It seems that the hubris of my last post (not to mention by off-blog comments) drew the ire of the gods. Since that post, the Earl and I planked half of the boat. That took about seven days of work. Then we got to work taking it all off. That took about three hours. Then we took the two forward frames off and took them apart. That took about 30 minutes. So after three months of labor and materials, I've gotten exactly nowhere.
That's not exactly true, but it sure looks that way. Or at least did for a few days. How did it come to this, you ask? How did so many work so much to achieve so little. This story goes back a ways so you better be sitting down.
In fact it goes already back to the fool who designed the damn thing. Its like the moron didn't know the first thing about naval architecture, and as that moron, I can attest to that fact. The first thing I didn't know was, well everything. Actually, the design wasn't all that bad. On a larger boat it probably would have worked with a little more care in the construction, but on that small frame, oh, not so much. The one thing a certainly didn't know was how wood bends and behaves when bent. If this was composite construction it would be now problem, but the curves that made the design good were totally unpractical with carvel planking. While the curves looked great in my mind's eye, the wood had it's own ideas. Remember learning conic sections in high school (or on your own if you went to a cess pool like mine). Apparently that place you use them is wooden boat design. Something to keep in mind.
After the design comes the lofting. Now every book or site on boat building is about half full of details on this critical step. They all go on and on about how crucial it is, how you should spend more time lofting than building, blah blah blah. That's why I felt confident in doing almost none of it. I had the picture of what it should be in my head. I mean, I designed the damn thing. Wasn't that enough? Apparently not. As usual with these kind of things, there are all of these little things that add up, in my case to disaster. Could I have avoided all of them with lofting, no, of course not, only about 99% of them.
The next place that things went wrong was the total lack of skill of the builder. I mean, this guy couldn't shape his way out of a paper bag. Well at least I couldn't when I put the frames together. Well, most of it was a fine enough job except the most crucial curves on the boat, frames 9, 10 and 11. These are the forward frames that give (gave) the boat shape. In hind sight, these frames should have been the same to the millimeter. I should have cut them from the same piece of wood and the split them. It turns out that close to the nearest 1/2 in. doesn't cut it. Unlike plastic, wood is not a very forgiving medium. A quarter inch difference in position on frame 9 was the ruination of weeks of work.
Finally (for this post at least) comes the selection of building materials and methods. Both choices were poor ones. First the method, carvel planking. Never having done it, and eschewing reading anything about it, I of course imagined it to be easy. Take some wood, steam it soft, screw it on, repeat, ?, Profit! I'm no stitch and glue man, not even lapstrake was good enough for me. I had to go right for the most demanding. And not only that, but with my own untried amature design! And my choice of materials was even less informed. Douglass fir is a fine boat building lumber I'm sure, if it's carefully selected and cured. Not mine, oh no! Only randomly sellected sodden heat wood from the Home Depot remainder bin was good enough. I was going to finally get one over on the man! What a disaster. They all looked great going on. That stuff bent like a dream. Of course, once it began to dry out it shrank some 20% of what it was leaving huge gaps in previously tight seems. To top it off, just about every board developed surface cracks that reached about halfway through the plank.
So is this the end of the Trenton steam boat industry. No, of course not. In my life, failure of this magnitude barely even registers. I know for some it would be a crushing blow, but for me, eh, just another day. So what's next? Well the forward frames are already rebuild, I'll be bending the new chine logs on in about an hour (steam's on as I write) and its all moving forward. Of course, compromises must be made. We're going with plywood planking and that nifty clipper bow is being reworked a bit to acommodate the plywood. Other than that, it must go on. I'll post pictures and the new drawings soon.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Walking The Planks
Who would have thought that superimposing square ridgid boards onto a constantly curving surface would be so much work?! I mean, just because nothing is straight, and the things that are curved change their shape as other things are put on them, and the designer obviously had only a loosely theoretical understanding of boat construction when he laid down the lines, that shouldn't mean that it should take two days to get two boards in place. Yet that's how long it took us. And by us I mean three of us, BiL Earl, nephew Chris and myself.
It didn't really take two days to get them in place, but it took us that long to figure out to put them there. If only I had read the books that I had bought. Although, in retrospect it wouldn't have done any good as the books I have are geared to sail boat designs and I'm building a classic power boat hull. No, this was a case where I had to waste some wood and time figuring it out by myself. Now that I see how to do it I'm anxious to start in earnest.
Here's some pictures of what's been happening in the boat shed.
This first one shows the first true plank to be put on. It's hard to tell from this picture but it twists from vertical to near horizontal over a
span of about 5 ft. It also has some funky carving on the inboard side to make it mate flush to the keel. It wasn't like I could just run it through a joiner at an angle to get it. It was all hand sawn and planed. Also you might notice that the very bow is slightly different. I previously had a rather monumental piece of work up there holding it all together and had some rather fanciful ideas on how wood might bend around it. It turned out to be both impraticable and unnecessary. As with nost of the design, I'm finding that a lot if it is wildly over built. So I took it off and replaced it with a simple sawn knee. The curve of the hull, at least at the garboard strake, looks a lot better.
You'll also notice the three strips of planking on the outboard sides. Those are there for now and where kind of a test before I had really figured out how to plank the damn thing. We'll see if they stay.
This next one shows the garboard strake on the
other (starboard) side of the boat. This one was cut from a 16' 2X8 that had knots in all the right places. For the smaller pieces, I take dimensional lumber (2X6s mostly) and cut in in half for two 3/4 in thick pieces. In this case, it was too wide to reliably run through the band saw, so after cutting it to size we ran it through the planer a few times and created a pile of chips about as high as my three year old. Then it was too long for the steam box so I had to cut 6 inches off to make it fit. In the end it's a true work of art. You might notice a pile of thin strips to the right of the picture. Those are reference battens. I'm using them to fit in the planks. Its a somewhat convoluted process I'm not going to take the time to explain here. I'll share if someone brings it up in the comments. Anyway, in both pics you can see the Earl fooling with something at the stern. What could it be?
Why it's the keel and skeg! I hadn't really thought about putting them on this soon since I
planned to do as most boat building information tells you and plank from the outside in. Since I'm now going the other way with all that, it turns out I needed it now. So there it is. I've been saving some choice pieces of oak for the job and it went on as I had designed. One interesting note: to fit the curve of the keel to the curve of the skeg I used my own variation of a technique I saw as a kid. When I saw it is was carpenters putting a scarf joint into some beams for a house. It involves running a draw saw between the two pieces of wood as a slight pressure is used on them. Not enough to stick the saw but enough for the saw to bite the extra between the gaps. It worked a lot better than fitting, marking and sanding the two pieces. Not good enough for inlay work but close enough for a home made wood boat. Anyway, here's BiL putting the nuts on the threadded rod that holds the skeg to the keel.
Tomorrow's a big planking day (took today off to go to the zoo). Also, I'm in an eating contest. So little to do, so much time! Wait...
It didn't really take two days to get them in place, but it took us that long to figure out to put them there. If only I had read the books that I had bought. Although, in retrospect it wouldn't have done any good as the books I have are geared to sail boat designs and I'm building a classic power boat hull. No, this was a case where I had to waste some wood and time figuring it out by myself. Now that I see how to do it I'm anxious to start in earnest.
Here's some pictures of what's been happening in the boat shed.
This first one shows the first true plank to be put on. It's hard to tell from this picture but it twists from vertical to near horizontal over a
span of about 5 ft. It also has some funky carving on the inboard side to make it mate flush to the keel. It wasn't like I could just run it through a joiner at an angle to get it. It was all hand sawn and planed. Also you might notice that the very bow is slightly different. I previously had a rather monumental piece of work up there holding it all together and had some rather fanciful ideas on how wood might bend around it. It turned out to be both impraticable and unnecessary. As with nost of the design, I'm finding that a lot if it is wildly over built. So I took it off and replaced it with a simple sawn knee. The curve of the hull, at least at the garboard strake, looks a lot better.You'll also notice the three strips of planking on the outboard sides. Those are there for now and where kind of a test before I had really figured out how to plank the damn thing. We'll see if they stay.
This next one shows the garboard strake on the
other (starboard) side of the boat. This one was cut from a 16' 2X8 that had knots in all the right places. For the smaller pieces, I take dimensional lumber (2X6s mostly) and cut in in half for two 3/4 in thick pieces. In this case, it was too wide to reliably run through the band saw, so after cutting it to size we ran it through the planer a few times and created a pile of chips about as high as my three year old. Then it was too long for the steam box so I had to cut 6 inches off to make it fit. In the end it's a true work of art. You might notice a pile of thin strips to the right of the picture. Those are reference battens. I'm using them to fit in the planks. Its a somewhat convoluted process I'm not going to take the time to explain here. I'll share if someone brings it up in the comments. Anyway, in both pics you can see the Earl fooling with something at the stern. What could it be?Why it's the keel and skeg! I hadn't really thought about putting them on this soon since I
planned to do as most boat building information tells you and plank from the outside in. Since I'm now going the other way with all that, it turns out I needed it now. So there it is. I've been saving some choice pieces of oak for the job and it went on as I had designed. One interesting note: to fit the curve of the keel to the curve of the skeg I used my own variation of a technique I saw as a kid. When I saw it is was carpenters putting a scarf joint into some beams for a house. It involves running a draw saw between the two pieces of wood as a slight pressure is used on them. Not enough to stick the saw but enough for the saw to bite the extra between the gaps. It worked a lot better than fitting, marking and sanding the two pieces. Not good enough for inlay work but close enough for a home made wood boat. Anyway, here's BiL putting the nuts on the threadded rod that holds the skeg to the keel.Tomorrow's a big planking day (took today off to go to the zoo). Also, I'm in an eating contest. So little to do, so much time! Wait...
Monday, April 6, 2009
Boiler Failure
At long last, I'm back to putting pieces on the boat. Now that I have identified the type of wood I'll be using I can really see the day when I will have an actual boat and not just a pile of boards in an unsightly pile in the back yard. With the help of my brother in law I had put in the forward pieces of the chine log (both sides from frame 7 forward to the bow). I then wanted to put in the rest. To do that meant firing up the boiler for the steam box.
Normally the procedure is to load the boiler, fill it with water, lite it and wait for the steam to come up. Loading it isn't a problem as I had chopped and cut a fair amount to wood and have lots of oak shavings and sawdust to get it going. Filling it proved to be more of an adventure.
As many of you know from previous posts, I've been running the boiler over the winter. I've had some trials and travails trying to stay ahead of the frost and keeping the water in it from freezing and have been more or less successful. Or so I had thought.
The normal filling protocol for winter operation is to use my little electric pump to take up the water stored in my tank/hot well that I had made (see previous postings). But because I hadn't fired the boiler in a few weeks, I had drained the tank after it had mainly drained by itself due to some 5200 failing in the cold. So I had to hook up the garden hose. Not a big deal as the hose in the back handily reaches to the boiler and it's already equipped with 3/4" fittings for just such.
Now, the old boiler holds close to thirty gallons of water and it takes a while to fill, even with the hose running full, so I hooked it up, turned it on and started doing other prep work, coming by every so often to check on where the level was. The other check I have to keep doing is keeping the relief valve open to relieve the back pressure as it fills. It's spring loaded and doesn't take to being held open and has a tendency to close it shaken even the slightest bit.
Well, I wasn't as attentive as I should have been and it seems that we have some fine water pressure at the house here. As I was walking up to the boiler from across the yard, I happened to notice that the pressure was up to almost 30 lbs. I wasn't concerned for the boiler at that point but for the hose as I had run the boiler up that far in the past. I thought the safety relief valve had closed itself and was going to kick off by itself soon (it opens at 30) but hoses are expensive and I didn't want to over stress this one. As I was nearing the boiler at a hurried pace, disaster struck! I heard the sound that strikes fear in every steamers heart, the tell tale PAHHSHSHSHSHHHHH of boiler failure.
I quickly ran the other way, not out of fear of any steam, the boiler was still cold, but to shut off the water. Even as I did so, I knew that that boiler's days were over. The person who made it, while a good designer and a genius at upcycling (look it up) was not a great welder. I mean, I'm not a great welder either, but even my beads are better. I really didn't trust it much before, but now it was nothing but 800 lbs of scrap. This wasn't just some pin hole that wept under pressure, this was a full scale blowout. If it had been hot, it could have been fatal.
Further investigation showed that a seam in the roof of the firebox let go, no doubt weakened by a winter of going from ice cold to steam a few times, plus the corrosive effect of boiler mud that no doubt must have collected there.
On the bright side, I've learned a lot about boilers from it and it will fetch me a few dollars at the scrap yard. The weather is warm enough now that I don't need heat in the boat barn any more so that's no hardship. The downside was, I still need to make steam to bend wood. So I made a new boiler!
And here it is.
This obviously isn't the one for the boat but it serves it's purpose. It's made from a pot I had in the basement, fittings reclaimed from the old boiler and, like the brakes on my first car, JB Weld and lamp parts. The wood on the top is the high tech clamping system I designed just for this application. It's fired by propane, so its way more convienient to use, but it cost more. The hose out of the top runs to the steam box. The hose out of the bottom serves both as a fill (note the handy funnel at one end) and as a sight glass. The hose is clear so I can see the water level in it. It gives a distorted reading because of the back pressure but as I'm really only interested in it not running dry, its good enough. It works like a charm too. I steamed the aft sections of the chine later the same day and they bent right to. I have pictures of the completed form but that will be for the next post.
Normally the procedure is to load the boiler, fill it with water, lite it and wait for the steam to come up. Loading it isn't a problem as I had chopped and cut a fair amount to wood and have lots of oak shavings and sawdust to get it going. Filling it proved to be more of an adventure.
As many of you know from previous posts, I've been running the boiler over the winter. I've had some trials and travails trying to stay ahead of the frost and keeping the water in it from freezing and have been more or less successful. Or so I had thought.
The normal filling protocol for winter operation is to use my little electric pump to take up the water stored in my tank/hot well that I had made (see previous postings). But because I hadn't fired the boiler in a few weeks, I had drained the tank after it had mainly drained by itself due to some 5200 failing in the cold. So I had to hook up the garden hose. Not a big deal as the hose in the back handily reaches to the boiler and it's already equipped with 3/4" fittings for just such.
Now, the old boiler holds close to thirty gallons of water and it takes a while to fill, even with the hose running full, so I hooked it up, turned it on and started doing other prep work, coming by every so often to check on where the level was. The other check I have to keep doing is keeping the relief valve open to relieve the back pressure as it fills. It's spring loaded and doesn't take to being held open and has a tendency to close it shaken even the slightest bit.
Well, I wasn't as attentive as I should have been and it seems that we have some fine water pressure at the house here. As I was walking up to the boiler from across the yard, I happened to notice that the pressure was up to almost 30 lbs. I wasn't concerned for the boiler at that point but for the hose as I had run the boiler up that far in the past. I thought the safety relief valve had closed itself and was going to kick off by itself soon (it opens at 30) but hoses are expensive and I didn't want to over stress this one. As I was nearing the boiler at a hurried pace, disaster struck! I heard the sound that strikes fear in every steamers heart, the tell tale PAHHSHSHSHSHHHHH of boiler failure.
I quickly ran the other way, not out of fear of any steam, the boiler was still cold, but to shut off the water. Even as I did so, I knew that that boiler's days were over. The person who made it, while a good designer and a genius at upcycling (look it up) was not a great welder. I mean, I'm not a great welder either, but even my beads are better. I really didn't trust it much before, but now it was nothing but 800 lbs of scrap. This wasn't just some pin hole that wept under pressure, this was a full scale blowout. If it had been hot, it could have been fatal.
Further investigation showed that a seam in the roof of the firebox let go, no doubt weakened by a winter of going from ice cold to steam a few times, plus the corrosive effect of boiler mud that no doubt must have collected there.
On the bright side, I've learned a lot about boilers from it and it will fetch me a few dollars at the scrap yard. The weather is warm enough now that I don't need heat in the boat barn any more so that's no hardship. The downside was, I still need to make steam to bend wood. So I made a new boiler!
And here it is.
This obviously isn't the one for the boat but it serves it's purpose. It's made from a pot I had in the basement, fittings reclaimed from the old boiler and, like the brakes on my first car, JB Weld and lamp parts. The wood on the top is the high tech clamping system I designed just for this application. It's fired by propane, so its way more convienient to use, but it cost more. The hose out of the top runs to the steam box. The hose out of the bottom serves both as a fill (note the handy funnel at one end) and as a sight glass. The hose is clear so I can see the water level in it. It gives a distorted reading because of the back pressure but as I'm really only interested in it not running dry, its good enough. It works like a charm too. I steamed the aft sections of the chine later the same day and they bent right to. I have pictures of the completed form but that will be for the next post.
Some updates at last!
I was doing a bit of spring cleaning the other day and realized I hadn't posted in some time, over a month in fact. That is just to long if I have any hope of keeping the scant few readers I do have so I have prepared a few posts on diverse subjects.
I really have no excuse for not posting its just not something that occurs to me that often to do. I have a hard time believing that anyone really reads this stuff. But since people do ask about it once in a while, I guess they do. I'm more of a theatre person I guess, needing a live audience to put on a good show.
Some general updates that most likely won't make the other posts: the big news is that since March 1 I have been officially jobless and am on the dole. You would think that this would leave me with lots of free time to pursue boat building in earnest, but actually it has freed me to complete some projects around the house that needed doing. Oh, and job hunting, I'm doing that too, but I have my priorities. Also, for those of you not in the northeast, it seems that it has been raining non stop here for the last month. I know that's not exactly true but it sure seems like that.
That's all I can think of for now. Well, now back to our regularly scheduled posts. Enjoy the show.
I really have no excuse for not posting its just not something that occurs to me that often to do. I have a hard time believing that anyone really reads this stuff. But since people do ask about it once in a while, I guess they do. I'm more of a theatre person I guess, needing a live audience to put on a good show.
Some general updates that most likely won't make the other posts: the big news is that since March 1 I have been officially jobless and am on the dole. You would think that this would leave me with lots of free time to pursue boat building in earnest, but actually it has freed me to complete some projects around the house that needed doing. Oh, and job hunting, I'm doing that too, but I have my priorities. Also, for those of you not in the northeast, it seems that it has been raining non stop here for the last month. I know that's not exactly true but it sure seems like that.
That's all I can think of for now. Well, now back to our regularly scheduled posts. Enjoy the show.
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