And after David worked on it, Robin worked on it. Here he is demonstrating a side chopping technique with an adze. Turns out, this was one of the tools that the museum had in an exhibit with those painted cutout shipwrights you keep seeing in the background of many of these photos. It was quite sharp, probably because those old fellers hardly ever used the dang thing.
At any rate, Robin was using this fine old tool to remove a section of heartwood that had checked and had some bark inclusions in it (places where the tree grew around it's own bark in the past).
There was a lot of work to do. Here he is using the standard (I'm not kidding) between-the-leg technique. The guys who did this every day would wear sections of stove pipe over their legs to protect themselves.
You can see that he's having to hack out quite a large chunk of keel to get past the problem area.
In the end, we decided that it was too much trouble to try to save this piece. We gave it our best shot, but the problems were too extensive. So, back to the woodpile for more wana.
As luck would have it, we found a huge, absolutely perfect board buried in a pile of silverbali (another wood that we're using in the boat). With this in hand, we were able to go back to plan A, and laminate a few boards of wana to make our keel.
You see the batten stretching along the edge of the large board on the left? That's marking out the edge of the keel. The board that we found was perfectly clear (i.e., no knots, checks, or other defects), wide, and the sapwood (the wood layer just below the bark that tends to be softer and more prone to rot) was well outside our pattern.
Finding that board really made our day.
Meanwhile, Karl and Jason have been steadily building molds. They tap the sharp edges of nail heads down onto the body plan lofting along a line that follows the inside planking shape.
They do this until the entire curve is outlined.
Then they lay the pattern wood on top of this line, stomp it to indent the nail heads into the wood, and pick it up. Now they have a perfect, dashed copy of the line that describes the curve of the mold. They fasten these sections of pattern stock together and, viola! A cross section of the boat! Here's one of the smaller molds.
They've been busy, and the mold pile has been steadily growing.
And growing
And growing
This looks like the accordion version of the boat.
The last thing we do with the molds before setting them up is to bevel them to fit the hull and keel. Here you can see the top edge of a mold being angled (beveled) to fit the keel.
This process leaves thousands of tiny holes in the lofting. You can see how far someone's progressed in making molds just by looking at the lofting surface.
Meanwhile, the underside of the stem / fore keel has been finished. Here's the stem / fore keel on its side with the underside pattern running along it. The excess glue has been planed off of the stem, and the sides are squared up to the bottom face of the stem. Not only do these clean, flat sides give us a good surface to transfer various measurement marks to the side of the stem, they also give us a way to make sure that the inner stem face is parallel to the outer face. If the outer face is perpendicular to the side, and the inner face is also perpendicular to the side, then the inner and outer faces are parallel to each other.
After all the measurement marks are transferred, it's time to work out the side-to-side shape. I made up a pattern of the keel shape earlier, and the next task is to get it centered precisely on the keel. We want to make sure that there is no twist to the keel, so we first measure along the length of the keel with a level to make sure the surface is flat, side to side. Then, to make sure that the pattern is placed properly on the keel, we set up a straight line over the fore and aft mid-points of the keel, and transfer marks from this line down to the keel. Looking forward:
And looking aft:
Once this line is marked, we know that we have an absolutely straight line that goes exactly along the center of the keel. Now we can lay our pattern on the keel and know that it won't be skewed side to side at all.
The stem section has a lot of bend, so it's good to have a thin pattern that will flex.
How do you make sure that the pattern hasn't wandered off the line somewhere in the middle? After all, the pattern now completely covers your center line...
Easy! Drill a hole in your pattern along the pattern's centerline. Now you can look through your pattern and make sure your lines are aligned.
Once the underside of the keel is marked out, we moved to the inside face and did the final glue up to add some thickness at the stem. These laminations will help give the stem more meat to hold the plank fasteners.
Unfortunately, a few laminations slipped during the glue up, and caused us some problems.
Above the red pen line, you can see a darker pencil line that ends in mid air at the end of a lamination. That pencil line describes the lofted inner shape of the stem. Here's another place where the lamination slipped.
Again, you can see the pencil line extending out into thin air. We don't want to adjust the shape to make the stem thinner, so the only path was to cut out some of the laminations where we had problems, and laminate in a few new layers. The red pen lines you see above make a fair, smooth curve that new laminations will glue to. So, it's back to the hand plane to smooth out these stair-step sections.
And back to one FINAL lamination on the inner face of the stem.
There's other parts being worked on throughout the shop. The laminated frames and floors have been varnished and are ready to install as soon as the keel is finished.
Max did the initial shaping of the sternpost knee with the Big Saw.
Then, a little planing fixed up the saw marks.
Finally, more planing brought the knee to the exact shape that we had previously drawn on the lofting.
Done.
Robin has finished shaping the horn timber. This is a long piece that will stretch along the underside of the boat from just aft of the rudder all the way to the transom. It's like a keel for the back of the boat. Here's the initial underside shape:
And here he is making the initial rabbet cuts along this face using a router.
And finally, here's the finished horn timber with the rabbet cut into it.
The planks will come right up into that slot that he just cut. Their outer faces will fair right into that raised part in the middle so it all looks like a smooth, even surface.
While the glue was drying on the last stem lamination, Jason and I patterned out floor timbers.
Using the lofting, we are able to make very accurate patterns of the floor timbers as they curve along the inside face of the hull. It's times like this that you're happy you've spent so much energy earlier making the lofting just right. In the photo above, the pattern is sitting on top of the keel. You can see the 2 large keel bolts drawn in to either side of the pattern. The green rectangle with all the cross-hatching on it is a floor, seen from the side.
We number and hang the patterns up as we complete them. There are over 50 floors in this boat, and we need to pattern each and every one.
And that's all the news that's fit to be shaved paper thin with a hand plane.