Cutting the Keel

Once all the individual pieces of the backbone were cut out and shaped, it was time to cut the keel. I had been saving this largest and most critical of timbers for last, so that I might benefit from the experience gained in cutting out all the others. The length of this piece meant that any mistake in measuring or executing the cuts would require re-purchasing a very expensive piece of wood, and I wanted to stack the deck as much in my favor as possible. There's no delaying the inevitable, though. Eventually, if I wanted to have a boat, I was going to have to take a saw to this gorgeous monolith of timber:

So it was that on August 10th, having scrupulously marked out the center line and the half breaths of the keel at every station, I called up Dad and invited him down to observe what promised to be one of the more momentous milestones in Astraea's construction so far. He also brought his circular saw, which can cut deeper than mine, and therefore would make things a little bit easier on the Prazi chainsaw attachment. The plan was to make a single cut with the circular saw 1/4" outside the lines, and then follow along that with the chainsaw, whose wider kerf would bring the keel to within 1/8" of its final sided dimension. That was the theory, anyway–now it was time to see how it worked in practice. With my heart in my throat, I spun up the blade.

Halfway through the first cut; looking good so far!

Tracing the line back on the port side:

Both guide cuts complete:

 Now it was time to bring out the big guns:

Following along the three-inch deep circular saw cut, the Prazi chainsaw attachment allowed me to rough out the port side of the keel. Angelique is so hard, however, that I had to regularly spray the chain with WD40 to keep it from overheating. Even that, however, only bought me time. Every two yards or so, I had to stop cutting, disassemble the saw, and give the chain to Dad for him to sharpen.

While he sharpened the dull chain, I would install the fresh one and saw another yard or two, then disassemble the saw again, grab the now-sharpened chain, and repeat the process. We also had to pause twice to adjust the position of the 6x6 sleepers supporting the keel stock, so that we didn't cut through them as well as the piece itself. Here, the port side has finally been freed from its wooden prison:

...and here I am starting the starboard side cut:

As the afternoon wore on, the chains grew more and more tired, the daylight faded, and progress seemed to go exponentially slower. Eventually, however, with the last gasps of twilight, we completed the cut. For the last three feet or so, dad was standing over me as I sawed, illuminating my guide lines with a flashlight. My hands were tingling and almost numb from the continuous vibration of the chainsaw against the nearly rock-hard timber, but the keel, the most massive and daunting of all the backbone timbers, was finally free.

"Okay," I said to Dad, surveying the assembled jumble of boat parts as we began picking up our tools from the day's work, "I guess it's time to start putting them all together, now, huh?!?"

Cutting the Backbone - Part Two

Following the successful completion of the aft backbone, I turned my attention to the forward end. The replacement keel timber I got from Gannon & Benjamin turned out to be quite a few feet longer than would fit on Dad's trailer, so we cut it shorter at the sawmill up in Massachusetts. By a very lucky coincidence, the offcut turned out to be almost perfectly sized to become the stem! Here, the pattern for that timber, which forms the forward curve of the bow, is overlaid atop the piece. I spent quite a while positioning it to make sure it avoided as many knots -on both sides- as possible.

Having positioned it to my satisfaction, I traced the pattern, and less than an hour later, had roughed it out with the Prazi:

You may also notice that the stock has been planed between the first and second images. This was done with a stationary shop planer whose feed mechanism failed about halfway through the job. It took too grown men (Dad and myself) to shove that thing through the machine for the remaining passes with pure muscle power. The scorch marks you see above are from when it got stuck and/or we got exhausted. Good times.

Next, it was the stem knee's turn. I applied yellow paint to all the cut out edges in order to prevent the moisture that's trapped in the wood from escaping quickly along the fresh cuts. If it dries out too quickly, small cracks (known as 'checks', in the jargon) will form on the surface.

As I cleaned up the Prazi's rough cuts with the radial arm saw, I noticed a very interesting property of Angelique: When cut with a blade rotating in one direction, it turns quite dark, while when cut in the opposite direction, it's almost pine-colored. Even more fascinating, the contrast faded very quickly from the surface, leading me to believe it has something to do with moisture content.

The stem itself has some pretty tight curves that are a challenge for a circular saw to navigate. At one point, while cleaning up that piece's rough edges, I tried to turn the saw through too narrow a radius, and it kicked back hard, taking a decent chunk out of the inside of the timber. Given the size of the piece, however, it's only cosmetic (and fixable). I'm glad this is all that happened; had I had less control over the saw, my hand wouldn't have fared nearly as well!

The forefoot, which connects the stem assembly to the keel, is an oddly-shaped piece that tapers from narrow at the forward end, to a foot across at the aft end. Due to the difficulty in sourcing an appropriately wide piece of timber that didn't include the center of the tree, I glued it up in Dad's shop using three smaller pieces and resorcinol. Before mating the pieces, I made sure that the rabbet line would not be crossing any glue joints, all of which will be inside the hull in the finished boat. When assembled, it will also have a bunch of massive bronze bolts backing up the adhesive.

At one point in the assembly, I ended up transporting timber for the entire forward backbone - forefoot, stem knee, and stem, plus patterns and tools - in my VW Jetta. 

My poor, poor station wagon!

With the forefoot assembled and planed down to its lines, and my friend Jon holding the stem pattern, I finally was able to get my first glimpse of the hull's profile.

OMG, it's actually starting to look like a boat!

With these done, there was only a single timber left to shape -- the biggest one of them all!

Cutting the Backbone - Part One

This past spring and summer has been a quite productive one at the Jefferson Manor Hilltop Boatyard. The same certainly can't be said for this blog, but I take comfort in the knowledge that that has more to do with a lack of time to write than it does with any lack of progress. Though I could have, I also decided not to compose a post about the shaping of each individual backbone component, since that would have resulted in a seemingly endless series of posts about barely distinguishable chunks of wood. Instead, I'm writing just two seemingly endless posts about barely distinguishable chunks of wood, which I'm sure will be far better. Let's get started:

Following the shaping of the stern knee, I took it up to Dad's shop in Maryland to glue it to the second component of the stern, known as the horn timber. This was done to make shaping the timber in the athwartships dimension easier once the backbone is complete, but due to the temperature constraints of the glue, I required a heated workspace (resorcinol won't cure below 50ºF, and winter was still hanging on hard at the time. Dad's workshop, however, had a nice wood stove that kept the place toasty even in the depths of the polar vortex:

Once fastened together and faired, they matched the patterns quite well, and looked practically ready for assembly:

The next piece to be shaped was the aft deadwood. Unlike the stern knee assembly, which rests on top of the aft end of the keel, the aft deadwood sits beneath it. I glued up this piece out of two wedges that were sawn out of the "good" end of my original defective keel. Here they are right after they were cut out:

As before, I took them up to Dad's shop to be glued together, then hauled them back down to my place on my trailer. Upon arriving, I then realized that I was not strong enough to move them on my own, and so decided to shape the piece on top of the trailer itself. It was still spitting a wintry mix that weekend, so I also improvised a temporary shelter over my workspace with the aid of a tarp and some 2x4s:

The other car belongs to my mom, who was on vacation in the Galapagos throughout all this schlock; lucky her. In order to form the highly angular shape of the piece, I made a number of lateral saw cuts, as Larry Pardey recommends in Details of Classic Boat Construction, and then used a hammer and chisel to remove the excess between each one:

I then used a power plane and belt sander to turn those "stair steps" into straight diagonals. When finished, it looked sort of like a puzzle piece in profile:

While from above, looking aft, I got my first glimpse of the shape of the hull:

Because of the way it interfaces with both the deadwood and the stern knee, I decided to wait until the entire assembly was bolted together to shape the sternpost. In the meantime, I set to work on the forward components of the backbone - the stem, stem knee, forefoot, and forward deadwood, which will be the subject of the next post.

Getting Back on Track...

Winter is generally a slow time for outdoor boatbuilding, and that's been particularly true for me. Shortly after I published my last post, I had to put my boatbuilding plans on hiatus while I prepared for a long work trip abroad. Upon my return, I discovered that cold temperatures had appeared in my absence, which further put a damper on my desire to go outside.

Also, I didn't have the right tools.

The backbone timbers sitting in my yard are too large to be cut by pretty much any of the power tools that a homeowner is likely to have. A standard circular saw, for example, has a maximum cut depth of around 2 1/2 inches. That's more than enough when you're building a playhouse for the kids out of dimensional lumber, but woefully inadequate for shaping a slab of tropical hardwood that's over twice that thickness and twenty-five feet long. Even a professional 16-inch beam saw like this seven hundred dollar model only has a cut depth of 6 1/4 inches, and many of my timbers, such as the stern knee and horntimber, are nine inches thick. About the only common tool that would stand a chance against something like that is a chainsaw, and those doesn't provide the user with enough control for delicate work like this.

Or so I thought.

Shortly after I got back to the states, I went up to my Dad's place to celebrate my birthday, and after dinner he and Brooke presented me with a long, thin box containing what looked like the chain and guide bar of a chainsaw, but with no motor attachment. Was it a chainsaw? In a manner of speaking. The product is called the Prazi Beamcutter, and it's about as badass a tool as one can imagine. A chainsaw that attaches to a standard circular saw in place of the blade, this tool allows its user to make long controlled cuts that are up to a foot deep:

With a tool like this in my repertoire, no amount of cold could keep me away from building; I had to try it out. And build I did, starting with the stern knee - the part of the boat that will eventually form the triangle (red) between the keel and the sternpost:

The timbers that made up these components showed no signs of the ringshake that afflicted the keel and deadwood pieces, and I eagerly went about shaping them. After nailing an aluminum angle to the timber to guide the saw, the Prazi made short work of that nine-inch-deep cut:

The roughness of the cut was somewhere between what you'd get from a sawmill's bandsaw and a handheld chainsaw. With the cutting done, the piece fit my plywood pattern from the loft floor beautifully; only a slight amount of planing was required to smooth out the surface and bring it right down to the lines:

To do that, I clamped framing squares to either side of the knee right on the pattern lines, and made guide cuts right down to the appropriate depth:

I then planed down, first with a power planer, then with a hand plane, until the cuts vanished:

And just like that, the first part of the boat is ready for assembly!

Oh, and remember the ringshaked keel timber that I couldn't use? Well the wonderful people at Gannon and Benjamin got me a new one; Dad and I drove to Massachusetts to pick it up at the beginning of December, along with that old hand-hewn beam I'd had my eye on for the forefoot. They even let me keep the old keel...I'm sure I'll use it for something!

So all in all, it's been a pretty productive winter, even with the polar vortex, trips to Africa, and all the other crazy stuff that's been going on in my life. This weekend, it feels as though we may have turned a corner with the temperatures, so I say bring on the spring! 2014 is going to be a very productive year!

The Moaning Chair...

Howard Chapelle's classic 1941 text, simply entitled Boatbuilding, is about as close to the Bible as a book can get in the field of wooden boat construction. In its introduction, he advises the following:

“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.

Special Delivery...

"You're good!" I shout, as Dad's license plate folds up between the trailer and the driveway.

It's been a busy few weeks. The wood arrived at its destination -my backyard- at the end of July. Dad drove down from Maryland with the load still strapped to his trailer, and I was waiting with my friends Ian and Selwyn to help me unload. Together, the four of us unloaded the timbers with a combination of block and tackle, rollers, inclined wooden planks, and a LOT of muscle:

"Heave!"

"Everybody watch your fingers!"

Unloading most of the "smaller" backbone pieces -the stem and stem knees, deadwood, stern knees and sternpost- was a difficult job, but one quite within the realm of possibility for four guys, as long as we didn't mind losing about a gallon of sweat in the process (this wood is heavy). The 6-inch by 18-inch by 25-foot long keel timber, however, was another story entirely.

Initially, we thought that we might be able to simply drag it straight off the back of the trailer by lashing it to the utility shed at the corner of the yard. We were forced to abandon that idea, however, when it became clear that the shed was more likely to move than the timber was - provided that it wasn't first crushed into an hourglass shape by the restraining cable! 

"We're going to need a bigger shed..."

Our second attempt involved placing metal rollers beneath the keel, and placing Selwyn in the bed of the pickup to provide the tension necessary to stop it from rolling uncontrolledly off the back as Dad hit the accellerator.

"Tight enough to keep it under control, but not so tight that it pulls you out after it!"

This cunning plan might have worked, but for the fact that the two-wheel drive truck was unable to obtain sufficient traction on the sloped wet grass of the back yard, and instead merely dug itself into a pair of begrimed divots beneath its rear wheels. Enter: Jenny the Jetta!

"I think I can! I think I can!"

With a heavy-duty tow line connecting the winch on Dad's massive Cummins diesel to the trailer hitch on my trusty little TDI wagon, the two of us counted down, and at Dad's signal we both gunned it, my squealing tires sending clouds of smoke billowing forth from the concrete of the driveway. It took two or three tries to get the timing right, but eventually Jenny's 90 extra horsepower proved to be enough to make the difference.

With the truck back on level ground and the keel teetering partway off the trailer, getting it the rest of the way became a simple matter of driving out from underneath - just as we'd originally hoped a few exhausting hours previously.

"So now there's this big hunk of wood in the back yard..."

Shortly after the work was completed, we were hit with a late afternoon sunshower, followed by a beautiful double rainbow over the neighborhood. If that's not a good omen, I don't know what is.

So now that that's out of the way, all I have to do is build the thing!

"Be Undaunted..."

We have the backbone timbers. After a week spent negotiating dates with the good people at Gannon & Benjamin, I arrived at my dad's house this past Sunday morning, where he was waiting with a big blue trailer hooked up to his green Dodge pickup. A moment or two later, after transferring my stuff to his vehicle, we were off - cruising North past the rolling hills of Maryland and southern Pennsylvania, then gradually shifting our course to the east, crossing the Hudson just north of New York City. Rolling through Connecticut, we sped past a nearly continuous traffic jam of vacationers in the westbound lanes heading back to New York from their Fourth of July weekends at the seashore. Later, we paused for dinner at an Applebee's whose walls informed us that we had stopped in Attleboro, Massachusetts - a name that sounded vaguely familiar to me for some reason.

After a beer and a half, it finally dawned on me that this must be the same town that my grandmother had once talked about spending her summers in as a teenager in the late 1920s. So that was kind of cool, even if all I did was grab dinner at a chain restaurant.

From Attleboro, it was just a quick ride up I-95 to my cousin Coral's house in Sharon, where she, her husband Henry, and their precocious troop of kids welcomed us in for the night. The kids in particular were interested in hearing about the details of our esoteric quest - especially once I unrolled the plans and described how the boat would be put together. Later, I'm pretty sure we four adults attempted to explain the concept of water displacement to an increasingly bored audience. Oh well.

The next day dad and I got up at 6:30 (some vacation day!) and after a quick breakfast, headed down I-495 to the Cautaumet Sawmill in Falmouth, where we waited for Ross to arrive from Martha's Vineyard. After a few minutes, he pulled up in a white truck with a steel frame that allowed for the transportation of large pieces of wood on top of the vehicle - quite a useful configuration if every delivery involves a trip on the ferry! Excitedly, I walked around to the back of the truck to take a look. There were the timbers, their ends painted with red lead:

A short time later, Tom from the sawmill retrieved a forklift and we began transferring the timber over to Dad's trailer:

Ross directs the loading of the Keel timber. It looked a lot bigger in person than in the pictures.

My first impressions of the lumber were overwhelmingly positive. This stuff is beautiful; I've never seen such a massive piece of wood be so straight-grained and knot-free. The keel timber almost looks more like a slab of metal or extruded plastic than wood:

It's also hard as granite; I tried scratching it with my fingernail, and barely made a mark. The comparison to granite may be rather appropriate, in fact; one unique characteristic of Angelique is its ability to incorporate large amounts silica into its cellular structure. This makes it heavy, but also unbelievably strong, and extremely hard on cutting tools. I foresee a lot of blade sharpening in my future.

While we were loading the rest of the timbers, I briefly mentioned to Ross that I would eventually need another large piece for the foregripe - the structural member that connects the stem to the keel. Overhearing this, Tom mentioned that he may have such a timber in the back corner of his lot, where it had been sitting for over ten years, so after we finished loading my order onto Dad's trailer he, Ross, and I followed Tom back to the edge of the lot where an enormous 12x12 of Angelique lay partially overgrown, and still sporting the marks of the sawyers who'd hand-hewn it from a single log back in the Guyanese jungle:

A few quick scrapes with a knife confirmed that under its weathered exterior, the wood beneath was well-preserved:

A look at the ends of this piece did make me a little nervous about the potential for ring shakes, but that's a question I'll have to pose to people considerably more experienced than I am - I think I might know just enough to scare myself! Returning to the truck, Dad fueled the truck and made sure that all the pieces were properly tied down while I settled accounts with Tom and Ross, then the two of us hit the road headed for home.

As we lumbered down the highway at sixty miles per hour, I stared out the rear window at the impressively massive load that we were pulling, began to feel more than a little like I was in over my head. I'd just made the single largest non-essential purchase in my life, and it was a bunch of wood. Excellent wood, to be sure, but that fact only added to my trepidation, as I imagined my inexperienced self taking a circular saw to those long, clear pieces and inadvertently rendering one or more of them completely unusable. They were hard enough even to move around - and I didn't have a forklift! How on earth was I supposed to build something out of them if I couldn't even move them? The presence of those massive timbers - now my massive timbers, threw the enormity of the task before me into stark relief. I felt daunted.

I started to express these thoughts to Dad, but was quickly cut off by his shout of "Oh my God, look what's behind us!"I turned quickly, terrified that my newly acquired timbers were about to be splintered by a collision with something even more massive. Instead, I saw this:

For the next few minutes, my dire thoughts were nowhere to be found, as we kept pace with the DeLorean while the two of us took turns reciting quotes from Back to the Future. When we were done,  I shouted a request of my own in the direction of the vehicular movie icon as it receded into the distance in front of us: "Can I jump in and take a ride to the time when I'm finished with this project?!?"

The rest of the drive passed largely uneventfully, and we made it back to Maryland in time for dinner with Brooke at Dad's place. The final leg of the wood's journey to the construction site will take place next weekend, when he'll haul it down to my back yard, where we'll take a considerably longer time unloading it using hydraulic jacks and block-and-tackle rather than a forklift.

After dinner, as I was loading up my car to return to Alexandria, Dad came over to the window of my car and, referencing my earlier anxiety over what I'd gotten myself into, gave me a final parting thought: "Be undaunted".

I will be.