Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for December, 2011

What Boat to Build Next: Part 2

Posted in Boat Building, Boating, Boats, Canoes, Sailing Canoes, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 31, 2011| Leave a Comment »

As I mentioned in the last post, I’ve started to explore whether the 1893 sailing canoe design Isalo would be suitable for re-designing for construction in modern materials. One of the first big questions to is how to build the boat.

If I follow through with the idea that this cruising canoe and the 16-30 are “bookends” that between them cover a nice range of sailing canoe history, then it would be best if Isalo was rendered in stitch-and-glue plywood. This has worked well for the 16-30s, proving to be light and durable and reasonably quick to build.

The body plan for the 16-30, showing its single chine hull made up from four separate stitch-and-glue panels.

The original 16-30 was a perfect choice for stitch-and-glue construction, with a single hard chine and a V-shaped bottom. The only difference from the original to the new version was that the plank keel was replaced by a filleted epoxy joint.

An interior shot of the original 16-30, showing the top of the plank keel. The bottom planks converge in a slightly rounded V-joint on the bottom of the hull.

The interior of the plywood 16-30, showing the filleted and taped seam on the interior bottom.

Our original 1893 canoe, however, has an arc bottom, much like a Star-class keelboat.

Body plan for Isalo from the original 1893 drawings.

You could likely make the plywood conform to this shape, but not in stitch and glue. In order to get the compound curve in the bottom panels, you’d have to introduce some interior framework, as on the 15 1/2′ sailing canoe Zephyr, and this would take us away from the idea of making both canoes as similar in construction as possible.

The arc-bottomed sailing canoe Zephyr, published in Yachting in 1925, was designed for traditional batten-seam plank-on-frame construction.

There are (at least) three possible ways to tackle the bottom of the new canoe, starting with the original lines. Here’s a sample section.

The original body plan at midships, with an arc bottom.

Option one is to take all of the arc out of the bottom and connect the chine and keel with a straight line, as on the 16-30:

Bottom section straight from chine to keel, with the dotted line showing the original arc section.

As you can see from the sketch, this takes a fair bit of volume out of the bottom. It might be ok, but I wouldn’t know until I did some hydrostatic calculations. Another option would be to introduce a second chine below the waterline.

The straight section from keel to chine has been broken into two parts by the addition of a second chine, with dotted line showing the original arc section.

This option preserves more of the original volume, but we’re now up to six hull panels, which will be more work to construct. Another way to do this is to give the canoe a narrow flat bottom panel:

Introducing a flat bottom panel equals or exceeds the original volume of the arc-bottom hull.

There are a few reasons why I like this option: it only needs 5 panels; it will make the boat easy to beach; and finally, the flat bottom will give a good solid anchorage for the centreboard trunk and mast steps without the complications of fitting them over a filleted centre seam. I built and sailed a little canoe with a hull like this for several years in the 1990s and it worked quite well. It was designed by John Bull, who used to own Solway Dory in the UK. He’s since retired, but the company continues, though I don’t believe they offer this design any more. The only drawback is that you need to install some floorboards so that you’re not sitting in any water that happens to come aboard!

Next step is to lay in the flat bottom on the original hull, re-draw the lines and do some calculations.

Until then. . .

Read Full Post »

What Boat to Build Next?

Posted in Boat Building, Boating, Boating Books, Boats, Canoes, Sailing Canoes, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on December 22, 2011| 4 Comments »

Well, it’s December 22nd, 2011. The Fiddlehead is done, all my hand tools have been sharpened and tuned up again and I have a couple of weeks off work and some precious free time. What better way to end the year and look ahead to 2012 than to think about what boat I should build next?

Three possibilities have been going through my head for a while. Back in the mid 1990s when I worked at the old Marine Museum of Upper Canada with Peter the Boatbuilder (see last post), we taught a workshop course called “Introduction to Lapstrake Boatbuilding.” The boat we used as the example was Pete Culler’s 13′ lapstrake canoe, a design he called Butternut. This is a lovely little boat, weighing about 35 lbs. We liked it because it showed you everything you needed to know about traditional lapstrake boatbuilding in a nice small package that didn’t go through a whole lot of materials, and was also small enough that we could have two of them underway in the shop at the same time. We told the students it was “the original personal watercraft,” a boat you wear more than use. Here’s one of the completed Butternuts:

As usual with these projects, I didn’t end up with one for myself, so maybe now it’s time? Something this light would also fit on top of Wendy’s little Nissan, and be light enough for her to get up and down easily. Butternut is featured on pp. 23-25 of John Burke’s book Pete Culler’s Boats. The original book is out of print but WoodenBoat have reprinted a catalogue of Culler’s designs. A simple lines plan can be ordered from the Ships’ Plans Department at Mystic Seaport.

Another boat I’ve had in my head even longer than Butternut is the late Bob Baker’s lapstrake canoe Piccolo. He designed this for WoodenBoat back in the magazine’s early days, and a comprehensive how-to-build article appeared in issues no. 36 and 37. It’s an exquisite little sailing canoe, a boat of thoroughgoing charm and modest windward ability (but gentlemen don’t cruise to windward anyways, right?). I liked this boat as soon as I saw her and have always wanted one. Plans are available from The WoodenBoat Store. I’ve gotten as far as lofting Piccolo and starting to pile up some cedar to plank her with (sorry for the grainy photo, hard to take a picture of pencil lines on lofting!):

Two little lapstrake canoes, two worthwhile projects, and eventually I’ll probably build one of each. I’m still thinking about the 16-30 sliding seat canoe, though. One of the ideas I’ve been mulling over is turning the 16-30 into a how-to-build book that also includes some of the history of canoe sailing. I’ve made a couple of false starts on this, but they’ve always come up short. I think one of the things holding me back has been the fact that, much as I love the 16-30 and the sliding seat era of canoe sailing, it was a relatively late development, and isn’t really representative of the whole 1870-1900 era when recreational canoeing first flourished.

An idea came to me in the shower a while ago (often happens there, perhaps the water hitting my head shakes loose a thought?): what about developing another historic canoe design for construction in modern materials that could be a companion to the 16-30? The aims of that project (see the 16-30 page on this blog) were to capture the decked sliding seat canoe sailing experience in a boat that could be built by one person with average tools and skills, in a garage, in a winter, using readily-available parts and materials. Could I find an original design for a cruising sailing canoe that could be adapted the same way? If I did that, then the book could feature these boats as “bookends” exemplifying the range of canoe sailing types, with some history sandwiched in between, and complete plans and building instructions for both.

On to the search for a suitable design. One of the things that made the 16-30 work was that the original boat I was inspired by was a hard-chine hull. I don’t mind turning hard-chine cedar on oak into hard-chine stitch and glue plywood, but I’m not as interested in rendering a round-bottomed hull into a multi-chine stitch and glue boat. Then I came across a design while browsing through Forest & Stream, a treasure trove of canoeing, yachting and other 19th century sporting history. Called Isalo (which is a town in Madagascar, not sure of the connection to canoeing), the boat is a hard-chined hull with a removable sliding seat and two sliding gunter rigs: a cruising outfit of 60 + 18 square feet and a racing rig of 100 + 30 square feet.

This design looks as though it has some potential, so the first step is to do a feasibility study by scaling the design up, re-drawing the lines, generating offsets and thinking about how she might be built. I’ll let you know how it goes.

In the mean time, here’s an interesting development for those interested in the history of small craft. Isalo‘s lines were originally published in The Model Yachtsman and Canoeist, a British magazine which appeared from 1884-1894. It wasn’t what you’d call a mass-circulation piece, so original copies are very hard to find. The Albert Strange Association has just announced that the whole run of 2000 pages has been digitized and made available on two CDs in a searchable pdf format for the very reasonable price of 15 pounds sterling. You can order your copy from the Association’s web site. Perfect Christmas gift for the boating historian on your list.

Best wishes of the season to you all.

Read Full Post »

Measuring Up: Collecting and Using Antique Rulers

Posted in Antique Rulers, Antique Tools, Boat Building, Boats, Folding Rulers, Uncategorized, tagged , , on December 4, 2011| 8 Comments »

In 1996/7, I built a St. Lawrence Skiff at the shop of my friend Peter the Boatbuilder. He was the boatman at the Argonaut Rowing Club in Toronto, and in exchange for looking after the club’s boats, he ran his boatbuilding shop out of the club. I shared the space with him while we built two traditional skiffs, one for me and one for him. He’s still building boats, most recently with Youth Boatworks Canada, and just finished a Bantry Bay Gig for the Atlantic Challenge competition.

Here's Peter at work lofting the skiff.

And here I am, laying out the keel line on the same lofting.

I even got my wife involved. Here's Wendy bevelling a lap on our skiff, which we would eventually name for her mother, Isabel.

And here's the skiff planked up and off the moulds, ready for ribs.

Lovely pictures, but what’s this got to do with antique rulers? Well, one day not long after this picture was taken, I came into the shop and there was a present waiting for me on the workbench from Peter. He studied traditional boatbuilding at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding in Port Townsend, WA, and it was probably there that he got introduced to traditional folding wooden rulers. Sometimes these get called “Blindman’s Rules,” although strictly speaking, that name only refers to one particular kind with especially large numbers. Peter had one that he used a lot on the skiff project, and I guess he had seen me admiring it while we worked. On the workbench that day was a package made from masking tape and a Country Style Doughnuts box (takes a lot of doughnuts to build a traditional wooden boat, so there were always plenty of boxes around the shop). Inside was a folding wooden ruler of my own, my “graduation” present for having gotten my skiff planked up and off the moulds. I still have the ruler, and I used it often while I was building the Fiddlehead this summer.

This is the ruler that started it all for me, a Stanley #61 boxwood two-foot, four-fold, square-joint ruler with middle plates, manufactured between 1855 and 1957. This particular one could be pre-1949.

Even a quick glance through Alvin Sellen’s book encyclopedic book Stanley Folding Rules will give you a sense of the vast variety of these that were manufactured from the mid 19th to late 20th century by Stanley, Lufkin, Rabone and other tool companies. Carpenters, shipwrights, surveyors, blacksmiths, patternmakers and a host of other trades all had their own rulers with features suited to their particular work. In case you don’t already waste enough time on line, take a moment to hop on eBay and search for “folding rulers” to see how many of these are still around and just waiting for you to buy them. The wooden ones are nice, but in the mid 19th century they were also made from ivory and oxbone with German silver mounts, and those are really lovely (with a price to match).

No question, then, that they make great collectibles, but are they really useful in the shop? For me, at least, the answer would be an enthusiastic “yes.” One of the things we’re blessed with in the 21st century is choice–just think of how many things there are to eat for breakfast in the average grocery store, for instance. It’s no different in the workshop. Need to cut something? If you have any kind of workshop at all, I bet there’s at least 6 different ways to accomplish the same purpose ready to hand (I took a moment to count my own stuff: compound mitre saw; tablesaw; bandsaw; 2 different sizes of Skilsaw; several  japanese saws; several western hand saws). Obviously if I have to measure off a 6′ piece of stock I’m not going to use my four-fold, two-foot folding ruler three times in a row. But for smaller measurements around a traditional boatbuilding project, these folding rulers work very well. As an added benefit, and here’s where the choice comes in, I find them just plain enjoyable to use (which I suppose is the same thing that someone else might say about their LED-equipped digital laser tape measure), and so use them I do. It’s a pleasure to have something in your hand that offers a connection to people who used to do what you’re doing now. Folding rulers also look very official sticking out of your back pocket or apron, and if you’re working in public, they’re great conversation starters.

Here's my Stanley #61 in use, checking the progress of a lap bevel at the midships frame.

Did I mention that these kinds of rulers are available on eBay? and from antique tool websites, antique tool shows, flea markets and  garage sales? I still have and use the Stanley #61 that Peter gave me more than 15 years ago, but that hasn’t stopped me picking up a few more over the years. Here’s some favourites from the “measuring” drawer of my tool chest. These are all tools that I’ve collected to actually use, so I tend not to go for the pristine examples, or pay extra for an original box, but concentrate instead on pieces that are straight, solid and ready to work.

Here's a sentimental favourite. It's a four-fold, arch-joint caliper ruler with no visible maker's mark. The outside is very worn from years of travelling in someone's pocket, but the inside markings are still clear and usable. Two higher-end features are the arch-shaped joints at the hinge and the brass binding on the edges. I carry this in my pocket nearly every day just for the pleasure of having it around.

Here's one I couldn't resist. It's a tiny Stanley 65 1/2, one-foot four-fold, brass bound with a square joint. This type was manufactured from 1855 to 1934, and this particular one dates from some time after 1867.

A Lufkin #42 boxwood Shipwright's Bevel. Competition was fierce in the ruler business, and Stanley offered an identical piece, also a #42, albeit with square ends on the brass bevel arms.

Here's a kind of Swiss Army Knife folding ruler. This big, chuncky four-fold two-foot Rabone # 1190, possibly from the 1930s, has an arch-joint and engraved hinge marked with degrees for use as a bevel gauge, as well as a brass level.

A Stanley #136, manufactured between 1932 and 1983, incorporating an inside/outside caliper as well as a ruler on the other side.

A Lufkin #41 3-fold, one-foot steel ruler with case. The leatherette case for this model was often embossed with a company's name so it could be used as a promotional item.

Some great sources for rulers like this include eBay; Jim Bode Antique Tools; Vintage Tools and Bob Kaune Antique & Used Tools.

Until next time. . .

Read Full Post »