While these sections may just look like scrap, they give us invaluable clues as to how the boat was put together. We can see how the Nevins boatbuilders beefed up some parts for strength, and shaved down others to save weight. We can see how they laid out their planks, how they tapered the horn timber, and even how they made and fixed their own mistakes. Things that look mundane to the average viewer become a gold mine to us as we work to replicate a boat armed only with a few lines plans and a construction drawing.
We also have a section of Jill's original backbone to use as a reference.
This tells us how the Nevins builders beefed up the floor timbers from the original specs, how they tapered the keel, and how they fastened the frames to the floors (the large, upright pieces along the keel).
While part of the crew has been drawing in these construction details on the lofting, there's other work to be done.
The stem and forward section of the keel are laminated up using 4 layers of wana, a tropical wood similar to mahogany. A pattern was made, using the lofting, construction plan, and information from Jill's parts. Here is the pattern laid out on some long slabs of wana.
The pattern is traced onto the stock, and then cut out with a circular saw.
These will then be steamed for about an hour and bent over a form that we built earlier. Here's the steam box, built long, to handle these boards, and squat, to concentrate the steam.
Steam is generated by boiling water in the silver tank at the far end of the box. We have a system that provides a small, steady flow of water into the tank to replace the water that's turned into steam.
Here's the form we'll be using the bend these parts.
Before proceeding with the actual pieces, we steamed a few sections of wana offcuts to test out on the form.
Good thing, too. We found that wana takes more steaming time than we'd originally thought, and that the form needed some beefing up at the end with the most curve. Sometimes these little tests end up saving us lots of time and materials.
We have some IYRS students who are coming in to the project at various times during the summer to help out. One built a metal working bench from some of the huge oak slabs that came down with the rest of the wood for the boat, but were not good enough to make frames from.
Not bad, eh? We're planning on making our own fin-neck bolts, and doing that requires a serious, heavy duty bench. This should do the trick I think.