There’s a few more things to complete before it’s time to attach the ribbands.
There’s beveling the face of the floors so that the frames will lie flat against them, for one thing.
Check
Then there’s fairing the aft face of the transom frame. This is what the transom planks will fasten into, and it’s what connects the transom to the backbone of the boat. Getting this angle just right is critical. The actual process of fairing it is relatively simple, but it hides the hours of calculations and just plain staring at this thing that precede the cutting.
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There’s the final painting of the ballast keel plug.
Check.
There’s gluing up the ribbands into 40’ lengths so that they can stretch continuously from the bow to stern of the boat.
That big tapered chunk of wood is the scarfing piece that connects the 2 16' long ribband sections into one long section.
Moving them from one side of the boat to the other is tricky, and it’s a good thing we have windows that open up. We send a ribband out into the grass, pass the front around the boat, and bring it back inside.
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There’s coming up with an arrangement for the planks, and then transferring those measurements to the molds. This process is called “lining off the planks.” In our case we did this first by dividing the side of the boat into more or less thirds. The top third is relatively flat, the middle third contains the large turn of the bilge (we called this the barrel section) and the lower third has both flat sections and a reverse curve called “the tuck.”
We decided that the upper section would contain 4 planks, the middle section would have 8, and the lower section would have about 11. We used a “Planking Scale” to give us a way to smoothly taper the planks from front to back.
The Planking Scale is an old trick used by boatbuilders, and is detailed in Barry Thomas’ book “Building the Herreshoff Dinghy.”
The lower section is drawn on paper first to get pleasing lines,
and then transferred to the boat using battens to check for fairness.
These planks will each be individually patterned, or “spiled.” It rhymes with “wild.”
When you have a long, noodelly batten and you're working by yourself, it helps to have an extra hand to hold the batten up at one end of the boat while you attach it to the other. A section of plywood cut into a circle works beautifully.
Check
There’s making sure that the sheer looks right. We fasten a batten along the sheer marks on the molds and check for fairness. This is tricky in a small shop, and it takes a lot of looking at the sheer line from as many angles as possible to finally be satisfied with your results.
Hmmmm.
Hmmmm.
Hmmmm.
Eventually we find a line that fits our patterns and looks right as well. We mark that on the molds, and when we plank, we’ll plank to that line.
Check.
There’s drilling a perfectly smooth and straight hole for the rudder post to go into. This is trickier than it sounds. Luckily, we had the help of Warren Barker, the 2nd year class instructor from IYRS, who leant us his boring bar setup. A boring bar is really nothing more than a steel rod with a small, adjustable cutter that protrudes from the side.
The rod spins on a couple of bearings that attach to your workpiece, called pillow blocks.
You spin the rod by attaching it to a drill.
In essence, the rod acts like a giant drill bit. The difference between this and a drill bit is that it has very precise guides to direct the cutter, and the cutter can be made larger with each pass, as if your drill bit could grow.
The setup principle is simple, you drill a hole close in size and orientation to the final hole you want, insert the boring bar, center the bar in exactly the place you want your final hole to be using the pillow blocks, and then gradually widen the hole by running the cutter down into your hole, backing out, adjusting the cutter, and running in your hole again.
Coming through the underside of the horn timber into the coved out section of the sternpost.
The setup worked beautifully. The hole was perfectly smooth, and perfectly aligned with the coved cutout for the rudder. Here's the rudder tube slid into the hole to check for fit.
Just look at how perfectly that fits! You’ve never seen so many people going ga ga a over a hole in your life.
Check.
There’s drilling the stopwaters.
These are little wooden dowels that go into very precisely drilled holes in the rabbet. They are put in any part of the boat where a joint that connects to the outside of the boat crosses the rabbet.
This is the stopwater at the lower edge of the keel where it joins the stern post.
The idea is that if (when) water works it’s way along this joint from outside the boat, it will eventually get behind the rabbet, and therefore behind the planks and inside the boat unless you come up with a way to stop it. The stopwater (ah, now the name makes sense!) is a roadblock for water that creeps up a joint.
Check.
And then finally, finally, you can start to put ribbands on the boat!
The ribband at the sheer...
Now bolted into position so it WILL MOVE FOR NO MAN.
At the transom, we let the ribbands run long and then attach them to each other. This gives them a nice, fair sweep in the section of the boat just forward of the transom.
Of course, it does confuse some people, who think the aft end of the boat now looks pointy, like the forward end of the boat.
No worries, the forward end looks completely different and we hardly confuse the two at all.
And then, before you know it, the ribbands are all on, and the basket look is complete!
Here's a panoramic shot, but it distorts things a bit.
Next up, steaming in the frames!