Little Red Hen - Clinker Dinghy

Hi Goolawah, The planks would have been about 11-12mm thick, we split some planks that measured about 155 x 27mm on the band saw & dressed them the minimum possible, the story behind the build was that one of the clients used to go for a row in his 70 year old clinker every morning- out of the mist came a tinny at speed which smacked into him & took out one side & sank him & nearly drowned him too! he decided he needed anothery so brought in the busted carcass of the old, we took off some station molds & transom shape & made him a new one, interestingly the keel & hog on the original was one peice with a curved topped wedge cut in aft to make the deadwood - very neat & cleverly done. The old bloke I never personally met, but the boss used to head up there on "holidays"(deductible if bringing back material I assume) & nicknamed him Koala Bill, 'cos the koala bear people(environmentalists) would frown on his timber winning ways(although rumour had it he got most out of new property developments where the trees were getting cut out anyway). The species he prefered was known as Bell Barrie Tea Tree but I've seen no botanic references to this- maybe his own coloquialism for the area worked in in winning them or even a variation on his name.These pics were from around 12 years ago too. You could try calling the post office there or go for a holiday too to track him down or search out some for yourself. Regards from Jeff.ps: you might wanna start sourcing you fastenings 'cos the're getting a bit tricky to get!

 

Hmmmm!
Some bloke offered me 6kg of assorted copper fastenings a couple of years ago, and I wish now that I had followed up more vigorously.

Boatcraft Pacific have now introduced fasteings to their range. Probably pricey to buy retail, but what can you do?

I'm keeping an eye out for some copper rod make bolts to fasten the backbone together. 1/4 inch seems a bit heavy for such a small boat but I haven't tracked down any 3/16 yet, which would probably do the job. Any thoughts on this?

Cheers

 

Goolawah,

Sam Allen Wholesale still sell copper, monel and silicon bronze fastenings mate.

Tea tree is very good grown knees, but be careful drying as it cracks easily, cut and store the little suckers flat after shaping for at least a year and they will be OK (in the shed).

The last clinker I did was for the Bi Centenary, we built a copy of the Tom Thumb at the Sydney Tech during boatbuilding trade course, all good fun.

 

Waikikin,

Yep, we did the long boat too, it was in about 1988, part of the course for us then, great fun and we all learned a lot. Clinker and carvel post trade course too.

 

clinker candy

Here you go Goolawah, I shot off some quick pics before I left work today for your perusal, theres a couple of light carvels in there too, although last week woulda been better cos about 15 oldies went into storage for a while. All the best from Jeff.

 

some more

more!

 

Beautiful boats! If our Little Red Hen comes out half that good I'll be over the moon. And I'll know a lot more about clinker boat building.

Are we looking at the Sydney Maritime Museum there?

 

Some of the CAD drawings I did of component parts are now re-appearing as carefully crafted pieces of assorted timber, depending on what each individual could lay their hands on. My wife Anne took an offcut from an old hoop pine board and turned it into a breasthook. This was presented to the other prospective participants as someting of a challenge for them to choose a drawing and go and make it. Ian Skeg found a nice piece of Meranti for the skeg. Chris Hog picked a nice straight piece of hoop pine for the hog. John Transom glued together a few planks of Huon Pine for the transom. Sam moulds cut the moulds from some MDF. (Obviously the names have been changed to protect the innocent).

I tackled the keel with a piece of Kwila. The wood was a bit too dark to see my pancil marks so I laid masking tape where the lines were to go. I've made the keel thicker in the middle to allow for the centre-case slot. I hope it won't be too difficult to remove.

Well, it's progress. The next step will be a 'dry' assembly to see how well it all fits together.

 

goolawah,

nice work mate, looking good. The beginning of a new baby, always fun to see.

That wife of yours worries me a bit though, so she can cook, dig worms, make breast hooks, and likes boats.....are you a dreamer or is this reality, what you should be doing is cloning her and putting her up on Ebay....there are millions to be made if she really is that good.

Next you will tell me she likes motorbikes, flying, diving and target shooting.....

 

Hey Goolawah

And does she like beer (or open them) and clean fish??

 

Hi goolawah, yeah there at the National Maritime Museum, although they belong to Sydney Heritage Fleet(my employer) along with quite a few more, I gotta move em round every time they want to change a light bulb but really spend most time in maintenance of the tall ship James Craig. All the best with "Little Red Hen" & regards from Jeff.

 

Well, she makes a nice home brew, and she likes catching fish (which I don't).

Meantime....

No luck finding anything remotely suitable in the way of a crook to use for the stem. One of our group let it be known that he had an old (100 years) hoop-pine mantel-piece that might serve if I want to build up the stem from blocks as suggested by Andrew of Denman Marine. A quick check of dimensions indicates that it might just do it. Next step on that front is to further develop my stem drawings so that I know exactly how to cut the timber, and to make sure that it will come out of the available piece.

Meantime I have dry assembled the components that are ready so far, and it almost starts to look like a boat.

Pic 1 - Keel, skeg & hog
Pic 2 - Transom & stern knee
Pic 3 to 5 - Moulds from various angles.

Practically finished once I get the stem sorted out..

 

goolawah,

Nice work mate, hopefully you will slowly start to forgive my comments on the stitch and glue boat as you become more familiar with "real" boatbuilding...I honestly was not being prudish, smart arsed or anything at all, just how I feel after a lifetime playing with boats.

Real boats take time and effort to build, as you now are understanding, there is a certain satisfaction in both watching and building them, Mac boats provide instant satisfaction....unfortunately many belleve this to be boatbuilding...which I now can see you have started to create......the longer the job takes to do, the harder the job must have been, and the personal reward (and that is all that matters in the end of the day), is certainly much more for the effort that you input.

Hopefully that is happening for you now, sort of like watchmaking, doing it by hand or watching some crappy machine in China punch out 200/hour, there is a difference.

Oh, I see also that you have learned a new language also doing this task....boatbuilding, long may she live.

Lovely to see your work progress, I live very close to you and have a workshop full of boatbuilding gear if you ever need anything, you are most welcome to use any tools I have.

 

Well it's all very well to talk about traditional boats, but I don't suppose that's really legitimate with this project where all the design, drafting and lofting has been done in CAD, rather than with traditional lofting. Anyway, I decided to offer a bit more detail about the CAD process as I have applied it to this traditional style boat.

I like to think of it as a unique convergence of traditional and modern technology.

The approach I took was to create cross-sectional profiles for the whole backbone. Along the keel, skeg, hog, and horizontal part of the stem, these were based on station cross sections. On the vertical part of the stem they were based on waterline cross sections. I had to create a couple of diagonals for the turn of the stem.

I then linked the vertices of these profiles with splines (as in TurboCAD splines) to generate the outline, then lofted (again using TurboCAD terminology) these into a solid. The first time I tried this I discovered a bug in TurboCAD where the lofted solid got all it's lines crossed over and it looked like the task would have to be abandoned. I was very impressed that when I took this up with TurboCAD they took it very seriously, fixed the problem, and gave me a free update.

In all of this I had to separate the hog, skeg, keel and stem into separate components that could be dimensioned individually to be made by different volunteers.

This is the 'virtual' stem on which I based my template to use in searching for a crook.