I'm back from a little winter hiatus, and I'm sorry to report that I was not in the Galapagos.
(photo by Ann Royal)
That would be a reasonable excuse for such a big gap in blog entries...
Much has happened in the past 3 weeks, so we've got a lot of catching up to do. First up, the lead ballast keel has arrived!
The keel and the wooden plug used to make it were dropped off at the IYRS parking lot the other day. It's a little tough to tell them apart from this vantage point.
Not so hard from this direction.
Of course, what if they were trying to fool you by spraying the wooden one with silver paint? The simplest test is to lift it up. Warren Barker, the 2nd year instructor at IYRS, gives that strategy the old college try.
I'm not sure he made it through college.
At any rate, this beast bent the forks of the forklift a bit when we lifted it off of the truck.
The plan is to bring Cherokee over to IYRS soon and do the final finish work right on the IYRS grounds. That's also where we'll attach the keel. No reason to haul 5800 lbs around any more than we have to.
Back at the Museum, the deck is finished!
We keep saying this, but each time we finish a particular part of the boat, we sit back and think, "This is one skinny boat!"
One thing that reinforces Cherokee's image as a needle, or rather a knife, is her bow.
Olin Stephens drew her with a VERY pointy bow, leaving it to the builders to work out how to fashion a bronze strip to protect and blunt that edge.
We'll get to that later, but for now, we're leaving it pointy just for fun.
Personally, I would feel quite motivated to move out of the way if I saw that thing bearing down on me.
The covering boards have been varnished, and soon we'll put the deck covering down.
We're using Sunbrella fabric on the deck, rather than canvas, because of its durability in harsh marine environments. We'll glue it to the deck and trap the edges between the toe rails and the covering board. We fit the toe rails over the inboard edge of the covering board.
Here are the toe rails.
By the way, they're sitting on top of a wider board to support them.
Now, you may be asking yourself how we'll deal with the fabric at the ends of the boat where things get curvy...
We could make up a segmented curve of toe rail to trap the edge of the fabric, but unless you have stock that has just the right curve to the grain, you'll end up either using short segments with lots of joints or longer segments with grain run out. We didn't have silver bali crooks to get those nice curves, so we decided to not use toe rails in these areas.
Instead, we went in another direction entirely. The solution was to use metal strips that continued the trapping function of the toe rails.
They will transition smoothly from beneath the toe rails as shown in this test piece.
The bronze curve is made up of 2 symmetrical pieces that are cut from sheet bronze.
Pretty nice curves, eh? It wasn't bent. To get that sweet curve, Robin decided to utilize the fact that carbide steel is much harder than bronze and rout the shape.
First, he patterned out the inside and outside curves that he needed for these parts, and then faired them using a rasp and sanding block.
After rough cutting out each piece of bronze, he clamped the bronze onto the patterns and cut out the final shape using a router with a bearing-guided straight bit. The result is a curved shape that exactly matches the wooden pattern.
We'll fasten these bronze strips over the deck fabric edges, thus making sure that all of the edges are mechanically held down.
And as long as we're hanging around the covering board, here's a very nice detail.
This is the slot for the chain plates where they emerge from the inside of the boat.
The cutout matches the chain plate exactly. All we'll need to seal the area around the chain plate is a little 5200.
The coamings around the cockpits are finished and almost all installed. Here's the boat-steerer's cockpit.
The grinder's cockpit has a very different coaming. Unlike the aft cockpit, this one is essentially rectangular, with only some gentle sweep along the sides. Here you're looking aft at the front of the cockpit.
Just forward of this cockpit is the rough-cut hole for the mast partner. This hole is elongated to allow the mast rake to be adjusted.
On the left you can see the elaborate clamping set up used to hold the forward face of the coaming in place while it's fastened in place.
One of the tricky challenges that the crew had was to work out the exact angle and location of the rudder post as it came up through the deck. It would be one thing to have the rudder post already installed before putting the deck on, so you could just build around it. Instead, we had to work out a way to map this out with the deck already installed.
Joel's method was to make a series of discs, exactly the diamter of the rudder post, and fasten them in the channel where the rudder post will be located.
In the center of each disc is a small hole. A string that's slightly smaller than the hole diameter is run through these discs and stretched tight (sorry, it's slack in this photo).
One person holds the string tightly up against the underside of the deck, and another tells him to move the string fore and aft, left and right, until it's lined up exactly in the center of the disc holes. Now we have an arrow-straight line touching the point where the center of the rudder post will intersect the underside of the deck. Next, we tack the string in that location and take the angle between the string and the deck. Now we can make a jig that copies that angle.
By lining up a series of small blocks with holes drilled in their centers exactly along a line drawn at the proper slope, we can remove our string, clamp this jig to the underside of the deck, and run a long drill bit up through the holes in the blocks so that it just touches our center mark. Now we can drill a pilot hole through the deck at just the right angle and location for our rudder post.
These things are easy, once someone points the way.
And speaking of rudders... here's some of the rudder hardware that was fabricated by Jim Reineck.
His work combines strength, precision, and understated elegance. Things like this add a lot to the boat. The rudder shaft will exit the deck through the collar at the bottom of this photo.
Karl has been also working with bronze, although in a different way. Here's one of those hanging knees that you saw earlier. You can see some initial marking showing the locations of the lightening holes there.
He's been working on the tabs at the edges to get them to fit into the boat just right.
Using measurements from the boat, he heats and hammers the bronze tabs to bend them to exactly the right angles so that these knees will precisely slide into place. It's good to do this heavy work now before the holes are cut out to reduce the likelihood that the knees will deform side-to-side as he works on them.
Only 3 more to go.
Inside the boat, the sole is nearing completion beneath the boat-steerer's cockpit. Looking aft:
The margins (the sweeping boards that bound the sides of the sole) came out beautifully.
The grinder's sole hasn't been finished yet, so we're still standing on plywood. Looking forward:
You can see the mast step on the floors just forward of this cockpit.
We should see the deck canvassed and the toe rails installed very soon.
Another sign that we're moving along: The official boat measurer came by recently. He marks the boat in the places that officials will later use to make sure that Cherokee's measurements confirm to the class rules.
Let's look just a bit closer...
We'll paint a triangle on the boat later to mark this exact location.
We'll close with Robin working on the toe rails...