A life in wooden boatbuilding

laminating mahogany stem & keel for Craftsmans Art, Bill Dixon, 24 metre ketch

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Patience, A shipwright yesterday, Peter Radclyffe, copyright 2009 The yacht had been converted into a ketch in the sixties
stainless steel honeymoon years, just before they all got into bed with fibreglass, which along with aluminium have to be some of the most ugly & dangerous post war products, but I’m bound to be distressed by these things as my modus operandi is beauty & strength rather than speed & ugly design , all this junk hardware had to be replaced with new bronze hull, deck& mast fittings. After supervising the masting & rigging , & modifying 80% of the rigging fittings on a 1930’s, 30 metre De Fries Lentsch steel schooner built of lomoor iron , I started building another tender for the big class but I let that go when the C&N came in, it was just too exhausting doing the work of 2 or 3 men, costing all boats, chief boatbuilder & shipwright, foreman yacht joiner, masts & spars, rigger, designing, surveying, woman & man management, referee, peacemaker, for 3 big vintage yachts, on top of being in charge of up to 65 people on the big class, I had to teach 35 people on Patience , the core team were 6 Polish joiners, I didn’t know what their trades were, because when I asked them they said they’d done it all, planking, framing, centreline structure, caulking, interior joinery, spars, tanks, blah-blah, so I gave them some tests, I asked them to pattern the fore deadwood & a plank, I could see straight away they were lying to me because they were afraid of losing their jobs ,but no matter, they were hard workers & over 4 years I taught them how to be shipwrights, none spoke Italian & only one spoke a little English, they knew no marine vocabulary in Italian or English, 2 spoke german which I continued to learn , I bought a polish dictionary & translated tools, fastenings, parts of the boat, etc& put up these lists in Polish, Italian & English around the boats , the dart board & the vodka barrel. the latter fell under Yanns control, it didn’t matter to me if they were half cut till half ten some mornings, if that was part of the equation of immaculate joinery, so be it, on top of the big class my work load doubled, one headache was joiner Yann on one end of the tender & a fairer with applied filler on the other end, I had to separate them before they punched each other out, also Mr Lacksadaisical on the tender figured his working week started on Friday night when he went snowboarding, another cute clown, there’s one on every crowded scaffolding corner, shooting the breeze what wiv der fag butts an all. Patience’s hull was distorted on the stbd side& the elm keel was hogged 103 mm, I got every ship cramp, G-cramp, boiler cramp, heavy joinery sash cramp & steel cramp that I owned, about a hundred & 8 RS J’s & straightened the keel, the lead keel arrived separately, her half composite construction thankfully meant no steel curtain or margin plates, no steel : keel , keelson, centreline structure ,deckbeams , diagonal strapping or pillars, or the daily battle I had with the big class platers & shipwrights to get her hull fair, teaching Italian as fast as I could learn it, on Patience’s framing only the mast step, intercostals, floors, every 3rd frame, extra frame at mast partners, hanging & lodging knees, engine beds & 3 web frames were steel, minimal weld distortion, after I marked all plank positions on the edge of the steel frames with a grinderette nick, we pulled out every 2nd or 3rd steel frame & sent the port frame to a fabricators in Stuccoville ,( so called because half the town relied on stucco to fair it’s brutally welded hulls, even a kicked bucket is fairer, the other half of the town being beach towels at dawn, until Portofino), a simple bevelled angle iron, the stbd frame stayed in our yard, the floors went to the owners blacksmith near Torino, he wanted to renew these with false rivets, some hanging knees & web frame plates & patterns went to Manyana Marine where they might make them this year if were lucky, where the frames were weak or distorted I made a wooden template, & as I’d done on 75 new patterns, frames & floors for the big class I marked all the buttocks, waterlines, centrelines & planks ,& at every 2nd, 3rd or 4th plank I marked the bevels, you only need to mark the bevel whenever it changes, no more & no less, I couldn’t work out why every thing had to be so complicated ,why the owner couldn’t just choose one fabricator, then I realised that’s the way some people are in Stuccoville, incapable of doing things simply & directly, if it’s not complicated they don’t want to know, better the chaos they know than the clarity they don’t, afraid as they are to develop into fully formed efficient, responsible logical adults, you suddenly realise having seen operas only on television that you are now in one, all the constant shouting about nothing all the time, it’s the way they are, pig-ignorant juveniles, like their fathers whose personal development stopped at 14 at the school gates, thesaurus digested has no better word to describe them, also it’s hard to maintain your clarity & vigilance when some people in the yard are troublemaking & intent on sabotaging all the good works done by so many, I can elaborate later, suffice for now to state

 

Rant ,rave Etc

 

Rant and rave must be.

No shouting, no swearing, no building nor bearing........

 

the 2 seem to go together Richard
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90% replica tender for lulworth, teak, mahogany, original bronze

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