As Mark Twain would have said...

Rumours of my death are greatly exaggerated...  That is probably not correct but I am aware I have been pretty quiet this week...

'Why you may well ask?'

Garboards!

Fitting the garboard has proven to be an absolute nightmare and we haven't yet succeeded in getting one on the boat, we have however finally reached the stage of getting it to fit.  If I am honest it has been a very frustrating week and trying in a number of ways.

Larch Board marked out with the first garboard

After almost a week we finally got the front end to fit!

This is the 'unsteamed' shape imagine the end bent through a 45% curve and you get some idea of what is going on, or not! 

However, we soldier on and hopefully we will get around to getting the garboard on the portside on tomorrow before the weekend.

Good to go...

...famous last words.

Before the fairing process.

After the fairing process.

This morning was spent straightening out the plank lines on the bilge, this involved lying on my back moving battens  a few mm. this way and then a few mm. that way until they ran straight.

Having achieved this we then transferred the Plank lines from one side of the boat to the other and beveled of the moulds.

At this point I was going to include more photographs but my computer has decided to censor them and is refusing to load.  So while Ben was transferring measurements and bevelling off the moulds I started cutting the Rabbet on the stem, this as I may have explained is a right angled rebate into which the ends of the planks (hood ends) fit and are secured.  We definitely ended the day on an upbeat note with spiling the garboard tomorrow now being a very real possibility...

Battens On! Battens Off! Battens On!

Following our creative modifications to the moulds... we were able to proceed with 'lining out' which is the process of nailing battens onto the moulds to show where the tops of the planks will come; more importantly it allows you to stand back and check that the lines of the planks run fair from the stem to the transom.

The position of the garboard, that is the plank that butts against the keel, on the stem is vitally important if you are to avoid the planks developing what is known as a 'Yarmouth Hump' or 'snye'.  This is where the planks rise and then dip to the stem; it looks awful!  I mention this only to set the scene for our next learning experience...

These are pictures of the battens in place, if you look carefully at the bottom of the stem you might notice a gap, not a Yarmouth Hump I hasten to add but what we thought was an acceptable positioning of the garboard.  Well the truth is that it wasn't and what you can't see is the muddle that occurred about half way along the boat where the garboard ended up very narrow indeed and was beginning to create problems. naively we believed we could resolve it and so we started Wednesday morning full of optimism.

Well by just before lunch having spent most of the morning horizontal on the floor trying to get planks to fit I decided that we would do what we should have done from the start, strip it all off and start again... This time we started by defining the width of the Garboard and then applied the well tried and tested formulae for calculating plank widths at each of the mould stations.  It is I am assured a very simple formula, You take half the Girth, subtract the width of the Rubbing Strakes, add the Land and then divide by the number of planks and HEY PRESTO you are a candidate for extended therapy.  Finding the correct solution took the application of CadCam, two tutors who couldn't seem to agree, and the two of us the better part of 2 hours and several false starts.  However by a process of elimination we finally got it all into place and looking fair... Tomorrow we can mark it all up and move onto spiling our Garboards....

Best laid plans of Mice and Men

'Well... ahhh, that presents a problem' quoth the Tutor.

It is a good thing we are into problem solving on this build, we have just found an error in the shape of the moulds and given that they will dictate the eventual shape of the boat this is of some significance.

To put it in simple terms, the bottom of the mould should match the bottom of the hog, why would take a considerable amount of time to explain, please just believe me and sympathise.

The first option was to completely dismantle all the work we have done to trim out the bottom of the moulds... (This suggestion was met with stunned silence.)

Following said stunned silence, we adopted the 'Rose' can do spirit and laughing in the face of adversity Ben came up with a creative solution; This has been to go along the moulds and glue bits on where needed to bring everything back into line, this appears to have been successful.

Why, you might ask had this not been spotted before, and if if you hadn't thought to ask I shall tell you anyhow... given that I could not believe we had made such a fundamental error I have returned to the LOFTING and found it is all to do with back rabbetts and more importantly cheek pieces which were a later addition.

The idea is that to allow the planks to lie properly you cut a bevel on the underside of the hog, this bevel has the effect of reducing the thickness of the hog and in normal circumstances the mould would then line up with this reduced height (the point at which the planks leave the hog and move onto the moulds is known as the bearding line).  We however added cheek pieces to re-enforce the keel along the sides of the Centreplate slot which had the effect of moving the back rabbet almost an 1" out from its original position, this in turn had the effect of removing the bevel and hence the moulds didn't fit properly.... that is my story and I am sticking to it!

We have started lining out and playing with the shape of the sheer and line of the planks, so hopefully we should get ourselves back on track by the end of tomorrow...

That was a week that was...

.... something of a nightmare when it came to plumbing, horning, and levelling, and/or a combination of all three.

We now have the moulds in and succeeded in running a batten around the sheer before we finished on Friday, so actually not so much of a nightmare in the end!

This was how the week began....

We then put the transom in place and riveted it to the stern knee using 4" copper nails, driving them through a 1" oak plank and a 1.5" oak laminate presented some difficulty, but we got there in the end.

The moulds were then put in place and we had something beginning to resemble a boat shape

The Team at work, me on the left and Ben on the right constructing a sort of wooden cats-cradle to hold the moulds vertically, horizontally and laterally, not I can assure you the easiest of tasks and there was a considerable amount of re-working the frames to achieve the goal.

Clearly something wrong with the bubble... the idea is for one person to hold the mould in position while the other screws it to the world!

Fortunately we have Ben who is left handed, with a left hand brain thought process, and I'm right handed with no brain process, it does however mean that between us we can get into the awkward corners to screw things up.... let me rephrase that, secure the frames.

These last two photographs show the completed mould arrangement, and in the previous photograph you can see the batten that runs around the sheer line of the boat, the top plank.  It was at this point that we realised what a large boat we are building.

So a quick resumé of the process to date since we arrived in the ground floor workshop.  We constructed the keelway;  laminated the Keel, Stem, Apron, Stern knee, and Transom from oak; scarphed the Keel and Hog; cut and shaped the Deadwoods and morticed it into the Keel; routed the centreplate slot through the Hog and then through the Keel, in the latter case we had to route from both sides as the Keel is 3'" deep and while the plunge on the router would have coped with the cut the cutter itself was chattering in the cut ( Mike our tutor had a colourful expresion to describe it - but this is a family show!). Careful measuring meant we hit it to about 0.5mm; we fitted the cheek pieces to the Keel adjacent to the Centreplate slot to re-inforce the Keel; cut the Rabbetts on the Keel and shaped and cut the Rabbetts on the Hog, Stem and Apron; Cut the Stern knee and Apron to length, jointed the Apron and shaped the ends of both components.

We then glued the whole shooting match together with thickened epoxy; fitted the Transom which is more traditionally bedded and riveted using mastic and copper nails and roves; marked up the stations and fitted the moulds around which we will plank.  This latter process proved to be extremely involved and was definitely a learning process, we found quickly that errors are cumulative and a 16th here and a 16th there quickly mounts up.  In addition, I have already alluded to the necessity to ensure that each mould is correct, vertically horizontally and laterally, this is a complex enough process without taking into account that the moulds have to withstand considerable pressure and are required to be absolutely rigid.  Needless to say there was a degree of reworking as we went along. Lastly we were able to run a batten along the sheer line and get some idea of what the final shape will look like, we have already made some adjustments to give her sweeter lines and the process of lining-out will take place Monday and tuesday to ensure that the strakes run fair and that she looks the part.

More to follow...

So where are we now...

That is a very good question, this is definitely a three steps forward, three steps back... not quite but it seems like that sometimes.  Progress has not matched the rather over-ambitious plan that I had in place but I have every hope that we will catch up this week, or at least get ourselves a little more on track.

All the components of the centreline are now pretty well completed and we have glued in the part of the deadwood, I know that the idea is usually to remove deadwood, in this case we are gluing it in, its a funny old business!

One of the major issues has been cutting the rabbets, this should be a very simple case of accurately measuring the revolved sections on the lofting, plotting the lines and then planing away the waste and hey presto, you have a perfect 90% rabbet into which your planking stock will slide ready to be obediently nailed into place HA HA peels of hysterical laughter.  It doesn't quite work like that, so having carefully drawn your lofting, working to the mm; having carefully transferred those measurements to the building stock, working to the mm, and battening of the marks to produce an accurate line; You totally ignore it and leave at least 2-3 mm waste to allow for vagaries in the planking stock and for 'movement'. (If all else fails there is always glue!!!)

The learning process continues to be great fun and confidence is growing with each day so I am optimistic that we will soon regain the lost ground...

Pictures to follow

Oak is HEAVY!

Oak is heavy!

Something of an understatement and at the moment it all seems to be about manhandling large and awkward chunks of boat.  For example the keel is 17 feet long and 3 inches by 2 inches, the stem is a pice of 3x2 laminate that is nearly 6 feet long, and the whole lot is stuck together, not the easiest piece of carpentry to manhandle.

Keel, Hog, Stem and Apron and Stern Knee without the transom!

Fortunately, we have made significant progress today and I am hopeful that we will get the various rabbets and back rabbets cut tomorrow and the centre line assembled at the latest by friday.  If we can achieve that we should be able to get back on the programme by the end of next week and be planking-up.

Today has also been a day of designing the Centre Plate box which we will have to construct and fit as a matter of some urgency as it needs to be in place once the garboards are fitted.  The other slight problem is that the wether has undergone a fundamental change and I could really due with low humidity at the moment...

Day 5....

No I haven't missed a couple of days, we have been catching up on some aspects of the curriculum that we had missed.

Stem scarphed and clamped onto the keel

The scarph requires  clamping in three directions, vertically, laterally, and horizontally.

Different view of the joint with the basic shape of the transom cut out on the table behind.

Yesterday was a good day, the stem is now scarphed to the keel and the elements of the deadwood have been cut out and are ready to be jointed into the keel.  Oak is a very difficult wood to work and time consuming, if, as in my case, you are new to it all.

Incidentally I did refer to clamping horizontally in the above caption... well it is very difficult to clamp something 6 metres (19 feet) long so one has to get creative.  The creativity involved the use of a 6 kilo pig iron.  Having clamped the joint laterally and vertically you give the end of the keel a sharp clout with the pig iron; this closes the final small gaps, believe me!  I should of course have used a hooked scarph but I opted for the 'wussy' solution.

End of the week...

Well we reached the end of the week and while we weren't as far ahead as I would have liked we are still OK for time...

It was a week of frantic activity and as I mentioned we succeeded in laminating all the components that we need and having them processed through the machine shop.  There were the inevitable hiccups with the dreaded lofting coming into play yet again, there were a number of issues that needed resolving and some on the hoof modifications to the plan.  Given that we are working from a drawing that was about the size of a half page of A4 we haven't done to badly but we are very much on a learning curve... well I am even if nobody else is.

A rig has now been finally agreed, I think, at least we think it will work and it is in the spirit of the original, with some modifications, well OK a lot of modifications, and on the basis that this is going to be a boat I want to sail not exhibit we are adopting some modern equipment where the rig is concerned.  she will however look very traditional when on the water.

More to follow...