Shopping for wood

A friend works for a local College with large tracts of land.  John is director of their forestry department.

Recently he hired a portable mill to cut trees that they are culling.

Great timing for the River skiff.

Beautiful wood, staked up neatly on a ridge line overlooking the Mississippi river.

18 foot lengths!

In our shop we had four 16 foot 1 x 12 cedar planks we cut down to 4.5 inch widths.  Then milled to 5/8ths of an inch thick.  These will form the bottom of the hull.

From John we purchased 10 Tulip Poplar boards and a couple of Ash boards as well.

The Poplar is about an inch and a quarter thick.

We will rip it into half inch strips and re-stack to dry.  This will be used to form the chines.
The ash will be used to make a set of oars, (the white ash breeze).

On my next visit he is going to show off an ancient barn that is apparently filled up to the rafters with dry wood.

On the list of wood that is cut or to be, is black oak, red oak, poplar, ash, basswood, hickory, walnut, cherry......

River Skiff Bow

The skiff's bow is a portion of a circle with a radius of 33 inches.
We scribed it onto a piece of cherry and cut it out.
Next we doweled and epoxied a foot in place.

Station molds for the River Skiff

After calculating the height above the base line for each station, we cut hardwood blocks to the exact height for each one.  The stations are then set with a string on their centerline and clamped down.

This illustrates my connection method for the stations.  I like using steel for the strong back and forms.  You can't beat it for strength, straightness, and ease of clamping.

For the strong back we use a steel angle that is 6 inches wide by 3.5 inches tall by 1/4 inch thick.  This twelve foot section has two brackets that each sit in boat stands, so it can easily be raised or lowered by spinning the boat stand's tongs.

To add the additional length for the boat , we bolted on a 5 foot section of channel.
This is supported by a stiff leg.

Mississippi River Skiff

We are making great progress on the Mississippi River Skiff stations.  It will be our biggest boat to date at over 18 feet.
After our experience using steel stations for the Niangua canoe, we knew the advantages of the steel forms made it worth all the trouble to fabricate them.
For our next boat we were looking for something native to our waters and fell in love with Howard Chappelle's Mississippi River Skiff.   He took lines off a 1889 working wooden boat.  It is on page 97 of his excellent book  American Small Sailing Craft.
Here are the stations during fabrication:

Paper work: we are converting the offsets to inch measurements.  Also we are using some trigonometry to figure the length of the station from the chine to the shear. Click on the image for a closer look.

Here the stations have their centerline and are ready for a coat of acrylic spay to keep them from rusting.

The cherry chine forms are used to narrow the face of the station to accept the bending wood without deflecting it under clamp pressure.

The next posting will show the shape of the hull as the stations are spaced on the strong back.