Just as we seem to have completed our lofting drawing, Bob gives us some more to add, shifting the finishing line once again! But, it’s all good experience, and emphasises his point that from these outlines, the components can be made exactly to size for the boat building proper. And this is not just for the hull: the deck beams, the bulkheads, the positions of any engine bed, even the bunks and cupboards inside … all these can be taken from the lofting drawing.

But how can these lines be transferred onto a piece of wood? Well, there’s more than one way to skin this particular (ships) cat, but we used the good old ‘nail head’ method. Nails are laid perpendicular to the lines to be ‘lifted,’ their heads pressed into the line with a tap of a hammer. Then, a board is carefully laid on top, and pressed and hammered down. When the board is then lifted off, it has the indents of the tops of the nail heads. Beautifully simple, and a technique that goes back hundreds of years or more.

One the keel is ‘laid’, these frames are fixed on top of the keel, and everything held together, ready for the planking to begin.

We have also done another type of lifting, our first experience of lifting a boat out of the boathouse’s dock for it to go on its trailer. Great fun.

It’s about time that I said a bit about Boathouse 4 and its history, and about the Portsmouth Naval Base Property Trust and its links with IBTC Portsmouth.

Boathouse 4 is the last boathouse built for the Royal Navy.  It was constructed between 1938 – 40 – the only boathouse to be built in a home dockyard during the rapid rearmament period of the 1930s.

The building was originally to be built in two phases. The second phase would have extended it to Victory Gate, making it at least twice its current size. It was intended for Phase 1 to be fully operational before Phase 2 commenced, so a temporary corrugated steel wall was erected on the southern side. However, the Second World War broke out before Phase 1 was complete and, as a result, Phase 2 was never built – the temporary wall became permanent, and is still to be seen today. Whether true or not, holes in this corrugated steel wall are said by some to be bullet holes from marauding Messerschmidt fighters.

Boathouse 4 has its own dock, from which boats can be lifted onto the boathouse floor with the gantry cranes, some of which still have their WW2 camouflage. On the other side of the building is a canal with lock gate – the canal continues under the main road of the dockyard to the mast pond, where spars were soaked. With a thin metal sheet wall, and two areas of water open to the harbour and the prevailing winds, it’s no wonder that Boathouse 4 is perishingly cold in the winter. Ah, the joys of the boatbuilder’s life!

In 1941-43 it is believed that the building was involved in the construction of the secret prototype three-man midget submarine X4 and later X-craft developments. King George VI noted in his diaries that he secretly visited the Dockyard to view the X4 project. X-Craft were deployed to neutralise the German battleship Tirpitz in 1943. 

After a major refurbishment of Boathouse 4 in 2014/5 commissioned by the Portsmouth Naval Base Property Trust, the IBTC Portsmouth was duly established in 2015 – as an independent registered charity. However, it found itself unable to secure sufficient funding streams to make it viable, and ceased operating in August 2017. Certain assets were sold to Portsmouth Naval Base Property Trust, which took over the college.

In 2017, the Portsmouth Naval Base Property Trust was granted £2.4m in LIBOR funding by the Chancellor for its Memorial Fleet project. The project’s aim is to create an operational Memorial Fleet of small craft which have played a significant role in the defence of the nation during the 20th century. (LIBOR funding comes from fines levied on the banking industry for manipulating the LIBOR rate, and has being used to support “those that represent the best of values,” in particular military and emergency services charities and other related good causes.)

The Trust’s Memorial Fleet project comprises: the First World War Armed Steam Cutter Falmouth, which served aboard the cruiser HMS Falmouth in 1916 and is one of only two known Jutland survivors to still exist; Foxtrot 8, a landing craft formerly aboard HMS Fearless which took part in the Falklands conflict; High Speed Launch 102 (HSL 102); and the Second World War Motor Gun Boat 81 (MGB 81). There is also a collection of other historic craft, including Cyclops, a 1916 workboat belonging to the World War 1 battleship Royal Sovereign, which is currently being worked upon.

In addition, a replica is currently being built of Coastal Motor Boat 4 (CMB 4) which, under the command of Lt Augustus Agar, sank the Bolshevik cruiser Oleg in 1919. This most extraordinary Thornycroft designed 40 ft torpedo boat is worthy of its own blog post in due course. The only remaining original example of the CMBs is about to be moved to Boathouse 4 from the Imperial War Museum Duxford.

Boathouse 4 is free to visit (there’s only a fee for visiting HMS Warrior, HMS Victory and the Mary Rose Museum). There’s lots to see, and you can see me and the other students at work on the the boathouse floor. There are tours at 1400 daily with a volunteer, and I can also give friends and family a tour of the floor too.

This week was the first of our boatbuilding course proper, having completed our extended joinery course before the late May Bank Holiday. Yet it is hard to let go of our benches in Joinery 1. We feel safe there, after 13 weeks developing hand woodworking skills that were a mystery and a distant goal when we started.

So, with an Instructor off sick, and the remaining instructors trying to juggle all the balls, we spent Monday and Tuesday morning – and other spare moments through the week – at our joinery room benches. Each of us had small projects that kept ourselves gainfully occupied. Two of us made ourselves some ‘winding sticks.’ They can be bought on eBay for £60 – an inordinate price for two straight sticks with some simple inlay!

I was so pleased with them, that I just had to mount them in my toolbox’s lid. So here’s a picture of my ‘finished’ tool chest (parenthesis added because there’s always room for some adjustment or tarting up!).

I have also started making a wooden Dorade box. More joinery, really, but a link with big boat boatbuilding – after all, they were designed for the famous 52 foot racing yacht, Dorade, which was launched in 1930, at a cost of $28,000. A tapered dovetail joint is used for the baffle, which is a new type of dovetail joint for us, so it’s a worthwhile project for that reason alone – even if I do end up using it as yet another box!

We had a lecture on lofting basics on Monday, and on Tuesday afternoon we were let loose on the loft floor – well a few sheets of 8×4 foot plywood, painted white, which we screwed down to the wooden boards below.

We are lofting a 10 foot dinghy using an enlarged set of line drawings from a book. The measurements are laid out in a table of offsets. “There are a few errors in the figures” said Bob, our instructor. Oh, great!

Using a (blue) chalk line, we set out the base line and centre lines for the sheer plan (side view) and the Half Beam Plan (bird’s eye view). Old school geometry came in here for ‘erecting a perpendicular’ from these chalk lines and then drawing out a grid. Using the table of offsets, we plotted out the Base Plan, checking that the lines created are ‘fair.’ No straight lines here, it’s all about fair lines i.e smooth curves that look “right.”

After just three and a half days, we have lofted the boat, all bar plotting a new transom – “just to make it more fun” said Bob. More geometry and brain gymnastics here. It is certainly a steep learning curve, thinking in two dimensions, then three dimensions, and then looking at four planes of perspective. But great fun too – we are so pleased that, unlike the last group who did this as a desk top exercise, we are doing this for real.

The next step (and blog installment) is taking patterns and moulds for frames and components directly from the full-size drawings we have created … this is real boat building!

Friday saw the last day of our slightly extended joinery course. As a nod to the timetabled move from Joinery to Boatbuilding, scheduled for 28th May, we had a couple of lectures: naming boat parts, and interpreting line drawings, but we continued to work in Joinery 1, our second home for the previous 12 weeks. It did mean that most of us completed our Deck Beam exercise, and our stepladders which is quite an achievement. Frustratingly, my third deck beam – the one being marked for City & Guilds – was the worst of the three … rather loose. But it’s done, and I also managed to put some fittings in my tool chest lid on Friday, to accommodate some saws, which was a good note on which to end the week.

This week is an INSET week – i.e. a designated week’s holiday. We headed down to Cornwall, to see James and Steph in Helston for a few days, and we had a super time. We were joined by Tony, Sylvia’s brother, and visited both old and new sights/venues/restaurants: our favourite fishing village of Porthleven, and some beaches that were new to us (Porthadu & Gyllynvase). James took Sylvia, Tony and I on a tour of the base, and this time we had a guided tour of the cockpit of a Merlin from one of the trainee pilots – more switches than you can shake a stick at!

We start on lofting next week. Lofting is the taking of line drawings to full-scale, and then using these to make moulds and components for the build. This process was only superseded by computer CAD drawings in the 1980s. Previously, and traditionally, the only space to draw out the full size of a boat or ship was the loft above the boathouse floor – hence the term ‘lofting.’