23-Foot Cabin Cruiser "Beaver". Part III.
The after end of the backbone of this boat is composed of several pieces of wood, and, owing to difficulties many amateurs have in borine their shaft holes, we have shown that style of construction in which the shaft log is built up of two pieces of wood, with one-half the shaft hole gouged out of each piece, and the two held together by iron dowels. Get these two pieces out first, and the piece of deadwood that is to go under them, as per plan, and then bolt them together, riveting up the bolts on the inside of the shaft hole, but be sure they are countersunk well below the shafthole, so as not to interfere with the sleeve when you come to put it through the shaft hole. Then bolt the stern timber to the upper piece of the shaft log, and the up and down sternpost which binds the ends of these deadwood pieces together. Be very careful that the holes for your dowels which extend in a row either side of the shaft hole in the shaft logs are perfectly in line, so when you set one piece of wood on the other, they will drive tightly together. The two shaft logs in this boat, owing to the deadwood being only 3 inches wide, are made of heavier stuff, 4 inches, beveled off outside of the rabbet line, so they face down with the 3-inch stuff.
When the deadwood is all bolted together, drift bolts and all, get out a stern knee, as shown in the plan. To this the transom is to be riveted. The transom is made of 1 1/4-inch oak, the shape shown in the plans, but, of course, you cannot buy a piece of oak as wide as is required for this. So you have to join two or more boards together to get the required width. This requires another nice piece of carpenter work to face up both edges so as to make a perfect seam, and then dowel the two together. Fig 6, shows one method of doing this, that is, where they are doweled together, and Fig. 7 shows how an amateur who feels he cannot successfully make the dowel joint, can put them together by nailing cleats across the inner face of them.
Figures 6,7 of 23-Foot Cabin Cruiser "Beaver".
It is generally customary to get this much of the boat all bolted together before the keel is "set up," as it is termed, and the manner of doing this varies according to the conveniences — or lack of them — at the builder's disposal: For instance, a man who has a shop with a good, level floor to work on, has many advantages over the man who has to work outdoors on the ground. All the former has to do is to lay a pile of blocking along the floor which will raise his keel 14 inches at the forward end and 6 1/2 at the after end, as marked in the plan. But a man who has to do this work outdoors will have to scrape away the loose earth and get down to hard pan before he begins to build up his blocking. If he doesn't, he will find that as the weather comes and goes, rain and dry, the blocking will settle his boat all out of line.
The manner of holding the keel firmly to the blocking while you put up the molds and proceed to the building of the boat is also done in various ways. Fig. 8 shows the method where these braces are carried down to the floor or to the ground, as the case may be, while Fig. 9 shows a much better system of shoring the keel to the rafters or beams overhead, which leaves the floor perfectly clear for a man to walk and work around his boat without stumbling over the braces. The stem and transom should be braced both sidewise and fore and aft, as considerable strain is to be put upon both of them when you come to bend the stiff yellow pine ribbands around as you proceed with the work. Where these braces are nailed fast to the upper part of the stem, called the stem head, it is customary to leave that part of the stem larger than is needed for the finished job, or to leave the stem head longer than is actually needed, and then when the planking is all on and you can dispense with the shores, the stem head, which at this part is full of nails, can be dressed down or if left longer, can be sawed right off and thrown away. In the case of the after end at the transom you cannot do this, so secure the braces to the inner face of the transom, where the holes will not show when you take the nails or screws, whichever you have used, out of the braces.
Figures 8,9 of 23-Foot Cabin Cruiser "Beaver".
The temporary molds which are to serve as guides to give you the shape of the boat when framing, can be made of about 1-inch stuff if the boat is to be built with cold fitted timbers. By this I mean timbers bent over a where the two join together by a piece 6 or 7 feet long, to which they are riveted or screwed.
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