The Newport Folk Festival was at our location last weekend. Just because we're surrounded by thousands of Jimmy Buffet fans doesn't mean we stop work!
Ok, yes it does.
But BEFORE the festival, we've been working steadily towards the goal of putting the backbone together. Once it's together and set up, the photos will start to look more like there's an actual boat being built here. We'll also try to have at least one picture / day taken from a static location to provide a kind of time lapse view of the construction process. In the meantime, we continue to crank out the parts.
Jason, Karl, and Max have been working steadily, patterning and shaping floors.
Here you can see the batten that Jason is using to define the shape of the floor on the lofting.
This leads to the creation of a pattern, and then another pattern and then another...
Aside from making a pretty picture, lining all the floor patterns up like this gives us another check on the fairness of our work. You can see the flow of the boat shape in these patterns, and your eye will naturally go to a pattern that doesn't seem to fit in the flow as well.
The floors get shaped one at a time
And then oiled to prevent them from drying out and splitting.
Not only are they functional, but the wana is just a beautiful wood when it's oiled up. Sometimes we line them up just because they look so nice.
You remember keel that Robin was working on? Well, he's moving along smartly. It was too thick to cut all the way through with a circular saw, so shaping this fellow is a 2 part process. First, cut part way through with the circular saw, and then use a hand saw to finish off the job.
(Max also helped cut this out, but he scooted away before I could get a photo)
You can see it slowly starting to take shape now. The shavings surrounding it are from a combination of power and hand planing to get it down to its final shape.
You can see that the keel is dead flat in this section.
Once it's shaped side-to-side, it's time to mark the taper along the side and cut the rabbet. The keel tapers to match the sweep of the planks coming down into it, and this shape continues down beneath the keel into the lead ballast.
Here you can see the taper of the keel on the left side. The top of the keel is on the right. You can also see the pockets that Robin is cutting to define the rabbet.
These pockets are cut following lines that were previously laid out on the keel. Each pocket is chiseled carefully and then checked with a fid (a small scrap of wood that's exactly the same thickness as the planking) to make sure that pocket is the right depth and angle. These pockets act like 3-D connect the dots. The next step is to cut the wood between the pockets and join all the pockets up into one continuous slot... aka the rabbet.
Karl has started making the plug for the ballast keel. Essentially, he's making a wood version of the ballast keel. This will go to the foundry where they'll pack sand around it, remove the plug, and pour 6,000 pounds of lead into the hole that's left.
If you've ever seen a half-hull of a boat being built, this is done in much the same manner. Karl lines up the pattern stock on top of the lofting, and then transfers the outline of the ballast keel to each layer of wood.
The shape of each layer (or "lift") comes from the lofting. Each lift will be cut out, and then stacked up with a common centerline to keep them in the proper orientation to each other. After that, it's a lot of careful shaping. You'll see that progress in the next few days.
Meanwhile, the stem / fore keel has been my constant focus. After gluing up the final laminates, it was time to make sure the top surface didn't have any twist to it. With a curvy part like this, you may be asking yourself, "How DO they keep the this surface from twisting along its length?" Well, that's an excellent question, and it's a good thing that I guessed what you were thinking, otherwise there would be no need for the following photos.
Here, you see 2 very straight sticks, called "winding sticks" placed on the upper surface of the keel.
This is an old old wood worker's technique (also called "a trick") to assess twist in a piece of wood. Clearly the left side of the closer stick is higher than the same side of the farther stick, indicating that the nearer part of the fore keel is twisting slightly down and to the right. Since this is all relative, we choose an area of the keel to use as our baseline and we make all adjustments to match that baseline.
To fix this, we use a plane to flatten and angle the left side of the nearer section of fore keel down slightly. Then we re-check with the winding sticks.
That's more like it.
Now it's time to take it outside to do some serious shaping with the power and hand planers.
The power planer makes huge piles of shavings that get all over everything, so it's good to do as much of this work as possible outside. Luckily, we've been blessed with sunny (pant pant) weather. The power planer gets us close to where we want to go, and the hand plane gets us to the final shape. The goal here is to make the sides perfectly square to the top and bottom faces of the part.
Once this is done, it's back inside (and out of the hot sun) to lay out the lines that will guide us in shaping this part and in cutting the rabbet,
A lot of time is invested in making sure these guide lines are exactly right. We generate cross-sections of the stem and fore keel on the lofting to give us the precise locations of the rabbet, bearding line, and shape of the keel.
By the way, the bearding line is line that defines where the inside face of the plank first contacts the keel and stem. It's just as important as the rabbet, perhaps even more so, even though most folks will never see it. Taken together, the bearding line and rabbet give us the information we need to cut out the rabbet to the proper angle and location.
When we cut the angle of the stem and fore keel, we essentially connect 2 lines that we've generated along the side and bottom of the keel.
In this case, the red line at the top defines the upper surface of the taper, and the top horizontal line below it defines the lower edge. By planing off the wood between these 2 lines, we generate our taper.
However, this is not a flat surface, it has some bulge to it, so we use templates (also generated from the lofting) to make sure we get exactly the right degree of curve at various locations along the length of the piece.
The process is a little slow, but it yields a sweet, sweeping curve with a rolling bevel along its length. Here it is in process.
The final product will have a taper that starts out almost vertical at the forward part of the stem that rolls down to an almost horizontal taper a few feet aft of the stem. All the while, the stem sweeps upward and flares outward along its length.
You've gotta love working in 3-D with no right angles to do this work.
After the taper is cut, it's time to cut the pockets that will eventually be joined up into a rabbet. That's a bit later...