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.

Taking off the tingle – a large thin sheet of copper fixed in place over some sealant with copper tacks.
Minus her tingle, there’s trouble at the bow end of the lowest (garboard) plank.
After removing old filler, a long diagonal split in the garboard is revealed. It has been repaired with bronze screws which had severely corroded due to electrolysis (de-zincification).
I cut back the forward section of garboard plank.  This revealed an unusual construction detail (never before seen by any of the instructors at IBTC): there is no rabbet (step) for the garboard to rest into. Instead, it is laid against a bevel on the keel, which means the plank is not securely seated onto the keel.  


A groove has been formed at the bottom edge of this bevel, seemingly by the attempts to caulk this seam as part of the repair to this damaged area. 

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.

A scarf joint is a way of joining two pieces of wood with a diagonal cross-over section.

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!

A loosely fitting piece of plywood, nailed in place, makes my spiling batten. A rectangular piece of wood (a spilling block), run along the edges of the adjacent plank and the keel, with a pencil on its inside edge, scribes a line parallel to the desired size of my plank repair’s outer surface.
The second technique is to use a set of dividers to take the measurements to the edge of the plank.
The spiling batten is removed, nailed to the wood to be used for the repair, and the outline of the plank to be made is transferred from the spiling board, by reversing the above processes.
The repair piece duly cut out. Now it gets even more complicated …
A so-called ‘bevel board’ marked with the angle of the bevel of the plank above, and the angle of the contact face on the keel.

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.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *