Week Three: Chuckanut 15 frame completed

A new group of boys has had a crack at boat-building, and is making good progress.  The carlins, which define the curving edge of the cockpit, have been lashed and screwed in place.  The boat came off the strongback on Thursday, with brief celebration.  The keel has been lashed.  The floorboards have been roughed-out.

On Sunday the church will celebrate our accomplishments and bless the unfinished boat.  Only another week's work will see her ready to "splash."  On the following Sunday, August 5, we will launch the new boat and take turns paddling her. 

In the meantime, the boys have been helping me to skin and paint the trial boat--a 12-foot version of the same design that they are building.  With luck, we we be able to take this boat to the water on Sunday even though the Chuckanut 15 won't be ready yet.

Ian lashes chine 1.

Oiling the frame with tung oil.

Jonathan poses for the camera.

Chuckanut 12: skinning the bottom.

Chuckanut 12: skinning the deck.

Chuckanut 12: second coat of Rustoleum.

Note: the plans for both boats come courtesy of Dave Gentry from gentrycustomboats.com.  Plans for the Chuckanut 15 were donated free of charge.  Thank you Dave!

The Kayak Comes Together

Nine days after they arrived, the boys are gone again, knowing a little more science and a little bit about Arctic peoples, and also leaving a boat about half done.  The second group comes Monday!

Teams hold some of the parts they cut.  Keel, two frames and gunwales are already on the strongback.  Pictured from left: Ethan, Sanfanity, Jeremy, Nathan, Nick, Adam, Shane and Nate, Joshua, Taylor, Etson, Emilio.

This is where the parts will end up!

Emilio cuts a stringer.

Shea and Devyn trim chine 2.

Ethan drives a screw to hold gunwale to stem.

Jeremy lashing chine 2 to frame 4.

Josh lashes chine 2 to frame 3.

After a bit of fumbling the first dsy or so, they became proficient with hand saws, jigsaws and sandpaper, and added to a growing stack of plywood boat frames and other parts.  They made and marked a strongback on which to mount the parts to keep them straight and true during assembly.  Gunwale, chine and keel stringers of douglas fir were bent around these frames, and the stems carefully aligned with a bubble level and attached--that job of aligning and attaching took several days.  Then we began the intricate process of lashing all of these joints together in much the same way the Inuit and Aleut would have done, except that we used "artificial sinew" rather than the animal tendons that were the Eskimo's chief fasteners.  Learning how to lash the joints was an education in itself, far exceeding in difficulty the other knots the boys learned.  At this point, eighteen of the boat's forty-one lashings are complete.

Emilio (above) and Etson (below) clean up.

These boat-building sessions were interspersed with other activities that included breaks for playing ball in the basement gym where we were assembling the boat.

B-ball in the gym.

Along the way, the boys learned how boats float, the concept and cause of buoyancy, and why a ship's weight is called its "displacement."  We built paper boat models and explored why some boats are more stable than others.  A few boys even tried their hands at making balsa wood models of Greenland kayaks.

Finally, we spent a good deal of time exploring the cultures of the Inuit and Aleut peoples who invented and perfected the kayak, taking advantage of the resources of the Old Colony Library Network.  We learned a little of the science behind the wild seasonal swings in daylength and temperature that characterize polar regions.  At the end of the two weeks, each boy told us the question he had explored, and taught us what he had learned.

The kayak so far: bow on, stern, bow.