Lofting Pictures

Here are some shots of the Bowl of Spaghetti.
This is an overall shop of the loft floor.

 


We stapled down sheets of doorskin and painted it white. We were then only allowed to walk on the loft floor in slippers, or in socks. Remember, we mark points with 6 penny finish nails. Finish nails sticking out of the floor like a pin cushion + Sock feet = ouch.

Here is my table of offsets, the keel of my boat, and the tips of my toes.

Tim's toes, and my benchmate dylan drawing a freakin tight curve at station 6 with a bundle batten. Battens are flexible sticks of straight grained wood. Bundle battens are 1/8" thick white oak battens bundled together and fastened at one end so they slide past each other as they bend. They are a natural spline.

Here is a closeup of the bundle batten in action. Amazing how tight of a curve you can draw with one of these things. If you're amazed by curvy wood, i suppose. I am easily enthused.

We finally got all of our major lines down today. Now all we have to do is develop about 50 straight on views of various pieces of the boat. Simple. I need to go back to 8th grade and actually pay attention to basic geometry, as its apparently the basic foundation to all lofting.

Yesterday i was convinced that it was voodoo, plain and simple. I was pretty sure i could benefit from carrying a chicken foot in my left pocket, and throwing a pinch of salt over my left shoulder before i struck a line. I also considered only lofting on the north side of the shop at midnight of the full moon. But, today i drew some righteous tumblehome in my transom by developing an extra waterline between 2a and 3a, and crossing it with butt 4. then i faired the errors in my LWL with the help of butt 4 and developed my rabbet at the stem with the help of diagonals A,B, and C.

Wow.
Maybe i'm getting it.

Winter life in the Hobbit Hole

The following pictures describe winter life in the "Hobbit Hole". The Hobbit Hole is actually the old deckhouse of the rehabilitated schooner Adventuress. She is a B.B. Crowninshield designed schooner built in 1913. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventuress_(schooner)
She operates in a shipboard educational capacity here in Puget Sound.

Cap'n Wayne-o, my landlord, was an officer aboard, (or maybe Captain; i'm not sure), and couldn't bear to see the old deckhouse destroyed, so he and a former boatschool student built a small cord-wood base and added the deckhouse lid. They later built a small 6'x6' kitchen addition. The Port Hadlock Marina unwittingly provides shower facilities to Hobbit Hole residents. The showers there are leagues above my shower in knoxville in both capacity, and quality.

The inimitable Sarah Taylor eating yogurt covered pretzels. I lost ten pounds when i moved out of the Ice Cream Monster's lair. I gained it back when the Ice Cream Monster brought cookies and preztels with her to WA. Why not ice cream, you ask? Cause my dorm fridge has a freezer the size of a pack of cards.

Too much Jack London. Now i know why the top of the stove is flat. The "white top" grandpa dishes work nicely for keeping my flapjacks warm while i'm cooking for the other Klondike '49ers.

ST also brought the "Chicken Hat" She is crazy. She said she was not sure i would wear it. I asked her if she had ever met me before. Of course i'm going to rock the chicken hat!

Pardon the mixed metaphors, but Hobbit Holes, Schooners, and Jack London Klondike flapjacks make for a pretty romantic life here in the Pacific Northwest.

Lofting Demystified

Lofting is the process of drawing a boat full size on the loft floor in order to create templates from the lines you lay down. These templates will then be used to cut out pieces of the boat. A table of offsets provides the dimensions required to measure up from a baseline, or across from the center line to plot the necessary point. 


Think of it this way: take an oblong bowl of spaghetti, cut it lengthwise, and use a faded, splotchy xerox of an old excel spreadsheet to plot each point that your knife touched. Put some nails in the floor at the points the splotchy graph indicated, bend a 20' long stick around it, and draw a curve. Then label all these noodles with strange, esoteric names, like "buttocks" and "forward perpendicular" and you pretty much have it. At the end of the day, when you can't stand up any more because your knees gave out, or you bought the local drug store clean out of white-out (cause erasing on white painted door skin is a bitch,)you look at your lines, and viola! It looks like a boat! No. It actually looks like a bowl of spaghetti with white-out stripes.


I have drawn rectilinear buildings for years, by hand, and in autocad. This business is just crazy. The concepts are the same, but keeping all the noodles straight in my brain is tough. It doesn't help that you can't see both ends of a noodle from one spot. It also doesn't help that you are dealing with a sixteenth of an inch tolerance over sixteen feet--especially when you are using a janky-ass plywood square some dude cut on a table saw and didn't bother to tell you was and eighth out in four feet. (Probably why i had so many white stripes in the first hour. I hate using crappy tools. If i ever loft a boat again, I'll have an 8' triangle milled at a steel fab shop.)


So far i have not done much in the boat drawing department to give boat building enthusiasts any faith in architects. I keep telling people that just because i have worked in architecture firms for years doesn't mean I'm GOOD at it. I keep telling myself its not about the drawing; its about learning how to draw the drawing. 


Tim said, "Oh, you don't EVER want to build the first boat you loft." Someone asked why.
"Don't worry. You'll see why." 


Maybe Monday will be be better, and I'll unravel the mystery of the noodle bowl. 

Beginning Projects

Chief instructor Tim Lee mentioned yesterday morning that we would have some time after our 3 weeks of lofting to finish up our beginning projects, but that it was important for all of us to loft together. (Lofting is the process of drawing a boat full size on the floor to later pick up templates for cutting actual boat parts. More on this later.) In the process of learning the basics, I actually forgot that i came here to build boats.

We have spent the first month and a half learning to use hand tools: Japanese pull-saws, or "Dozuki" saws, chisels, planes, draw knives, flat and round bottomed spokeshaves, files, Japanese water stones for sharpening, grinders, and an assortment of measuring and marking tools.

In the process of learning these basic, but extremely difficult hand skills, we have produced a series of janky-ass joinery: half-laps, mitered half laps, bridle joints, carlin joints, and the mystical dovetail. (The good news with all this butchered pine is that i burn all of these useless joints in my wood stove at night.)

We then used these skills to make our own mallets (for driving chisels) as well as our own toolboxes. We were also being lectured daily on power tools, such as routers, table saws, lathes, planers, jointers, band saws, and various cutting jigs for all these machines. Upon demonstrating our prowess with these machines, (by holding up both hands with all 10 fingers upon completion of each cut) we were "checked out" on the power tools and given free reign to get on with our projects, or dismember ourselves as we saw fit.

I went to the local exotic lumber dealer/sawmill and bought a cant of cherry, re-sawed it, planed it to 3/8" and built a swanky tray for the top of my toolbox. I then realized that there was not enough "meat" at the top of the handle, and that it would probably break at some point in the near future. Tim then mentioned that i could use brass strapping to reinforce it. I asked him if this wouldn't be a bit masturbatory. He said "of course, just don't do it in public." The attached pictures say it all. No one prepared me for the nearly spiritual fulfillment that i experienced when loading my own hand dovetailed toolbox down with my beautiful, ridiculously expensive hand tools. I think some of my classmates want to shiv me in the alley between the wood shops; the brass might have been a bit much.

Another instructor wandered by while i was staring at it. For like, 5 minutes. He said, "What are you looking at?" I just turned and looked at him blankly.
"I cant believe i made this."
"yeah. Its pretty cool. I remember the first time i made my first beautiful boat. There not all beautiful, but man, you'll never forget the first beautiful one."

Oh yeah. I forgot i was here to build boats. But first, we have to learn to draw them.

The Koshka's Farewell

How this all started

Several years ago, i decided it would be fun to learn to sail. I lived in Asheville, NC, sailing capital of the world, so it seemed like it would be simple to find a suitable body of water and a like minded group of folks with the same nautical interests. I ended up in a cooling pond for a coal fired power plant cowering on the bow of a skinny dude's laser in a pair of borrowed swim trunks. In March. This harrowing experience prepared me only nominally for the wet, cold privations of my sailing future. I realized immediately that i HAD to have a boat of any color or stripe, and that i had to learn to sail.

I had the great misfortune of mentioning this experience to coworkers at Mathews Architecture. Rich, the bearded Wooden Boat Magazine hoarder pipes up and says, "You know you can build a boat out of plywood and epoxy, right?" In two weeks time, i received my plans in the mail, bought plywood, began design revisions, and started the slow and lethal process of poisoning Robin with a pile of toxic trash in the basement/garage. The wafting fumes of paint thinner, bondo, varnish, and epoxy silently crept under the midget door between the garage and basement and nearly did us in. In 6 months time, with the fine carpentry skills of Capn Crockett, we had an attractive, seaworthy dinghy that did not disgrace the Flint Street Boat Shop. Now i had to learn to sail it.

Having 43 minutes sailing experience between the two of us, Crockett and i launched her with family and friends at Lake Julian in a near gale on April Fools day. We piled into the Koshka (Russian for "Cat") and cast off. We crept out of the cove in a jumble of skinny legs and cheap nylon line, climbing over each other and the exquisitely crafted, gossamer thin, yet over-long cherry tiller. Cherry is the soft hardwood. We scooted round the lee shore, and the sail filled. I somehow missed in the plans that the tiller had to pivot. Steering was limited, the gale screamed at full tilt, and we swamped 50' from the launch site. Then we swam, bailed, laughed, and broke the hearty tiller off in our second attempt. Crockett climbed onto the pitching foredeck and furled the sail and we paddled like hell to get back. We considered it a successful maiden voyage, and i went home to build another tiller. I think i ended up splicing the one i had, cause spring had arrived, and i had sailing to do.

I have been truly obsessed with boats since those days. I finally realized that i needed to spend more time being in, on, around, under, or at least near them. The end goal with boat school is to work in a shipboard or boat building educational situation with kids. I love to share the things that give me so much joy, like paint thinner, varnish, bondo, epoxy and turpentine. (Ask Robin how much i love to share.) Or maybe if I'm going to be cold and wet, i'd like for other folks to be around. Either way, I'm in WA for a year to learn how this curvy, mystical mojo is really done.

First Blog Post Ever

Monumental occasion. First post. I cant even upload a photo to facebook. What am i trying to pull here?
This blog is an attempt to record my year at boat building school in Port Hadlock, WA. Think of it as a digital fireside chat, without the polio, or maybe the firebombing of London. Oh well. Paltry and rather anticlimactic first post i realize. I'll actually talk about boats tomorrow.