Copper

Hey, I didn't design this wacky boat. It wasn't my idea to tack copper along the chines. To be honest, I don't think it's a very good idea--kind of a silt and rot trap. But it does look cool.

I screwed the last of the deck hardware on this morning, then flipped the boat. I tacked all the copper on this afternoon, then went and picked up the bow tie and stern handle from Danny Martinez, the welder. They are going to look bad ass. This evening I gave the ironwork the rust-spray treatment for a few hours while I milled out the floor battens. I got started on installing the battens, but by 9:30 I was tired and hungry so I quit. After a bite to eat I went down to close up the shop and stoke the fire and finished the floor instead. Now it's midnight thirty again. Sheesh.

Hatching Lids

One fun part of today was trying to track down some sort of chemical to make the new steel latches look old and weathered. I finally called an outfit in Tucson that made something called EasyRust, which sounded like the ticket. The guy there talked me out of it immediately. Instead, he walked me through how to make the perfect thing myself.

First, soak the latches in diluted muriatic acid until all the coating, scale, etc. is gone. Then rinse them off, and start misting them every time they dry out. After about a dozen times, they'll get pretty rusty. Once they've rusted up good, make a mix of 1/2 tung oil, 1/2 boiled linseed oil. "That's the original recipe for Rustoleum," the fellow informed me. Rub that on and bingo, you've got 100-year old latches.

Here is the patina factory, on a board over the wood stove:

During the hours of mistification, I oiled and assembled the lids–oak rim, cedar planks. Then I trimmed the canvas inside the hatches, folded it back on itself, and tacked it to the rims:

After about twenty or so mistings, the latches did just what the guy said they would, and the tung/linseed mix worked beautifully on them:

It was only as I was finishing up that I figured out I had left one latch in the vise where I trimmed it yesterday. Poor thing was an hour's acid bath and twenty mistings behind it's friends. I guess I can put that one on tomorrow.

Hatch latch

How many Dewalts does it take to...

...make a little latch hasp?

Edith has sixteen little steel hatch latches. Gary Perry did the hard work of making the main body of them. Today I made the receiver plates and finished off the main latches with jam nuts and a good bit of grinding.

Here is a picture of the original Edith's latches:

And Todd Bloch's drawing of what they looked like, along with our replicas:

And here is a potlatch. Or a boxlatch:

Meanwhile, a couple loose knots in the cedar for the hatch lids are getting epoxied overnight before I assemble them.

The original leaky hatch lids, which the Kolbs bitched about at length, have a whole mess of tacks on the bottom rim, as if they were trying to tack on some sort of weatherstripping. I wonder what they were using? I may try and use some of my heavy deck canvas rolled into a tube. I've got plenty of extra, and a big box of copper tacks. Why not? When squashed by the latches, it should at least slow the water down.

Oh my

Easily the most rewarding day yet. With the edge paint finally dry, I affixed the oar blocks to the gunwale caps and installed them. Then the splashboards. Then the hatch coamings. But first I got to slash!

Then I made the stern rail trim, installed that. And finally, the two side rails, which pull the lines for the whole boat together once and for all.

By 5 p.m. it was ready to paint, so I did. Wheee!

There's still plenty to do over the next week, but other than the hatch covers, this is pretty much what she is going to look like. A bowpost cap, oak skid-battens on the bottom, and the copper chine. A couple pieces of hardware. The lights in the shop are odd--the main decks are exactly the color of grey poupon mustard.

I am very, very, very, very pleased.

Dry, dammit!

Got an early start this morning and painted all the edges where the trim boards will touch the paint. The thought was that as soon as that dried this afternoon, I could install all the deck wood, then finish the deck painting this evening. Well, the goddam paint decided not to dry today. Frustrating, especially since that meant I had no excuse not to go in the house and do the taxes.

Late this evening the paint seemed almost dry. So I set some of the trim in place for an interim picture:

 Everything that appears white in these pictures will be the color of Grey Poupon tomorrow night.

Canvassing

I fiddled around this morning finishing off the splashboards and doing a few last details to the hull. But by early afternoon I could not procrastinate any longer. I got the canvas out and began figuring out just how to stretch it across the decks. 

Way back in high school art class we learned how to stretch canvas on a wooden frame to paint. Same thing, really: start with the center in both directions and keep halving it. Pulling it as tight as you can, tacking it with adorable little copper tacks. Corners last, pulling out diagonally. The canvas is amazing stuff: #4 natural cotton duck. It makes Carharrt pants look like tissue paper. I think it may be bullet-proof.

The hatch opening sounds like a tympani when I drum on it. Tight!

Huh. That was pretty easy. Now the primer goes on. Wow. It's really white. I mean, like, white.

And that canvas was really thirsty. It took a quart and a half of primer to cover it.

Edith has been looking radically different every day. Like a teenage girl who changes her appearance with each mood swing.

I'll let that dry until tomorrow, then paint the final coat on the decks. Once that dries, I'll fasten the coamings on, cut out the hatch canvas and tack it to the inside of the rims. But just to see what it looks like, I have to set the coaming and spraydecks in place.

Yeah, that's mighty white. What a crazy looking boat. Tonight she reminds me of some classic racing schooner from New England, back in the twenties.

Looking frighteningly like a boat.

Oh my oh me. This thing is really shaping up. Today I built the coamings for the hatches. I will fasten them on once the canvas is stretched on and painted. Then I'll cut the canvas and tack it up against the inside of the coamings. Here are the coamings set in place:

This evening I made plywood patterns for the splash guards. They are a pretty wacky cut, so I figured I was better off trying it with disposable wood first. Here they are set in place:

I traced the patterns onto the cedar and cut them out. They needed a few knots filled, so are curing for the night. 

Canvas tomorrow. Bye bye woody decks.

Detailing

A slow day. Trimmed off all the edges of the decking, fair to the hull, and sanded them down smooth. Built a second oarlock block and sat in the seat with the oars. Came to the realization that even though eight-foot oars are pretty short, they are pretty long when your oarlocks are only 45 inches apart. This may prove annoying on the water. Looking at the photos of the Kolbs, it looks like they had the same issue. According to the tried and true oar to beam ratio, the oars should be closer to six feet. Egad.

Oiled down the decks and floorboards and am ready to drop the latter in tomorrow. Then it's time to figure out just how to deal with the canvas decks. Wet it first? Not? Hmmm.

Decked

Well, she's decked. It went surprisingly well—just a few high spots that quickly succumbed to the belt sander.  And much as I regretted covering the wild architecture, the decking looks kind of cool too. At least I think it does. But part of that is how curious I have been to see how they conformed to those wacky deck arches. The stern deck went on in the afternoon.

And the foredeck went on after dinner.

The decks get sanded down and oiled, probably tomorrow, and I get to figure out how to stretch the bomber canvas over them and tack it on. My current thought is to varnish the canvas, since I have not yet thought of a sweet color to paint it. If that goes south, I can always paint over the varnish.

Meanwhile, there's a bit of cockpit outfitting to do. Oarlocks, floorboards, splash guards. And the hatch coamings and lids.

Last day of the rib show

Well, tomorrow I gots to cover up that cool architecture, dad gum it. It sure has been fun to stare at. Today I finished milling out a pile of 3/8" cedar planking for the decks and oiled it up. Seems kinda skinny, but that's what the Kolbs had.

I also spent quite a while reconciling the deck arches to each other and the sheer, raising a few boards by an eighth or a quarter, belt-sanding a few others down in places, to where they all seem to be in the same plane. "Seem" is the key word here, as there is really no way to make them actually agree totally, since every one is a different radius. I'll be really interested to see what the decks look like once they are on.

While the juice was soaking into the deck lumber, I cut down the cockpit gunwale and cut the curved oak gunwale cap. It will be a showy piece in the final boat and it looked so good when I oiled it and screwed it on that it gave me shivers. Whee! So I did the other one. And the seat rails. And the seat.

It is a mighty big cockpit. Seems to have been the style back then, as the Powell boats before Galloway and the Nevills boats after them all had the same huge bathtubs that had the dual disadvantage of being an awkward space to store anything, but a huge invitation to swamping and bailing. Having run both a Powell boat and a Nevills, I can vouch for this.

The Kolbs, in their journals, describe their excitement when they got to Green River, Utah, because they received some waterproof boxes. These they could secure into the cockpit, so they no longer had to bury their cameras in the hatches. I am taking this tidbit of information as a license to build a couple nice water-resistant wooden side-boxes to put in the cockpit for the very same reason—convenience—but also to fill some of that great water-hungry void. I don't think I'll have much trouble making them match the look of the boat. There is also about a foot of space behind the seat that I can use to store soft duffel bags. That should eat up some more of the great pit and give me a backrest as well.

Whisky and turpentine: not recommended

Judging by how I felt this morning, I am relatively certain someone snuck in while I was oiling the boat last night and switched the whisky and turpentine bottles. Ugh. Took the morning off to recuperate, then wandered down to finish fastening in deck ribs and grinding the sheer to match the tapering slope of the decks. We accidentally got one stick of red oak mixed in with all our white oak. Can you spot it?

Gary Perry wandered by yesterday—he came over a year ago and welded my boat-hoist rack together. That was fun to watch:

This time I enlisted him to help wreak my deck latches. (Isn't wreak the present tense of wrought, as in wrought iron?)(Well, it should be.)

He came by this morning with a sample and it looks pretty much like the original. I found the proper iron wing-nuts on the internet.

Then I stared at Edith for a while in the afternoon sun.

Maybe I should deck her in plexiglass.

Framed

Geez. It's really late but I have some cool pictures to post. We finished up the deck framing today and dragged Edith outdoors for a photo match with a 1911 shot of Ellsworth at the Racine Boat Company.

The original I cannot legally paste here, but here is a link :

Ellsworth Kolb at the Racine Boat Company, 1911

And our match:

We broke for the afternoon but I drew night shift duty (my boss is a tyrant). Starting around 6 p.m. I went after about a zillion little things that weren't quite right and needed fixing. Adjustments, patches, fills, tightenings, sanding... and around 11 started the inner oiling of Edith. At 1 a.m. I finished rubbing down the second coat and took a few photos.

Each and every frame is a completely different radius. They all play in concert to define the deck.

It breaks my heart that the next move is to cover all this up.

Raising the roof beams

A full day in the shop. I cut out all the deck framing and Dan painstakingly fit each into the gunwales. 

Every day the boat looks a little wilder, a little more boaty. Soon we'll deck her over, at which point I think she'll lose a bit of her exciting geometry and become more of a pure form. For now, though, it is fun to gawk at the lines of all those ribs, of the deck framing wrapping around, each board curved tighter than the last.

Ah, the sweet light of a single incandescent bulb, once the operating room lights are shut down for the night...

Deck Framing

Today was mostly an errand and life day, with only a few minutes in the boatshop. We did create the first of the arched deck frames and wiggle it in, however. Now that we've done one. we have a pretty good idea how to attack the rest. Nine to go.