Social Distance Ship Building

Shipwrights are back on campus as of last Monday working in three isolated cohorts, with one Delaware team, and two Dove teams respectively. Shall we allow an hour per day of tool and vehicle sanitization, six feet of social distance, or the donning of face masks to dissuade us from our shipbuilding mission? We say nay. With a healthy dose of viral aversion, due diligence in collective and personal cleanliness, and a fresh thirst for productivity, we shall prevail.

Over the past two weeks we have been working on putting together the Dove’s stem assembly, which includes fitting out the beak head joinery in the shop as well as fitting and bolting together the gripes and forward keelson. Additionally we have brought to completion the building of our forward half frames, and have milled up some lovely donated loblolly pine logs.

Dust shakes off from the gears of machinery and from the limbs of shipwrights in our shop this spring as we carefully begin again.

If you take a look back at the post on half frames, you’ll become reacquainted with the process of building as well as the necessity for this method of construction. Essentially, the half frames complete the framing of the ship forward and aft as the vessel gains in shape from the flat and straight keel. Wherever we have significant shape or rise we see half frames. All of the frames proper are square to waterlines and buttock lines and can approximate the station lines in our lofting. The frames forward of the half frames are unusual in that they do not follow this rule. These extreme forward frames lean forward away from perpendicular, that is, they '“cant” forward and are thusly termed cant frames. The reason for this is to reduce the extreme beveling necessary in this part of the vessel where our planking is forced to take the shape of our bluff (round and obtuse) bow. In the coming weeks we will begin building these cant frames.

Using the engine lift to work on the fit of our lower grip.

In the above images you will see a number of large structural joinery pieces that come to constitute what we call the stem assembly. The lower forward piece is termed the lower gripe, which connects the the lead ballast just aft of it, the keel, and the upper gripe, above it. The upper gripe connects to the keelson just aft of it which joins to the top of our full frames. The stem will then land on top of the upper gripe with the stem apron tying it to the keelson. The gripes are built out of southern live oak, with the keel and keelson made out of cortez. For a post on wood selection click here, you will also find at the bottom an image of the built stem assembly during test fitting last August, which comes to its conclusion this spring in the image below.

In the above image you will find the stem painted white with master shipwright Frank Townsend pondering the joining of the stem apron in hand. The protruding pieces in yellow and orange make up the unshaped beakhead or gammoning knee. The gammoning knee is built out of local osage orange which we harvested in partnership with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources last November. The gammoning is where the bowsprit is secured to the ship, on vessels of the 16th to 18th centuries a lashing is used which lashes to bowsprit down to the beekhead, this is called the gammoning lashing, in later vessels up to our time an iron is fitted which is called the gammoning iron. Osage orange is extremely stable and is indeed Maryland’s most rot resistant and dense naturalized wood resource. Below you will find images from November 2019 while scouting out ideal specimens for harvest on Wye Island just across the Miles River from our St Michaels campus. This large assembly will be permanently secured to the vessel in the coming month.

Associate Shipwrights Noah Thomas and Clara Zinky, clearly secondary to the glory of perfect osage growth rings before them.

Every so often we are called to accommodate unexpected duties in the shipyard, such as the care and proper milling of the below loblolly pine logs. Loblolly pine, the dominant tree of the southern coastal pine forests, and indeed the Delmarva peninsula, is commonly used by shipwrights for deadrise boat construction, log construction, carvel planking, and even deck planking. In order to thwart potentially devastating bug damage it is paramount that we at least strip the material of its bark and treat with borates. We however brought most of the material to square cants and even milled up a few quarter sawn and plain sawn boards for the Delaware crew.

An immaculate tree: large, free from knots, perfectly round, perfectly straight, tight growth

Till next time

SH