Mayflower II Captain's Blog

Three types of caulking irons each witha specific purpose

This is a shot from a few weeks ago. I was caulking the completed planking on the starboard quarter. The three different irons each have a unique shape and are designed for a specific job.

The bottom iron is known as a bent iron. It is made this way for just the purpose  you see, caulking a seam up against an obstruction. The second iron up is a making, or caulking iron. It has a fine edge designed to wedge cotton, or oakum into a seam. You can see the cotton has been looped loosely in the seam prior to driving it in completely. This looping allows the caulker to control how much or little cotton goes into the seam, depending on how wide or narrow the seam is. The top iron is a setting iron. Its driving edge is blunt and is designed to drive the full width of cotton into the bottom of the the caulking seam all in a bunch.

A good caulking seam is about half the thickness of the plank and open, in this case, about 3/16″ on the outside. Ideally the planks are touch, wood to wood, for the first half of their thickness. I say ideally, because, well you know, we don’t live in a perfect world now do we.

All Hands to pay seams

This shot is both instructional regarding paying seams after the planking has been caulked and primed and it is a testament to the strength of our staging.

Paying is a boat builder’s term for filling the seams with putty after the caulking. we are using a modern, linseed oil based compound. In the 17th century the seams were often filled with molten pitch applied with a mop. Yum.

Last week we started an eight week boat building program with the 7th and 8th grade classes from the Bay Farm Montessori School in Duxbury, MA. The twelve students and two teachers come to the Plantation’s marine shop on Wednesdays from 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM.

We are building a traditional “Flat iron” skiff. The side planks are each made from one piece of pine about 18″ wide and 15′ long.

Planning the side planks.

We chose to build only one boat with the kids so that we can focus our attention on the individual tasks at hand. It does make for tight quarters sometimes but it is also a good team building exercise. Nothing builds  “team” like planing over the fingers of the person standing next to you.

Building character while we build a boat.

When both planks are the same size we attached them to the stem, which is a piece of white oak cut into a triangle shape in cross section.

The stem is attached with marine adhesive and bronze screws.

The whole trick to this type of construction is to get both sides planks fastened to the stem the same way so that when we bend the planks around the mold the back ends of the planks meet at the transom equally.

Matching up both sides planks at the stem.

They say many hands make light work. Yes, the girl sitting down on the left is helping to hold the plank.

The boat takes shape.

With about twenty minutes left in the class today we got the side planks attached to the stem, the center mold in and the planks bent around to the transom. It seemed prudent to wait until our next class to fit and fasten in the transom.

Next week the students have testing at their school so they won’t be able to come to the museum. Stay tuned for more…

We have truly been fortunate with the weather this winter. No snow to speak of and fairly mild temperatures have allowed us to keep working on the ship through the winter season.

Planking the starboard quarter, January 2012

This shot shows not only the work of re-planking the side of the ship but also gives a fairly good impression of the weather this winter. For the most part it has been reasonable to be working outside. Often the wind blows out of the North in the winter around here and we are on the south side of the ship. Clever, right?

The wale which is the oak timber fastened on and plugged in this shot is made of white oak. The planks that are going on above the wale are douglas fir. They are some beautiful pieces of wood we picked up at a lumber yard,Downes and Reeder, in Stoughton, Ma .

Main building at Downes and Reeder housing some very expensive wood.

Getting quality timbers for planking does not come cheap. We paid around five hundred dollars for four pieces of wood. that comes to about $6.50 a board foot. Mistakes are not an option.

flawless work by a mere human being.

We are working on the second pair of planks in this shot.  Also take note of the commodious staging we built to work on this winter. If the weather continues to stay this mild we may install a grill and some benches for lunch time in the sunshine. Of course, this would be after we are done with our high priced planking.

Spars scraped clean and re-oiled.

Winter work has begun in the shop in earnest. Every winter after down rigging we bring the spars in to our shop, one after an other, to scrape them clean and re-oil everything.

This shot shows almost all the spars. The end of the yard that is visible in the right foreground is the main yard. (54 feet long and weighs in at about 1 ton).

The smaller spars to the left are the topsail yards, and the flag staffs. On the right in this shot are the main topmast with it’s square end and heel rope sheave facing the camera, the mizzen yard in the middle and the fore topmast all the way to the right.

During the original crossing in 1957 Alan Villiers, the captain, found the fore topmast  was a focus of concern as he referred to it as a “broom stick”. Apparently he was more used to the large steel spars of the grain ships of his youth. His fears were well founded generally as the fore top yard actually broke early on during the voyage.

A sharp eyed observer may notice the fore top yard is made of spruce unlike all the others which are made of  Douglas fir.

The fore course yard and the sprit yard are in the shop but not in the photo.

As promised here are two more pieces of down-rigging video. In the first one we see the process of lowering the port top mast shrouds. There are back stays, the head stay, flag halyards, a cap the upper cross trees, martinets and some other rigging I am sure I am not remembering this moment all sitting on top of the top mast. Each piece is lowered down as the video of the shrouds shows, with a line (called a gantline) secured to the top and a a tagline on the bottom of the rigging, used to guide it to the pier.The video will make this clear. Maybe a soundtrack in the backround would make it more dramatic.

shroud

The video was all shot by Dennis Gillis, one of our security guards at the ship four days a week. Thanks, Dennis!

This last piece of video shows how the fore topmast itself is lowered. A line called the “topline” is attached to the head of the mast. A tagline is attached to the bottom of the mast. Someone up in the bowl lowers the top line while a group on the pier pulls the mast over. Eventually the mast is placed in a cart. (we will get some video of that for the main top mast.). Also missing is the process of how we start the down rigging of the mast. But for now let’s go to the tape…topmast

This is the first time I have tried to insert video into the blog. The first piece of video was taken after the foremast was lowered and now we are “undressing” the mast, starting with the foretop mast flag staff.

flag

If this post works I will post a few other videos from the same day.

The museum season has come to a close and it is time to pack up the reproduction 17th century material culture, down-rig the ship and otherwise transition into our winter mode. Mostly this means continue working on repair and restoration projects but in colder weather.

Keith and Jolyon sort through artifacts on the main deck hatch.

Packing bedding onto our truck for transport to the Plantation.

The Shallop and Ships boat hauled out for storage at the marine shop.

There will be more posts soon of the down-rigging process, including some video shot to capture the process.

I wanted to post some shots of our ongoing work mostly in case anyone is wondering what ever happened to these projects.

New wood scarfed into the clamps.

This shot is taken down below, up forward on the starboard side of the ship. Keith has installed the new frame sections (called futtocks) so he is now buttoning up the opening he needed to make to install those futtocks.

These pieces of oak, about 1 3/4″ thick were boiled for about one and half hours  to make them pliable enough to bend over a form so they would have the right shape to conform to the inside curve of the hull.

This is a shot of the newly installed main wale. It is two thicknesses of 2 5/8″ white oak. Each piece is spiked together then the whole thing is  bolted through to the frames with 5/8″ bolts. I’m pretty sure it won’t come off anytime soon.

Frame Futtock

I like this shot because it show the curvaceous nature of the work we do. This is a futtock Danny has been shaping for the forward frame repair. This piece was complicated because along with its curvy shape in length  it is a parallelogram shape in cross section.

Yesterday we were pleased to host the crew from CBS Channel 4′s, Patriot’s All Access.  Punter Zoltan Mesko, #14 came along and had a tour of the ship, talked with our interpreters and was gracious enough to pose for pictures with visitors, Plimoth Plantation staff, and our own crew.

Zoltan Mesko and Patriot's All Access crew preparing for a take.

Zoltan talking about Thanksgiving

The best part of the day was when I brought him over to our waterfront gift shop and someone there asked if he was a new security guard I was showing around. As I said, Zoltan was a very gracious visitor who smiled and remained polite throughout his whole visit.