Setting Molds
A couple of real spring days and you forget Winter ever happened.
What was that heavy coat for? Snow shovel? Put that thing away.
Where'd I leave that rake? Between sun showers we've had a few
raw reminders, but no late snow, and precious little rain. Even
a bask in the 60s. Outside burning is by written permit only,
and the high ground is dry as toast. Had to hook up the hose to
wet our plantings.
First peas are in, spinach is up in the grow hole, and hyacinths
are exposing themselves. The beds along the north wall are wonderfully
phallic with Solomon Seals, and maples are in flower. We've been
nibbling our first lemon sorrel, and the garlic is up six inches.
Verdant vernality abounds.
spinach
Solomon Seals
My truckma is improving with the weather, too. Ebba actually started
in the AM the last few days. Three pumps and full choke. One nice
thing about having a classy ride with the hood up is you get lots
of friendly advice, and all the Chevy lore you can calibrate.
Rochester Quadra Jets and Bakelite heat shims. There's something
comforting about an arcane mechanical language. It soothes the
male animal. Pass me that feeler gauge, will ya?
I've been mixing grease with sawdust again. Trying to make headway
on this millennial ark in the dooryard. But it's awful slow coming,
what with the spring songs at beck. Not that I hear them all.
I'm so deaf in the high freqs that birdsong is beyond my ken.
Mr. Mann is forever saying, "Listen to that white-throated sparrow,"
or somesuch. I think he's twitting me. Finally did hear peepers
the other night, and spotted a midday turtle sunning on a log
in Frank's pond. Didn't hear his song, though. Been humming boat
tunes just the same.
Sawmill
Eric stopped by Sunday week and we loaded that hunk of white oak
on his truck, to take to the mill. Went over a few days later
and he ripped it into manageable slices, 1X4s and 6s. Pretty sorry
stuff at the core. Lots of shake and rotted knots. The quest for
prime boat stock continues. I'll be able to piece out some frame
parts from this sliceage, but will need more oak for topside work,
and I ordered some long spruce 3X8s, boxed heart, from Eric, to
build up the skeg. I also spent an hour at Brent's running wide
pine planks through his planer. Beautifully clear 14 inch wide
boards, 16 feet long, plus. A sweet smelling task.
This boatyard lingo must be so much gobbledee to most of you,
but it's a callused kind of poetry that goes way back. Capt. John
Smith actually published the first glossary of seaman's terminology,
called A SEA GRAMMAR, in 1627, and it's full of pintels and gudgeons,
horn timbers and limber holes. Chevyites have nothing on younkers
when it comes to jaw cracking. I might describe the steps of scow
construction to date, in plain talk, so you can follow the melody,
however.
To make a symmetrical hull which doesn't float all crooked, you
have to start from a solid, square, and level surface. That's
why I set up that strongback of parallel 6X6s, cross tied and
shimmed level, and ran a taut line down the middle of it for a
reference mark. Next you construct forms to establish the shape
of the hull. These are transverse sections, like slices across
a banana, taken every two feet or so along the length of the boat.
I'm taking the dimensions for these slices from a set of plans
copied off a 42 foot long hulk in 1938. That means they are both
too big, and probably a bit misshapen. I'm scaling the slices
down to suit a 24 foot vessel, and will shim and shave them by
eye once they're set up.
The skeleton of each transverse section is made up out of scrap
wood, notched to fit the frame pieces of the actual boat, cross
braced, and installed in the proper place on the strongback, plumb
and square. These are the molds, and I'm using 14 of them to define
the hull. Nine of them are removable templates, three are actual
sections of the hull, plus the bow and stern transoms. This week
I concocted most of the scrapwood molds, and puzzled out the actual
hull sections.
There's more head-scratching to this gig than I remember. Of course,
if you remembered what you were doing, there wouldn't be so much
giggling. By laying out and assembling each mold in turn on one
reference sheet of plywood, you get a chance to double check how
the lines compare from section to section, and the process takes
on a rhythm. Between transposing numbers from the wrong offset
columns (the recorded measurements off that hulk), muddling the
math, and wrestling with the materials, I had to remake about
half the molds, and the bends of this beauty still look lumpy.
