Starting off

2 January, 2010

At last year's NZSSRA Championship (a.k.a. the Maadi Cup regatta), Howard Croker told me about a book - Rowable Classics: Wooden Single Sculling Boats & Oars, by Darryl J. Strikler, published by Wooden Boat Books, Maine, USA, 2008. Howard recommended the book partly because he knows a little about my interests, and partly because he said that the segment on his oars was accurate.

The book got me thinking about getting my hands on an old wooden single and getting it under my backside, on the water. So, I started asking and looking around.

There was a bit of a job upheaval, and I've ended up at St. Andrew's College, Christchurch, as their Director of Rowing. Up in the rafters at the Avon RC boatshed was an old wooden single, of which the ownership was uncertain. (Until about 3 days ago we kept our equipment at the main Avon building. We've now moved into our new boat bay, an addition to the Canterbury Rowing Association's boatshed - still part of Avon, but now all under our control.) After a couple of months of asking around, the ownership of the boat was established - essentially Avon seized the boat for non-payment of 10 years' boat storage fees, and "sold" it to me for the price of a bottle of Pinot Noir. So I bought a fairly good bottle, and the trade was made.

On starting the project, I blabbed about it on rec.sport.rowing, a usenet newsgroup that I access through Google Groups; a Canadian fellow now living in the Excited States e-mailed to suggest that I blog about the rebuilding process, along with some photos.

So here we are. A rather beat up old single. I'd done quite a bit of the initial dismantling prior to getting the blog bug, so I can't show you the original condition of the boat with the really crappy blue plastic decking. Eventually this will have a tightly stretched fabric deck held in place the old way - stretched and nailed in place with a half-round bead of Kauri..

The boat is of unknown (to me) manufacture, and it's had at least a few repairs by someone who didn't appear to care what sort of cosmetic results they got. I suspect it was at one time taken to a regatta tied to a trailer by people who had only previous experience with composite boats, because the internal bits and pieces (deck stringer, cross struts) are in pretty rotten shape, most likely from being crushed against a rack on a trailer. You can see the crossmembers and thwarts seem to be painted with a white primer of some kind, instead of a marine varnish.

In this photo, you can see a bit under the seat deck where a previous repair of a hole in the hull is a double layer of fibreglass (one inside, one outside): The horizontal line about halfway up the skin from the hole is a crack, also covered with glass - that you can see through. This is going to be a bit of a tough one if I want to do it "right".

The next bits and pieces in the project are to get the rest of the wooden ribs, diagonal braces, and deck stringers carefully out of the boat, (so they can be used as templates - the ones that aren't completely demolished, that is) sanding through some of the white primer and digging out the filler that's been glued all over the place. Then spreading a liberal dose of lemon oil all over the exposed wood, followed by a week to let the oil soak in. Convenient that there's a week-long training camp at Twizel coming up.

I've managed to find a chunk of Kauri from which to cut the replacement wooden bits and pieces. Kauri is now a protected tree in NZ - and any I'm going to be using is recovered from old buildings. The 45mm x 150 mm x 1.8 m chunk of Kauri should provide me with lots of parts with some to spare. I've done most of the big cutting at the St. Andrew's College Technology Centre (woodworking shop) and will do the rest with hand tools (an old veneer saw, for example).

A couple of more photos:

The bailing board - ugly...

And the bailer out of the boat - a pattern for a new one.

Til the next post...

Walter