Ashley River Boatworks

The Stem and Gripe together make the Forefoot of the boat.  This is the curved part of the bottom that provides the transition from the stem to the keel.  It needs to be a formidable piece of the boat because it is the piece that parts the water as the boat makes its way.  It takes considerable pounding, and in an older boat, almost always has some rot in it.  That means it’s going to have to be replaced.

Since we have the plans, we could loft the boat and then take off the curves to make a new stem/gripe.  But we have a pretty good pattern (albeit with a little rot here and there) in the old one.  Using a sheet of glass and some clear plastic from the art store, we can draw out a pattern and transfer that to properly dimensioned white oak to make a new one that’s better than the old–better because it’s made of rot-resistant white oak.

So the first step is to lay a piece of 1/4″ glass over the old part and trace its lines onto a piece of clear mylar.  Of course you want to get as much information as you can on this tracing, including bolt locations, bootstripe, etc.  And make sure you are looking straight down on the part when tracing to avoid any parallax error.

Then take your new pattern and transfer the lines to your new wood.  You do this by tracing over the new mylar pattern with a “pounce wheel”, which you also get at your friendly art supply store.  You can see in our example that we made sure to avoid any sapwood in the new pieces.  Sapwood is much lighter in color and contains dried sap and sugars.  Including sapwood in your boat is like a flashing neon sign for rot spore–bad news if you want to keep your boat rot free.

Once the pieces were cut on the bandsaw, it took a little time to fit the joint between the stem and the gripe.  You need a good, solid joint here that, once slathered with bedding compound, will not allow ingress of any water.

Once we got that joint in good shape, the stem and gripe blanks were bolted together and fit to the breasthook.  Then it was time to look at the curve of the whole assembly and make sure it would be fair with the keel joint.  As you can see, we had to glue in a shim or two, but there’s no shame in that.

Finally it was time to carve the rabbet.  That’s the groove that runs lengthwise along the piece for the bottom planks to rest in.  That’s really a topic all in itself, but we’ll show it here.  To make a long story short, you use the lines you’ve traced on to your blank from the old stem/gripe assembly.  Using those lines, you have at it with your chisel and carve out the rabbet.  It helps to have a test stick, called a “fid”, that is the same thickness your planking will be to test how it fits in the groove as you carve it.  With a tough wood like white oak, you have to pause a few times to sharpen the chisel.  You can definitely tell the difference a sharp tool makes here.

Then clean it up with a plane, sander, Fein multimaster, whatever works.  You’re done!

After stripping the bottom planking off (see Remove the Bottom), it’s a good time to take another look at the soundness of the bottom framing.  Now you can see it from it’s most vulnerable angle–the joint between the frame and the bottom planking.  This is where water is most likely to collect (the bottom of the bilge) and be absorbed into any unsealed wood.  Remember, any wood with over 20% moisture content is a great place for rot spore to grow.   The factory may or may not have sealed this joint with paint, but that was 60 years ago.

After taking another look at the bottom framing, it’s in pretty good shape for being 60 years old, but still, it is 60 year old wood.  It leaks around the transom joint, and is oil-soaked under the engine.  We’re going to be putting a newly rebuilt engine in this boat and it is, after  all a speedboat.  You wouldn’t put a new engine in a 60 year old car without addressing the chassis.  It would soon shake apart.

Aside from all that,  the original bottom frames are made of  Philippine Mahogany–a wood with little to no rot resistance.  We’ll replace them with white oak which is a traditional boatbuilding wood because of it’s good fastener-holding and rot resistance properties.

We’ll use the old frames as patterns to cut out new ones.  Then we’ll  install each new frame, using the old keel and chines to get the lines right, along with battens, and bevel the new frame in place.

Finally, disassemble the whole thing, seal the new frames properly, and permanently install them.  This gets the new frames sealed at the joint surfaces–a very important step that keeps them from soaking up moisture where you can’t see it.

So we’ve got the bottom off (see Remove the Bottom), what now? Well let’s take a moment to look at the chines (the longitudinal piece of lumber that creates the “corner” between the topsides and the bottom).  While we’re at it, we’ll take a look at the keel as well.  These pieces are made of white oak, so that’s good material.  But they’re also 60 years old, and very perforated.  The keel is oil-soaked under the engine, which weakens wood considerably.  It also has a bad dip in it forward, with no good way to smooth that out.  Once you’ve come this far, you’d be crazy not to replace these pieces.  So off they come.

In order to get the chines off, you have to remove the first topsides strake (plank) next to the chines.

The first step in removing the topsides strake is to strip the varnish off it to make removal of the bungs easier.

We haven’t made a decision yet on whether to replace this plank, so to avoid splintering around the bung holes when removing bungs, we strip the finish which acts as a glue and can pull splinters of this delicate old wood.

Once the finish is stripped, the bungs can be removed by splitting them with an ice pick, and pulling the pieces out carefully.  This exposes the screw heads which you can carefully back out, trying not to catch on the side of the bung holes and splintering the wood.  You will inevitably break some screws and find some already broken.  Mark them for later drilling and extraction.

After you’ve got the planks removed on both sides of the chine, it’s a pretty simple matter to unfasten the chine and remove it.  Broken fasteners holding the chine in shouldn’t present too much of a problem since we’re replacing the chines and the bottom frames.

A poultice is a moist, soft mass used to treat inflammation of a body part.  It is often applied with heat.  It can also be used to draw out stains and other contaminants from a porous material.

In our case, it is a way to draw out oil from oil-soaked wood.  The stringers in this boat have, over time, absorbed engine oil that has been spilled in the bilge.  They’re not damaged enough to warrant replacement, but I want to get the oil out of them to facilitate sealing of them, and paint adhesion.  A good way to do that is by making a poultice of ground up non-scented kitty litter (dried clay) and lacquer thinner.  The lacquer thinner is a solvent that soaks into the wood, dissolves the oil, and keeps it in solution long enough to leach out through osmosis to the kitty litter where the oil concentration is less.  This may sound like snake-oil.  But it really works.  Try it.