Random Picture Thread

Thanks for the info Nick & Tiny . .

On second thoughts I'm also less confident that the oakum rolling person, and the lady with the phone hat, actually have the same kind of hairstyle . . .

 

What is oakum made of? From what I have seen, it looks like unprocessed cotton. Looks white or yellowish.

 

I'm told that cotton is effective, here it is sometimes used but apparently it rots easily so caulking is usually done with hemp fibre which is more resistant. Here it's not white but brown, see my photo Random Picture Thread https://www.boatdesign.net/threads/random-picture-thread.11052/page-524#post-819687

 

I'll repost the picture of the painting, and also Nick's colleague of course, as someone might find some more special detail to discuss here . . . ​

(source post by Nick)​

​

​

​

 

I wonder if you could make "oakum" from brush coir? It would probably be more durable than the planks.

 

The quick search results sounds good . . . ​

Coir - Wikipedia​

How Products Are Made → Coir ↓​

 

Here, (traditionally) red lead is mixed with linseed putty, after caulking, the seams are filled with the leaded putty. The lead is said to prevent the putty hardening and falling out but probably it is sufficiently toxic to preserve the hemp too.
Here is a boat currently being built (to the right), it is an amateur first build under yard supervision, the seams have just been filled with red lead.

 

For the painting... The person has the same posture as Fachtna above, he's got the lose fibre to his left, he draws the fibre with his right hand and then pulls it out with his left to make the roll thicker or thinner depending on the seam. He has a cloth over his knees (white) for rolling the fibre on and rolls with his right hand...in the painting, he is rolling, his right shoulder is higher and his head is tilted as he is watching the rolled thread gather on the floor.....well, that's how it looks to me!

 

It certainly bears a blurry resemblance to a grind stone, but surely they must have been a pump there somewhere, initially to pump the lock dry, and then to keep it dry.

If the workmen did have a grindstone you might expect it to be located in the foreground, where the rest of the tools are. But the location of that object, between the river and the dry dock, is exactly where I'd expect a pump to be.

I'll leave it to Angelique to find us photos of period pumps. She's an Internet sleuth, par excellence.

 

My guess is that it is a winch not a pump or grind stone. I read that the lock was drained to a culvert, to flood it they would have had to dam the culvert and then open the lock gate. I imagine the thing with the handle is either a winch for pulling up a board to let water in or a winch for pulling the new boat out of the lock...or both?...Although for the grindstone... he used brilliant white for the sharp edge of the adze on the ground and there's another splash of white under the handle thing suggesting something newly sharpened on the ground?
The person kneeling on the left seems to be eyeing up a board. Is that a covering board for the STBD side? The finishing touch?

 

It's the River Stour we see there, the boundary between Suffolk and Essex, and close to the tidal Stour Estuary that flows into the North Sea. Don't know how tidal it was at Flatford in 1815, there could be more locks now. So don't know if they needed a pump for the dry dock at all. Maybe just float the boat in at high tide, let the water out at low tide, and then close the door . . ?

In those days the bottom of sandstone sharpening wheels usually ran through a sump filled with water. The water in the sump was taken upwards by the grindstone, to protect the tool being sharpened against overheating.

So if it's a sharpening wheel we see there, then it could be handy to have it near the river, although I think it needed only a little water to refill the grindstone sump every now and then.

Here some pics from my previous grindstone post, showing some grindstones with a water sump underneath . . .

​

P.S. - Didn't have seen Nick's above post before I posted mine, I'm going to read it now.

 

The thread might enjoy this similar painting of THE LOCK, also by John Constable.

 

Well, looking at "The Lock" (thanks for that) I see they didn't use a winch as such for letting in water. On the far side you can see a chain hanging from a log with a hole through it. I guess the man in the foreground has his staff through the log on the near side hidden by the structure and is opening the sluice?

The grown knees are interesting...logical I suppose since the locks were possibly built by boat builders?

 

Yes the boat builder who built that lock just called me, and said he'd sawn several of the knees for that lock out of this log . . .

​

Of course I had an inverted aluminum colander on my head, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to have this conversation.

 

We used to use oakum for joining cast iron sewer pipe. It was stuffed into the gap around the joint and molten led poured in over it. It smoked and burned a little but the resulting joint was water proof enough for the application.