Hi All,
Due to a rather gratifying response to my last attempt to post pictures, I here offer some more of my rather unprofessional attemp to photograph a large boat in a small space. This is where we are now:
We have nine strakes now all the way around, this after one month of planking with three people. The color change is a change of wood. The darker stuff is angelique, a VERY hard hardwood. Bloody miserable to work with (smells like a manure pile when cut and dulls tools faster than you can sharpen them) but some gawdawful strong. And heavy. The upper stuff is wana, which resembles mahogany except that it has more of an orange color and a waxy feel. My back can tell you it's much lighter than angelique.
Inside the boat, the bilge stringers are in but not fastened. The stringers are scarfed out of 2 pieces of angelique, but the forward piece on each side is 30' long, 6" wide, 2" thick and clear and straight-grained the whole length. Beautiful, beautiful stuff.
And there's the transom frame. It's curved, eliptical, and laminated out of what appears to be mahogany, but don't hold me to that, since I haven't actually asked. It will eventually be faced with teak.
I'll hold the pictures there, since I have a feeling the files are a bit big. I didn't get a chance to edit them, since it's late and I'm headed to bed. I'll post more later, if there's an interest.
To answer some of the questions about the builder, "Twig" Bower is the Wooden Boat Company and the builder and the owner. It could, I suppose, technically be called a backyard project, since his shop is in fact in his back yard, but it's a 30' X 54' shop and a bit beyond the normal scale of such projects. He has been building this boat for the past five years, mostly by himself, along with operating the charter boat Shantih II with is wife out of Rockport, ME. The Heron, the project pictured above, will replace the Shantih. The Heron was originally named Elissa after his daughter, but the arrival of daughter Rachel midway through construction complicated matters somewhat.
Hope that clears things up a bit.
Jeff
Reply With Quote
[img]smile.gif[/img]
