Plank City

Guten tag, bienvenue, bonjourno bonjourno! We have a restored hull.

The Plan, professes to be a plan, but cannot say ‘I am what shall happen’ instead it prefers to mumble about what might happen if all things go to plan…

And that has generally been the state of play for the last three weeks, a battle, if you will, against splitting wood, awkward angles and the tug of gravity. Thankfully the floor cannot be described as comfortable otherwise we may well be asleep under the bilges.

The second planks were beasts, twisting, cupping and curving around the deadwood, three steaming sessions for the port side until we figured out a way to exert the desired forces. For the starboard side we cut a male former out of softwood and put a screw through it, the plank, into the deadwood. Job done, spot of filler before being painted.

The third planks behave like garboards, running along a rabbet line for the aft 8 inches. Cheek pieces were added to the deadwood to simulate a hog and give something meaty to fasten to. Browing on the second plank introduced us to Gerald’s doppleganger Cedric the Countergerald, basically a sort of rabbet line cut into the previous plank that fairs into the rabbet on the deadwood…

Boom. We had the bottom three planks replaced, only took us two weeks…. In between times, waiting for things to steam or dry we motored on with the smaller localised repairs. The shutter planks or the plank that seals the hull skin up was steamed and clamped to the its lower neighbour as a former, Adkin special right there.

Before the deadwood was planked in we set up a jig for determining the prop shaft angle and marked on internal and external entry exit points, plus an angle jig for eyeballing the drill as we bore said ‘ole.

Happy days