Staying with Tom Sherrin, my next job was to remove a ‘tingle’ and take a look beneath it.

A tingle is a batten or board used as a patch to cover a split or damage to the planking of a boat. Patches can also be made with lead or copper plate. Properly caulked and fastened, a tingle provides a sturdy repair until the damaged plank can be properly replaced.

At the forefoot on the starboard side there was a large copper tingle.  It probably covered a broken plank. The tingle had to come off, and whatever lay beneath would need a proper repair.

So this repair was unsuccessful, either initially, or it failed some time later. That’s why a tingle was added to fix the leak, until a substantive repair could be done.

A plank repair is called for. Step forward Stuart Morgan!!!

I cut back the damaged section, and scarfed the end of the plank.

Time for the dark art of spiling.

Spiling is a way of marking out the shape of part of a boat, where it is curved or otherwise complex, and cannot be fitted directly. A spiling batten is laid over the gap to be filled, such as a plank or bulkhead. The accurate lines of the edges for the piece being made are then drawn onto the spiling batten. There are at least two ways of making those lines – and, of course, I used both!

I now need to shape my repair piece to fit in place, getting the bevels right by using the information on my bevel board. All this while being unable to offer up the board to the hole, because it is straight and needs to be both curved and twisted.

And here’s where the skinning of cats comes in.

Ask the opinion of three doctors, and you’ll probably get three different answers. So it is with boatbuilders. There are seemingly several ways to skin every cat … every task in building or repairing a boat.

We are short of Instructors due to sickness and people leaving, and due to difficulty finding replacements – a bit like General Practice! The paradox is, that, nevertheless, there are often multiple varied opinions on how we could/should complete each project. This plank repair has exemplified the issue.

The initial advice, was to carve the repair piece to the inner shape, and then carve out the outer face. It would be difficult. The alternative was to laminate a repair piece on a jig, but this would be no less complicated or difficult. On Thursday, it was suggested that the repair piece could be steamed to shape, though others disagreed that this was possible. Nevertheless, the final decision is to try and steam the repair in place, albeit this is something of an “experiment.”

All I want, is to do a good job, and to enjoy the work. Watch this space.

Tom Sherrin is a Poole Harbour Pilot Launch, designed in the 1960s by John Askham of Bembridge, Isle of Wight, and built by James and Caddy of Weymouth.   She was launched in 1970, and served as a pilot cutter until 1988, and was subsequently sold to the Harbourmaster in Alderney, for use as a pilot boat, work boat and occasional push tug. In 2000 she was purchased by the MVS (Maritime Volunteer Service) in Poole. She came to Boathouse 4 in December 2015.

There is still much to be done for her restoration (lots of pics on this hyperlink), and my first task on this boat was a minor repair, requiring a ‘graving piece.’

Rather than replace an area of minor damage, it is often possible to make a repair by fitting a graving piece. This is a small piece of wood, often diamond-shaped, or an oblong with pointed ends, laid into the damaged area, once the damaged timber has been removed.

A graving piece, often nicknamed ‘gravy bit’, is also known as a Dutchman repair or just Dutchman – one famous small yard, Hilliards, uses the nickname ‘little boy’. Of course, the reference to Dutchmen and little boys, is to the apocryphal little Dutch boy who put his finger in the dyke to stop a leak.

After deciding how much timber needs to be removed, the graving piece is made, just big enough to cover the damaged area.

The graving piece is cut out of a piece of wood that is thicker than the depth of the repair, making it both stronger and easier to handle. Once fitted it is easy to remove excess thickness with a plane or a sharp chisel.

Next, the graving piece is put in place on the plank, and carefully scribed around using a knife to ensure that the scribed lines perfectly define the shape of the graving piece. The damaged area is now chopped out.

The graving piece is then glued into place, and often screws or other fixings are added once the the excess thickness has been removed to make the patch repair level with the surrounding wood.

On the keel of Tom Sherrin, just aft of the bow, a knot in the oak had split open (probably due to the drying out of the boat). The hole created extended right through the four inch thick keel.

A two part Dutchman repair was agreed. This is known as a ‘top hat’ repair, because the outside graving piece overlaps the deeper part, like the brim of a top hat. This has the advantage of the water pressure pushing the outer part against the inner part, making a sounder repair.

My fellow student, Tom, did a one piece repair to the smaller defect on the other side.

As I will elaborate upon in my next post, there is more than one way to skin a cat, and that’s certainly the case here. As the Head of the College said, “In a commercial yard, you’d just fill the hole with epoxy and wood fibres, and have the job done within an hour or two.” This, after I had spent a few days doing this repair! Never mind, it’s always good to learn the gold standard techniques, and gain experience and skills in doing that … you can learn the short cuts later.

It’s like that in medicine and, no doubt, in other professions too. As medical students, we learnt how to ‘clerk’ a patient by taking a full history and performing a full examination … taking nearly an hour at first to do so. On qualifying, we were clerking in hospital admissions in a fraction of the time. A few years later, it was 10 minute consultations in General Practice!

I sometimes feel frustrated at how long it takes me, to complete a job on a boat. The others feel the same. Worth remembering then, that everything we are doing is for the first time; how one does speed up after the first time of doing something new; and that no skill comes without repetition and experience.

My next ‘gravy bit’ won’t take me half as long!

Three weeks ago, we moved from lofting to Big Boat Boatbuilding, starting with making and fitting new quarter knees and refashioning some floors on Lilian.

The Lilian is a 25ft. open motor launch built in 1932 by Hincks Boat builders of Appledore in North Devon.  She was commissioned by Mr. Plumber, the owner of the Anchor Hotel at Porlock Weir, to take guests on sightseeing tours of the Exmoor coastline, pick up passengers from the paddle steamers Waverley and Balmoral and bring them ashore for cream teas etc. Later, she was used for commercial fishing until 1984, and has been in private use since then.

She is of Carvel construction, and was built with Larch on Oak with a solid Elm stern and was powered by a three cylinder diesel engine. 

With a new keel, new planks, and new timbers (ribs), there is little left of the original boat, but she still has her frames and some deadwood structures.

Our first job was to fit a pair of Quarter Knees. Think of the hind quarters of a horse or cow, and you can understand the nomenclature and siting of these knees (brackets).

After making a plywood template for the required shape, wooden blocks (cleats) are bolted to a worktop, and the laminates are coated with glue, and then clamped in place for 24 hours.

To fix the knee in place, pilot holes were drilled, and thick copper nails driven through. We used three 6 inch nails from stock, but needed some longer ones as well, so I made three longer nails from 6mm copper rod. Domed copper washes are then driven down over the nail, and excess material is cut off the protruding nail, which is then ‘peined’ over the washer, creating a rivet-like fixing.

If knees aren’t what you’d think them to be, then floors are still less so. You don’t stand on the floors of a boat, you stand on the deck. The floors are strong structural timbers that lie across the bottom part of the boat, to which the planks are screwed.

Due to the movement of the shape of the boat in its restoration from a very dilapidated state, the floors and frames are no longer fitting properly. The gaps under ‘my’ floor were up to 10mm in size. In addition, the Limber Holes, that allow big water to flow along the boat and not collect in pockets, were too wide. By scribing a line parallel to the inside of the hull, the floor was re-shaped, and Graving Pieces were fitted to reduce the size of the limber holes, so that there was sufficient wood to take a screw through the plank below.

Having got a good fit, I drilled a hole through the frame and keel, and made a bolt out of 1/2 inch silicon-bronze rod (using a die to make a thread for the first time in over 40 yrs!).

These were two projects that were veery challenging at times, but equally satisfying to complete. I have gained lots of useful experience in various techniques: laminating, fitting to complex bevels, making copper nails, roving copper nails, scribing wood to fit curves, making bolts, drilling 8 inch holes accurately ….

In the last few days, I have started working on another boat: Tom Sherrin – a Poole Pilot Launch. This is another long-term restoration project. I have been tasked to undertake a repair on her keel.

A new arrival