Fiddlehead

Boatbuilding language includes terms and phases we don’t often hear. Some make sense once you understand their meaning. Others just need definition.

Take that long piece of fine Sitka spruce I bought a couple of weeks ago. It has lots of parts inside. All we have to do is get them out of the raw timber. A lot of boatbuilding is getting out parts. “Scantlings” is an archaic term for “small” and is used in nautical language both to talk of the dimensions of small structural components and of the components themselves.

One of the frequent activities of boatbuilders is making patterns. We have lots of dimensions on paper drawings that need to be transfered to our lumber. Sometimes we’re blessed with ful size drawings of components. Other times, we have to scale up from a drawing to full size, something called “lofting,” a topic for another day.  The Fiddlehead drawings contains one sheet with full size drawings for a few scantlings: the stems, parts for the frames, bulkheads, and carlin braces. Some of these need to be made in pairs, so it’s a good thing to make reusable patterns. I traced the drawings to thin plywood which I can carry to the lumber and draw around.

The spruce will be used for these parts and for a number of long thin parts. The long thin parts will remain inside a 13 foot section of the spruce for a while longer while I get these scantlings out of the remainder.

The first task is reducing thickness, from the rough sawn board to the desired thicknesses of 3/4 inch, 5/8 inch, and 7/16 inch. I reduced thickness first to 3/4 and got out the long part of the mid frame. Then reduced to 5/8 and got out the stems and carlin braces. Then, reduced to 7/16 and got out the rest of the mid frame pieces. Thickness reduction in some shops is done with power planers that use rapidly spinning knives. Thickness reduction in my shop uses hand planes. First, a Stanley #40 “scrub” plane that dates to about 1910 is used to scrub away material quickly. Its rounded blade can take fairly deep cuts and makes quick work when used diagonally across the lumber. A few passes up and down the lumber does the bulk of the work. When close to the desired thickness, I switch to the Stanley #5 “Jack (of all trades)” plane to smooth the marks left from the scrub plane. My jack plane dates to the late 1930’s and I keep it sharp enough to leave a surface that is very acceptable for framework. For the cases where the parts will be exposed and need fine finishing, follow up with a #3 smoothing plane (mid 1940’s heritage) brings the surface to baby butt smoothness.

When cutting the parts, I sometimes use one of the few power tools in my shop, the band saw and smooth the sawn edges with planes, rasps, or sometimes even sandpaper. The results are well made pieces, crafted with almost no dust.

An aside: as I read about people building workshops, one of the first things many woodworkers do is plan for powerful dust removal systems that attach hoses to every electric tool. Each of those tools works by pulverization that creates huge amounts of incredibly fine dust. Left uncaptured, the dust not only creates a mess, but more seriously many health hazards. Hand planes create no dust. Dust from band saws and rasps is large and heavy and usually falls quickly to the floor instead of lingering in the air. Sanding is something I minimize by keeping the planes sharp.

My tools are cheaper, and very much quieter, than all of the electric tools and a lot healthier to use. Instead of consuming electrons, my tools use a lot of human calories, giving me a good workout … and justification for a cool Coors, or maybe an occasional Snickers.

It’s been a long time getting started on Harry Bryan’s Fiddlehead decked canoe. A 1:16 scale model was a good preliminary project and served the purpose of learning how the boat goes together. Now, it’s time for the real thing.

Last week, I bought the first few boards, enough to get the framework and bottom together. Harry calls for spruce and Northern White cedar as the first choice lumber, but advises alternatives should those not be available. Northern White cedar is rather plentiful in Harry’s Nova Scotia and in Maine, but not here in New York. The closest Northern White I can find is at the far Eastern end of Connecticut, quite a long drive from here.

My closest supplier of any sort of cedar is Maurice L. Condon in White Plains NY, about 35 miles from here. M. L. Condon carries a kind of cedar they call Virginia White. It is actually a juniper and is also known as Atlantic White cedar. It has many of the same properties as Northern White, light in weight, excellent rot resistance, and good strength for its weight.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect at Condon. Like most everyone, my lumber yard experiences are mostly at those places that sell construction lumber, the rough stuff we use for framing buildings. Condon is a specialty lumber seller. Most of their stock is hardwood, everything from oak and maple to exotics like purpleheart and ebony. Their softwood stock is also specialty woods such as the cedar I wanted, Western Red cedar, and Sitka spuce. Talk about feeling like the kid in the candy shop! M. L. Condon has what I need for this project, and lots more.

Not long after entering the yard, actually an open area surrounded by storage sheds (most all wood is sheltered from weather while being in open air), William came to help me. We had a short dscussion about what I wanted and he then used a fork lift to open up a stack of cedar and help me select some boards. I came away with four 16 foot long cedar flitches, a 20 foot long 6 inch wide board of sitka spruce and an 8 foot piece of Western Red cedar.

William fork lifted the order onto the truck rack that I recently built. The trip home was uneventful. Service at Condon was excellent, and I now have enough to get started.

Now a bit about the wood and its intended use.

The top piece in the stack is the Western Red cedar. It is the only piece that is surfaced four sides. It is a 2 by 6 of very straight grain, is milled vertical grain, and has a Greenland paddle inside.

That 20 foot long piece of Sitka spruce was too long to fit in my workshop, and has been cut to preserve the long lengths needed for the clamps, carlins, and rub rails. That board was not surfaced and measures a full 1 by 6 inches. This board is very clear, with only 4 small knots, none larger than the width of a pinky finger. It’s a beautiful piece of lumber that will provide key structural parts of the boat.

White cedars are sold as “live edge” flitches. They are rough cut, the result of running a complete tree through a saw, and what you get is boards that are four quarters thick and still have bark attached. The flitches up in Maine were 20 feet long. These are 16 feet long. The part of the lumber we use for boatbuilding is the heartwood, the center material with the reddish tint. We discard the lighter color sapwood at the edge because it still contains sugars and other semi liquids that are not as impervious to rot as the heartwood. These 12-14 inch boards will yield 8-10 inches of good material. The cedar is also quite clear, with fewer knots than I remember in the cedar we had at the Wooden Boat School in Maine. The bottom of the boat, the planking, and the decks are all cedar.

I’ll need to triple the size of that stack of lumber to make the full boat, but this is enough to get started. I’ve got wood!

Click on any image to show a larger version.