The first is a beam saw.  This tool is the love child of a big circular saw and a chain saw.

It has a wide base, like a circular saw, but instead of a disc of spinning teeth, you’ve got a long chain saw sticking down.  As you can imagine, this allows you to make a very deep cut, and it’s the absolute tool of choice when roughing out 18″ thick chunks of oak for futtocks.

If a full-blown tool like this is out of your price range, you can go with a conversion kit.  See that little blue saw on the floor?  That’s a good quality Makita worm drive saw fitted with an aftermarket chain saw attachment.

They pretty much destroyed it on this project.  It’s not a bad tool, but it’s no match for thousands of board feet of thick oak.

Next up is a big, big circular saw.  One advantage of the beam saw is that you can cut curves with it.  You can steer a circular saw, but only in gentle, sweeping curves.  The bigger the blade, the less you can steer it.  Circular saws are great for cutting in a straight line, and they also have a thinner kerf (the slot that the blade makes in the wood) so you get less waste.

This big Mafell has a blade that’s about the size of the blade you’d have on your table saw.  It’s a beast.

Ok, enough tool porn.  Back to what’s been going on at the boat.

Or, to be more accurate, what’s been coming off.  The answer is: lots and lots of wood.

A lot of time has been spent making new parts, and now it’s time to make space for those parts to be installed.  This means cutting out large sections of the boat that won’t be able to be saved.

This can be heart-breaking if you want to save every possible original part of the boat.  This boat has been extensively surveyed, and the years have not been kind to many of the frames.  Iron sickness (areas where rusting iron destroys the surrounding wood) numerous holes from previous fasteners,  rot, and the various ravages of time have degraded the frames to the point where they are no longer safe or practically worth saving.  So, away they go.

We’ll try to save as many of the knees (those big white parts that look like shelf brackets) as possible.  We’ll also save most of the ceiling planks (the large planks that run fore-and-aft on the inside face of the frames).

The stem has been removed now, and you can see Leo standing in the boat, framed by the forward ends of the ceiling planks

Riley the shop dog supervises as Claes and Chris move a section of hull, with the sheer clamp and knee still attached, over to a storage pile.  Even though all of these parts may not be saved, it’s good to have them around for reference later.

For instance, here’s the ship’s registration number and tonnage carved into a deck beam.  They’ll probably want to copy this font and style when they carve in the new numbers.

I mentioned earlier that we’ll be saving the ceiling planks.  It’s not enough to simply remove all these planks and thrown them into a pile.  We want to put them back where they came from.  If you’ve ever seen photos of famous stone structures that were dismantled and re-built, you may recall that each stone gets labelled so that it could be put back in the proper place.  That’s what they did when Robert P. McCulloch bought the London Bridge and re-built it in Arizona.

This is a bit less involved than that.

Here’s Leo, standing on the ceiling that he’s marked with spray paint.

Each plank is marked with a number designating which course it comes from (1 is lowest, 2 next up, etc.), Port or Starboard, and since each course is made up of multiple planks, a letter indicating it’s order along the length of the boat (“A” is the farthest aft, “B” is the next plank forward, etc.).

So, the plank marked 4SB is the 4^th up from the bottom, Starboard side, 2^nd from the aft end of the boat.  The pink numbers identify the frame location for each plank as well.  Once everything is marked, the ceiling planks can be removed and stored.

The deck has been taken off now, and the deck beams are slowly coming off as well.

So, load after load of old boat is taken off and carted away.

The ceiling gets stacked up,

and in no time, there’s only half a boat left standing.

It’s rare to be able to see a cross-section of a big wooden boat like this.  Here’s a great shot of the major structural members.

From the bottom up, you’ve got the keel in 2 pieces, the floor resting on top of that (the piece with the arms stretching out to either side), and the keelson on top of the floor.  See that the top of the keel has a little angle cut in it?  That’s the rabbet.  The planks lie along the outer face of the floors with the bottom edge set into that rabbet.

With the demolition complete, it’s back to construction.  Leo is assembling the forefoot and forekeel here.

Work hard, play hard.  The guys decided that it was time for a pig roast, so they built a spit using an old bike, a motor, and a creepy fluorescent painted guy.

It’s a bit hard to explain without video, but when it’s up and running there are giant butterfly wings that flap, a moving tiki lamp, and a big slab of slowly turning meat over a fire in the half barrel.  All in all, a stunning presentation.

And the meat was delicious.

In particular, they’ve been working out the details for making futtocks.  One of the great things about the level of detail in these drawings is that both the front and back shapes of the futtocks are drawn in.

One face is drawn in green, the other in red.  This allows the guys to work out the bevels for each piece of wood very accurately.

Here’s a tracing from the lofting that can be taken downstairs and placed directly on the stock.

This is the best way to match the shapes that you need to your available stock.  It also allows you to find stock that has grown into the shapes that you need.  Curved parts are strongest when the grain of the wood follows the part’s shape.  That’s why knees (the look like giant shelf angle brackets) are usually sawn from the crooks of trees.  It’s also why builders will laminate thin pieces of wood into a curve; the thin pieces bend and allow the grain to follow the curve.

There’s lots of wood laid out, ready for this process.

And a lot more, waiting to be sorted.

The end result:

When they’re not working on futtocks, they’ve been assembling the forward section of the keel.

Getting all these parts to line up just right and stay together requires some serious  clamping.

One set of holes that have to be right are the holes that go down the center of the keel.  These are used to fasten the scarf joints together, to fasten the floors to the keel, and to fasten the ballast to the keel.  Getting these holes right is particularly important because the keel has all kinds of other fasteners coming into it, and you want to give those other fasteners as much room as possible.  Also, if you know exactly where your through-fasteners are, you can make sure to avoid them when drilling other holes for screws and bolts.

SO, Leo has been working on this problem.

He decided to build a jig that holds the drill exactly perpendicular to the keel.  This jig has a series of hole that guide a very long drill bit down into the center of the keel.    The open end on the left slides over the keel, and the whole thing is clamped in place.

Here, you can see the starting holes he’s made on a test piece.

You can see that they line up very well.  He’s using a particular type of drill called a barefoot auger.

This drill doesn’t have a little screw point on it like you find in a typical auger bit.

Sometimes bits will wander as they go through wood.  They can follow checks or grain patterns or just a soft section of wood and can exit the wood in an almost random manner.  There is some debate over whether or not a barefoot auger goes through long runs of wood with less tendency to wander, some people swear by them, others at them.  Leo started with one.

Remember how those entry holes started off right in the middle of a straight line?  Here’s how they came out.

Pretty close, but they wandered a bit up and down from the reference line.    He kept fine tuning it until he could dial it in pretty much every time.

Here’s an interesting aside, by the way.  Coronet had a lot of iron fastenings in her, and over the years, some of them simply dissolved in the salt water environment.  However, dissolved does not necessarily mean “gone.”  In some cases, it means, “moved.”   For instance, when the planking was removed from the stem, there were these odd deposits in the spaces between the keel and deadwood.

You can pull them out and handle them.

I’ve seen the same thing down in mine shafts.  This is iron oxide, redeposited.  It’s layered, like filo dough made from rust.  It crumbles easily in your hand.  This little cookie used to be a whole lot of nails.

But, back to the boat.

A lot of planking has been removed recently, and the stem is gone as well.

There’s been a lot of time spent on stock prep.  These oak slabs will most likely be made into futtocks (parts of a frame) and deck beams.

Upstairs, Eric has been working on the rudder post.

Here’s the original part.  The rudder post is the vertical part with the metal straps on it here:

You’re looking at the aft end of the boat.  The rudder attaches to those metal straps.

The new rudder post, like the old one, uses mortise and tenon joinery to lock it into the aft end of the keel.

That’s the keel on the right, and the rudder post on the left.  You can see the mortise holes in the keel that the tenons on the post will slide into.

The guys have been getting some practice in making rolling bevels using the ship’s saw.  Here’s one test piece that they were fooling around with.

Of course, when they fool around, they may be using a 400 lb chunk of wood…

More coming soon!

Those long bar clamps with the red handles are being used to hold everything together while the scarf is being fit.

On a job like this, the 1 ½ ton hoist is indispensible.  With a little practice, two people can easily move and flip an 800 lb chunk of oak.  Here’s the forefoot being worked on up in the lofting area.

The hoist travels on a gantry that runs the length of the shop.  It’s controlled using a small wireless remote.  Once Claes is happy with the shape of the forefoot, he can hoist it down from the loft and bring it right into place for final fitting.

Once the joint is in good shape, the rabbet can be carried through from one part into the other.

You can really see this transition when the forefoot is removed.  The rabbet is the angled cut.

Using the lofting, the shipwrights have made templates that accurately describe the shape and location of the rabbet at specific intervals along the keel.  These templates serve as checks to make sure that the rabbet is exactly as drawn.  Here’s Leo showing how one of these templates will fit against the keel.

In case you were wondering about the tools that are used to work timbers like this, well, they’re big.

The thicknessing planer is quite the beast.  Here’s Eric adjusting the knives.

A thicknessing planer works by pulling stock through it, and cutting off the top face of the stock with spinning knife head.  Most planers that I’ve used can handle up to 1/8” of stock removal at a pass, and that’s pushing it.  This one can easily handle cuts twice to three times that deep.  It’s a Whitney

and when it gets turned on, everyone pretty much stops talking.  It would be good to know sign language when it’s running.

The other really big tool at the shop is the ship’s saw.

This is a bandsaw, but unlike the kind of band saw you’d have at home, this one tilts the blade rather than tilting the table that the stock rides on.  A home bandsaw might cut through 4-6” of material, and so guiding something that small along a tilted table isn’t a big deal.  When you’re working with timbers that weigh hundreds of pounds, suddenly a tilting table becomes a very big deal; you’d never be able to hold the stock on the table as it goes through the blade.  So, the solution is to have a saw where the blade tilts and the stock stays flat.  That big “C” shape is actually a track that the entire bandsaw apparatus, wheels and all, ride along when the blade is angled.

An added bonus of having a bandsaw with a tilting blade setup is that you can change your blade angle on the fly.  This allows you to push the work through the blade while slowly changing the blade angle as you go.  The result is a cut called a “rolling bevel.”  A part with a rolling bevel appears to twist along the cut face.

There are a lot of rolling bevels in boatwork, so a saw like this is extra extra handy.

We’ll try to get some action shots of this big boy in the future.

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.

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.

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

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.

Although the ceiling planks (the long fore-and-aft planking that goes up the sides of the boat) were still in place, you could see the frame construction down in the lowest parts of the boat.

You can see that each frame is made up of multiple parts, called futtocks.  Yes, futtocks.  If you tell that to your teenage son, expect Beavis and Butthead snorting.  Go easy on him, he can’t help it.

Up top, the boat was looking more and more skeletal as a crew worked to cut away the decking and leave only the deck beams.

Many of the original square iron nails used to fasten the deck were still intact.

Here, you’re looking at the mast partner, the reinforced area that supports the mast as it comes up through the deck.

It was hot, hard, dirty work.

And you definitely didn’t want to be standing beneath the boat as the crew tossed load after load of wood over the side.

The stem was still attached to the boat at this point,

but the level of disassembly going on made it clear that its days were numbered.

Down at the other end of the boat, sawyer Ken Beck was working with his portable saw mill to mill up oak for the keel, new stem, and futtocks.

Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you, Ken is a wizard with this machine.

The lofting floor has been constructed and used to do some initial patterning of some of the forward frames.

The combination of deconstruction and first parts made it feel like things were starting to roll on this project.

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.

So, what was going on there?  Let’s take a look at the original boat.

If you look below the bowsprit (that big white tree coming out of the front of the boat) you will see 3 lines.  Those are the bobstays, and they help to hold the bowsprit down.  You can see the fittings for them in the photos above.  The bowsprit is being pulled up by all the forces from the various sails and lines that are attached to the bowsprit.  The aft end of the bowsprit is about 10′ or so back from the stem of the boat.  If you think of the bowsprit as a lever, there’s a lot of force being directed into the front of the boat from this giant timber.  You can get an idea of this by holding a broom handle at the end with both your hands, and have someone else push the other end.  There’s a lot of torque there at your hands, and even if you’re plenty strong, your hands will be moved by a relatively small push.

Now, the forces on the bowsprit are not just vertical, but horizontal as well.  The sails are pulling from one side or another as the boat is being moved by the wind, so the forces on this lever are also side-to-side.   To counteract these forces some, boat designers add in what are essentially  horizontal bobstays, called the bowsprit shrouds.  Here’s an old instruction manual on seamanship and gunnery that gives diagrams of these parts as well as instructions for setting up the rigging.

Too much information??  Oh, that’s just the beginning.

But, Back to the forces… Now, you may notice that the angle of the bobstay to the bowsprit is rather large as it goes down to the stem.  That angle gives the bobstay a lot of holding power against upward forces.  Imagine that the bobstay was attached  to the boat much higher up the stem, making a much shallower angle between it and the bowsprit.  It wouldn’t be able to resist the upwards forces of the sails as well as when it’s attached lower on the stem.

NOW, we come to the point of this whole digression:  The bowsprit shrouds, those lines coming out from the sides of the bowsprit, attach to the sides of the boat at a very shallow angle.  This means that they are not that good at resisting the side-to-side forces transmitted to the boat hull by the bowsprit.

In other words, the front of the boat gets absolutely whaled on by the forces acting on the bowsprit.  So, the front of the boat creaks and groans and moves, seams open up, water gets in, things start to rot.  You could build a beefier rig to help resist these forces, but it starts to make your fine yacht look ungainly.

And THAT is why you have the front of Coronet looking so rough underneath her planking.

Whew.

I referred to the bowsprit as a tree coming out of the front of the boat earlier.  I wasn’t kidding, it really was a tree.

Here it is coming out of the boat with the help of a 1.5 ton capacity crane.  Next, we’ll look at some of the replacement parts under construction.

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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