Success!!... well, so far.

She's in the water and floats, and actually moved under her own power for a bit. For those of you who may be shocked that it's in the water prior to the christening, don't be. It's not unusual for boats of a certain size to undergo trials prior to the "official" launch. These builder's trials are undertaken to make sure that things go smoothly when the brass show up to officially take the craft. Even ships that are christened on the ways prior to launch still have several months, if not years, of work to complete before they're ready for pubic sailing. In keeping with this, Mercer Queen shipped no passengers except her builders (and my brother when I needed an extra hand), so no one has missed anything.

But it's been I while since my last post (my god, has it been since July!?!), mostly because I was too busy trying to get the boat ready to start trials to take time to write. I spent quite a few nights working into the wee hours and those that I didn't was only because I was too exhausted to do any more and just collapsed into bed. August was just a blur of sparks since most of the time was taken up with metal work, primarily the boiler.

And here's the beast getting put together. For those interested, it's of a modified Yarrow type, which is a boiler type that was once found on the fastest patrol boats. It consists of two lower mud tubes on the bottom and a steam trunk on the top and a bunch of smaller tubes that wind between them. The picture to the right was taken while I was welding on the connectors for blowing down the mud tubes. The steam trunk is on the left. You can also see the two down-comers that holds the assembly in place and also give a path for excess water in the steam trunk to find its way back to the mud tubes.

This picture is of me putting the steam tubes in. They are made of copper, mostly to better transfer the heat, but also because they are relatively inexpensive.They are attached to the steel with flare fittings. Originally the steam tubes were supposed to be all identical and bend in a simple S pattern from to to bottom. IT was a great idea except that 3/4 in. copper tube can't make a 5 in radius without an annealing torch, and even then... The problem was I had already ordered the shell of the boiler and had to fit the same surface area of tube into the same volume while making only 9 in radii for the bends. The result was the crazy bends you see in the picture, where every tube is custom bent and was tricky as hell to put together. On the computer, they can move through each other as I put them in place. Not so much in the real world.

The other limitation to the boiler was that all of the sheathing had to fit on two 4X10 sheets of steel. This was strictly to control costs. The entire boiler cost as much as (probably more than) the hull. Although it was close. Both came in just over $2K although final accounting isn't complete (mostly because of fear of the truth). This limitation let to an interesting feature that the steel pipes poke out through the cover. You can kind of make out this feature in this picture of the aft face of the boiler. This was taken just before we hoisted it into the boat. The pipes and tubing is all inclosed in a double layer of 16 ga. steel. This design is a safety feature of my own imagining. The draft for the fire comes from the top of the boiler, through the gap between the walls and down under the grate. This serves two purposes, the first is to keep the outer skin somewhat cool and the other is that should there be a failure in the steam tubes (the weakest point of the assembly), the steam would all go up the stack or through the top of the boiler, thereby sparing the boat's occupants the worst of the steam's damage. That's the theory, although the draft doesn't quite work without a full head of steam being blown up the stack to increase the draft. (For those of a safety minded bent, I did hydro test the assembly before and after the skin went on. It passed with flying colors.)

There was some wood work as well, mostly the wheels, although the tricky part was the hubs which I welded out of steel. You can't really make them out in this picture but they are at heart 10 in pieces of 1 in pipe. That size pipe has an interior diameter just a hair over 1 inch and they slide perfectly over the main shaft for the wheels and are secured with 6 set screws. In all it worked out quite well.

It's getting late so I'll stop here so that I can give the assembly move and launch the detail they deserve. Until tomorrow...