www.talesfromtheboatshed.com

Some say: “If you can piss, you can paint.” Of course, this is true in one sense: anyone can slap on a coat of paint. On the other hand – as with any activity – skill is required to achieve speed and the best results. And so we are finding!

Our progress on Westerman has been slower than expected. Our plan to complete the re-painting and varnishing in two weeks by Friday was always very optimistic. The decision to apply extra coats of undercoat, and the high humidity (over 80% some days) preventing us doing two coats a day, blew our plan out of the water.

We have caulked and payed some of the garboard seam (where the hull meets the keel), so the topsides are fully ready to paint, and have now had plenty of practice in applying paint … on with a roller and, always maintaining a “wet edge,” “tipping off” with a brush. This gives the best finish. Varnishing requires a cross-hatching method of application and again, maintaining that “wet edge,” so the all-important “tipping off” leaves no dragging brush marks.

We have also been preparing the spars – rubbing down, and applying new coats of varnish.

We needed to re-mark the boot-top. Most boats have a painted boot-top (stripe) around the waterline of antifouling in a different colour. Not just a simple bit of decoration, it can help to prevent fouling around the waterline by allowing antifouling to be painted higher up the topsides. The old boot top was too irregular to be simply reproduced, so we had to start afresh. There are at least two methods. The traditional method is to set up wooden battens at the bow, stern and mid-ships, level with the line to be drawn, and then, using string held taught across the battens, mark points on the hull. The modern approach is to use a laser level. We used the former. It is a tricky task, especially on a clinker hull. Once marks had been made, we “joined the dots” with masking tape – again, more difficult with it being a clinker hull. A lot of sighting down the line to make sure it was “fair,” and minor adjustments were required, before we were happy with the result.

It’s Friday, and a late finish, but we have managed to mask out the top line of the boot-top, and to apply a split coat of undercoat/gloss. We are looking forward to seeing her with the gloss coats applied, but we may have to do another split coat before we can get the gloss on – that’s after rubbing down between coats with fine sandpaper, and a wipe over with a brush cleaner-soaked rag.

There is at least another week’s work to do. The lower line of the boot-top needs to be masked off; the area below needs to be primed; the rest of the caulking seam needs to be caulked and payed; and then antifouling can be applied. Only then can the boot-top be painted. Oh, and there’s still more varnishing to do, both on the boat and on her spars!

It’s great to completely finish a project (and we will be “dropping back” on Westerman to finish the job), but the most important thing is that we have learned a lot. Two weeks was never going to be long enough.

Next week, we are supposed to be moving on to our four-week Spars Module, starting with making an oar. I don’t know, but we may spend a few days on Westerman beforehand – it really would be great to get that gloss on!

We had a lovely time in North Yorkshire. The heather was ‘out’ and the moors looked spectacular. There are some beautiful villages, and really good pubs. The walk across the top of Sutton Bank (James Herriot’s favourite walk) gave spectacular views across the vales below. Afternoon Tea at Betty’s in Harrogate was a great experience – well done Anna, the 7th Duchess of Bedford for initiating this great British tradition!

York Minster was very grand, but I preferred the Abbey Church at Ampleforth – perhaps because an excellent tour from ‘Father Paul’ was rounded off by him giving Sylvia and I a private tour of the crypt. Crypts, cellars and basements always hold a strange fascination for me. Freud would have a reason, no doubt, but I think it’s the element of secrecy and discovery that gives them that allure.

We visited the home (and factory) of ‘The Mouseman’, Robert Thompson, whose trademarked furniture we also saw in the Minster and Abbey, and the local church. Spotting the mouse is rather fun . The adzed scalloping to the tops to his tables, pews and other furniture reminded me of our Tudor boatbuilding module – where, ironically, the adze was used to create a flat surface!

Hutton-le-Hole, a beautiful village just south of the North York Moors, is home to the Ryedale Folk Museum. Nothing to do with folk music, it is a collection of reconstructed buildings from the Bronze Age to late 9th Century, and home to the Harrison Collection (of more than 10,000 curios and artefacts collected by two brothers).

The Harrison collection includes many medical artefacts:

This last exhibit reminds me of a story from WW2. Churchill was asked if a supply of condoms could be sent to the Russian allies fighting in severe wintry conditions. They wanted the condoms to cover the ends of their rifle barrels, to stop them getting stoppered with frozen snow. “Yes, of course,” said Churchill, “Just label the boxes English, Extra Small.”

Back at Boathouse 4 this week, we have started our two week ‘Painting and Varnishing’ module. Our task is to paint the hull and varnish the brightwork on Westerman, a Navy whaler. I had de-rigged her before our holiday, and we had removed her caulking and done a few minor repairs. Now, we have to get her looking good and – hopefully – ready for the water.

Ah, the weekend … time to relax. A classic boat festival nearby, at Birdham Pond Marina this weekend was too good to miss. Sylvia and I went yesterday, and there were some super classic yachts and small boats, as well as some classic cars and vintage bikes. AND there was no charge for the beer and wine, because they had not requested the temporary licence in time. Very good Pale Ale, and all the better for being free!

One of my fellow students, James was there, and we met our recently-retired Instructor too. Now I believe it when people say I look so much better since I retired – after just two weeks, Bob was looking years younger already! James and I did some networking with local jobbing boatbuilders, and with Tim who runs the boatyard here. Altogether a super afternoon.

And today, Sunday, we had our daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren for lunch and the afternoon.

Our Grandson has a new pedal bike, a step up from his balance bike. He soon got the hang of it and enjoyed pedalling up and down our road.

We have reached the half way point of my course in Boathouse 4. The year is going so fast. I wonder if there is time enough left to complete the process of putting my final years of Practice life behind me. I realise now that this is part of the reason for doing the course, even if it was not the original intent. Legal and financial strings, though flimsy, still bind me to the Willow Group – something highlighted only this week!

We have travelled today to ‘God’s own country’ – Yorkshire – and are staying in a stone cottage, just north of York, for a welcome week’s break.

It is just after 5, and I am sitting in the pocket hankerchief of a garden, that adjoins the cottage, taking in our suuroundings. A soft breeze barely tempers the heat of the sun, and the air is filled with birdsong and the buzz of bees. House Martins and the occasional swallow swoop overhead, and several different butterflies dance around me. A cock pheasant runs across the nearby field, as a pigeon swoops up, clapping its wings before gliding on.

As the shadows lengthen, the birds in the holly hedge sing even louder and sweeter, and I wish that I could identify them from the trills and tweets they are making.

The sound of the bees buzzing around the lavender, reminds me of Yeats’ poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43281/the-lake-isle-of-innisfree): ‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, …

In medieval times, rest was a healthy ‘activity’, whereas frantic work or listless idleness were taken as a sign of not being at peace with oneself. I can certainly identify with the former!

Brook cottage is certainly a lovely peaceful place to spend a week away, together. As the Welsh would say ‘Ile i’r enaid ddod o hyd i heddwch:’ a place for the soul to find peace.

Ahhh … tools! Can you ever have too many? I have been very fortunate to have inherited tools from my Dad, and to have been given tools by one of my patients, who was the Foreman in the joinery team at a local large boatbuilding firm, Camper and Nicholson. With birthday, Christmas and retirement presents, I should have been fully equipped, but it’s strange how strong the draw is to extend ones armamentarium!

I have mainly sourced additional tools from eBay, and the vintage tool stall at Winchester Market (on the first Sunday of the month). I bought a couple of items in an on-line auction a few months ago – it would be great to attend one of the David Stanley auctions some time. I have also bought from Tooltique – an on-line vintage tool dealer, who refurbishes and sharpens their tools really well, and prices them very fairly. On eBay, it’s fun to find and bid for good examples of vintage planes etc, especially now that I know the market fairly well, but it’s getting harder to justify buying additional planes now!

One of our group picks up treasures from car boot sales for next to nothing, but a recent visit to our local car boot sale was very disappointing.

Fellow students have recommended Leeside Tools as a place to get good second hand tools, but with my Saturday mornings usually taken up with DOLS (Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards) medical assessments, I have not got around to paying them a visit – until yesterday, that is. I was prompted after one of our gang of four bought a superb Stanley No. 7 plane there for a remarkably good price.

The shop is made up of four or five extensions and rooms, so it is only as one ventures deeper into these areas that the enormity of their stock becomes clear. Wow, what an Aladdin’s cave!

As well as a wide range of new and vintage tools, the owner, David, has created a small museum, full to bursting with his collection of planes, plumb bobs, brace and bits, and more.

Anyway, I didn’t find it difficult to find a few items I ‘needed,’ including some ‘pig-sticker’ mortise chisels, an I Sorby No.6 gouge, a Stanley No.80 cabinet scraper, and a 2″ chisel.

While there, a chap came in. “I need some tools from this list,” he said, brandishing a piece of paper I immediately recognised as the tool list for IBTC Portsmouth. And so it was, that I was able to give some – hopefully helpful – advice to one of the students due to start the joinery course in two weeks time. “Take a look at Tooltique.co.uk for your saws,” I told him, hoping David wouldn’t mind – well I had advised on his purchase of a Stanley No.4, boxed, for just £28, a reasonable starter block plane, a £6 vintage coping saw, and some chisels, including a nice I Sorby 1/2″. In fact, I rather enjoyed helping him spend HIS money!

A LITTLE ASIDE FROM BOATBUILDING:

I am no longer a regular GP, but I have witnessed and experienced the strain on NHS services and workers from the perspective of General Practice, which has been particularly hit by the reduced funding under the recent period of austerity. So, perhaps more than most, I maintain a close interest in the NHS, and was interested to hear the recent announcement from our new Prime Minister, of an extra £1.8 billion for the NHS. This announcement bears close scrutiny.

The headline figures are an extra £1.8 billion over the next five years, including £1billion for the coming year.

The 2018/19 NHS England budget was £115 billion, so an extra £1 billion for this year is only an additional 0.86%.

THE BACKGROUND:

Accounting for inflation, NHS spending has historically grown at an average annual rate of about 3.7% from 1950/51. However, the average growth between 2009/10 and 2014/15 under the Coalition government was 1.1% and from then to 2016/17 under the Conservative government was 2.3%.

Last year the government announced that an additional £20.5 billion in real terms will be made available for the NHS in England by 2023/24. When it was announced, this meant an average increase on the NHS’s budget of around 3.4% a year (i.e. nearly back to average annual increases). However, with inflation over the next few years set to be higher than expected, the actual real terms increase will be less than 3.4%.

At the time, health experts said that this money will “help stem further decline in the health service, but it’s simply not enough to address the fundamental challenges facing the NHS, or fund essential improvements to services that are flagging.” In January 2019 the National Audit Office said: “There is a risk that the NHS will be unable to use the extra funding optimally because of staff shortages.”

Across the country, many NHS trusts are in deficit, because they are spending more than they’re bringing in.

The NHS was also asked several years ago to find £22 billion in savings by 2020, in order to keep up with rising demand and an ageing population. So, the Government is promising nearly the same amount of increased spending over five years as the amount of savings asked of the NHS for the same period!

IS THIS £1.8 BILLION NEW MONEY?

The Nuffield Trust has said that this money isn’t new. It says the £1 billion added to the NHS capital budget was actually “cash hospitals and other NHS trusts already have, but have been forbidden to spend. They earned it last [year] in incentive payments for cutting their costs”.

But this money couldn’t be spent on the day-to-day running of hospitals, so it had to be spent on capital projects instead: things like IT, equipment or new hospitals. Ironically, with a total spending limit placed on capital spending, trusts found they weren’t going to be allowed spend all the incentive scheme money once they had it.

The Health Foundation says that “As a result of these spending limits NHS trusts were asked to reduce their capital spending plans by 20% … This meant that some trusts had money available to them which they were being asked not to spend.” This 20% reduction has now been reversed with the announcement of money for the NHS.

As the Health Foundation puts it, from the perspective of NHS trusts, this is “money they’d already thought they could spend”. But the Health Foundation also says that from the Treasury’s perspective it’s correct that this is ‘new money’—as it’s an extra £1 billion of spending this year that it hadn’t planned for previously.

The Nuffield Trust had the same view. It says that it “will feel like a new spending commitment for the Treasury. That is because it will no longer be able to recycle NHS trust cash stored in government coffers to fund other bits of government funding, and the total amount of money going out will therefore increase. However Mr Hancock was wrong to claim this was ‘new money’ to the NHS. From the point of view of trusts it is not.”

TO CONCLUDE:

NHS spending in the past decade has increased annually much less (about 60-70% less) than the average annual increase since its foundation.

The latest announcement is for a 0.8% annual increase for this year – hardly likely to reduce the approx 40% of trusts in deficit!

The Treasury will be spending more than it expected on the NHS, but NHS Trusts will be accessing money that they had already earned (but told not to spend).

We have learnt not to expect our representatives in Government to be straight with the voters, and tell us how it really is. The NHS remains a political football, when what is needed is a cross-party consensus, long-term planning and public agreement over what should and should not be funded.

Silly anachronisms continue. For example, a well-off patient with an under-active thyroid, has ALL their NHS prescriptions free, not just their thyroid replacement tablets. Conversely, someone who is struggling to make ends meet, but not in receipt of key benefits, may be paying for three or more items for their chronic eczema/ asthma/hypertension …

The NHS is a ‘holy cow.’ Politicians can play smoke and mirrors with funding pledges and announcements, but short-termism, and fear of upsetting patient groups, means that nothing really changes.

Mermaid is an Itchen Ferry. These small gaff-rigged cutters were originally used for fishing in the Solent, and often raced in town regattas. Mermaid’s final resting place is Boathouse 4, where she is used for planking practice by the IBTC students. Each student puts on a plank, and the practice planks are then removed, to be duly replaced by successive cohorts of students.

The preparing and fitting of my practice shutter plank went remarkably smoothly. Just a tiny gap towards the bow, which would ‘take up’ if she were ever to go back in the water.

With wood, the force of expansion with increasing moisture content exceeds that required to compress the wood. So, when ‘taking up’ occurs, the expanding planks compress the caulking seam (and the caulking material) sufficiently to dent the adjoining edges of the plank and make a better seal. That’s why traditional wooden boats open up when dried out, and are really best left in the water, with only brief periods out for repairs and antifouling.

Practice plank fitted, it’s time to do my City and Guilds ‘test plank.’ Normally, C&G planks are not shutter planks, because they’re more difficult. Happy to do another shutter plank? I was asked. “Yes, of course,” I said, my fingers firmly crossed.

So, it’s back to Lilian:

I cut the plank to size, put the bevels on the edges and …

… she was nearly there when I tried my ‘first fit.’

After much to and fro-ing between boat and bench, to take off just a few shavings at a time, I got her ‘home.’ The gaps disappeared as I got the plank seated right in – what a relief … I was really pleased!

I am now making a scarf joint for the joint with the plank that is to continue forward to the stem (bow). I will then add a small bevel for caulking before priming the plank and fixing it in place with screws and roved copper nails.

And planes?

Well, the inner aspect of the plank has to be bollowed or ‘backed out.’ This is get the plank to fit to the inner curve of the hull and to lie nicely against the timbers (ribs). Templates are made for each timber and the plank is shaped to fit using a bollow plane.

I had an old wooden plane with a rocker, but no transverse curvature, so I fettled this by adding a transverse curve to the sole, and grinding the blade to shape. This worked well, getting the plank to fit at each station, but I needed a different plane to even out the inner curve long the length of the plank.

In my worksop (Doc’s Den), I found a wooden plane with a flat sole. Ideal, I thought – I just need to put a transverse curve on the sole and it will work a treat.

I shaped the sole, and then the iron; rubbed in boiled Linseed oil; and re-glued the handles. The next day, at the Boathouse, I noticed the maker’s stamp on the plane:

Curious, I went to Google, and found that this plane was made in New South Wales, Australia, by Berg Tools. They made wooden Planes in the 1940s and 1950s. And there was picture of a plane, just like ‘my’ plane!

Anyway, it worked a treat: the ‘swish, swish’ sound, as it smoothed and bollowed out the inner surface of my plank, was wonderful.

I have altered a plane that I now know to be my Dad’s, but I have made it useful and fit for the task at hand. I’d like to think that he wouldn’t mind my adjustments, and would be happy that I had found a good use for it, pleased that I had found pleasure in its efficient and effective shaping of my test plank.

Well, I am pleased to report that my plank repair went OK and, after a second steaming session, we had the repair in place – albeit with a lot of clamps! I pulled the wood out of the steam box and ran to get it fixed in place – just a few minutes to work the wood before the heat started to dissipate too much to allow further movement.

Now, to caulking. Caulking is the technique of driving oakum (rope fibres and tar) or – as here – cotton into the plank seams, to make them watertight. Locally, there were teams of men who would be called in to caulk ships. Many of these teams came from the Isle of Wight – hence the term “Caulk Heads” for the island’s residents.

The caulking cotton is pleated in, and then driven home. A set of caulking irons numbers about a dozen, and the caulking mallet has iron hoops to lend it heft. Thankfully, I don’t need a set, as a single iron fetches £10-15 and a mallet about £90.

A Tudor interlude.

The 26th and 27th of July, saw me doing some Tudor shipwright work. The 16thC Mary Rose museum is nearby, and the College has long run a module on old shipwright techniques. We have had a trip to the woods on the Stansted estate to look at how shipwrights would select trees for timber, and this phase was to make some parts for a ‘Jollywat’ – a tender/deck boat – for the Mary Rose. The Jollywat became the more familiar Jolly boat.

So, I did some axing and adzing and marking out of timbers for the proposed Jollywat.

Back to my plank repair:

Red lead powder (rather toxic) is mixed into ordinary putty – the same sort of putty that is used in wooden window frames. The red lead stops marine micro-organisms from trying to eat the caulking material.

I have filled the holes left from removing the brass tacks that held the tingle in place, using thin sticks of oak – a process called ‘sprigging.’ The repair is now completed, and I am pleased and relieved in equal measure – glad too to be moving on to …

… my ‘practice plank.’ Yes, after doing a very difficult plank repair, I am putting a plank on an old boat called Mermaid as part of the college’s set curriculum. We do a ‘Practice plank’ and then a City & Guilds test plank.

Planks/strakes are generally put onto the boat from the bottom up and from the top down. That results in a gap in the middle of the hull, which is filled by the final plank, called a ‘shutter plank’. Fitting shutter planks is doubly difficult compared with the other planks

So, naturally, I have opted to do a ‘shutter plank.’ Well, I didn’t think I should do a simple plank after my recent repair on Tom Sherrin!

And finally, … to Valerie.

Today, my friend Craig and I went for a bit of a sail. We had both been given a trip on an 1895 gaff yawl called Valerie as a Christmas Present. What a beautiful boat she is, and it was absolutely super to sail on her in the Solent.

After discussing the IBTC course, I said to the skipper that if he was extending his fleet, I’d be available for work in 7-8 months’ time. Alas, he’s planning to downsize his operation. “Would you sell Valerie?” I asked. “Any boat is available for sale” he replied. So, I asked him what’s she’s worth, but he just said that she’d fetch three times the price if he sold her in the Med.

Ah well, one can but dream … just hope my shutter plank isn’t a nightmare!

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