Paying the Devil

Yar! For you landlubbers, paying the devil is a seaman's way of saying caulking between the keel and the garboard strake, and that's just what I was doing today. And while you may caulk with some chemical mastic, I was paying out my seams with cotton wick, a home made mallet and my caulking irons. Larger seams would require oakum, but my seams are as tight as a... well no need for that kind of salty language.

Here are the pictures I promised yesterday. I had them but was too busy to post them.
This is the port side looking aft. Its a terrible picture but it shows the dead straight sides. This is perhaps the oddest feature of the boat but it was a design necessity. I needed the full width at the chine for adequite displacement but I couldn't cant the side out any because the deck needs to extend another 1-1/2 feet out from the sheerline to accomodate the paddle wheels and if the sides did come out any, the boat would never fit out of the back yard. Then I'd have to install a bathtub and fireplace like Landsailor Dave at Traders Cove.

This one is from the starboard quarter looking forward. For some reason it looks a lot bigger from this perspective. Maybe because you can't really see the tapered bow. You can also see the leading edge of the skeg I finally got around to making the other day. You can kind of see that it matches the height of the bow. This is actually a design feature I put in to protect the wheels from grounding. The wheels will reach down to the bottom of the keel amidships. The bow and skeg are both 2-1/2 in. higher (or deeper) than that so even if both are grounded most of the weight will be carried by the keel and not the wheels. Why not just shorten the wheels? It's that whole displacement problem again, except this time it had to do with the height of the boat and where the center of the weight of the boiler would be. Suffice to say, everything is where it is for a reason.

This one is of the skeg. That the piece that is standing proud of the keel back there. Its designed as a sacrificial piece that can be replaced if need be. You can also get a good look at how the stern curves up. It's actually a fairly tight radius and took quite a bit of steaming to get the planks to lay in like that. Its designed like this to make the boat a bit "sucky" in the rear in order to put more water over the rudder, which is fairly small. The idea is that ole bernoulli will pull the stern down a bit into the water while she's in motion and pull the water up a bit as well, giving me an artificially high waterline over the rudder. I don't know if this is sound naval architecture but that's how it plays out in my head. It will eat up some power, but we're not looking to set speed records here.

This last pic is the false stem I installed the other day. I should have taken it further up the bow so that you could see how it bends over the keel. Those bums are the plugs that haven't been sawn off yet. This is one of the few pieces that have gone on exactly as I imagined it would. It's main purpose is to hide the end of the side planks as you can see here, but its also a sacrificial piece for the stem so that if there's ever a collision with something harder than the boat, that piece is a lot easier to replace than the stem and fore keel.

That's it for today. Tomorrow I'll finish paying the seams and then it's painting time. We should be ready to flip this weekend. Keep your finger's crossed.

The Tribute Post

Well, the sides are now fully planked out and we finished plugging them today. I'll post pictures tomorrow but I'd like to take this moment to pause for a tribute to all of the people who made this project possible so far.

The reason for this trip down memory lane is the overwhelming feeling of nostalgia that came over me at the sight of the freshly plugged hull the other day. Doing the sides today brought it back just a clearly so I figured it was a sign that it was time to write this post.

The first name to be mentioned is George Orsi, who was my sailing instructor when I was about 9 years old. He's first because he took me, and a few others in our class, on a trip to Beaton Boats in Mantaloking, NJ. For those who don't know, Beaton's is a place on Barnegat Bay where wooden boats are built, restored, kept, etc. The nostalgia at seeing a freshly plugged boat takes me back to that trip where I first saw such a thing. I had been around boats for most of my life up to that point, but to see one actually being made for the first time made quite an impression on me and I have to say, started me in my life of things nautical. Mr. Orsi also imparted a lot of other sea lore, like navigation and some marlinspike and his teaching has served as the foundation for my nautical knowledge ever since.

Now for a rogues gallery of others who have contributed to my delinquency:

My uncle, Bernie Sobon, a true craftsman, who not only imparted key nuggets of wisdom over the years but has also contibuted in no small way to my tool chest.

My old boss, Larry Ellis, at USMI for giving me the chance to learn how to make some really great boats.

Also at USMI, Bryant Bernhard, once chief engineer, now president, for teaching me the basics of naval architecture (although he might deny it if he saw this boat), and for that matter all of the guys on the shop floor there, especially Karl LaBouve (who works for the US Gov., not USMI) for being patient with the young yankee so that he could keep his job and keep learning the ropes from them.

My great friend, Chris Chadwick and his father Jack, who kept me in sailing and boats when I could have drifted off to learn to smoke dope under the boardwalk. Instead, Chris and I learned the maximum amount of beer an A-Cat's crew could drink during one race (13.5 cases).

Also, Richard Switlik Sr., my wife's grandfather, who lent me one of his row boats so that I could teach myself the basics of wooden boat repair. It probably didn't mean anything to him, but it meant a lot to me.

Their names are too numerous to list here, but honorable mention to most of the guys on the SPYC Saturday morning tow. I'm not sure if I learned much beyond some salty language and a few local tactics, but it was a formative experience in my boating life. Sort of my two years before the mast.

This list wouldn't be complete without a mention of my mother, Eleanor Welch, and not just because I wouldn't hear the end of it if I didn't include her. It was her infinite patience with the meriad junk boats, cars, bags of tools, cans of paint and beer at her house in Seaside that enabled my brother and I to indulge our strange obsessions.

Of penultimate importance is my brother in law, Greg "Earl" Switlik, who has been not only a source of cheap labor, but a great sounding board for my ideas on how to fix things that I've screwed up the first time, a source of those ideas, and that indispensable set of extra hands that no boat gets built without.

The most important of course is my wife Kassia, who let me build the boat shed in our tiny back yard between my chicken coop and bee hive. I think that sums up the latitude that I have been given in taking on this, and all my other wacky projects.

There are quite a few other people who deserve to be on this list, and if you don't see your name here but you think you deserve a mention it's probably missing because your contribution would require too much space to explain fully.

In the future, I plan to post a list of people who have actively thwarted my efforts to date but I may run out of server space on that one.

Pictures tomorrow.

A Milestone, not just a millstone.

At long last I've reached one important milestone. The bottom is fully planked. This was acheived at about 4 this afternoon. After I drove in the last screw, the Earl and I to a moment to have a celebratory beer. Then we went right back to work.

Here's some pictures of the finished bottom.



As you can see the clear oak is quite fetching but it's not quite good enough to keep bright so it will get a coat of white paint like everything else. Some of the wood on the topsides I plan to keep bright. Actually just oiled since varnish tends to go bad too quickly and I don't have the facilities to do it right.

And here's a view of the stern.



It's hard to get a good angle in the shed of the aft parts but they really came out much nicer than I had expected. I also promised pictures of the bull nose. You can sort of see them in the second picture above but here's a close up of the port side. You can click to enlarge it. As you can see by the lines, there are 5 layers of 4/4 oak put together then shaped down. Its hard to tell from the 2d picture but there is a lot of curviness to that area and there was no way I was going to get 1/2 inch oak to fit in. On my next boat (don't tell my wife!) I'm going to pay a lot closer attention to the design of the bow. I've learned a lot about what wood will and won't do, and just because I can make a pretty curve work on paper... you get the idea.

There were a few other pictures in this series that had some good shot that Earl took. Alas, they also contained images of my bloated corpus and so were not fit for publication. I take enough mock on my work, I don't need you all to be casting aspersions upon me personally as well. That's my family's job anyway.

Good news at Last.

I apologize for not posting in some time, and am sure after my last post many of you might have thought that I'd never post again and would be enjoying a roaring bonfire in the yard as what was once my steam boat dream went up in smoke. But for you fans out there, be of good cheer, progress, and substantial progress at that, has finally been made. If things go well, and I have no reason at this juncture to expect otherwise, the bottom of the boat will be done in the next few days. And when I say done, I mean planked, primed, caulked and painted. I mean flip ready.

When we last left off, I was just about to bend on the new chine logs after a complete rebuild of the bow. That was successfully done. I had enough eucalyptus left to complete the bendy parts and I used a nice piece of 5/4 white oak for the straight part amidships.

Now when I redesigned the bow, I gave up a lot of curviness that I really liked, but was not quite skilled enough to pull off. What I didn't give up was the sharp radius where the keel meets the stem. The front of the boat is very nearly vertical and turns to horizontal around a ten inch radius. I really like it, but no matter how I tried to manage it, I couldn't get the wood to be bendy enough to fit it. I realize now that had I designed the keel slightly differently it would have worked nicely. I kind of knew it when I was first putting it together but of course I was too cheap and tried to do it with the least amount of wood. 17.5 board feet of white oak in the burn box latter... well that's where I was. So instead of bringing the planks to the bow, after consulting with the Earl, I decided to bring the bow to the planks. using some 4/4 and 8/4 oak scraps I had, I epoxied up two bull noses that I then shaped to fit the bow as I wanted it. (The Earl actually did most of the shaping) Then I cut a notch in the rear of them for the planks to mate into. I'll take pictures when I get a chance. The end result is I get to keep my shape and the planks get to not bend in unnatural ways.

Wait a minute, you say, what's all this about planks?! The last we heard you has said plywood! Yes I had said that, but that was before I had actually priced it out. A sheet of 1/2 in. marine plywood goes for about $70 a sheet. That's nearly $2 per square foot. The bottom alone is about 90 square feet. $180 dollars in plywood, right? It would be if the boat was square and flat and had sides in multiples of 4. But a boat is non of those things, at least no boat I would want to build, and so there is some waste where the wood is cut to match the shape of the boat. Quite a bit a waste actually. It would have taken 6 sheets to to the bottom alone. That's $420 right there. Then I would need to seal it up with fiberglass and resin and that stuff is far from inexpensive. All told it would have been nearly $800 just to do the bottom, forget about the sides and the deck! So I found a supply of 1/2 inch clear oak (red this time) for pretty cheap, and it turns out to be a lot let expensive to do it that way. Actually about half the price. As some of you may realize, I had originally planned to plank it in oak, but I had gone away from it because, yep you guessed it, I was too cheap. Several hundred dollars in the burn pile latter...

So good news so far. A little behind schedule and slightly over budget but I'm planning to make it up. I have a new boiler design that will not only make it easier to build but be cheaper too. I wonder how long it will take for me to learn my lesson this time. Until then...