- Stem (and in this case forekeel since they're built as one part instead of 2)
- Keel
- Stern post and sternpost knee
- Horn timber
- Transom
These parts all go down the centerline of the boat, and the rest of the boat is supported by them. Suffice it to say, these are the parts you want to get spot on. We've been busy gluing up laminates for most of these parts, as well as a few other odd jobs. So, without further ado, here's the week in review!
We finished steam bending the keel last week. We decided to do it in 2 stages since it was too difficult to try to bend 4 steaming hot laminates all at once. Here it is cooling on the bending jig.
I had mentioned in an earlier entry that we kerfed the ends of the stem where they bent the most. Here's a close up of those kerfs while the laminates are being bent.
What you're looking at here is the ends of 2 laminations. However, since they've been kerfed, essentially you've got 4 thinner boards at the end. It's interesting that when you bend a kerfed board, the ends start to act like they're independent. Notice that the 4 kerfed sections are not the same length where they end on the right. As they bend, the upper boards have a longer distance to bend than they lower ones do, and so the upper ends drop back. You get the same effect of you bend 2 of your fingers, one on top of the other. The upper one drops back.
Now if these boards hadn't been kerfed, the tops of the boards would have had to stretch to stay even with the bottom of the board. That puts a lot of strain on a board, and unless you have a way to compress the top, you can get failures along the top of a bent board.
Once everything has cooled and the curve has been somewhat trained into the laminations, it's time to glue the whole mess up.
Accent on the word "mess" there. Clear tape keeps the keel from becoming glued to the jig. Glue doesn't stick to the tape. Obviously, we're still working out how much of this G/Flex glue we need to add.
We use every clamp in the shop (ok, we borrow a PILE of clamps from IYRS... Thank you Lew & Warren!) to get the job done.
It's true what they say, you can never ever have too many clamps.
At night we cover the whole thing up to protect it from dew. We often keep it covered during the day when we're not working on it to keep the sun from drying out and warping the wood.
With the glue dried, we can clamp the keel up on its side to do some initial planing on the edges.
The power plane is a wonderful tool, and since the G/Flex is a little softer than regular epoxy, it's not hard on the blades.
Here you can see the end of the kerf that we cut to allow the ends to bend more easily. It's the dark line on the 3rd plank down. It's filled with epoxy just the way we wanted it to.
Next, we'll be fine tuning the shape and gluing on a few smaller boards to build up the areas where the keel gets thick.
We do exactly that on the horn timber. After it was glued up, Jason cleaned it off, planed the taper into it, and got it ready for one more glue up.
There it is looking nice. Next, he needed to add some thickness to just one part of the timber, so he glued on a few more short segments.
And then cut and planed a curve to transition between the original lamination and the new addition.
A circular plane (also called a compass plane) is just the right tool for planing a smooth curve.
The sole of the plane is flexible and can be adjusted to exactly match the curve you're planing. Carriage makers used to use planes like this to round the rims of their wooden wheels, but that's another story.
We've decided to use angelique for the aft section of the keel since we didn't have enough high quality wana to continue down from the forekeel. Angelique is often used in boat keels as it's incredibly strong, heavy, and rot resistant. It's also tough on your tools. If you work with angelique, you get good at sharpening.
Here is a huge timber we just got in the shop. It's 7" thick, 12' long, and very wide. Yes, that's a subtle way of saying I don't remember how wide it is. So how do you plane down something that huge if you don't have a giant thickness planer? You do it by hand, sort of.
First, you make tons of parallel cuts with a skill saw at the depth you want to remove. We like using a worm drive saw because they're just as tough as they come and they don't burn out when you make them work hard. Like us.
Next, you get your hammer out and you start whacking.
When you hit these thin strips of wood from the side, chunks fly off down to the level of your cut.
Here's David going at it.
He's surrounded by just some of the thousands of hard, brittle chunks that come flying off the board. Angelique is very dense wood, and the pieces you see here are gathered up and will be burned in a wood stove this winter. It burns like coal.
And, after a lot of whacking, this is what you get.
It's rough, but we've now effectively reduced the thickness by 2". A hand power planer will smooth that surface down in a relatively short time. And then we'll change the blades because... have I mentioned this... angelique is very hard.
Meanwhile, Karl has been gluing up more of the "grown" frames.
He's also been working out the patterns for some floor timbers. Here he is fairing out a pattern.
Robin has been working on the molds for the boat. These are large cross-sections of the boat that will be used to control the boat's shape as we build her.
He gets the shape from the body plan, rough cuts it on the band saw, and then does the final fitting with hand tools. Here is one side being lined up on the lofting
And the other side added on and fastened together.
That's a cross-section of the boat. You can get an idea from this as to how narrow she is.
In the midst of all this, there have been some changes at the museum. Jay has taken the parts from Jill and arranged them in an approximation of how they would look in the boat.
It looks like a giant dinosaur skeleton. We call it Jillosaurus wrecks.
It's a very cool thing to see, really, and he's made a chart on the wall showing where each part fit in relation to the rest of the boat.
So, needless to say, we've been staying busy.