Failure - Utter, Complete and Abject

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.