Coronet1885

Posted By Tom Daniels on November 25, 2009

Welcome to the home page for the classic yacht, Coronet.  Coronet was first launched in 1885, and was one of the most elegant sailing yachts of her day.  She was designed for crossing the ocean in style, and featured a marble staircase, stained glass doors, mahogany paneled staterooms, and a piano in the main salon.

Since 1995, Coronet has been on the campus of the International Yacht Restoration School, awaiting restoration.  Coronet Restoration Partners purchased her in 2006, and restoration has now begun in earnest.

We’ll be following Coronet’s team of shipwrights here as they bring this classic boat back to her former glory.  We’ll cover it all, from harvesting the timber to restoring the original interior.  If you are a builder, a hobbyist, a historian, or just enamored with classic boats, we think you’ll enjoy watching this beautiful vessel come back to life.

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Posted By Tom Daniels on July 13, 2010

During January,  Leo, Eric, and Claes focused on building the Stem.  Chris was in New Zealand for much of the month visiting friends and family back home.  It wasn’t all fun and games though, while he was there he worked with some local foundries to make some bronze castings for the boat.

The entire boat has been lofted on computer, and the lines from this lofting have been printed on mylar sheets.  The great thing about the mylar is that it doesn’t tear easily, or shrink and  swell with humidity.  You can also get very precise, multi-colored lines to work with.  This makes it much easier to lay out tapers and other  layers of information on the lofting.

The sheets are taped together using registration marks to line them up, and fastened to the lofting floor upstairs.

The shipwrights can then lay the parts right on top of the lofting to make sure that everything lines up exactly right when all the parts are assembled.

Here you can see the stem sections on top of the lofting, with clamps holding them together just as they would be when they are through-bolted on the boat.

Down on the shop floor, the long sections of the keel were tapered in preparation for being scarfed (sometimes spelled “scarphed,” by the way) together.

The keel had been turned on its side while the rabbet was being cut into it, but here it’s been set upright in order to fit and clamp the forefoot onto its forward end.   You can see how the rabbet has been carried through from the forward section of the keel (the lighter colored wood) into the forefoot (the darker wood above).

You can also see that the rabbet has not been finished in the forefoot.  Those 2 rectangular slots are the beginnings of the rabbet in this piece.

You can see the faint impressions of the same kind of slots on the other side of the forefoot where the rabbet has been cut.

Just in case it’s a little difficult to picture how this looks in the actual boat, how about we step back a bit and explain some terms.

Here’s the bow of the boat, partially stripped of planking.

The backbone runs down the center of the boat and primarily consists (from back to front) of the transom, sternpost, keel, forefoot, gripe, and stem.  There are more parts, but these are some of the biggies.  The hull and frames all connect to the backbone.  The planking intersects to the backbone  at that angled slot called the rabbet.

Here’s a detail of the previous picture with the rabbet marked in yellow

You can see how the planks end right at the rabbet.

The forefoot is outlined here in pink.

And here is the stem and gripe.  The copper cladding on the front of the stem assembly was still on at the time of this particular photo.

Behind the planking, and above the gripe is the deadwood.  Deadwood is essentially filler wood. By January, the planking has been pretty much removed from the forward section of the boat, and you can see how the rabbet comes up through the forefoot, and then continues on up into the deadwood.

Next up, some scarfing details.

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Posted By Tom Daniels on May 26, 2010

December 2009

Work on the stem continued throughout December.  The stem had been lofted full scale on the lofting floor, so it made sense to build the actual stem right on top of the lofting.

The stem is made up of multiple parts, so being able to lay it right on top of the drawing allowed the shipwrights to make sure that the joined parts followed the curve exactly right.  You can imagine how a small deviation in the joint angle could easily translate into a large deviation farther along the stem.

One way to make sure that everything aligns properly is to screw small wooden blocks to the lofting right on the lines that you want to follow.

You can see the wooden block here, just to the left of some wedges that hold the angled side of the stem.

When you slide your part so that it just touches these blocks, you know that you’re right on the money.

Of course, moving these parts around would be prohibitively slow without the help of a gantry crane.

You’ll be seeing a lot of this puppy in coming months.  With a wireless control box, a single person can move up to 1 ½ tons of wood as easily as a 2×4.  Ok, a single person with some experience.  And yes, it’s even easier with two people to guide these huge timbers around.

Just to put things in perspective a bit, these are the parts that are being replaced as they exist now in the boat.

The stem is the lower section curving up to the right.

At this stage, much of the outer planking has been removed.

The new keel is being fashioned alongside the boat.  This is the only place in the shop large enough to lay out a new keel.  You can see that the rabbet has been carved along the right side of the keel.

Boats of this size had many different structures for reinforcement.  The keel by itself is not strong enough to handle the loads placed on it by a ship of this mass.  The keel is reinforced by the hog and keelson (thick oak members directly on top of the keel).  Up forward, the stem is reinforced with a gripe.

The gripe spans and reinforces the joint where the stem meets the forefoot.  I’m looking for diagrams to make this a bit more clear!  Film at 11.

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Posted By Tom Daniels on April 28, 2010

By November 2009, the lofting floor had been set up, and everyone was working on the backbone.  The backbone of Coronet is made up of a series of substantial parts that lie along the boat’s midline: the stem, keel, and transom.  There are other parts that tie these all together, like the gripe, sternpost and transom knee, but for now we’ll stick with the basic parts.  As the name implies, the backbone is the part that ties everything together.  Break the backbone, lose the boat.

Eric and Chris have been up on the lofting floor, working on the stem sections.  They use information from the lofting to determine everything about the shape of these parts.  They use the lofting to get the general curves of the parts, the location of the rabbet (the groove that the planks land in), the changing taper along the stem… everything.

Here’s one section of the stem, laid on its side.

Another view, with the top of the stem to the right.  You can see how the leading edge gets wider as it sweeps down.

It was getting dark early in the day back then, and the guys used halogen work lights carried to the areas they were working.  Besides providing good, bright light, they give off some heat.  Not a bad thing on a cold November afternoon.

Here, Eric is using a plywood template that he made from the lofting to lay out the exact location, depth, and angles of the rabbet at a particular location on the stem.

He’ll chop and chisel a pocket in the oak that matches the shape of this template exactly, and then move down the stem to another location with another template, and chop a pocket there.  After a while, he’ll have a series of pockets that can be connected into one long groove.

Chris has been working on tapering one face of a massive chunk of oak.

He uses information from the lofting to draw in the edges of the taper on each side of the part, but then, how do you quickly connect those lines to produce your taper when you can’t see both sides at the same time?

Simple, use a jig.

Here’s a simple sled that guides a router with a straight-cutting bit and a guide bearing.  On one end, the jig has a board with slots that you set your bit depth with.  Line those slots up with your taper line on that side of the log, and you know that your router will begin cutting at exactly that depth.

You can see the taper depth line just to the left of the jig.  Note the screws coming out of the jig… you really want to fasten this puppy to the work.  An identical board with cut-outs for the router bit depth is attached to the underside of the jig on the other side of the log to lock in the taper depth on the other side of the log.

The rest is a piece of cake.  Run your router down the jig, and you’ll create a slot that’s the exact taper you want.  Move the jig down your piece a little ways, set up the same way, rout, repeat.  This gives you a series of perfectly tapered channels along the length of your part.  Connecting them is now easy.  You just run a power planer across the part until you get close to the depth of your slots, and take off the final bits with light passes of a hand plane.

Down on the shop floor, Claes and Leo have been chopping the rabbet into the keel in exactly the same manner.

They also have templates that they use to check the location, depth, and angles of the rabbet as they go along.

You can see in this next photo that the rabbet is still a little shallow.  It’s right when the template just touches the face of the keel along its entire length.

This is work that goes along inch by inch, day by day.  There’s no machine that will carve out your curving rabbet for you.  It’s all chopping and planing by hand.

It helps to have a good radio and get along with the guy you work with.

board is used to raise the jig to On the other end,  If you set your bit depth to plane down

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Posted By Tom Daniels on April 12, 2010

We’re catching up on Coronet’s progress here… soon we’ll be up to date.

Back in July 2009, Coronet looked pretty much like she had the month before.  Her interior had been long since cataloged and removed.

It was all but impossible to imagine how elegant she used to look below decks.

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Posted By Tom Daniels on April 3, 2010

June 2009 progress

Coronet has been in her shed behind IYRS for quite some time now.  Over the years since being set up “on the hard” as they say, she’s been carefully surveyed using laser measuring tools, and that data has been turned into a new set of computer-generated lines plans.

Her interior has been removed and is mostly stored off site, although we have a collection of artifacts arranged around the catwalk that surrounds the boat.  If you come to visit, you can walk around the catwalk and see these, as well as watch the shipwrights working on the boat.

Naturally, the first order of business when doing a restoration like this is to document as much of the existing boat as possible.  You take pictures and measurements of everything you can think of.  You keep everything you take out of the boat.  You look for old photos and drawings of the boat, newspaper stories, magazine articles, references to her in ships logs… on and on.  You never know when you’ll run across something you need, such as the placement of a winch or the style of deck chairs used on the original.

Then, there is information about the construction and state of the boat that can only be found by taking her apart.  In the summer of July 2009, the team began to tackle this part of the project.

[NOTE:  clicking on any of these photos will take you to the larger, original pictures.]

You’re looking at the starboard side (the right side, as you’re facing forward on a ship) of Coronet, with the stem to your right.  A section of the planking has been removed to reveal both the construction of the boat around the stem as well as the areas where the boat was failing.

You can see a lot of rot in this area.

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Posted By admin on May 26, 2009

The lofting floor is a large, flat area that parts of the boat are drawn out full size.  Many of the parts of the boat are made directly on this floor, and these can be huge and weigh hundreds of pounds each.  Therefore, the floor itself has to be made of some serious timber.  This is what we mean when we say Serious Timbers:

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Posted By admin on April 28, 2009

Some more photos of the harvesting process. Here, the sawyers are cutting off the “Gambas,” the stems of the tree used for the curved grain in the framing of Coronet.

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Posted By admin on April 13, 2009

CAOBA

By Bob McNeil

Our quest for mahogany for the restoration of Coronet has taken us to Guatemala.  Jeff’s wife, Gladys (born and raised in Buenos Aires), has been kind enough to search out sites in Central and South America in an effort to find supply of this wood to be used in the railings, skylights and other parts that are needed in this massive restoration.  We need about 12,000 board feet for the project.

Earlier a group from IYRS had worked to acquire the oak from the Royal Danish Forest.  This oak is in storage and will be used for the frames (ribs), keel (pieces 11”x24” nearly forty feet long) and planking.  This effort is well documented and we hope to get back to the participants, both from the IYRS team and the officials at the Royal Danish Forest and film interviews to incorporate into “Ultimate Restorations”.  The acquisition of this wood is critical to the project.  Its quality is high, its sizing helpful in restoring the vessel that was launched in 1885.

When my youngest daughter Emilie approached me last winter with the question, “Dad, where can we go for Easter vacation?” I was stumped.  Her sister Katherine is studying at Bowdoin.  Their schedules do not match.  Her mother, Deborah, is studying for a degree in counseling and her schedule does not match, as a consequence Emilie assumed that it was just the two of us and exotic places call!

So, where to go?  Complicating the issue was the need to begin to look for a supply of mahogany for Coronet.  Gladys had made some calls based on internet connections and had a source in Guatemala that we could visit.  A large order merits going directly to the source both for quality and pricing.  A factor that came into play in planning travel was that the cutting of wood in Guatemala was limited to certain times of the year, ending mid April.  So drag Emily on this excursion?  You bet!  It would be a great experience.

So on Saturday we flew to Guatemala City, met up that evening with our camera crew and documentary producer Terry Strauss and the next morning took the 6:50 am flight up to Flores, a historical center of northern Guatemala founded by the Spanish on an island in the lake, well protected from the Mayan natives.  The town is classic Spanish Colonial with a cathedral on the top of the island hill.  Quaint streets fortunately containing tourist from the world but not crowded, nor excessively “touristey”.  Interestingly on the peninsula across from the island still overgrown with rain forest, Mayan ruins rise as small hills.

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