I Score Some Blades

Sorry for interrupting the fascinating story of how I built my frames, but I'm super excited about this week's garage sale find. And I have a cautionary tale about being 'too careful' (i.e. cheap) with money.

A couple weeks ago, I went to visit Roger, a very experienced boat builder in my area. I don't know what he thought of me, since I don't remember doing anything more intelligent than walking around his amazing shop with my mouth open, uttering the word 'Wow' every so often, but I learned a lot from him.

Among the other secrets he let me in on was the fact that you could find great old tools at garage sales for less money than you'd spend buying new tools of inferior quality.

Now, to be honest, I've been off garage sales since moving to Long Island. I used to love them when I lived in upstate New York and New Hampshire, back before eBay turned junk into 'collectibles'.

"Back in the olden days", out in the country, you could find all sorts of stuff at garage sales. Being a bookish kind of guy, I was especially interested in old books, of which the old-time sales had plenty.

By the way, that's another thing that turned me off of Long Island garage sales... either Long Islanders don't read at all, or they obsessively hold on to their books. I'm not sure which, but it's very odd... No books at garage sales. I've never been able to figure it out...

Anyway, Roger had drawers full of tools that he'd picked up for next to nothing at garage sales, so, my need for tools being great and my dingy fund being sadly depleted, I decided to give garage-saleing a try this past Sunday.

I even managed to drag Helena away from her hobby -- redoing our 100 year old cast iron windows. She looks 10 times more handy than I do, so I figured she'd be good to have along, just in case I needed to do some heavy negotiating.

Actually, I was pretty skeptical. I mean, my most immediate need was for a hand plane to help shape a beautiful block of oak (thank you, Roger!) into something approximating the 'stem' or front of my boat. What was the chance that I'd find something as specific as a plane at a garage sale?

I was going to head straight for the ritzy section of town, but Helena was all for stopping in the 'working class' parts of town first. She reasoned that a working class guy might have some tools from his working class father kicking around the garage. I was doubtful, but since Helena is the luckiest person I know...

Here is what we found lying in that very first driveway:

My New Wooden Planes

Photo by jalmberg

The seller said his father used them in World War II when there was a shortage of steel and planes had to be made out of wood, but I wonder if they might be even older than that?

The top, light-colored one is a French made plane with the words "PEUGEOT FRERES" on the blade. The other is an English plane made by W. Butcher. If you know anything about them, I'd be glad to hear about it.

Anyway, I'd never owned a plane, much less a wooden plane, so when I got them home, I had no idea what to do with them.

Whoever used them last had retracted the blades so they were not protruding from the bottom. However, some careful thumb-probing indicated that they were still fearsomely sharp.

The planes seemed to be of extremely simple construction, consisting of only 3 parts: the body of the plane, the blade, and a wooden wedge that kept the blade in position.

Both wedges were still doing their jobs fantastically well, too. First thing I tried to do was to pull the wedges out. I tried wiggling the blades free. They didn't move a millimeter (hey, they are European planes).

I considered whacking the blades with a hammer, or trying to lever the wedges out with a screwdriver, but when I get these sort of thoughts, I tend to back off and think before doing (yes,  Helena, I have learned one or two things over the years...)

I decided to post a quick question to the Wooden Boat Forum (fantastic resource, by the way), and within a few minutes, got back several recommendations. When it comes to wooden boats, there always seems to be several ways to skin the cat.

The most interesting idea came from Nick in the UK. I guess they still use ancient tools over there. He claimed a few raps on the back of the plane, like at 'B' in the photo below, would back the blade out of the body and loosen up the wedge.

Tab at B to loosen blade

Photo by jalmberg, suggestion by Nick

I say 'interesting' only because the idea seemed so daft. I mean, these wedges were really, really stuck. How could a few taps on the back possibly free them up?

However, one of the things I love about boat building is discovering neat tricks that builders have discovered over the last thousand years or so. The most improbable things do work, and work amazingly well, so I gave the French plane a few smart raps on the back with a hammer, and sure enough, the wedge freed right up. I still can't figure out why it works, but it does, and that's really all that matters.

Here's what they look like apart and ready to be cleaned up and sharpened:

French Plane - Apart

jalmberg

English Plane - Apart

jalmberg

Pretty amazing, eh? Well, I was amazed. The first garage sale we stopped at. What are the chances, I ask you? It must have been Fate. Fate wants me to build a boat. What more can you ask for?

And $15 for the pair.

I do have one regret, though... there was a third plane, a mate to the French plane. Roughly the same size, but a smaller blade. The guy wanted another few bucks for it. Did I buy it?

Ouch...

Sometimes you can be too... cheap.

I think I might drive by his house tomorrow, see if he's still got it. Sailors should never spurn Fate.

I hope you're enjoying "The Unlikely Boat Builder" as much as I enjoy writing it. Some people have asked for a way to be notified automatically when I post new episodes. I've just figured out how to do this, so if you'd like to be notified, please click on the link below. I promise I'll never spam you (and Google will have my head if I do.)

Thanks for your interest!

-- John

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Building the Bones

Like supermodels, boats are mainly skin and bones, with some extra bits for added interest. Big boats, like models and dinosaurs, carry their bones around inside them for strength and to help them keep their shape.

Photo by Luc Vernet (used with permission)
Building 72' Schooner in Vietnam

But small boats shed most of their bones before birth to save weight, retaining just enough of them to maintain their shape. It's a bit like a snake shedding it's skin, only in this case, it's the skin -- the bottom and sides of the boat -- that we're after.

Apatosaurus

American Museum of Natural History

To build those soon-to-be-shed bones, I needed to build Cabin Boy's four molds. A mold is something like the rib of an Apatosaurus, only smaller. The boat's skin (planking) is bent around the molds. When the planking is secured and reinforced, the molds are removed. It seemed a bit more complicated than that, but that was the basic idea, I thought.

Drawing of mold for flat bottom boat, like Cabin Boy
Howard Chappelle

To build the mold for Station #3, for example, you start buy lofting the Body Plan for Station #3. I thought this would be pretty easy, now that I had perfected my lofting techniques.

The first step was to draw the grid for the Body Plan. This was nothing more than a vertical Center Line (drawn with my plumb-bob), and a horizontal Load Waterline (LWL), drawn using my home-made beam compass.

Body Plan Grid

Drawing by jalmberg

Next, I needed to draw in the bottom of the boat. On Station 3, the bottom is 2" below the LWL (not the real measurements, which are copyright John Atkin). To do this, I just put a mark 2" below the LWL on the CL, and then used my beam compass to draw the horizontal bottom line.

Bottom Line

Drawing by jalmberg

Then I did the same for the line for the top of the boat, which is called the Sheer Line.

Sheer Line

Drawing by jalmberg

Drawing in the sides of the boat is easy as connect-the-dots. There are 4 dots to draw: 2 on the Bottom line, 14" on either side of the Center line, and 2 on the Sheer line, 21" from the Center line. Then you just take your straight edge and connect them.

Sides drawn in

Drawing by jalmberg

And that was the Body Plan for Station #3. Easy, peasy.

The plans for the other three Stations were just as simple. And now that I had my Body Plans lofted full scale on my lofting board (difficult to see the lines in a photograph), I was ready to build my bones...

Why I have so few photos of my lofting board...

Photo: jalmberg

 Next Episode: What you get when you build a boat

I hope you're enjoying "The Unlikely Boat Builder" as much as I enjoy writing it. Some people have asked for a way to be notified automatically when I post new episodes. I've just figured out how to do this, so if you'd like to be notified, please click on the link below. I promise I'll never spam you (and Google will have my head if I do.)

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-- John

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Lofting - Take 2

Out of ignorance comes innovation. Or at least the chance to re-invent the wheel.

Back at my lofting board, I had banished my cheap plastic spirit level to an out-of-favor position on a lower shelf in my 'work shop'. However, I still hadn't lost my faith in gravity. If my spirit level couldn't handle the simple job of drawing a vertical line, I had an even simpler tool that could.

I found my old fishing tackle box, stored away with the camping gear. I'd had that box since my college days, when I lived on Burden Lake in upstate New York. That lake was home to some mighty feisty Blue Gills and an expert angler, named Dewey, who'd taught me the trick of catching them (make sure your hook is in the water, not the trees.)

With a 1/2 oz. sinker and some fishing line, plus the dim memory of how to tie a fisherman's knot, I 'built' a plumb-bob.

When I'd done that, I hammered a small nail near the top-middle of my lofting board, and hung my new plumb-bob on the nail. Instant vertical line.

Then I used a trick found in every boat building book. Under the fishing line, I made a small mark with my pencil every 2 inches. Then I removed the plumb-bob and used a straight edge to connect the dots. That was my Station 3.

Next, I needed to draw the Load Waterline (L.W.L.). This is where my old High School Geometry came in handy:

If you have a line AB, and draw two arcs (red) AC & BD (AC=BD) and then draw a line (blue) at the points of intersection E & F, then you have a perfect perpendicular.

To draw such arcs, you need a big compass -- either a monster version of the two-legged dividers used in school, or something called a beam compass. I had everything needed to build a beam compass, so that's what I built...

 
Home Made Plumb-bob and Beam Compass
on my adjustable work bench (Helena's ironing board)

All you need is a bit of wood (I got fancy and used oak). Drill a few pencil-sized holes along one end, and bang a nail into the other. Then you can cut off the end of a pencil and press-fit it into any of the holes. That's all there is to it.

So, to draw the L.W.L., here's what I did:

1. mark on Station 3 where you want the LWL to cross
   
2. press the pencil into the #1 hole on the beam compass (shown above). This makes the shortest arc possible.
3. put the nail of the beam compass on the LWL mark
4. swing the compass and draw two small arcs that cross the Station 3 line -- one above the LWL mark (A), and one below the LWL mark (B).
5. move the pencil in the beam compas to the #5 hole -- the one farthest out
   
6. put the nail at A and draw two arcs, where you think the LWL line will fall -- one near point E and one near point F
7. move the nail end to B and draw two more arcs near points E and F
8. E and F are where the two arcs cross
9. connect E and F with a straight edge, an you have a perfectly perpendicular L.W.L. line.

Again, easy and very accurate.

Once you have these two perpendiculars, it's a simple matter to draw in the rest of the grid. As they say in High School, that exercise is left to the reader.

And that's how I drew my super accurate, totally level-to-the-face-of-the-earth lofting grids.

Lofting Lessons Learned

Hopefully, readers of this blog will realize by now that this is not a How-To... it's more a How-Not-To. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to pass on some lessons learned. They say you can't teach experience, but...

1. Don't mount your lofting board on the wall. I didn't have enough room on the floor for both the lofting board and the boat, so I thought I needed to mount the lofting board on the wall. But as future posts will illustrate, space is not a real problem. Loft on floor. By the time you start to put your boat together, you won't need the lofting board so much, and you can get it out of the way by leaning it against the wall.

2. Don't worry about making your lofting grid level with the surface of the earth... i.e., perfectly vertical stations, and perfectly horizontal L.W.L. Having a vertical lofting board planted this idea in my head, and I did manage to draw a perfectly level grid using the above methods, but as I later learned, this didn't help me in any way!  The lines do need to be perpendicular to each other, but it doesn't matter a bit if they are level, gravity wise. In retrospect, that effort was a total waste of time.

3. Do use a variation of my method, which is the 'trammel point' method mentioned in many boat building books. Since I didn't know what trammel points were, I had to re-invent the wheel, but you don't need to. After laying your lofting board on the floor:

1. use fishing line -- stretched twanging-tight between two nails -- to draw a perfectly straight Base Line (connecting the dots under the line, which is more accurate than snapping a chalk line)
   
2. use a home-made beam compass to erect your Station Lines
3. measure up the station lines to plot the L.W.L. and Floor Line

I personally think a beam compass will help you draw more accurate perpendiculars than a carpenter's square, so I'm happy I didn't spend the money for a square. But, fortunately for my poor readers, I don't have time to prove that assertion...

The build must go on!

Next episode: Building the Bones

I hope you're enjoying "The Unlikely Boat Builder" as much as I enjoy writing it. Some people have asked for a way to be notified automatically when I post new episodes. I've just figured out how to do this, so if you'd like to be notified, please click on the link below. I promise I'll never spam you (and Google will have my head if I do.)

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-- John

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Lofting - Take 1

My degree is in Computer Science, which is one of the growing points on the tree of Mathematics. But like everyone else, I suffered through high school Geometry thinking, "I'm never going to use this stuff... why are they teaching it?"

And I was right. For 30 years, practicing in a field of Mathematics every day, I never did use that Geometry. It wasn't until I was ready to pound my head in frustration on a concrete wall that I finally figured out why it was still part of the curriculum...

Having mounted my lofting board firmly on my basement wall, I was ready to "lay down" the lines of my boat. I would begin with the Profile view, and the first step was to draw the standard lofting grid of horizontal and vertical lines:

Lofting Grid - Profile View

While this grid might look abstract at first glance, the horizontal and vertical grid lines have concrete, physical meaning:

The L.W.L., or Load Waterline, for example, shows where the surface of the water will be, when the boat is floating. The Floor Line shows where my basement floor will be, when the boat is built upside down.

The vertical lines on the lofting grid are called stations. Station A shows where the absolute front of the boat is. If you held a straight edge vertically at station A, the bow of the imaginary boat would just kiss it's edge. Likewise, station S shows the absolute back of the boat.

Station 0 shows where the bow of the boat will slip into the water. Station 5 shows where the stern will emerge from the water. And the strong wooden forms, that Cabin Boy will be built on, will be positioned on my basement floor at stations 1, 2, 3, and 4.

In other words, there is nothing abstract about the lofting grid. Any errors I make in the grid will physically distort the shape of my boat. If the lines are not parallel to each other, and the proper distance apart, the boat I build will not be Cabin Boy, but some other boat, designed not by the hand of John Atkin, but by the ugly, misshaping hand of Error.

There are lots of ways to draw a lofting grid. Probably the simplest method is to snap a chalk line near the bottom of the lofting board and call it the Base Line. If you nail a long strip of wood (called a batten in boat-speak) along the Base Line, then you can use a large steel carpenter's square to measure off and draw in the vertical lines. Once you have them perfectly vertical, it should be simple to measure up the verticals to draw in the L.W.L. and Floor Line. Easy peasy, and probably pretty accurate.

Drawing Grid with Carpenter's Square

Two problems: (1) I didn't have a big Carpenter's Square and (2) I like the idea of building with the tools I have. Or at least trying too, before I run out and buy a tool that I may never use again. Plus, I thought I had a great idea...

While I was using my 1 ft. plastic spirit level to erect my lofting board, it had occurred to me that I could use the same spirit level to draw perfectly horizontal and vertical grid lines.

This won't work for builders who loft on the floor. But because I had a vertical lofting board, I had gravity in my tool box. The same force that kept planets in their orbits could be used to draw my lofting grid easily and accurately. After all, what could be more accurate than gravity?

Close up of my spirit level, perfectly level.

This technique was a bit trickier than it first seemed. As illustrated in the photo below, it took a bit of juggling to balance a long ruler on top of my spirit level, while drawing a pencil line... all the time keeping a slippery bubble in it's place.

My patented spirit level/ruler/pencil technique

(dramatic re-enactment)

Nevertheless, too stubborn for my own good, I persisted, and managed to draw both the Profile and Body Plan grids using this technique. When I was done, all the grid lines looked perfect.

It wasn't until I started laying out the lines for the Body Plan that I realized something was wrong. The Body Plan lines, projected onto the Floor Line amplified my errors. All the lines were off by a 1/4" or 1/2". Far to big to ignore. I had done something wrong.

I remeasured all the offsets, but they were correct. The only thing left was the grid. When I measured the distance from the Floor Line to the L.W.L. at one end of the grid, and compared it to the distance at the other end of the grid, I realized that they were not parallel... not even close.

So how could two lines that were perfectly level, as measured (again) by my yellow plastic spirit level, not be parallel? In other words, how could gravity be wrong?

I'm sure experienced wood workers smelled the problem as soon as they saw the photo of my spirit level. In a quality, precision spirit level, the ends of the bubble line up exactly with both lines on the glass when leveled. My cheap plastic level had a good 1/8" gap between the bubble and the lines, on both sides.

That left plenty of room for error. A quick calculation told me that even if I was able to measure level to within 1/4th of a degree, that tiny error projected over the 8 ft. length of my lofting grid translates into almost a .5 inch error. Clearly not good enough.

I use Trig without thinking...

After kicking the basement wall a few times, I realized that it was time to refactor, as we say in the programming world. In English, that means take out the old eraser, and try again.

And that's when I suddenly realized that an old trick from High School Geometry could come in handy...

Next Installment: Lofting - Take 2

I hope you're enjoying "The Unlikely Boat Builder" as much as I enjoy writing it. Some people have asked for a way to be notified automatically when I post new episodes. I've just figured out how to do this, so if you'd like to be notified, please click on the link below. I promise I'll never spam you (and Google will have my head if I do.)

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-- John

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My First Major Wood Working Project

Lofting is the simple art of turning the small-scale plans of the boat designer, into the full-scale plans you need to make patterns for various parts of the boat. It's a bit like dress making.

But in boat building mythology, lofting is the eye of the needle through which all prospective boat builders must pass before entering boat building heaven.

Every boat building book has a chapter that insists that lofting isn't a black art, that any damn fool can do it. They then try to demystify the supposed non-mystery with language and diagrams so impenetrably complicated that the mind -- at least this mind -- boggles.

Even Wikipedia, the giant online encyclopedia that can explain Nuclear Fusion with enough detail to threaten national security, sputters out after a few confused sentences when trying to explain the ancient and humble craft of lofting. They throw in the towel saying: "Generally, boat building books have a detailed description of the lofting process, beyond the scope of this article."

Boat designers encode their designs onto paper using three standard views -- Profile, Half Plan, and Body Plan -- and a table of numbers called the Table of Offsets.

Drawing by Howard Chapelle (public domain)

This standard system of encoding the plans for a complex three-dimensional structure onto paper has evolved over many years, and is an extremely efficient way to capture the essential information needed to reproduce the boat it describes, which is why it reminds me of DNA.

Lofting is also system that has been standardized over the years. In a nutshell, it boils down to two steps:

1. drawing a grid on a large surface -- traditionally the floor of the loft above the boat shop, thus the term 'lofting'
2. plotting the coordinates contained in the Table of Offsets on the grid, and connecting them with smooth curves

If you follow these simple steps, you end up with the plans above, full-size.

This task isn't really complicated, it's just persnickety and time consuming.

Having spent 25 years doing the most persnickety and time consuming work ever invented -- computer programming -- I found lofting the plans for Cabin Boy to be both sublime and incredibly relaxing. Compared to debugging a C program, for instance, it was a romp in the park.

Now, I have no doubt that lofting a 55 foot schooner would be a long and arduous job, and I have no idea where I could borrow the gym-sized space I'd need. But building a 55 foot schooner is the equivalent of cloning a Tyrannosaurus rex. Building Cabin Boy is more like cloning a one-celled animal. I was pretty sure I could do it.

My first step was to prepare a lofting board. While you'd need a huge space to loft a big boat, the full-size plans for Cabin Boy are small enough to fit on one 4x8 foot sheet of plywood. Traditionally, this is laid on the floor and the builder lofts his plans on his hands and knees. Gardener's knee pads are highly recommended.
 

Lines of Cabin Boy

Drawing by John Atkin

Unfortunately, my only practical building space was a semi-finished room in the basement. There wasn't enough floor space for both a sheet of plywood and an 8' boat mold, so I decided to mount the plywood vertically on the wall, like a school black board.

 My lofting board

Photo by John Almberg

I thought this was pretty clever for several reasons:

1. there was plenty of light in that spot
   
2. it would save my slightly creaking knees from crawling around on the floor
3. gravity would be a very handy 'tool', not available to those who loft on the floor

In fact, as I stood back to admire this 4'x8' sheet of plywood, mounted perfectly level on the wall, with 12 heavy-duty concrete wall anchors, I realized I had just completed my first wood working project, ever... and it was really pretty trivial. I wondered why I felt so good.

Helena came up behind me, put her arm on my shoulder, and helped with the admiring process.

"You've started," she said. And she was right. I'd cast off the lines to the Pier of Procrastination, and was on my way.


Next I'd lay down some lines.

Next Installment: Lofting - Take 1

I hope you're enjoying "The Unlikely Boat Builder" as much as I enjoy writing it. Some people have asked for a way to be notified automatically when I post new episodes. I've just figure out how to do this, so if you'd like to be notified, please click on the link below. I promise I'll never spam you (and Google will have my head if I do.)

Thanks for your interest!

-- John

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Dinosaur DNA

The scientists in Jurassic Park needed a full set of plans for each dinosaur they brought back to life.  If I was going to bring a semi-extinct wooden boat like Cabin Boy to life, I would need plans, too. And darn simple ones.

The 'plans' for dinosaurs -- as indeed for all living organisms -- were written down or encoded in DNA long ago. DNA is pretty fragile stuff and the 'plans' for 99.9% of the species that have roamed the earth are now lost forever.

But in the movie, billionaire John Hammond and the rest of his doomed team were able to recover the plans (i.e. DNA in dinosaur blood) from the stomachs of mosquitoes trapped and preserved in amber. Roll the mayhem and chaos.

 DNA animation
Wikimedia Commons

The plans for the 99.8% of wooden boats built in the last few thousand years have also been lost forever.  And the loss would have been higher if it wasn't for the Great Depression.

A New Deal project called The Historic American Merchant Marine Survey was established to study and preserve American naval history. The head of the New England section of the Survey, Howard I. Chapelle, documented many of the wooden boats that were, even then, rapidly disappearing.

Drawing by Howard Chapelle (public domain)

These plans are now preserved in Chapelle's classic books like American Small Sailing Craft, in museums like the Smithsonian and The Museum of America and the Sea at Mystic, and by the families of some of the great wooden boat designers.

By the way, the final report of the Survey, The Historic American Merchant Marine Survey (HAMMS): Works Progress Administration, Federal Project No. 6 - Historic American Merchant Marine Survey, containing over 1000 scale drawings of historic ships, was the 9th most expensive book sold on ABE Books in May 2009. It sold for $3500.

Luckily for me, Mrs. Pat Atkin still carries on the family business after the passing of her husband John in 1999. She even has a website, atkinboatplans.com, which itself helps illustrate the amazing diversity of old wooden boats. Highly recommended.

Mrs. Atkin doesn't take credit cards or online orders, though, preferring more traditional means of payment. So after dusting off my check book (talk about dinosaurs) and quill pen, I dispatched my order via the Post, and two weeks later, received a tube containing plans spread over 5 sheets of old-fashioned paper.

And what a thrill it was to spread them out on my dining room table. Old John Hammond himself couldn't have been more excited.

I had my Cabin Boy DNA...

Photo by John Almberg
Plans by John Atkin

But the purpose of small-scale paper plans is to efficiently encode the information needed to build a boat. To actually construct it, the builder needs a set of full-size  plans.

And lofting -- the act of turning easily storeable and mailable small-scale plans into full-scale building plans -- is said to be the task that separates the Wooden Boat Dreamers from the Doers.

Having spent more than a fair share of my life dreaming, I was determined to become one of the Doers.

Next Installment: My First Wood Working Project

I hope you're enjoying "The Unlikely Boat Builder" as much as I enjoy writing it. Some people have asked for a way to be notified automatically when I post new episodes. I've just figure out how to do this, so if you'd like to be notified, please click on the link below. I promise I'll never spam you (and Google will have my head if I do.)

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-- John

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A Boat Chooses Me

Newly-minted boat builders don't need to go down to the sea to drown. It's easier to drown in the sea of choices.

Now that I've made the unlikely decision to build a boat, I need to choose which one. Here is where I get my first surprise: unlike the mass-marketed fiberglass sailboats that I'm used to, which all tend to look alike, wooden boats were apparently built in a bewildering variety. Short and long, round and flat, sail and oar, lapstrake and carvel and strip and plywood and...

The list of choices goes on and on, even as the remnants of the wooden boat population die off.

In fact, the more I look into it, the more the words 'mass extinction' come to mind. Charles Darwin could have saved himself a lot of trouble with religious folk if he had studied the evolution of wooden boats, rather than life.

As Greg Rossel points out in his book "Building Small Boats", the ecosystem that boats live in is extremely diverse. Just consider the East Coast of the United States. Every creek and bay from the cold, rocky coast of Maine, to the warm blue waters of Key West is different from every other.

Just two examples...

If you made your living digging oysters in Long Island Sound, you needed a stable, shallow draft boat that was fast enough to get your catch back to market before your competitors. The flat-bottomed Sharpie evolved to meet the needs of fishermen who worked in this unique environment.

Drawing by barbetort

But if you ferried people and goods on and off the ships coming into New York Harbor, speed was your main requirement, since the first ferryman to the ship earned the most money. The round-bottom Whitehall rowboat was fast, tracked well, and could handle the harbor chop.

Photo by Harold Aune

These boats weren't present at the Creation. They evolved over time. And natural selection in boat design is just as brutal as in life. Successful boats returned to shore with their owners and cargo, unsuccessful ones didn't. So the designs that survived long enough for their lines to be taken down by Howard Chapelle and other boat historians were the best of the best.

And although the evolution of fiberglass and mass marketing triggered a rapid mass-extinction in the wooden boat population, replacing them with homogeneous plastic boats, the classic designs still exist, ready to be brought back to life, like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.

That's the good news. The bad news is that there are thousands to choose from. I start the selection process by making a list.

1. The boat I build must be short. Two reasons: the longer it is, the harder it will be to build and the more time and materials I'll waste if I fail. Plus, I hope this boat will eventually become the tender for a larger boat, and so will need to be short enough to fit on a cabin top. Thus, my boat must be a maximum of 8 feet long.

2. It must have a flat, rather than round bottom. A flat bottom is much easier to build than a round bottom (every boat-building book I own says this, so it must be true!). I want to finish this boat in one winter, not end up with a half-built fiasco that my kids will tease me about till the day I die, so relative simplicity is important.

3. It must be traditionally built, not one of these modern stitch-and-glue plywood models. My main purpose in building this boat is to learn how traditional wooden boats were built, so that I can repair them if necessary. So the boat I build must incorporate one or both of the traditional planking systems: carvel and clinker, also called lapstrake:

Drawing by Willheg

4. It must be both a good rowing boat, and a good sailing boat.

5. It must be beautiful, at least to my eyes. Over the years, I've discovered it's much easier to work on something you love. And even a small boat is a lot of work, both in the original build and in maintenance. A beautiful boat is more likely to get the kind of attention it needs.

All these considerations got me looking at the designs of William and John Atkin, the designers who launched the long-range crusing life style with Eric, that later evolved into the famous Westsail 32. The Atkins (father and son) worked at the end of the wooden boat age, and thus could draw on the entire history of sea worthy work boats for their inspiration. Their designs have a serious looking 'chunkiness' to them that make their smallest dingy design look like it could sail around the world.

And, in fact, I only looked at 5 designs before I found my boat. As soon as I saw her, I knew, that's the one. Or perhaps I should say 'him', because his name is 'Cabin Boy'.

Drawing by John Atkin

Cabin Boy's lapstrake sides and cross-planked bottom would let me practice both the traditional planking systems, and his spritsail gave him a jaunty look that I really liked. Just looking at this drawing got me thinking of sailing across a palm-fringed lagoon.

So, choosing a boat design ended up being easy for me. Would it be as easy to build?

As I inventory my collection of half-rusted hand tools, I doubt it.

Next Installment: Dinosaur DNA

I hope you're enjoying "The Unlikely Boat Builder" as much as I enjoy writing it. Some people have asked for a way to be notified automatically when I post new episodes. I've just figure out how to do this, so if you'd like to be notified, please click on the link below. I promise I'll never spam you (and Google will have my head if I do.)

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-- John

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