an old boat somewhere yesterday

[peter radclyffe]

http://www.tv3.cat/3alacarta/#/videos/3019550

[johngsandusky]

I watched the weather and some commercials in spanish.

[peter radclyffe]

some links dont cross countries, i dont know how to get another link

[peter radclyffe]

http://I had been working under the arches at Kew Bridge building loudspeaker cabinets for rock bands. I made the routing jigs too for all the guys to use and we made the cabinets of birch and gaboon plywood. I layed the concrete floor in the workshop, I had learnt to do this making swimming pools in Norfolk. When I got involved with a lovely Frenchwoman I wanted to stay with her, so I thought I better get a long term job. I'd heard about the Brentford yard so I went along to ask for a job as a labourer. It didn't occur to me to be a shipwright or yacht joiner; when I asked the boss for a job he jokingly said to me you can replace our shipwright, a south coast trained guy who had just left. I thought he was joking but six months later I was a shipwright. The boss said I'd become a boat builder overnight and a year later I was the shipwright foreman. I had studied hundreds of boats and lived on them most of my life so I knew how they went together. I'd studied every book I could find: I knew how to rig them and when I started work at that yard in Brentford it all came together. I found something I was very good at and it became my career. What a surprise, I worked with my girlfriend. Brentford is where I learned the main shipwright techniques. I made spile boards, patterns, jigs, planks ,frames ,floorboards ,panels, roofs, decks, shearing, bulkheads ,linings. The boats were usually elm or steel bottoms 3" x 7' x 6” to 30” wide bottom planks, fastened across the boat to steel or wrought iron knees which were also fastened to the first strake, the chine. The first strake was slightly angled. The rest of the oak side hull planks were slab sided until the top strake, which was angled in. The forward and aft planks were mostly steamed in a steambox that was.fed by a fire made of old planks and anything else, sometimes started with paraffin. These oak planks were very difficult to steam into place as there was any amount of junk either side of every boat or on the dockside over the water. Tanks, boards, panels, plywood, cupboards taken out of the boat to get to the hulls to repair them, fridges, cookers, a car or van, trolleys, baskets, oil drums, water containers. You could barely find a way through the yard sometimes. Bicycles and motorbikes, stacks of oak, elm, pine, mahogany. If you can steam 2 inch thick by 10 inch wide oak 25 foot long planks round the bow of a narrowboat you can probably steam them around most boats because the bows of narrowboats have sharp shoulders. And the smell of fresh steamed oak soaked in linseed oil in the sunshine is great along with tobacco ,red lead and creosote. It smells great though dangerous. We replaced cratch beams, foredecks, stern decks, cabins, beams, gunnel caps, and counter blocks. The whole world of narrowboats is very particular. Apart from us repairing them there didn't seem to be many people who repaired them on the canals in southern England. The other yards mostly did interior work. Some of these narrowboat owners go to odd lengths to buy replica tollgate tickets from 100 years ago. Some of them dress up like people from 100 years ago. One guy walked into the yard and asked if we had a narrowboat. He had bought an old clapped out engine , maybe 60 years old a Bolinder, the holy grail for these boat owners. With a faraway look in his eye and his hand on his wallet we could tell he was serious.

[peter radclyffe]

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wooden-Boat...s%2C207&sr=1-7

[peter radclyffe]

[COLOR=var(--primary-text)]The yacht had been converted into a ketch from a Bermudan cutter in the 60s, the 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 and dangerous postwar products. But I’m bound to be distressed by these things as my modus operandi is beauty and strength rather than speed and ugly design. All this junk hardware had to be replaced with new bronze hull, deck, interior and mast fittings. The electrolytic blight orchestra, the giveaway rivulet rain tracks and many other details I learnt from 29 years surveying wooden boats. Some of the photos on Lulworth and Patience were taken by Catherine Libeert a photographer from brussels, who regularly brought us Belgian chocolates. One day Poland beat Italy at football, when you’re in charge it pays to know the fixtures even if you don’t follow football, next day one of the poles dropped a steel frame on his foot with a vodka hangover, so for a month part of his work, hobbling on a broom was gluing up old hull planks, he was was to be kept working wearing leather sandals, I told him to get some steel toe capped working boots, I didn’t want to send him off the job because the team was welding tight, we could only use 10 old planks, if the yard on the Riviera had put a tarpaulin on the hull 20 years ago we could have used 150 old teak planks, what’s the difference in cost between that & a tilt, that yard reckoned they were the restoration yard in the Med, but tarpaulins obviously weren’t the only things they were pig ignorant about. I made a new 2 ton keel & gripe cut out of solid opepe, and a new keel, deadwoods, counter, stem, sternpost. The Italian companies could not deliver iroko keels, 30 ft. long x 3ft. wide x 10 or 20 inches thick, so I measured and ordered it from Barchards in Hull, 25 tons of it, to do the centreline & beams, etc. We made lodging, hanging knees in way of mast, double teak beamshelves, web plate knees, mast step. In one month I bored the sterntubes on Lulworth & Patience. I caulked all of Patience. I made a building board, joining 6 x 1 inch planks longer than the boat on the ground, painting it white, for marking out all the deckbeams, I fixed the board level above the boat, dropping the lines down to the boat, I could not hang it off the scaffolding roof which blew about in the wind. The battens hanging from the building board represent the main deck beams, not th

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