Inside IYRS: Planking all around

Now that the Watch Hill 15 has been framed, it's time to fine tune. The crew uses battens laid along the frames to check for fairness.

As the batten rides along the frames and floors, the crew looks for areas where the batten seems to ride up on a rise, or span over a low spot. Sometimes the frame may be canted just a little bit, and one edge is higher than the other.

They use this information to selectively spokeshave off little bits here and there. The goal is for the batten to come down and touch each frame with no high or low spots.

Since the batten will bend in a fair manner, it's the perfect way to check that a curve is fair and pleasing. Our eyes are very good at detecting straight lines, but nothing beats a batten for assessing tiny deviations from a given curve.

Click here to read this entire IYRS Blog entry. (Lots and lots of photos.)

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VESTAS Sailrocket 2 sets its sights on world speed sailing record

It's built specifically for speed and nothing else.

The Australian-built Vestas Sailrocket 2 is currently in Walvis Bay, Namibia, where it will attempt to break the world speed sailing record.

Designed and built from the ground up with a focus on speed, the boat and the VSR2 team have headed to Walvis Bay in Namibia with the aim of breaking the outright world speed sailing record for the short distance 500 meters (1,640 feet) of 55.65 knots (64 mph) set in October 2010 by American kite-surfer Rob Douglas.

In 2008, the original Vestas Sailrocket 1 boat hit speeds of more than 52 knots in Walvis Bay, Namibia, but failed to clinch the outright record before flipping as it approached record-breaking speeds.

Read the complete story and see many photos and drawings.

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Sunken Rhode Island barge surfaced as salvage efforts near completion

BOSTON – The U.S. Coast Guard, in coordination with Donjon Marine, Clean Harbors and partner agencies oversaw the surfacing a barge that sank Oct. 31, 2011, directly under the Newport/Pell Bridge in Newport, R.I., Monday.

The construction barge is owned by Abhe & Svoboda, Inc. and was being used as part of a major painting operation on the Newport/Pell Bridge.

After several weeks of coordination with port and industry partners, salvage crews hoisted the sunken barge to make it easily accessible for hazardous materials recovery. Crews then rigged fuel removal lines and have recovered approximately 1,900 gallons of diesel.

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DoryMan Blog: Nova Scotia Schooners

Halifax, Nova Scotia.

On the back of the Canadian dime you will find the world famous wooden schooner Bluenose, the pride of Nova Scotia, and the fastest of her kind in the 20th century.

The Nova Scotia schooners were home for fishermen on the Grand Banks who fished from dories carried on deck during the heyday of the cod fishery.

But schooners aren’t just a relic from a bygone era. In fact, there’s a resurgence in wooden schooner building happening in Nova Scotia and membership in the Nova Scotia Schooner Association has increased steadily during the past decade.

(check out this video) Nova Scotia Schooners Trailer:

Nova Scotia Schooners is a film featuring four men of different backgrounds who share a passion for schooners and are each doing their part to keep these wooden vessels alive. The documentary was filmed during the summer of 2011 and includes scenes from the Nova Scotia Schooner Association annual race week as well as the reconstruction of Bluenose II, currently underway in Lunenburg.

Read the complete blog entry

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Winter Boatbuilding Courses at the Cape Cod Maritime Museum

The following courses are available for December 2011 & January/February 2012:

Half-Model Making: One of the most satisfying wooden boat projects is building a half model of your favorite design. Half model making helps understand hull forms and design concepts as well as challenging your wood working skills. In this course not only will we learn how to build a model using the lift method, but we will talk about the lines which make up the hull shape, such as waterline shapes, buttock lines and body sections.

Dates: December 12th-16th (5 nights)
• Time: 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
• Cost: $225 non-members, $180 CCMM Members
• Tools: spoke shaves, chisels, block plane
• Design: Catboat 1″=1′ scale

Visit the Cape Cod Maritime Museum website for a complete schedule, course listing and registration details.

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Formosa 41 Blog: Making the change to the v-berth

To start things off , I hope everyone has had a wonderful Thanksgiving !

Now to update you on the boat refit from our last post , Our plans are to move the sleeping quarters to the vberth and change the setup to the bathroom.

In the drawing below you will be able to see how we are making this change. In this time we have removed walls and added the supports for the bed and cabinets for storage.

Read the complete blog entry and view the full size pictures.

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Carving a Siberian Dugout Canoe

Here's a nice video showing two men carving a dugout canoe from a trunk of Siberian aspen. It's not in English, but among the points of interest are:

• the use of an axe with curved lips, like that of an adze, for hewing the sides of the log
• the care and precision with which the sides are hewed. A long straightedge is used to detect high spots that are then hewed down.
• the use of dozens of small pegs to achieve a consistent wall thickness. Dozens of holes are drilled into the outer surface of the log, then small pegs of a consistent length are pounded into the holes. As the inside is hollowed out and the inner ends of the pegs revealed, the builders know they have hollowed enough in that place. Note how the canoe is carefully lined off first, so that the pegs are installed at consistent intervals.

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Adventures in Woodworking: The Reject Roubo

I’m happy to announce the completion of my workbench! I call it the “Reject Roubo” as it was constructed almost entirely out of reject lumber that was given to me by a church friend whose husband runs a timber export business. I bought the big wooden screw for the leg vise ($10), and the glue, and that’s pretty much it.

This workbench was a LOOOOOONG time in coming. Seriously. Looking back on my blog, here are some real quick highlights:

• December 2007: I purchase my first bunch of boards for what the top of what I believe was to be a Roubo-style workbench. I never finished prepping these 16 boards.
• May 2009: Now in a different home, I start pondering afresh how I’d build my Roubo workbench.
• June 2010: I receive free lumber and have no excuse!
• May 2011: I declare the bench completed (as in entirely assembled), and stated that within the week I expected to complete the flattening of the benchtop.
• September 2011: I request a kick in the pants.
• October 2011: I finally get going, and indeed, finish the bench in virtually no time.

So that is about 4 years from start to finish. About a year and a half on this current iteration. But it’s done. Pics!

Read the complete blog entry.

(Several high quality photos. Ed.)

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On Board with Mark Corke: Trailer Tips

So you bought the boat but now the time comes when you attach it to the back of the car or truck and drive it home.

Generally speaking the larger and more powerful the vehicle the bigger the and heavier the boat that you will be able to tow will be but you should always check the vehicle manufacturers hand book or website for the maximum towing weight of your particular car or truck.

After all it would be a bad move to buy a boat only to find out that you need another car to tow it with, of course the other option if you only tow infrequently would be to hire a vehicle.

I used to do just this before I had a large truck, my boat is 26 feet long and the family car was not up to task.

This was economical for me as I tend to put the boat in the water at the beginning of the season and pull it out in the fall, so the boat and trailer only did two trips per year

Read the complete blog entry.

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Inside IYRS: Framing season is in full swing

The students have been off on Thanksgiving break for the past few days, but right before that, everyone was bending in frames.

Some people really liked milling up stock, and so they did that. A lot.

For one thing, you get to work out jigs to make production jobs go faster with consistent results. Here's a setup for routing a slight radius on the edge of a frame.

With so many boats all needing frames, it becomes necessary for someone to take on the task of organizing all the stock as it gets steamed. This student keeps tabs on which frames go in at what time, and then lets folks know when their frames are ready.

Just because it's not glamorous doesn't mean it's not critical.

So, here's the sequence that the first year student go through for every frame in their boat.

Prep your boat. Put clamps everywhere they'll be needed so that people can grab them without hunting around.

Click here to read this entire IYRS Blog entry. (Lots and lots of photos.)

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