches apart, to match the width (and therefore the rabbet lines) on the sternpost. Study the cross section in Figure 6-2b, and if your courage is good, make both cuts with your portable power saw—from aft to a point 15” forward of station number 8, no more. Save the rest of it until you have molds and battens to guide your chisel.

And finally, you are ready to make the cuts at the after end to receive the transom frame ‘Figure 6-2c). Get out the transom knee first— its profile from the construction plan on the floor, cut from 4-inch stock—and place it in position atop the tail feather, Cut off the tail feather in line with the after face of the knee, but be sure to leave a jog at the bottom in way of the rabbet that matches the mitered ends of the planking-to-be, and simply carries the face of the rabbet across the transom. Note also that the bottom of the transom frame is in one piece across the end of the tail feather, and must be allowed for when you locate the knee and make that cut. A pad on the after face of the knee, from the top of this piece to the underside of the deck, provides a straight line for the transom planking to bear on.

Clamp the tail feather to the top of the sternpost, and sight it like a gun—right down its centerline to the middle of the keel just forward of station number 5 (see Figure 6-2d).

figure 6-1b

Drop a plumb bob from station number 8, and check its horizontal distance from station number 7 on the sternpost. Cut a narrow straightedge (3/4 inch by 15/s inches) and push it down through the rudderport to the keel. This proves the angle of the rudderport, gives the line to which the outer pieces of the stern- post will come, and will eventually support the skeleton pattern of the rudder, complete with the shape of the aperture and the location of the pintles. Put it aside for future use and bore those two forwardmost bolt holes, from the top of the propeller aperture up through the tail feather. Counterbore, as shallow as you dare, for the heads of 5/s-inch bronze bolts. Square off on top for washers and nuts. Poison the contact surfaces and drive the bolts. Fit a post from the floor to support the tail feather, just forward of the transom, and brace it strongly with diago- nals to the floor.

If you are sensible and methodical, you will now fit and fasten the two pieces of the outside sternpost (above and below the shaft hole). These will of course be tapered from the for- ward to the after edge, and grooved for the rudder stock and forward face of the rudder. Use !⁄2-inch bronze for all these remaining bolts. Plan locations of the three sets of gud- geons, and keep your drifts and bolts clear of them.

Bolt the transom knee in place—and be sure it stands absolutely true athwartships.

Squaring the stem by plumbing down to the centerline of the timber keel near a forward station

figure 6-2a

Tail feather

L

LWL =>

NZA | 12B YSR Sa a WAR 36B Line of the rabbet

48B Ne m

Traditional system of sandwiching the tail feather between parallel horn timbers

Extended sternpost locks with deckbeams

Fitting the transom frame

One last painful job remains to be done before the real fun begins. We need a transom, or at least the strong, exactly shaped, correctly beveled frame of a transom. If you love lofting, you can arm yourself with Chapelle's Yacht Designing and Planning and go through the whole process of developing a full-sized tran- som, complete with bevels, on the floor— projecting sheerline, waterlines, and buttocks, and using the stretchout. I did this twice, 40 years ago. Since then, I have become reconciled to an easier system that places faith in the designer's ability to do the job in his scale drawing. If he hasn't done it, ask him why not. If he can't do it, regard him with grave suspi- cion. Half the transom will probably be shown on the lines drawing, laid off at right angles to

Junction of tail feather and sternpost, as shown in the loft drawing above

figure 6- 2b Aft side of the body plan

in the loft drawing 678

24A

12A = LWL

12B

24B

36B

48B

The tail feather in profile crosses station 8 at an angle.

The bevel taken for the back rabbet here must be applied to the timber at the same angle.

i" 8 —>)- i= — | ae ieee

the centerline of the transom in profile, and with enough points exactly located in its perimeter to define a fair curve. Cut off a 6-foot length of building paper, and fold it once, across the middle, end to end. Crease it, and lay the crease along the profile of the transom on the floor, with the ends aft. Tack it down. Lay off the transom widths shown on the drawing, square to the crease, at the appropriate inter- vals along the crease; these intervals are also shown on the drawing. Bend a batten to the points thus located, and there she is. Cut to the line, unfold, and you've got the full transom to the outside of the planking, with the centerline nicely defined. Now all you've got to do is build a frame to that outline, arched to the proper radius, beveled to the run of the planking, and reduced in size, where necessary, to allow for the thickness thereof. (You will, of course, do

Detail blowup

Curve of hull at station 8

,Bearding line

LEVELE wat

Middle line

caza M

Rabbet line

LWL

Rabbet line of body plan

figure 6- 2c

Transom knee 8

Bottom member of transom frame

Transom planking Mitered " d joint xposed, faired, ine l lower face Bearding of line LWL tail feather

Aft face of sternpost

Aft end of the

< tail feather

Trim or seating for the transom planking

when the bottom planking = is in progress e

Bearding line

of hull planking

figure 6-2d

Before boring for fastenings—

Check alignment fore-and-aft by comparing distance between stations 7 and 8 on the structure with that in the loft drawing.

Check alignment athwartships by aiming centerline of tail feather along centerline of the keel.

all this in the best locust, white oak, black walnut, or dense hard pine you can get your hands on. This is the place where the rot starts first.) The transom frame is pictured in Figure 6-3a.

Begin with some bandsaw work. Swing an arc on a board to a radius | inch less than that given on the plans (to allow for the thickness of the transom planking) and long enough to reach across the full width of the transom. Saw this out, and use it as a pattern to mark at least two curved beams of 2-inch stock, which will temporarily bolt to the outside of the frame and hold it in shape until the transom planking replaces them. Now comes the tough one. You need a slab 11/2 inch thick, about 7 inches wide and 30 inches long, sawn (or bent) to that same radius, which will make the bottom piece of the frame across the end of the tail feather. (Lack- ing a big, single chunk, or the means to saw something of this thickness, you can build it up

56

Test batten to prove angle of rudderport becomes strongback for rudder template.

Propeller port

Gudgeon locations

Outer pieces of the sternpost,

applied last, permit adjustment of

the deadwood to accommodate variation in alignment of the rudderport.

with four layers sawn from 2-inch stock, doweled and glued edge to edge.) You will save yourself time and frustration if you now pre- pare an arched bed, on which you can assemble and clamp the various parts. Saw two boards to a radius 3!/2 inches less than that of the finished transom—to allow for the thickness of the tran- som (1 inch) and its frame (1!/2 inches) and the slats menuoned below (1 inch)—and separate them a distance slightly more than the height of the transom. Tack l-inch slats square across them, one to take a centerline, two on each side to support the vertical members and joining knees.

Fit the various parts together, face down, on the bed, as shown in Figure 6-3a, and apply the full paper pattern you made earlier for the final outline. (The paper pattern represents the outer face of the transom and includes the hull planking in its outline. For this particular boat, the pattern, if used for theinner face of the

transom—i.e., for the shape of the transom frame—makes things come out about right. In other words, the plank thickness and the tran- som bevel just about cancel each other out. But be careful about using this simplistic approach on other designs—sometimes it doesn’t work. Another technique that might not work is that of ignoring the difference in expanded transom widths over the projected ones. The designer’s plan shows projected widths, and I've assumed, because there’s not much curve in this transom, that these can be used for making up the paper pattern. If your boat has a significantly radi- used transom, you'll have to be more precise here as well.)

Saw the individual pieces of the transom frame to the line, with a standing bevel suffi- cient to add wood enough for fairing in the finished bevel when the molds have been set up. The rough bevel along the bottom of the transom can be taken directly from the junc- tion of the transom and the tail feather in the loft drawing. The bevel along the sides can be

figure 6-3a

Bevel at centerline

a ieee iy TS | e Bevel at deck E

Full outboard face of the

loft drawing with folded paper template

Due to the particular angles at which the side and bottom planking approach the transom in this boat, the transom plank will cut off nearly square to make the

bevel at their ends.

Thus the paper template of the exterior face of the transom can also be used to lay out the aft (upper) face of the transom

LWL and centerline

transom obtained from the

approximated where the transom joins the sheer on the half-breadth view in the loft plan. Finished beveling will come later. Reassemble. check with the pattern, pin the corner knee to the bottom and side pieces, and bolt your two temporary beams across from side to side to hold the true arc and tie everything together. Mark the vertical centerline on these cross- beams. Fit the 1!/2-inch by 4-inch vertical pad up the middle, the two intermediate vertical timbers, and the pair of big scab cleats that tie the sides to the bottom piece. Figure 6-3a shows all this better than I can describe it.

Now cuta notch at the bottom of this heart- shaped transom frame to fit the angle at the end of the tail feather, and just wide enough in the forward face to match the rabbet lines (Figure 6-3b). Practice with a scrap piece until you understand the requirements. Hoist the frame into place now, clamp and bolt it dead center to the knee (Figure 6-3c), and prepare to square and brace it. T'o square it, you need a heavenly reference point. By eyeball estimate, project an

Half-face of the transom in the loft plan

Transom-frame bevel at centerline

Transom frame bevel at deck

frame on its bed, with sufficient margin of

timber to adjust the final bevel.

(figure 6-3a continues on next page)

57

fastenings (beam to transom frame)

Ne. Top edge of transom frame a beveled downward to drain water

Transom knee

Fastening to hold

transom frame together ~~ 8 during fabrication ~~ Qtton;

~~ Plan

~~

Pad behind ee

transom knee Full-sized paper template

of the transom’s exterior face may be applied to the aft face of the transom frame during layout and fitting.

Intermediate planking cleat

1 Aj eara

a L S Bevel taken from

sheer-at-transom in the half-breadth plan

Radius 31/2” less

— A than that of the

transom's aft face

Arched bed for

Bevel taken from assembling the transom frame tail feather—at transom

in the profile

Beams with sawn curve to hold transom frame together when mounted on the

tail feather

TW NN SM NE us Scan MEME

CNN 1" less than

exterior face of the tail feather

anh

Gusset (slice of a knee) to cover joint on the forward side of the transom frame futtocks

figure 6-3b

wv LIN

ge

Bottom of the transom frame notched to receive the cut end of the tail feather

imaginary line from the top of the transom knee, square to the line of its raking profile, and up to the roof of the shop. Plumb up from the center of the keel in this general neighbor- hood, and drive (and bend) a nail there, to hold the ring in your long steel tape. The nail must center exactly over the middle line on the keel (see Figure 6-3d). Now swing the tape from side to side of the frame, and brace the frame from the floor, so that the twin points on the two edges are equidistant from the skyhook. If

figure 6-3c

Knee pad

Transom planking Transom frame

Stern knee

Tail feather J

Bottom plank Rabbet in

the boat you are building has an almost plumb transom, you can, of course, do this squaring from the center of the stem, or from the center of the cross spall on one of the molds. You can also square a raking transom from a point on a true centerline on the floor, extended well a- stern of the boat. But this is not always an easy line to lay off, through all those piles of block- ing. Stretch your tight line from the top of the stem to the top of the transom knee; check once more with the plumb bob to the centerline of

Gusset

the tail feather

59

figure 6-3d

Horning a transom

Measuring tape or tapes drawn from the same nail

over the centerline N

Same measurement, both sides, when the transom is square to the centerline

Midpoint of the transom

the keel and tail feather, and brace strongly against sideward movement. You may by this time wish you'd picked a double-ended boat witha fine, simple stem at the back end, as well. I would understand and sympathize. Transoms demand thought, firmness, and constant vig- ilance in their handling or they’ll fool you, every time. But this one is locked, for the moment.

If you havea bell toring, or a rocket to shoot off, now’s the time. You are about to set up the molds and see your boat full-size in three dimensions.

60

Plumb line to centerline of

maiko »" di

A

Set up those molds

Gather a level, a 2-foot square, a plumb bob, nails, a hammer, and half a running mile of pine scraps 3 to 16 feet long, and | inch square (or thereabouts) to use as temporary props and braces. Find two straight, clean, true, straight-edged planks that, butted end to end, will reach from the after face of the stem to the forward face of the transom knee. Mark centerlines on these, full length, on both faces, using string and the straightedge to get them true.

Fetch out mold number 5, and stand it on the keel as shown in Figure 6-4, centered, with the forward face on the station mark. Brace it with a prop from the top of the keel aft, plumb it fore- and-aft, and hold it level athwartships with two posts to the floor. Measure from the top of the cross spall to the rabbet line, exactly on station, and make sure that this agrees with what you laid down on the lofting floor. Set up mold number 4, then number 3, checking the height to the spalls and keeping the forward faces of the molds on the station marks. Brace these from number 5, well clear of the centerline on the tops of the spalls. Toe-nail the bottoms of the molds to the top of the keel lightly; brace number 5 forward, so that you can remove the braces to make way for number 6, which will stand with its after face on the station line. These four molds establish the plane of the spalls, which is of course precisely 2 feet above the load waterline. Set up number 8 on the tail feather, with its after face on the station mark;

figure 6-4

Strongback

Cross spall

Continuous strongback set on plane of WL 2A -

Diagonal brace

Central vertical member of mold number 5, with edge set to centerline

Bearding line Rabbet line

set up number 2 on the stem, forward face to the mark. Stretch a tight string from the stem to the transom knee, touching the tops of all the spalls, and mark the stem and the knee precisely where this line intersects them. You will proba- bly need to adjust the heights of the last two to agree with the plane established by the first four. You may find to your dismay that the mark for the 2-foot load line on the stem does not exactly agree with the string you stretched. Try to figure out what went wrong, and correct it; but keep those cross spalls in line. If you raise or lower one or two out of that flat plane, you will perpetuate worse errors than the most care- less designer could commit in fairing lines and scaling offsets. With this cross spall plane sacred and unbroken, you know that the sheer marks on the molds are right; you can extend the plane, by string, straightedge, or eyeball, and measure up to spot the height of the sheer on the transom—and on the stem, too, if any doubt exists. Finally, you can lay a fine strong- back down the middle, and tie everything together square and true, thus:

Lay the longer of the two centerlined planks fore-and-aft on the spalls; bevel its forward end

Centerline along this edge

<i FE

EXT BUS

(Saez VA

Post set alongside 128 centerline on station 5 U ee —E = b 24B

Station 5 mold

to fit the slope of the stem; fasten it securely to the stem, centered exactly, underside on the cor- rected 2-foot load line mark. Let's assume that its after end reaches 2 feet beyond the number 5 cross spall. Bring its centerline to the center of station number 5 spall. Plumb the mold fore- and-aft again with your level to the vertical post. Use your big steel square to set the cross spall precisely at right angles to the centerline on the under face of the strongback, and clamp it. Finally, drop the plumb bob from the center- line to the keel top, and tie the strongback to the side of the shop so that it cannot budge off center. Anchor your long steel tape on the after face of the stem, dead center, just above the strongback, and measure to the two sides of the mold at the height of the spall. If these agree, it must be square to the centerline. Now, butt the other section of the plank to this one; cut it to length to fasten to the stern knee; join the twoat the butt with a wide board cleat. Hang the miss- ing molds in place; plumb, square, and fasten all of them. Tie the strongback to the shop wall every 8 feet and put a special tie, high up, on station number 1—and she's almost ready for ribbands.

61

Prove the sheer

For my sake, if not yours, let’s define and prove the sheerline with light battens. This isa process shrouded in mystery, mentioned in whispers outside the shops of the incompetent, accepted wordlessly as the final touch of the Master Craftsman—if you happen to like the way it came out. We've all heard of that taci- turn genius who spends a day making minute adjustments to the batten, viewing it from his stepladder, allowing in his subconscious for perspective, haze, highlights—and finally achieving a line of ineffable grace, which even looks good when she's out of the shop. I'm not in that class. I decided long ago that the designer probably liked to have the sheer come out about the way he marked it on his drawing. This assumption takes most of the glamour out of the business, but saves a lot of time and soul-searching. If the molds are at their proper heights and spacing, and the sheer marks, taken from the loft floor, are clean and accurate on them, there's not much need for inspired guessing. Start a batten at the stem, with its bottom edge at the mark, and wrap it around as far as it will go. Don't pull it lengthwise and cause it to flatten its curve between molds. Tap another batten over it, top edge to the marks, and go the rest of the way aft. Measure up from the plane of the spalls for the height on the transom. If the curve has humps and hollows, go back to the floor and try to find your mis-

figure 6-5

takes. After all, you are the one who laid her down. If some expert (other than the designer) tells you it ought to tip up more quickly up front, don't just knuckle under. Tell him you'd like to see a half-dozen of his boats in the flesh, in order to study his individual style...and mark the sheer as it shows in the plans.

The line of the tuck

One more line should be determined and marked now, before the clutter gets too thick. I call this the “line of the tuck,” for want of a better name. It marks the division between two different areas of planking, and it's important to get itin there, with a good ribband to follow it, just to establish squatter's rights and keep others from encroaching on the territory. Choose a long, flat batten, 1 by 11/2 inches, say, and start 1t at the point where the rabbet line crosses the joint between the sternpost and the tail feather. Run it forward as if roughly paral- lel to diagonal number 2 in the lines plan, to cross mold number 3 about 9 inches above the rabbet line, and thence straight (without side- wise distortion) to the back rabbet on the stem (see Figure 6-5). If you pulled a string tight between these two endpoints, and outside the molds, you would get much of the same line— the shortest distance, or the nearest thing to a straight line between the points. Mark the molds at the crossings.

Designed sheer faired through and marked on the molds

“Tuck” batten

Approximately follows diagonal 4. Establishes run of bottom plank

62

figure 6-6 Cutting the remaining frame sockets

Finishing the rabbet

Go aft, now, and study the problem of the unfinished rabbet at the after end of the keel, up the sternpost and around the curve to the tail feather. Use plenty of battens to simulate plank- ing. Twist a thin board from mold number 5 to the sternpost, to see where the garboard will lie. Cut with special care and caution at the top of the sternpost, where the angles change very abruptly. The battens will tell you what to do, if you are patient with them. Use your adze on the back rabbet on the keel and up the sternpost; use a chisel to cut the face of the rabbet all the way.

Finish this chore by cutting all the remaining frame sockets in the keel, knee, and tail feather (see Figure 6-6). These last will angle aft, in order to lie in a true vertical plane athwartships. Clamp a matched pair in place, apply square and plumb line, and study them. You'll get the point.

Bevel the transom frame. Bring the battens pastit from mold number 5, and make saw cuts, in line with the battens, all around the edges of the frame. Cut to the bottom of the scores with an adze, a chisel, and a plane. Leave the final and exact cutting to be done one jump ahead of the planking crew.

63

XM = on Ñ X AI NY

IN

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| CLAIM, WAY) TA W VL /, ux YS

Chapter Seven

Ribbands and Timbering Out

And now to put on the ribbands. We always use clear fir, 15/s inches thick and a bit wider than that. Half of these we leave solid (at least while they are young, green, and flexible); the others are cut with a saw, flat, right up the middle, stopping a foot short of the other end. They recuperate between boats, in the darkness under the shop floor, and last for years. You can use two layers of green spruce, and consider them expendable, if the fir is hard to come by; but watch them with suspicion between molds. Fasten the ribbands to stem and transom with one 2!/2-inch number 14 screw; use the same wire,!/2 inch longer, for the softwood molds. These ribbands have one purpose only, and that is to hold the bent frames precisely to the shape of the hull, at the inside of the planking, until the planking can take the job over. Their arrangement, therefore, is governed by two con- siderations: first, to get them on fair, as easily as possible, and spaced closely enough to do their job; and second, to hang them so that they fol- low somewhere near the line the planks will take, and can be removed one by one, as the planks go on, without leaving a great area of unsupported frames at one end of the hull. Study the problem with the aid of a long batten draped around the molds. Think of Great Circle

courses and barrel staves. Look at the body plan on the lines drawing, and consider each diago- nal as a ribband. They are spaced twice as far apart as the ribbands should be, but their arrangement is about right.

Hanging the ribbands

Start the first one just below the 36-inch load line on the stem. Drape it ina gentle sweep, to cross mold number 5 barely clear of the load waterline, and up the transom frame just below the line of diagonal 5. This will, of course, be done in two halves, with the butt end screwed to the transom frame, for the second. The after half should lie fair, against and above the forward one, where they lap by each other. Fasten an exactly similar pair on the other side of the boat. Check to be sure the molds still stand, undis- torted, in the true athwartships station plane. You understand, of course, that you do not bevel the molds where the ribbands land. Just hit the forward corners in the forebody, the after corners aft of amidships. Shoot the screw fastenings into these corners, square to the run of the ribbands.

I like to have the uppermost ribband just clear of the sheerline, to remain in place there

65

until the sheerstrake is fitted and fastened. You must bevel the forward end to fit against the flat of the stem above the top of the rabbet. Be sure its inner surface is in line with the back rabbet. Always work in matched pairs, keeping them as nearly as possible at the same height, each side, on every mold they cross. Where the ribbands lap past each other and end, forward or aft of amidships, they will tend to flatten out in the last bay they cross. Even them up with clamps, and edge-fasten them; back off the screw 1/2 inch, in the last mold they reach.

The final job in this setup is to brace the ribbands, down in the hollow of the wineglass, against the outward thrust of the frames. Use l-inch-square pine props, up from the floor, butted square against the ribbands halfway between molds (see Figure 7-1). Experiment with a thin slat, jammed into a frame socket, bent outward to the flat of the bilge; and notice where the pressure comes. Hold the tuck rib- band true at all costs. There's no sadder sight in a boatshop than frames leaning stiffly away from their sockets—unless it's the same frames straining the ribbands inward at the turn of the bilge. You can do something about it, up there, as you'll learn in framing. Down below, the ribbands must do the job on their own.

Now, about those frames...

Clean out the braces, pile the firewood, round up your crew, and get ready for the big day. I feel that we’ve come a long and tedious way, with too many side excursions; but pretty soon, now, she’s going to start to look like a boat. You are going to enjoy two, or three, or four of the happiest days of your life. You are going to put in steam-bent frames; you'll breathe vapors as sweet as honey, and shout with relief as those old bad doubts retreat...and take up new residence in the pile of planking stock. You'll know how J. Keats felt when he first looked into Chapman’s Homer. And though the too, too solid flesh of your hands threatens to melt, thaw, and resolve itself into cooked meat, you'll still have (let's see, now: seven bays at four each; add four more in the counter; three forward of mold number 1, double it)—70 golden nuggets of pure happiness, when the timber goes chunk into the heel socket, and you ride it down and mold it to shape against their ribbands. Some fun, I assure you. This is Mardi Gras, break- through—the only quick and easy process you'll encounter in this whole business of boat- building.

66

Before we get going, I would like to discuss in my usual unpleasant way some of the bad advice, incorrect assumptions, and plain ig- norance that show up in pracucally every treatise on steam-bending techniques—and in about half the designs and completed boats you'll see.

The first and perhaps worst mistake is based upon the pernicious fallacy that Too Strong is better than Too Weak. The Designer, urged on by the Owner, specifies frames built of wood 21/4 inches square (by God, this one is going to be built to last). The Builder, who is an ingenious chap, if long-suffering, uses super-steam, snake oil, and compression straps, and bends that timber in so that it touches all the ribbands (or perhaps one should say, “‘so that all the ribbands touch it" —there will be just the tiniest sugges- tion of a hollow at each clamp); this way, there will be very little slivering on the outside of the bends, even at the tuck and the turn of the bilge. Its a beautiful thing, that curved piece of flawless oak...and a beautiful thing it continues to be, when the boat is planked with fine, dry mahogany (extra thick, of course) and caulked tight in the good, old-fashioned way. (None of that sissy stuff with a wheel on this boat.) The boat 1s launched, and swells, and swells; they take her out and drive her (she was built to take it); and maybe she grounds out on a bar one day and pounds a few times before the flood makes enough to kedge her off (but she was built to take that, too). And then, in a week or two, she starts to leak. So she's hauled out for examin- ation, and someone finally discovers that one seam at the turn of the bilge has, for some strange reason, opened up, and you can pull the caulking out with your fingers. That's easy to cure: drive in three strands, smooth off, put her back in the water...and this time they install that most wonderful of all inventions, an Automatic Bilge Pump. Ten or twelve battery charges later (or the end of the yachting season, which- ever comes first) she's hauled again, the offend- ing plank is removed, and the impossible truth is revealed. Several of those magnificent frames have broken clean off, right on the line of the fine, one-piece bilge stringer. (The bolt holes are only ?/s inch, but the 7/s-inch counterbores for the heads may have a slight weakening effect.) Put in sister frames (half the thickness of the original ones), replace planks (be sure to use good, dry stock to butt against the soaked planks—this makes for a very interesting devel- opment at the ends), and maybe the other side won't let go until next year. — .

If you think this is an exaggeration, examine

some old Navy liberty boats, or yachts built by the master craftsmen of European yards. The frames are such as no small boatyard could afford to match—standing square across, bev- eled inside and out, with the greatest dimension athwartships. They are scientifically correct and lovely to behold. They are shaped from oversized stock, which had been bent on a slab with a compression strap on the outside of the curve, and cooled in place. The wood fibers had to make a violent and painful readjustment under duress, and they didn’t like it. Unfortun- ately, most of them are badly cracked or have broken clean off. If you want to know why this happened, hearken to the voices of the salty ones: “Do you [of course, you don’t! ] realize what it's like, driving to windward in the Fastnet, with the wind force 7?" Or, “Just watch one of these slam into the landing stage with 50 men aboard, and you won't wonder.” If you suggest, timidly, that you've seen a heavily laden seine boat flex- ing her topsides in and out against the pilings half a foot every roll for hours on end, or have watched an old Down East lobsterboat twisting her tired length over the short seas as fast as her mighty 1947 Buick can push her—and nary a broken timber or open seam in either of them— you'll be treated to a diatribe on clam baskets and the men who build them. Why, those farmers couldn't bend a real frame if they tried all winter!

The point I'd like to make (and I seem to have spent considerable time getting to it) is this: in bent frames, even as in ski bindings, women's voices, alcoholic drinks, and the teth- ers that hold the heroine to the railroad trestle, too weak is usually better than too strong. When that frame is shaped in place it should have no regrets or hypertensions, no nervous dread of cold drafts or needle pricks on its Southern exposure. It should be relaxed, serenely confi- dent, as it starts in its half-century of service... Sometimes those skinny fellers'll fool you. They may not look like much, but they’re withy, real withy. And don’t feel too bad when that Con- stant Visitor sneers at your efforts and tells you that Manny Lucas never has to laminate his umbers to get them in. As Sam Crocker used to point out, with patient forbearance, you'll probably have to wait 20 years to prove you're right, but it'll be worth it.

So much for super-frames and the men who can bend them. Let’s consider the Annual Ring theory, which appears in every good discussion of steam bending.

The theory, and the reason supporting it, are

68

simple: bend the frame so that the annual rings, when viewed end-on, run as nearly as possible parallel to the line of the planking, because the frame bends most easily in this plane, and because fastenings driven through the annual rings at right angles (that is, in line with radii from the center of the tree) are least likely to split the frame. It is therefore very smart to use square frames, so that you can always present the proper face to the ribbands. The only trouble with this bit of advice is that it is almost com- pletely wrong, as well as being impossible to follow more than 20 percent of the time, even with square frames, which only a trained naval architect would specify, anyway. It contains one tiny bitof truth—that one out of five frames will actually. bend slightly more easily (although with no less likelihood of breaking) than a piece of wood from the same plank which has the rings at 20, 30, or 45 degrees to the plane of the planking. As for resistance to splitting—surely anyone who has ever spent two days on a farm knows that oak stove wood is always cleft straight through the heart, in line with the medulary rays. Any fastenings driven on these radial lines are most, rather than least, likely to split the frame. So what do you do? Forget the whole business, and take them as they come!

Then there's the Percentage-of-Moisture theory, which tells you to get that oak stump to steambox before the leaves begin to fade. This advice appears at first to be sound and reason- able. Surely a piece of dead-green stock, so limber it will almost bend in cold, is likely to give less trouble than one that’s fully air dried, hard and stiff as an iron bar? Strangely enough, this conclusion is also wrong—at least in the light of my own experience, which covers thou- sands of bent frames, and the use of frame stock that had seasoned from 10 minutes to 10 years. The dry stuff (at least a year on the sticks, for 112-inch or 2-inch plank) seems to require short- er steaming time, and bends more easily and with less breakage. It is admittedly much more difficult to work before it is steamed, and rough on drills after it has cooled and hardened again, but that is all you can say against it.

And now, what magic lubricant do we apply to this frame stock before it goes into the box, or add to the water in the boiler, so that the wood becomes pliable as rubber and tough as whale- bone? Frankly, I don't know! I have tried linseed oil and kerosene. Others swear by permanent antifreeze, creosote, bag balm, and one or two more that I won't mention in a book that might fall into the hands of small children. All these -

treatments work wonders—if you have really straight-grained white oak to start with, plenty of screeching-hot wet steam to cook it in, and the speed of a sleight-of-hand artist to get it bent to shape before it knows what’s going on. Unfortunately, the timbers you forget to paint, subjected to the same steam and speedy treat- ment, also bend very nicely, and the only real differences you are likely to notice are: (1) the treated timbers are darker in color; and (2) you are in somewhat less danger of sliding off and breaking your neck with the untreated ones. (The hot oil does make things a bit more excit- ing if you lose your gloves.)

I don't use any of these treatments. But I have not the slightest doubt that someone could

figure 7-2

Three types of frames needed

Single stave— (frames between stations 1 and 3)

End of saw cut

Stave ripped down the middle—for frames between

stations 2 and M. 51⁄2 and T (transom)

(if he hasn't already done so) develop a boiling process involving a good wood preservative, perhaps a fiber-softening ingredient, in a solu- tion that would go higher than 212 degrees; this might be worth investigating. However, plain steaming, at atmospheric pressure, with no tricks or additives, seems to work satisfactorily; andIsuspect Iam no more likely to try anything else in this direction than I am to investigate the possibilities of rock elm or some other substi- tute for white oak. I know about glued lami- nates, and I assure you that the cost would be enormously greater than the cost of our good bent-frame system. And don't try to convince me that putting edge-glued strips around the bulk- heads is the answer. I have built strip-planked

Four-piece lamination— for frames between station

Screw of rivet set flush

69

boats, cross-planked deadrise boats, lapstrake boats, plywood boats—and I still prefer the type of construction we are describing here.

So, let's get a few things together, and bend the frames. I've promised you great joy, and so far I've.come up with nothing but grief.

Getting out the frames

First, of course, you've got to get out the frames. In this particular boat they will finish 1?/s inches by 15/8 inches, and will be sawn most economically out of rough 2-inch plank. Slice them off 13/4 inches thick, starting just inside the sapwood andas nearly as possible parallel to the outside of the tree—that is, if the plank tapers, work in from both edges. Don’t skimp on length. Any one of them, in its proper place, should reach at least 2 inches above the sheer- line. The frames that are going in away aft should be a foot longer than that. If the rough plank is sawn oversize, trim the frames on your table saw to a scant 2-inch width. Dress off all four sides in a surface planer to your finished dimensions.

Inspect them carefully, choose ends, and square the butts. (You might also make sure that the top ends are even enough so that you'll be able to hit them true with your mallet.) And now, with your thinnest saw, set very lightly and filed sharp, split every one of those frames dead center, edgewise, from the top to within 4 inches of the square butt end (see Figure 7-2). You will have taken out, I hope, a bit less than 1/s inch of the original 15/s-inch thickness. If you want to be properly methodical, you can mark all these frames with numbers to your own system, so that you'll know where each one is supposed to go in the boat. (It's embarrassing to get one all bent in and discover that it stops below the sheerline.)

Three pairs of frames will need special treatment. These are to goat the after end of the tuck, where the reverse curves at the butt ends of the frames are most severe; that is, two pairs immediately forward of station number 6, and one aft of it. The best way to make these up is simply to lay together four pieces, each 3/s inch thick by 17/s inches wide, and tack the butt ends together with a pair of 1!/2-inch screws. Tie a string around the bundle halfway along the length of the frame. Some sharp mathematician will point out that this assembled butt is !/s inch thinner than the regular frames, and I will counter with the fact that this frame is exactly the same as they are at the top, where the sheer

70

clamp demands uniformity. If you insist on per- fection, and have read to this point before cut- ting the sockets for the frames, you can make those six sockets !/s inch shallower.

If you want to be absolutely sure that you won't lose one of these special frames by break- age, make up four spares. They may come in very handy farther aft.

There's one more thing I feel obliged to add here, but itshould be in very small print, so that only the desperate few will notice it. It's this: I once knew a man who couldn't get any white oak for his frames, and used some tough, young, fast-grown oak of another variety instead. He pointed out, in his defense, that 85 percent of the boats and yachts on this coast are framed with this other variety, and most of them are doing tolerably well; and furthermore, you show a piece of this oak to one of those smart young architects and he smells it and says, "That cer- tainly is a beautiful piece of white oak” (with the bark still on it, mind you); so what are you supposed to do? Tell him he ought to work in a boatyard for a year, and learn the facts of life? Don't be ridiculous. Congratulate him on his sense of smell, and let it go at that.

So if you can't find any good white oak, remember that there is another kind, known (though not to botanists) as gray oak. In North America it grows on, I think, 57 different types of stump (in England only one, strangely enough), but it's all gray by the time it gets to the boatshop. And if you, like the man I'm speaking of, can get some young, heavy, fast- grown oak of this variety, and sozzle it with some potent bug juice after you get it bent into place—don't worry too much about its ancestry. There are many others in the same boat with you, if I may be permitted to coin a phrase.

Of course, if you turn pro, and contract to use only genuine white oak in the boat you are to build, that's a different matter altogether. You should not take advantage of their ignor- ance, however thickly and obnoxiously it may be displayed. If you don't know how to recog- nize Quercus alba when you see it, ask almost any farmer or sawmill man. Don't bother the botanists. They'll draw you pictures of round- lobed leaves, and have you taste the acorns, which are sweet.

Bending the frames

Let's assume, then, that you've got your frames ready to cook, and get on with the busi- ness. If you haven't already done it, make up

and install that steam-box bulkhead, complete with pusher and cross rack, just far enough in to take your longest frame. No sense wasting steam. Lay the frames on edge, so that the lami- nations can hang apart. Separate the tiers with cross sticks at the open end of the box. Don't push them back any further than necessary, or you won't be able to see them 'mid the encir- cling gloom, and it's no fun fishing around in there. Don't try more than a dozen in the first batch, unless you own more clamps than I think you do. You'll need four on each frame, and you'll not want to stop and fasten, when things are going really well, just to get clamps free. Close the door on the steam box, whoop up the fire, note the time when the steam starts coming through strong, and assemble your gear.

Inside the boat, laid out on the strongback, you'll have a big mallet, a good claw hammer, the stone-crusher shown in Figure 7-3, a can of eightpenny nails, some cotton gloves—and, eventually, yourself, shod with non-skid rubber, trying to rally from a knock on the head. (Young fellers do get a little worked up, first time they try it, and tend to forget they aren't really sitting on a cloud.) You might also have with you a piece of black crayon, and while away the hour marking where the frames are to be spaced on the ribbands. Throughout most of the length of the boat they will, of course, stand plumb in profile—that is, parallel to the nearest mold, from heel socket to sheer ribband. For- ward of mold number 2, and aft of number 7, we'll start to compromise with this ideal; but right now we won't worry about that problem.

Outside the boat, your assistant festoons the ribbands with all the C-clamps you can buy, borrow, or steal, and provides himself with two heavy carpenter's hammers (one for each side of the boat, and damned lucky if either one of them is in reach when he needs it) and a better pair of gloves than you've got. He may decide to make himself a short gaff for hooking the frames out, after he's groped for a few with his wrist exposed. There are some special boatbuilding terms that are used to describe this experience, but I think we can afford to omit them here.

If we've forgotten anything, its too late now. They've been cooking an hour, with the box huffing and puffing and spewing out great gouts of ink-black water. Take your stand on the ribbands just forward of mold number 5, and call for the first frame timber. Your helper should fetch it at a dead run, shove it to you butt-first over the top ribband, and then dive to the keel with hammer in hand. You start the

figure 7-3

Bear down

"

Frame

McIntosh's Stone-Crusher

butt into its socket, crawl up the ribbands with your big mallet, and belabor the upper end until your helper cries “Hold, enough" —and drives the butt sideways in the socket, while you are riding the frame down to the ribbands. It bends quite easily to the shape, but you know perfectly well that it's only waiting for your foot to slip. All this has taken about 30 seconds.

Right now the serious business begins. It is not enough merely to bend it out until it touches all the ribbands, and there fasten it to await the planking. Itand its three companions will inevitably distort the fair curve of the rib- bands between the molds, and cause a flat spot, ugly to look at and difficult to plank. Someone is going to get all excited here and point out that molds should never be more than 2 feet apart. I know one good boatbuilder who uses no molds at all, and others who couldn't turn out a good job if they made a mold for every frame in the boat. Take my word for it: if you know how to work the timbers, you can keep them fair with this 4-foot spacing. You've got to over-bend each frame, manipulate it, shape it with your hands, feet, and the stone-crusher, until it stops fighting and relaxes into place. And the way you do it is this: the outside man clamps the frame to the ribband just below the turn of the bilge, and then you pull the head of the frame inboard all you dare, and half a foot more (see Figure 7-4). Hold it 10 seconds, let it go out- board to take a clamp on the next ribband up, and repeat the extreme bend and holding. (You'll learn eventually to bear down on the top as you pull it in, to increase the amount of the bend and move it upwards on the frame.) Con- tinue to move upward, ribband by ribband,

71

breaking it in each time, until you end up with the bending tool at the very head of the frame. The frame should be by this time completely tractable, so that one clamp only, to the ribband just above the turn of the bilge, will almost hold it in place. Of course, you leave at least four on it, until you have time to fasten to the ribbands. I hope that you have remembered through all this excitement to keep it lined up at those black crayon marks. As a last act before you leave it, nail the head of the frame to the uppermost ribband, right at your crayon mark.

And what if the frame refuses to take this punishment—being bent to 6-inch radius, when it needs only to fit a curve three or four times bigger? If it won't take the quick turn without showing signs of distress, you don't want it in your boat. Throw it out and try another. But if it does take it—then it’s a good, tough frame, well adjusted within itself, and quite able to with- stand all the flexing and shocks it's likely to get in the next 30 years. And it accepts those rib- bands as guides, not captors, in assuming its final shape, so that the curves of the planking fore and aft will remain fair.

Now, this bending should have been easy to do (I hope much easier than trying to describe it). If it wasn't easy, there's something wrong— poor stock, steam not hot enough, too much time lost somewhere. The same rule should apply throughout this business of boatbuilding— and possibly in broader fields of endeavor, if you want to get philosophical about it. If it comes hard, try to figure out where you've gone wrong. (It might be the designer, too, you know. Invite him to come up and demonstrate. You and he might be somewhat surprised at the results.) But hang onto this thought: if it’s done properly, it should be easy.

Use up the rest of this first batch here in the middle of the boat—forward and aft of station number 5—to develop your speed and skill. These big frames are the easiest to fit, since they require very little twisting. There is the further advantage that a frame you break here may still be long enough to reach the sheerline if you go two stations forward with it. Remember to keep the boiler full and driving until the last timber is out of the box. Take the clamps off, one by one, and substitute for each of them a 3-inch number 12 steel screw—for which you drill a 36-inch hole—through ribband and frame from the outside. Always try to drive those screws precisely in the middle of the frame, because this is the one spot you're not supposed to hit with the plank fastenings. You'll break your pre-

72

cious tapered drill every time you let it fall into one of these hidden gopher holes. Finally, before you start another batch, check all these newly bent frames to make sure they are still touching the ribbands above and below the reverse curve, way down low. They have a sly tendency to lift away here as they cool off.

It should be safe now to go aft and consider the special problems in the counter. These short frames aft of the sternpost might appear at first glance to be the easiest of all to fit, but they are not. They can get you into bad trouble if you don't watch out. They'll try to straighten out by pulling the bilge ribbands insidiously upward; and you'll realize, too late, with the topsides all planked, that she looks starved in the flanks. You can try to blame it on the designer (the: transom does look too big, it's true), but you'll be wrong. You gave up too soon. You let the clamps take part of the burden, instead of fight- ing it out to total victory with your bare hands. (You think I've forgotten your gloves? Oh, no. You shook off the right-hand one early so that you could hang on to the mallet handle long enough to drive the frame down the inside curve to the heel socket.) And maybe you had some foolish notion that you could twist this frame and haul the head aft, so that it stands plumb in profile, and follows those crayon marks up the ribbands to the sheer. An attempt to do this would impossibly complicate an already diffi- cult situation. Forget your ideals. Let the thing lie almost as it wants to, leaning drunkenly forward from the bilge up. Pull the top of that frame in, and hold it 'til your arms crack, and your foot is paralyzed; and then, having let it fall out against the ribbands at the turn, tie that top with rope, across to the strongback, with enough tension to pull the frame clear of the sheer ribband (see Figure 7-5).

You will have noticed in the midst of this struggle that the extra foot of length on the frame was a great help to you. You may also have had the fleeting thought that three or even four laminations (totaling the full thickness of the two-layer frames, of course) would have been much more pleasant to handle. Why not? It's far better to have them go in with only moderate strain on their fibers and your mus- cles. The butt ends of at least three pairs, as you remember, are already prepared for that extreme turn at the after end of the tuck. If you have doubts, or troubles, fit all the frames, between station number 7 and the transom, in four layers each. Easy does it, every time.

One more point, before we go up front

LOW N N P" ; IL Se

SEDE] / CLAM, VAT A =) A

"forward," to you purists) to discuss the prob- lems there. In this matter of allowing the frames to lie naturally, with their heads leaning toward the bow, try (as they will try) to have this effect increase gradually and evenly as you work alt. The second frame aft of station number 7 could start the trend; it is permissible also to increase the distances between frames at the bilge as those distances decrease at the sheer. And, of course, match them up port and starboard, and tell all your visitors you meant to do it that way, and that you've got authority to back you up.

The same spirit of moderation and com- promise should guide your hand up forward. You'll be able to hold the line aft of the num- ber 2 mold, but beyond that you'll encounter an increasing desire in the frame heads to lean aft. Don't fight them too hard. Better to allow a slight laxity in posture than to have them pres- ent a hard and unyielding corner to the plank- ing. And shape them, before clamping, just as earnestly as you shaped the frames in the stern.

Remember, when you are bending those three terrible pairs aft (the one just forward of mold number 7, and the next two aft of it) that the ribbands that form the tuck are sacred and must not be forced outward. Better to have no frame there at all than to allow a bulge in the fair curve of the plank line.

Fastenings

And now to fasten these frames to the foun- dation. I hope you will by this time feel that those sockets were worth cutting if only to locate and hold one end of the frame while you worked on the rest of it. I think you will get

great satisfaction and reassurance from the act of fastening them; you'll know it's good; and never mind how it looked on the construction plan. If you estimate that each of these connec- tions will take a 500-pound load, and count only the frames between stations number 2 and number 7, you still come up with a figure of 20,000 pounds, which isa nice little start toward supporting 6,500 pounds of ballast and keeping the garboard seams tight. And all free, you might say—since your critics will maintain that the floor timbers do all the work, anyway.

Those same critics will shake their heads in shocked disbelief if you follow my advice and fasten each frame heel with two hot-galvanized 20-penny spikes. Drill */ie-inch holes for them, angled out and down, and countersunk so the heads will be out of the way when you fair the frames off flush with the back rabbet. Back on the tailfeather, and up the stem, where there is less wood to hit, use 10-penny nails, or 2!/2-inch number 8 bronze nails. Pay no attention when the Voice of Doom gets going on the subject of electrolysis. If the two metals are not in actual contact with each other, and are buried and bunged in sound wood, they'll manage a peace- ful coexistence in spite of all the agitated experts.

Now, while you are (having bent the last frame) in the full flush of pride and victory, you would do well to get down on your knees with an adze, planes, a slice, battens, thin boards, a big hammer, and a punch, and fair off the frames and the back rabbet to make ready for the garboard. You'll want a clear conscience when you face the next operation.

Jo

BAW lr

"But put a timber and jack under each bilge... and the ocean drops right out of her garboard seams."

Chapter Eight

Floor Timbers

The glossary will say something like this: “Floor timber—an athwartships member, usu- ally of wood, used to tie the heels of the frames to the keel." This definition comes close to being the ultimate in oversimplification. The floor timbers provide a base for the engine bed, intermediate shaft bearings, and a mast step. They tie the two halves of the boat together down where it really counts. They take in hand the enormous wringing strains of the ballast keel, and transfer these loads smoothly and subtly to the main fabric of the hull. They connect a flexible keel to the longitudinal rigid- ity of the topsides. They even provide support for a platform to walk on. Unfortunately, they are not always provided in sufficient numbers, styles, and sizes to do this work in a satisfactory manner.

Various types of floors

I can think of seven different forms in which this member can appear, each one with certain virtues of its own (Figure 8-1).

There's the simple plank-on-edge, suggested by the above definition, which can go before, abaft of, on top of, or between the frames. In its best form this simple floor is shaped from a "grown crook," with long arms up the inside of the planking. You are most likely to find it in a primitive boatyard where the builders live close to the forest and time is not of the essence—and you can well envy them their pile of sweeps and knees, because we can't improve on them a bit with all our refined techniques.

There's the metal floor—forged from wrought iron or steel, or cast in bronze, or welded in web form from bar and angle stock.

a

figure 8-1

Types of floor timbers

78

This usually is used up forward, where an hon- est plank floor would stand too high and spoil the headroom. It’s a pretty thing, and very expensive; but it sometimes fails to do its job. I'll have more to say about this later. (Once upon a time, there was a special rating rule in the Great Lakes which for some reason penal- ized inside ballast, as distinct from structural members. One boat appeared with a 600-pound bronze fairing piece on the lower end of the rudder stock; another used, in the refrigeration system, bronze tubing with a 2-inch-thick wall. Needless to say, the designers of these boats went wild with metal floors. In my innocenceI contracted for and built one of them, and the old scars act up when I think of it. I have suffered since from the failings of three others that came here in mid-career and drooped their chins, as it were, on my doorstep, asking to be made whole again—and I learned a lot about floors from them.)

And there's the spring-leaf floor (Figure 8-2), built up of glued laminations, saturated and sealed with super-epoxy, light, stiff, strong, and guaranteed not to delaminate as long as the moisture content stays the same. It is also frightfully expensive, but worth every nickel if you are building a three-ply featherweight to the quarter-ton rule. Such a boat is outside my experience and beyond my desire. However, if my boat won't get there the same day, it'll make it the same summer, fortified by massive, heavy, perhaps crude floors that'll never let a garboard swing open.

Let's contemplate some of the stresses that occur in a sailboat with outside ballast. We'll stand the boat on edge and drop her off the top of a 6-foot sea that hits beam-on.

Look at "Knockabout, 1900" (Figure 8-3). This boat probably leaked very little in its youth, even when driven hard. But despite splendid workmanship and tender loving care, the fastenings and joints would eventually work loose and allow for cruel leaking. Caulk- ing would aggravate the trouble; the only cure would be more and bigger floors, with bigger bolts through them. And don't tell me you can fiberglass the bottom and make her as good as new. You've got to stop that wiggle first.

Now look at “Sam Crocker, 1939" (Figure 8-4). This is much better. (We were building Fomalhaut then, and trying to learn all we could from Sam Crocker; there was a lot he taught us—one lesson having to do with that particular keel-floor-ballast configuration. It seems that even he had had secret doubts as to its ultimate indestructibility, so when he started

figure 8-2

Spring-leaf floor

figure 8-3 Knockabout, 1900

Bent frame across apron:

Hinge joint with fulcrum at the rabbet Effective lever arm

Deadwood

—— Ballast keel

79

figure 8-4 Sam Crocker, 1939

Bent frame—11/» x 13/4” VL Plank—11/:6" cedar

Oak strap—11/2 x 1/2"— fastened on top of frame and to the plank floor and keel

Ballast keel 5,500 Ibs iron

across country, after the 1938 hurricane, on the trail of one of his 30-footers, he counted the successive trenches her keel had gouged. His heart sank lower and lower as he approached the 50 mark—and there the little so-and-so sat, leaning against an oak tree. “Christmas!” said Sam. “She hadn't even squeezed the putty out of the garboard seam!” He told of another case in which they hadn't, for some reason, boxed the frames into the foundation; that boat always leakeda little when they drove her hard, and they couldn't cure it.)

If we accept the garboard (in the rabbet) as the fulcrum in this diagram of forces, then the lever arm to the top of the keel is at least four times as long in the second instance as in the first. Add the greater depth of floor, the thicker bolt, the boxed-in heel, and the bent timber across the keel and atop the frames, and you have a very strong structure, perfectly suited to a stand-up keel.

Now look at the third case, illustrated in Figure 8-5. This shows the usual molded keel, wide in the way of the outside ballast, tapering both ways to the siding of the stem and stern- post, and only as deep in profile as necessary to provide an adequate junction for frames, floors,

80

Plank floor—2 x 12"

planking, and ballast shoe. A plank-on-edge floor will do nicely here—drift-fastened to the keel, heavily fastened to the two or three planks that cross its ends. But it would be far more effective if it had tapering arms that reached almost to the turn of the bilge, strongly secured to eight or nine planks on a side and directly attached to the ballast keel, if possible. This line of thought (or yearning?) has led me to design and use, in my latest half-dozen big boats, what you might call a composite-con- struction floor. It’s not difficult to shape, it’s enormously strong, it allows easy access to the keelbolt, and it spreads the bolt load across the entire width of the wood keel.

The composite construction floor

Start with a piece of 1⁄2- by 4-inch steel long enough to reach almost across the top of the wood keel in the way of a ballast-keel bolt. Make a pattern for a vertical plate, or web, comfortably smaller than the width down there in the ditch. Get your friendly metalworker to cut this out of 3/s-inch plate and weld it across the forward edge of the first piece, to stand plumb, as in Figure 8-6.

Drill the bottom plate for the keelbolt; drill at least five holes on each side of the centerline in the vertical plate; drop the assembly down to the top of the wood keel, with 2 inches of threaded keelbolt coming up through the cross plate. Shim it 1/8 inch clear of the top of the keel, turn a nut on finger-tight, and proceed to fit the wings—sawn to shape out of the tough- est white oak or locust that ever grew, scribed to fit snugly against the inside of the planking, and extending out and up at least to the under- side of the cabin sole. Clamp to the plate and drill the wood to match the holes in the plate. Mark where the wings lie on the planking, and punch lead holes out through to lead the screws that will go from the planking into the wings.

Take the whole business apart; apply zinc- rich paint to the metal; set the athwartships plate on a fine bed of canvas gasket and tar-and- oakum grommet, but don't tighten the keelbolt nut until everything else is bolted and screwed together. That last !/s inch (with roofing tar squeezing out around the edges) will take up all the slack. The final move is to fit and fasten a [ine timber across from tip to tip, at the height of the underside of the cabin sole. You can spike and screw-fasten the ends as shown, or you can fit a metal plate on each side and through-rivet to tie things together.

I think you'll be satisfied with one of these floors in every other bay (say, 24 inches apart) and view with pleasure the chance you have to install worthwhile fuel and/or water tanks below the cabin sole—but be sure you can get them out without disturbing the joinerwork. You might want to check a keelbolt after 20 years, or you might have to clear the limbers, or convince a surveyor that there's still a sound boat down in that hole.

Before we finish comparing timbering sys- tems, look at Figure 8-7, which shows typical big-ship double-sawn frame-with-keelson con- struction.

New bootstraps

I'dlike now to consider some of the respon- sibilities of the floor timbers, how they can fail in their duties, and what can be done to get them out of a bind.

There is a subject dear to my heart best described as The Case of the Shrinking Gar- board. This crops up most frequently in “planked-down,”’ “‘ditch-keel’’ powerboats like Old Novis, but I’ve known the phenomenon to occur in an ancient Crowninshield schooner

figure 8-5

“Third case”

Plank-on-edge floor

—but more effective if it had tapering arms that reached almost to the turn of the bilge

81

figure 8-6

Composite construction floor

3/8" plate

i li

CEN

and a classic fantail-stern launch. The opening move is always the same. "Have you got any real good oakum?" asks the owner. “My gar- boards have shrunk something awful. 'Course, they're original—been on there 15 years—can't expect them to last forever—anyone knows you can't do a real caulking job with cotton....” So you tell him you think she needs new bootstraps more than she needs further prying apart. (Garboards don't shrink, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Keels sag under the weight of engines; and if the frame-butts let go their grip of the foundation, there's bound to be a gap above the rabbet. You can't blame the trouble on floor timbers, because they were . not provided in any great quantity when the boat was built.) If you areas foolhardy asIhave

82

Ballast keel — | Keelbolt

been known to be, you will tell him to bring her up, and you'll put her on the railway; and if he'll tear up four feet of cockpit floor down the middle, you'll fix her.

So you haul her out, with water in her up to the flywheel, and nota drop runs out of the old basket. But put a timber and a jack under each bilge, just aft of the engine, and take half her weight off the car—and the ocean drops right out of her lovely garboard seams. While she’s up thus, rake out the lovely mess of cotton, oakum, and roof tar from the garboard seams, and let her down again. Chances are those gar- boards have miraculously expanded (or some- thing has happened, anyway) so now the open seam looks almost respectable. All you need worry about is keeping it that way when she’s

figure 8-7 Double sawn-frame construction (in U.S, Navy frigate of 1797)

Floors and cross chocks are locked to the keel under a three-log keelson.

Scarfed-together futtocks were primarily a feature of naval vessels, according to Wm. A. Baker, N.A.

Use of chocks permitted use of straighter timber.

First futtock Cross chock

Second futtock Chock

Floor

Floor timbers

Cross chocks

ee

| ——— Top timber

Second futtock bae ye Keelson

Paired floor timbers were pinched between keel and keelson in double sawn-frame construction of an 1832 Maine pinky schooner.

Floor timber

83

figure 8-8

Installing bootstraps

Keel—6 x 12

supported by water instead of by railway. Here’s where the bootstraps are applied. First, look at Figure 8-8. That timber sitting on edge across the ditch is brand-new to this old boat, and is one of three, judiciously spaced between the sternpost and the forward end of the cockpit. I call it a floor timber for lack of a better name. Bore a hole down through it, far enough off the centerline to clear the propeller shaft. Continue the hole down through the keel. Cut and thread bolts to reach from coun- tersunk heads on the bottom of the keel to the top of this cross piece. Do the other two like- wise; fasten earnestly from the planking into these pseudo-floors; fit vertical cleats, wedges, and fillers down each side of the ditch, bolted to the crosspiece at the top, fastened to the plank- ing below. Tighten the nuts on the bootstraps 'til she squeaks in pain. Caulk that fine small garboard seam and shove her back in. You shouldn't have missed more than one tide.

figure 8-9 Deep floors for powerboats f Cockpit deck Beam

g

Floor timber

(We did Brooksy’s gramp’s boat this way one morning. She was strip-planked, and not too old, and sat on the railway tighter’n a you- know-what in flytime until we jacked her a little—whereupon 1,000 miles of hairline seam appeared in view, oozing water every damned inch. We put the bootstraps to her, as above, and shoved her back in to adjust herself. Saw Gramp a week or two later looking kind of morose, and felt obliged to inquire how she was doing. “She stinks!” he said. "Used to be you pumped enough water through her to keep her sweet, but not any more. That gurry just sets in the bilge and rots.” Ah, well...some days you can't do anything right.)

With all these pictures of flat-floored pow- erboats around, this is a good time to consider another special responsibility of the floor timbers—or perhaps what happens, in this type of boat, when they're too small and too few.

L-shaped casting

Propeller shaft

Twin bolts

figure 8-10

Fitting deep floors

Let’s agree that the topsides of the boat (the side planking from just below the waterline to the sheer, in my book, and never mind what the Navy calls it) provide most of the longitudinal stiffness of the hull. The keel contributes very little to this (unless, of course, we are consider- ing a heavily built dragger, with considerable deadrise even in the after sections), and the great need is to transfer this topside strength to the rest of the fabric, including the keel. This is one of the main functions of the floor timbers. Go to any graveyard of old lobsterboats, and you'll see what I mean. If they've sat long with- out careful shoring under the bilges and tran- som, they'll likely show a dimple at the top of the sternpost and a kink in the keel where it rests in the forward-most crossbeam of the cradle. The bilges may sag a bit, like the jowls of middle age; and in a planked-down boat there will be a definite coming-together of the sides above the shaft alley.

You may argue at this point that the boat was designed to float in water, and not sit up there in the weeds. True enough; flexibility isa great virtue if you don't have too much of it, and they all have to leak a little or they wouldn't be boats—but what if you hit the sand a few times while running an inlet, or get caught in the surf along the beach? You'll feel better if you know the garboards aren't likely to pop out of the rabbet on the third bounce, nor the sternpost to come up through the deck, nor the propeller