“In every amateur boatbuilder’s shop there should be a ‘moaning chair’; this should be a comfortable seat from which the boat can be easily seen and in which the builder can sit, smoke, chew, drink, or swear as the moment demands.”
The wisdom of this bit of furniture has become remarkably apparent to me over the past few days. You see, my keel timber has ringshake.
Ringshake -also known as 'wind shake'- results from a bacterial infection within a tree while it is alive that destroys the wood fibers connecting one annual ring to another. When the tree is felled, it may be invisible, or present itself as a fine dark line along the circumference of one or more the annual rings. As the timber dries, however, the fibers will often separate along this arc, and in extreme cases, the entire piece will simply fall apart along the compromised ring, as illustrated in the following photo that I found on the 'net:
And so it was, shortly after delivery, as I was coating the four sides of my keel timber with a mixture of linseed oil and turpentine to help it season, that I noticed it. Below is the end of my keel timber. It has two concentric cracks: the one that's clearly visible from (A to A'), and a second less visible one from B to B', outside of the first. I discovered the latter when pouring the oil into crack (B) on the top surface caused it to start weeping out the endgrain around (B''). Subsequently, I poured oil into crack (B') while the timber was vertical, and noticed it dripping out at (B), confirming that the two are connected.
My growing realization of the implications of this discovery mirrored to no small degree the stages of grief. At first, I told myself that the defects could surely be worked around. The more I thought about it, however, the more it dawned on me that whatever their surficial manifestation, it's nearly impossible to tell what's going on deep inside the timber; even if the currently visible shakes are avoided, they may open up again once the keel was cut to shape. There are two primary dangers to that - (1) it may undermine the structural integrity of the keel timber, and (2) if one of the shakes opens up as it crosses the rabbet -where the lowest course of planking interfaces with the keel timber- it could cause leaks.
Here's the end of the sternpost. One small chunk has already fallen out at the end along the circumferential cracking. I certainly wouldn't want anything like this happening on the keel timber. If this one chunk is all that falls out of the sternpost, it could be worked around, but the pattern on the end grain -the big radial check in particular- is worrisome.
Here's one of the deadwood pieces, which has some of the most severe shakes, extending nearly halfway through the piece:
Last weekend I showed these pictures to an experienced local shipbuilder who worked on the Susan Constant and Kalmar Nyckel, and he mentioned that in his experience this sort of thing is a common problem with Angelique. In light of that, and the fact that I'm probably only going to build a boat this size once, I'm feeling pretty uncomfortable about using these pieces for the backbone.
The good news is that I've been in touch with the yard who sold me the timbers, and they've been incredibly sympathetic and helpful, which gives me great confidence that I'll eventually be able to see may way through this setback one way or another. In the meantime, though, it's a big, big delay for a project that was only just starting to really get off the ground.
In the meantime, well...let's just say I'm giving that moaning chair a real workout.
