Frames

The summer has been really nice and warm - I for one have welcomed the +30 degrees Celsius summer days nice for sitting outside or working indoors with all the windows and back-porch door open and the heat slowly creeping into house. Unfortunately by the start of August these temperatures were gone and there’s also rain here now. Luckily I have a shed to take cover in.

Since I finished preparing the 8th frame last night and will start with the transom today I figured it would be a perfect time to look back at this summer’s activities.

timber

So the material. The original plans call for white oak to be used for the framework which is very North-American. Traditionally in these parts pine, spruce, and oak have been been used in ship construction. Oak would be very fine but securing the amount that I need would be tad too expensive - especially considering that there’s a risk of everything going totally wrong and the whole thing ending in a gigantic bonfire - a very expensive one. After some pondering and a few talks with far more competent people (the local shipwrights) I decided to go instead with Siberian larch.

Finally managed to find a place where I could go and do some sorting myself. Of course everything does not always follow plan so the dimensions I needed were 1 3/4'' * 4'' (roughly 4.5cm * 10cm) for the keel and framework, so a five-times-ten plus some extra labor on my part would have sufficed. But the stock available was only 5cm*12.5cm. And to add to that - the cross sections were almost all completely wrong… For the keel I wanted tangential cuts which was relatively easy to find, and for the frames and stem radial cuts which in turn was very hard. Not to mention some boxed hearts. But as I needed to do some cutting up by myself anyway I figured I could epoxy laminate two or more tangential cuts into a radial and ended up buying all the stock that was available.

Some of the lumber that I picked up had some deformations at places, and some with twists in them but as these were 5+ meters long and most of these would have to be cut into shorter lengths anyway I didn’t really mind about it. That was going to be just another sorting and measuring thing. Anyway I’m hoping that I’ll be able to do all the main frames including the transom (framing at least) plus the keel and stem out of these.

starting the build

In the end of last year I lofted the full size body plans on building paper and the first idea was to do full size frame plans on paper aswell but after some longer thoughts on this I decided to do all the frames on the shed floor instead one by one. Starting with a whatever datum line and a centerline at a right angle to what all frames will be relative to. Using a tick stick just like before picking up measurements from the loft drawing I’m going to be drawing up every frame one by one including the 20 cm wide floor support and 15 cm wide chine knees. As soon as the drawing for a frame is complete I can prepare the material and then assemble it on top of the drawing.