No, it's not a still for making 'shine. That's over in the fort.

The water comes from a garden hose and goes into the bottomof the black bucket you see hanging there, and into a toilet tank float mechanism.  The float keeps the water in the bucket at a constant level.  When a little water drains out, the float level drops and allows some more water in from the hose.  

This is important because of a good old physics fact: Water seeks its own level.

We have a 2^nd hose that connects the bucket to our boiler.  Since the bucket and boiler are connected, the water in the bucket will flow to the boiler until the two are at the same water level. The red line shows the water level between the two. 

This is handy, because as the water in the boiler turns to steam and heads up the tube into the steam box, the water level in the boiler drops.  If we didn’t have this nifty little bucket setup, we’d have to keep adding more water to the boiler to keep it from running dry.  

Of course, each time we did that, the cold water would stop the boiling and we wouldn’t get a good, constant source of steam for our frames.  The setup adds just a squirt of water as the level drops a bit, and the hot water in the boiler isn’t affected at all.  This allows us to have a steady supply of steam as long as the burner is on. 

Ok, enough on why you should have paid attention during science and math classes.

Once the inside of the ribbands are marked, and the steambox is going, it’s time to add frames to the mix.

We made a lot of frames. Each one is numbered so that we know where it goes, and each one is cut to a length that will allow it fit into it’s specific location with a little extra length to work with. There are some extras cut as well, since we assumed that at least of a few of them would break during installation.

We moved the steam box so that it faced the side door.  This makes it easy to get hot frames into the boat with minimal delay.

The frames begin to cool the second that they come out ofthe box, and a cool frame is a stiff frame. We want to reduce the time from box to boat as much as possible.

Once a frame has cooked long enough, we pull it from the box,

dip the bottom end into oil to help seal the end grain,

and pass it up to two guys inside the boat.

They press the frame out against the ribbands

as we pull from the outside.

Once the frame is bent up against the ribbands, we clamp itinto place.

After installing a few frames, we came up with a way to get the oil a little higher up the frame. We filled a length of pvc pipe with oil and used that as our dipping source rather than using the can.

Once the frames are hot, this whole process goes very quickly.  

Run in with a frame

Do a quick pre-bend across your knee

Dip in the oil

Pass the frame up, and guide the bottom of the frame into the socket

While one of the guys inside the boat hammers it home into the the socket from above.

Clamp the frames in quickly before they cool

Repeat, 138 times.

Not all frames can handle this kind of abuse.

Mostly these problems were due to the severe bends at the forward and aft sections of the boat. Some of the frames were cut from wood that had been a little too dry, and this made them brittle. That's what we think happened in the top frame that broke right across the grain. Others had grain that ran from the middle of the frame out to the edges, and those broke along that grain line. You can see that in the lower 2 frames.

As the first day of framing continued, the number of casualties rose.

The frames had to make a substantial bend near the ends of the boat, and they didn’t want to stay in their sockets without some assistance.

Here you can see that the frame nearest to the camera is coming out of its socket.

Right behind that frame you can see that we’ve held the next frame in the socket with a metal plate.

Robin came up with this plate as a way to hold the frame into the socket while we bent it into place.  This plate has the added advantage of providing an access hole to screw the frame into the socket once it’s cooled down a bit.

That goop is bedding compound (Dolphinite). We drill our pilot hole with the plate still on,

And drive the screw in as well

before removing the plate. It worked like a charm.

Once the frames have cooled down, we can replace the clamps with cable ties.

These are relatively cheap, easy to install, and they hold the frames solidly in place until we screw the planking into them.

A little tuck neatens things up and helps us to not get poked in the eye.

As framing progresses, the boat fills out just a little bit.

And really starts to look like a basket.

In some places, the frames didn’t make the turn as well as we wanted, so we did a little spot steaming to soften them up.

We then used small blocks and clamps to push them exactly into the curves where they belonged.

And in a few days, we were just about finished.

Some of the frames at the aft end of the boat gave us a lot of trouble.  At one point we were breaking five frames for every one that went in. We think it was probably a batch of wood that wasn’t as green as some of our other stock. When you’re bending in frames, the greener the wood, the better.

But, perseverance furthers, and at last we bent in the final frame.

Whew!

No time to rest on our laurels, however.  There’s planking to be done, and the days are getting a little cooler in our unheated shop.

Special thanks this week go to Anna and Jason for their help in getting the framing going, and we all thank Holly for taking so many of the photos used in this entry.