April 2010

I’ve been thinking lately about craftsmanship—what it is, how we cultivate it, how we appraise it.

In the past month several people have complimented me on my “fine craftsmanship” on Nil Desperandum, and as usual, they made me squirm. As I wrote in The Year of the Boat, I’ve always felt that accepting an undeserved compliment is a moral lapse, like pocketing the benefit of a waiter’s mistake on a restaurant check. Still, I’ve finally trained myself not to swat away the compliment, insulting the bearer. I murmur a polite “thanks,” and try to change the subject.

Imperfect and fitful as it still is, though, my craftsmanship is getting better—even I can see that. And it’s not steadier hands at the bandsaw. It’s cultivation of the mental component of craft—thinking through a problem before plunging into it.

Ever since I started the Winter Wren, I’d been planning to build the cabin 1” to 1½” higher than Sam Devlin’s plans, just to scrape out a little more sitting headroom than Sam’s miserly 42 inches. I had made the forward cabin bulkhead taller when I installed it months ago, figuring I could shave it later if necessary.

When it came time for the aft bulkhead this month, though, I had to make a final decision. So I mocked up a cardboard cabin on the port side and studied it for a couple of days—inside and out, aesthetically and practically.

And in the end, I decided Sam’s design was right. Even one extra inch of cabin unbalanced the boat’s profile. It looked cartoonish, like a cow drawn with an oversized head. Sam’s sailboats are remarkably beautiful and based on traditional lines and proportions—you can barely believe they’re plywood. My proposed modification was a crime against nature.

So I sawed off the offending 1½” from the cabin front piece and made the aft bulkhead exactly to plan. And sitting bolt upright on a cushion in the mockup, I still had ½” of headroom. Good enough; I’m expecting no more growth spurts.

I then made several mockups of the companionway, studying different widths, shapes, and locations. What I finally decided on was a substantial departure from plan. My doorway is skinnier and offset to the port side, so a person stepping into the cabin won’t have to straddle the daggerboard. And I like the bold stroke of asymmetry—it creates a dynamic visual tension against the pure balance of the rest of the boat.

Uncharacteristically, I plopped onto my shop stool and for a good, long time contemplated making the drop boards and the tracks for them to slide in.

My lifelong nature is to plunge directly into a problem, acting on instinct/impulse. It looks like decisiveness, but really is just impatience, and it leads to good craftsmanship only occasionally, by accident. First impulse was to make the tracks with a router. I’m not very good with it, and this would be a character-building exercise. But it would also be a mahogany-wasting exercise. After considerable thought, I came up with an easier way: use the table saw to make the tracks out of two L-shaped pieces, to be glued to the edges of the companionway.

Now the only crafty skill would be taking care to set the table saw for precise cuts. Not difficult; just requires patience.

It took me about three hours to make all six framing pieces for the companionway, but at the end they all fit almost perfectly and I had to make only one of them twice. With  minor touch-up sanding the boards slid smoothly into place.

Although I’m decidedly no Calvinist, I suppose I’ve always assumed that some souls are born predestined to be good craftsmen and others klutzes, and by lifelong

evidence I was one of the latter. But what I’m finally learning is that there’s more to craftsmanship than coordination, and that an innate deficit in eye-hand skill can be compensated elsewhere. A great part of craftsmanship is patience, and that can be learned. Another part is in what we can simply call “opening up”—contemplating the nature of the material, the job to be done, and the resources available to do it.

There’s great value in building a boat, and it’s not simply the big floaty thing you enjoy at the end. There are character-building lessons at every turn, and they all have application in the wider sphere of life.

March 2010

Nil Desperandum on March 1, 2010

When you’re building a boat, preserving momentum is vital. I mean personal momentum, the grit or gumption that keeps you going out to the boat shop every day to work on the beast. Novelist Annie Dillard says that

The Devlin Winter Wren — eventually

writing a book is like keeping a feral beast that must be visited daily if the writer is to preserve her mastery over it. “If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room.” A boat is exactly like that.

After several months of slogging through mostly tedious projects on the boat I needed to make something pretty that would add a dramatic touch and pump up my enthusiasm. Decorative sheer strakes, or rails, seemed like the answer. And they’d be simple, just a couple of days’ interlude in the big project of finishing the inside of the hull.

What kind of wood? I did a small test with my stock of khaya mahogany and realized that I’d wipe out a $50 table saw blade slicing the necessary 40 feet of planks into the 1/8” thickness I needed. So I settled on vertical-grain fir, softer and with a resplendent sunlit-honey glow that contrasts nicely with the rich Interlux Lauderdale Blue color of the hull.

I’ll forego the excruciating details and just report that the two-day project stretched into three weeks. I ruined several pieces of VG fir before I got the hang of resawing it into the thin planks. I botched half a dozen strips of the same precious wood while making the moldings with the router. Somewhere in the middle of varnishing, which I decided to do before installation so as not to dribble varnish on the nice paint, I knocked one of the strakes over and put a three-foot-long rupture in it. (Rather than lose momentum making a new piece I closed the wound with epoxy.)

Even after all that effort, the finished pieces were far from perfect. I was half tempted to throw them out and start over when supportive neighbor Brian Kansky delicately reminded me that once Nil Desperandum visits a marina, these pieces are going to take a beating anyway. He’s right, of course, and it was a relief to abandon the prospect of building the damn things again.

Another kind neighbor, Ken Leisher, came over on a Sunday morning

The port strake with clamps

and helped me epoxy the strakes in place. It wasn’t difficult, but it’s one of those jobs that unquestionably demands four hands. And a mountain of clamps. After the requisite amount of fussing and jiggling we had 35 on the port side alone, and had to delay the starboard installation a day.

Sheer strake at bow, before trimming

Almost nothing else got done on the boat in February, but the varnished strakes have made a difference in my mood. It’s rewarding just to stand in the shop and stare at the boat now. The craftsmanship may be questionable, but it represents personal progress—three years ago I wouldn’t have attempted anything like this.

That’s a component of momentum, too.

I have about 1,020 hours in the boat so far, with at least that many more to go. Any time you take on a 2,000-hour project you’re going to have to devise ways to trick yourself into keeping enthusiasm and effort alive—the normal human brain just isn’t programmed for that kind of sustained momentum. Rewards must be woven into the grind.

That’s one more lesson that could transfer seamlessly from boatbuilding to life.

February 2010

I’m a fan of non-glossy varnish. Call it ignorance, call it chicken, call it the path of least resistance, but it’s working for me. I’m brushing all of Nil Desperandum’s brightwork with Epifanes Woodfinish Matte. You can assess the results from a couple of photos.

Here’s the mast tabernacle, which turned out to be January’s main project—a really strong, heavy chingadero made of khaya mahogany. (It’ll bolt to a reinforced cabin front and 3-inch-thick laminated deck beam with six 6-inch stainless steel carriage bolts).

And here are some of the cabin hull ceiling planks, ¼-inch vertical-grain fir, removed for their varnishing:

Why a matte finish? It’s vastly more forgiving than glossy varnish. Doesn’t show bubbles, waves, ridges, dips, chicken pox, or any other embarrassing surface geography. Yes, it’s much less showy than a flawlessly reflective varnish job. But we nonprofessionals have so little hope of pulling off the latter. My philosophy is to cultivate the art of the possible—and to let the natural beauty of the wood’s grain and color make its own statement, unadorned.

Or, as a Charles Schulz Peanuts cartoon from ‘way back in the ‘60s said (through a sick-grinning Charlie Brown): “I feel much better now that I’ve given up all hope.”

I didn’t make great progress on the boat in January due to heavy teaching duties. But I did complete the tabernacle, the hull ceiling, and passed an important milestone: the boat is now guaranteed to float. By that I mean I’ve now completed more than enough watertight flotation compartments and foam installations to counter Nil Desperandum’s 700 pounds of lead ballast and batteries.

I’ve made use of every possible cranny. There was a ¾-inch space between the inside of the hull and the ceiling planks, so I bought a roll of minicell foam of the same thickness, cut pieces to fit, and installed them behind the ceiling. There’s about 2,500 cubic inches of the stuff, enough to counter 90 pounds of lead.

There are three or four more air or foam compartments to make, and by the time I’m  finished I’ll have flotation exceeding ballast by at least 20 percent—not counting the bouyancy of all the wood. That margin of safety is already making me feel very good about this boat.

There’s one small thing I didn’t feel very good about in January’s work.

Two of the ceiling planks turned out to have some natural discoloration in them—pale brown-green streaks several feet long. The flaw was barely noticeable on the unfinished wood, but the varnish upped the contrast.

I debated it with myself for several days. Why not let the wood be what it is? (Knots never trouble me unless they’re going to weaken a structure.) Is this a resurgence of the old perfectionist impulse?

Finally I asked my wife Patty to come out to the shop and offer her opinion. She said, perceptively, “I think it’s going to bother you every time you go into the cabin and see it.” I knew she was right, and that was really all it took. I unscrewed the offending planks and made replacements. It took about an hour.

How good is good enough? That’s one of life’s central issues, and as with so many others, building a wooden boat is a remarkable instructor.

Ultimately, it comes down to how the issue in question makes you feel. It’s as simple as that. Pride or embarrassment? Pleasure or disgust? Play the movie forward, imagine yourself in the boat (or house, or job, or marriage) a year or two in the future. The emotion that stirs tells you what you should do.

Next month: I really, really need to complete the cabin area from sole to sheer. I’ve been messing with it for too long. Nil Desperandum’s projected launch date is June 2011. Feels like a deadline—and a needed motivational force.

Nil Desperandum at the dawn of 2010.

Wasn’t that long ago in human history that hardware had to be handmade. Nails, door hinges, coathooks—every metal component of every building, buggy, or boat was the product of someone’s individual craftsmanship.

Nobody in right mind craves to go back to the crepuscular days before machine production. Yet, occasionally when we do, by choice, it’s a revelation.

I was having no luck finding chainplates for Nil Desperandum. Chainplates are the bronze or stainless steel straps that bolt to the hull as attachment points for the shrouds, or guy wires, that support the mast. The big Seattle chandlery, Fisheries Supply, had a few, but the version that came closest to the specs for my Devlin Winter Wren were heavy and ugly and $92 apiece. The 21st century’s most dazzling technology—a Google foray in search of used chainplates—failed, for once.

But we have an amazing concentration of  oddball artisans here on Whidbey Island, and this past year a small sign for a business called Renaissance Metal Shop had gone up on a rural road a mile from my house. I made a scale drawing of the chainplates I envisioned and dropped in. “No problem,” said metal artist John Moritz, and later in the week I brought him a scrap of silicon bronze I had picked up in Seattle.

Nil Desperandum decked out in her new jewelry

Two days later my chainplates were ready. They were, in a word, beautiful. “I hope it’s all right that they look handmade.” Moritz said, a tint of worry in his voice. “Of course,” I said. “The whole boat is handmade.”

In a provocative little book titled The Nature and Art of Workmanship published 40 years ago, British industrial designer David Pye laid out a distinction between what he called the “workmanship of  risk” and the “workmanship of certainty.” While not damning mass production, Pye said it is so important to keep the workmanship of risk alive—the crafting of things by hand, where the quality of the production depends on the artisan’s experience, skill, and values—that it goes right to the heart of civilization itself.

I polished and drilled Moritz’s chainplates and installed them on the hull—with bronze bolts, of course, and on the outside, instead of hidden inside like the chainplates on modern production sailboats.

A whole convergence of fine things have happened here. I saved money myself, while contributing to our island economy. Nil Desperandum acquired a bit of functional jewelry that’s entirely in keeping with her character. The structural necessity of chainplates will be outside, in plain view, and it’ll be like seeing physics tangibly at work on the boat, the loads on the mast flowing down into the structure of the hull.

In other December work, I decided that instead of painting the inside of the hull I would finish it with a plank ceiling—which in boatspeak is the hull’s interior walls, not the cabin roof.

It’s painstaking work. I have to resaw vertical-grain fir into ¼-inch-thick planks and fit each one individually, then screw it onto vertical strips I’ve glued inside the hull. All these planks will be removable, of course, in case work on the hull ever becomes necessary (tightening the chainplate bolts, for example).

The starboard fir ceiling with mahogany book rack

The photo here shows the ceiling in place from the deck beam to the aft cabin bulkhead. It’s not finished yet. In January I’ll remove the planks piece by piece for improved fitting, beveling the edges, and varnishing. And then I’ll plank from the deck beam forward to the anchor locker bulkhead.

Is the extra cost and labor worth it? I think so. When I sit in what will become the cabin, there’s a tangible sensation of warmth and welcome from the natural wood grain that just wouldn’t be there in a painted enclosure.

It’s just like the slight randomness of the metal artist’s handmade chainplates. I think that in certain contexts—a Boeing 737 at 35,000 feet, for example—we’re reassured by the precision of perfect, machine-made environments. But in others, we have an intrinsic craving for connections to the natural world, which is something we’ve almost lost. Varnished wood, with the infinite variety of grain patterns, establishes one connection. A handmade sailboat, if it works right, is a connection to the full spectrum of nature’s cycles.

In January: Work will alternate between finishing the ceiling and building the mast tabernacle—like the chainplates, a beefy bit of structure. A lesson I’ve learned in boatbuilding is to alternate repetitive tasks like planking the ceiling with something entirely different. When work on one project threatens to stall because it’s tedious work, there’s an alternative that preserves forward progress.

If it were all fun, all the time, everybody’d be doing it.

But a lot of the work of building a boat is slow, painstaking, rife with potential for ugly mistakes, and likely to keep you awake at 3 a.m.

Nil Desperandum on Nov. 1, 2009

Most of October’s work falls into that lumpy category. I built the berth flat, flotation compartments, and battery hold in the bilge. I perched on my shop stool for hours staring at the blue beast, trying to figure out a (a) cheap (b) strong (c) decent-looking, and (d) buildable compression post. I spent another Big Gulp of cash on goop, literally: another gallon of epoxy and several tubes of 3M’s 5200 adhesive/sealant, the modern boatbuilder’s salvation unguent.

The Devlin Winter Wren plans call for a raised, ½-inch plywood floor from the anchor locker to the daggerboard case. Eventually outfitted with a custom-made, form-fitted foam cushion (whir of money taking wing), this will form the berth flat, or bed.

I complicated the matter by turning the various spaces under the flat into several of the watertight compartments that will keep Nil Desperandum* afloat despite her 700 pounds of ballast if the worst happens, a capsize and total swamping.

Designer Sam Devlin heard about my idea and strongly suggested I not permanently seal the compartments, but preserve access through watertight screw-in deck plates. I bitched and moaned about the extra cost and work, but seeing as how Sam has built about 350 more boats than I have, I figured I should follow his advice.

Now that I’ve done it, I’m glad. The deck plates, recessed into the plywood with router and chisel and sealed with 5200, actually look cool. And besides providing a way to peer in and check for water penetration, they turn the chambers into storage crannies for items like spare rope and tools.

The biggest chamber won’t be sealed. It’s to hold 240 pounds of lead ballast plus two beefy 100 amp-hour deep-cycle batteries (each weighing another 65 pounds).

Bilge with battery compartment and 200 lb. ballast (not yet locked in).

Why so much juice for a small boat? I detest gasoline outboards—honestly, not as much for environmental reasons as for their noise, vibration and general crankiness—so I’m planning a Torqueedo electric motor for auxiliary drive. Clean, quiet, and more insane extra expense. But one of the few defensible reasons for building your own boat is to be able to build exactly what you want.

The compression post literally led to several October mornings awake at 3 a.m., staring at the predawn ceiling and gnawing at the problem. Devlin’s plans are not rich in detail and do not explain what the compression post is supposed to look like or how it’s to be built, only that there must be one. The post obviously has to be strong, since it has to carry some of the mast’s load off the deck beam and into the bottom of the hull. Since the post bursts up through the middle of the berth to the deck, it should be compact and nicely finished, a piece of the cabin furniture.

A friend helpfully donated a beefy piece of stainless steel pipe. But it was an unusual size and I couldn’t find fittings that would help attach it to the berth flat and beam.

I talked to a bronze supply company in Colorado. They had beautiful bronze pipe, of which they would sell me a six-foot length for $240. But I needed only two feet.

A neighbor was walking his dogs past my garage—a Boeing engineer neighbor—and I invited him in for a consultation. Very helpfully and adeptly, he studied the plans, then  picked up a spare wooden stick and demonstrated how the loads would act on the post. For the first time, it made complete sense. A big thanks, Ian.

The solution I’m now making is one of the two he recommended, and it’s the simplest, cheapest and prettiest: A $7.95 galvanized steel pipe from the neighborhood hardware store, to be cocooned in epoxy inside a mahogany post. Here’s a section

Mockup section of compression post

I cobbled up from scraps as a trial, then the complete post ready for bonding together. It’s fairly easy to make and appears as though it will work perfectly.

As I related in my book The Year of the Boat, there

compression post ready for bonding

are endless lessons with wider life   applications to be learned in building a small sailboat. Here was one: So often we burden our lives with systems of excessive cost and complexity. Sometimes we can’t help it—the burdens are forced onto us—but when we have a choice, the simplest solution is also likely to be the most elegant.

And the most conducive to a good night’s sleep.

* Not to Worry

Sam Devlin nailed it with eerie prescience. He wrote Devlin’s Boat Building, the bible of modern stitch-and-glue construction, almost fifteen years ago, and in it he predicted exactly where I would be on October 3, 2009:

Overwhelmed.

The Winter Wren, post-turnover

“Guard against post-rollover stall-out,” he warns (p. 141). “Don’t be overwhelmed by the number of projects yet to be completed, and resist making a list of them. Just pick them off one by one …”

September had seemed like a good month in the boat shop.

The Winter Wren's bottom

I gave the bottom three coats of antifouling, cut a heart-stopping two-inch hole in the hull and installed the depth sounder, cobbled up a waterline-simulator with a sawhorse and a bunch of clamps and painted a stripe, and finally rolled on three base coats of topside paint.

Usually topside paint waits till near the end of construction. A lot could happen to the sides of the boat over the next year or two, including spills, scrapes and unanticipated holes to be drilled. But it looked easier to put at least the base coats on while the boat was still inverted, so I did. I also craved the selfish pleasure, frankly, of seeing my boat try on her party dress. Nothing makes as big a difference in appearance as quickly as paint.

And pleasure it is. The color is Interlux “Lauderdale blue.” I stirred in a 50 percent mix of flattening agent to leave a satin finish instead of high gloss, which helps mask the many surface imperfections. More credit to Interlux than to me, but it looks stunning.

On the last weekend in September, three neighbors and I rolled her upright again. No mishaps, no 911 calls—and the engineer among us noted that he heard no creaks or groans, aside from those emitted by the crew, and proclaimed that a good sign of  structural integrity.

But now, just as Devlin predicted, I’m suffering post-rollover blues. The work of finishing all the interior structures—cabin sole, cockpit sole, ballast, battery compartments, bilge pump, compression post, storage compartments, on and on and on—looks like it’s stretching into infinity. It’s daunting and discouraging.

Of course Devlin is right in advising to “just pick them off one by one.” But it’s an emotional hurdle I’m not over yet. It’s going to require a few more days of sitting on my shop stool, staring at the great blue thing that is not yet a boat.

The blue thing does now have a name: Nil Desperandum.

I’ve bounced it off several friends, Not all of them have liked it. One cracked, “If you get in trouble out there, better hope the Roman Coast Guard is around.”

I like it very much. It’s a reminder I need constantly, even when sitting on the shop stool, staring and feeling overwhelmed. Advice from the Roman poet Horace, it translates: “Quit worrying, dummy.”

• ·

The second weekend in September I went to the annual Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival, which grows more spectacular every year.

Peter Gron and I gave a joint talk on “Perfectionism and the Wooden Boat,” illustrating our differing approaches on how meticulous one should be in building a boat. Peter is vastly more skilled, methodical, and patient than I am, and his Devlin Arctic Tern, now approaching completion, sets standards that will send most other amateurs, and some professionals, into stark raving paroxysms of envy.

Even so, he’s been an inspiration (and a generous source of advice), and I’m a better boatbuilder because of him. Visit his blog here.

The festival is also

Jibsheet led through cam cleat—way cool.

a fountain of practical ideas. As long as they’ve been around, sailboats are still floating galaxies of problems, and amateur and pro builders alike keep devising better ways to deal with them. One revolutionary

idea I may borrow for  Nil Desperandum is builder Barrett Faneuf’s cam cleats for the jibsheets. If the jib isn’t big enough to demand winches, why not use the quickest, easiest way to secure them?

Exquisitely homemade Wiley ports—an inexpensive, lightweight alternative to stainless steel portlights

Finally, the festival is a minefield of lethal boat lust.

In The Year of the Boat I wrote how my normally wise, prudent, and rational wife Patty fell for a colossal wooden boat years ago before we even knew how to sail and was hatching a plan to convert our home equity into it. And also moving aboard. I intervened. In September she did it again—or

"Ripple," a 26' Atkin gaff cutter

more accurately, a festival boat for sale did it to her. It was a 26’ Atkin gaff cutter, beautiful condition, good price. Once again I exercised my veto, but this time it was hard: I had no trouble imagining us sailing the whee off this beauty, and lavishing the care on her that she would demand.

But there’s only so much time and energy in a human life, and dividing it among five wooden boats—two kayaks, one completed daysailer, one cruiser-in-the-making, the Atkin cutter, and, yes, our day jobs—is asking the impossible. That doesn’t always stop wooden boat enthusiasts, but it made us pause. At least till next year’s festival.

Here’s a photographic sprinkling of boats and details from Port Townsend 2009.

A 16'6" Devlin Eider, predecessor to the 18'8" Winter Wren

The shapely rump of Pax, festival director Kaci Cronkhite's lovely 1936 spidsgatter

"Martha," a 102-year-old schooner designed by B.B. Crowninshield, the most beautiful boat on the planet.

One crucial difference between pro and amateur boatbuilders:

The Winter Wren's skeg with helpful boulder

A pro would not wander out and harvest a handy boulder to weight down a glued piece where a clamp wouldn’t fit. Or if he did, he wouldn’t post a picture of it on his website.

An amateur will improvise recklessly, even proudly, and admit to it all. In lieu of clamps I’ve deployed bungee cords, rubber bands, springy sticks propped against walls and ceilings, Zip-loc baggies of lead shot, and of course, boulders.

My operational philosophy,

A pro-built Winter Wren by designer/builder Sam Devlin

in life and in boatbuilding: Whatever works is good.

This last month the big job was attaching the shoe keel and external stem, which together form an impact-absorbing strip along the centerline of the boat. The keel grows into a finlike skeg near the stern, which assists tracking. The boulder and clamps in the photo secured a quarter-inch-thick oak strip intended to be replaceable after it gets scraped and battered.

The stem is also decorative, as it defines the cut of the bow above the waterline. Since it had to be laminated in order to follow the bow’s curvature, I slipped in a couple of layers of pinkish khala mahogany among the white oak. It turned out nicely, although I’m a little worried about the fragility of the skinny part at the top end of the bow. It will eventually plug into a bowsprit, which may protect it from crunches.

The terrible problem was cutting and trimming the pieces to adjust to the continually changing curvature of the hull. I’ll spare the intimate details, but it required many cardboard templates, router, chisel, and three kinds of sanders.

I made it more, not less, difficult with what turned out to be a dumb idea. To increase the lever arm of the ballast, I wanted to get as much of the specified 685 pounds of lead ballast outside the hull, hanging below like in a full-keel sailboat. I drilled 30 one-inch holes in the 1.75-inch-deep shoe keel and poured them full of lead shot and epoxy. The holes accommodated a total of 7.5 pounds of lead—1.1% of the ballast. Very impressive effort.

Professional boatbuilders, of course, execute dumb ideas, too, and they charge real money for them. Twice this summer I sailed a $200,000 French yacht that had the engine controls—throttle and shift—way down on the cockpit floor. You’re nervously guiding this costly monster into a crowded slip, and you have to keep looking away from where it’s going while you bend down to adjust the power.

During August I also finished fairing the outside of the hull—smoothing the surface in preparation for painting—and engaged another bout against that old latent demon, perfectionism.

The Winter Wren, ready to have her bottom painted

Professional boatbuilders need to finish every visible square inch of a boat to a high standard; it’s evidence of a deeper attention to detail. And they know how to do it efficiently.

I know some amateurs who, though less efficient, hold themselves to the same standard. A mediocre square inch, even in a place that won’t ever be seen by anyone except mussels and salmon—the bottom of the hull—is a testament to their failed dedication. It’s practically a moral issue.

I was working long and hard, grinding away with sandpaper on the Winter Wren’s bottom, carefully surveying each section with fingertips, and despairing of ever finishing the damn boat, when I suddenly straightened up and said (almost out loud) “Hey! Do I want a usable sailboat or a bloody moral testament?”

At that, I gave myself permission to sand the bottom to a lousier level of imperfection than the topsides.

I explored this issue in The Year of the Boat, where among other reflections on perfectionism I quoted designer/builder Sam Devlin: “As you’ve learned, you can work on these things forever. There’s no end to how far you can take it. The place where we stop is the place where it’s better than what we did on the boat just before.”

This makes perfect sense for pro or amateur. And yes, this boat is—so far—better than the daysailer that came before it (named, affectionately, Far From Perfect).

For an amateur, whose time and boatbuilding chops are necessarily limited, a boat should not be seen as an avatar of one’s moral character, but simply a chart of personal growth in skill and values. For me, at least, that seems more realistic and manageable.

And it sure as hell relieves the pressure.

Yesterday I gave a luncheon talk for a Seattle yacht club on “Imperfectionism and the Wooden Boat,” a topic I know a great deal about.

I wrestled with it throughout The Year of the Boat, but the issue doesn’t go away when you embark on a second boat. If anything, it gets worse because the second boat is always more complicated and you are now more demanding of yourself. When the demands outpace the boatbuilding skills, you feel dumb and inept.

 And they always do.

 Throughout February I worked on taping my hull and bulkhead seams.

Taped seams at the forward bulkhead

This means laying down three overlapping layers of glass cloth and wetting them out with epoxy. There are about 110 feet of seams and junctions in this boat, so it’s not a minor job.

My glasswork will not be confused with Dale Chihuly sculpture. It’s wavy, uneven, ragged at the edges. It has a pre-industrial appearance, like a weekend project by Fred Flintstone. All through the month I kept thinking I ought to be doing better, but I don’t seem to have the chops.

Morale improved slightly when I referred to Peter Gron’s website, where he described his seam-taping woes in 2005. Even meticulous craftsmen like Peter struggle with this step.

I’ve now devised two solutions.

Microballooned epoxy after sanding

 The first is to lather the taped seams that are going to show with a microballoon/epoxy mix and sand, sand, sand until the surfaces are finally smooth or the universe explodes, whichever comes first. Microballoons, which are phenolic grains filled with air, at least are easier to sand than pure epoxy.

The second is to let go of those considerable stretches where seams will be under the cockpit sole etc, and quit caring whether they look good. In fact, I’ve decided to build watertight flotation compartments in several crannies of the hull so the boat will float even if capsized. Wouldn’t it take a sick mind to sweat over finely finishing a seam that’ll be locked away in eternal darkness?

A South African friend, Davout Van Zyl, is building the same boat I am (the Winter Wren II by Sam Devlin), and he recently sent photos of wooden boatbuilding he encountered on a beach in Zanzibar.

Ribs and planking of Zanzibar boat

By the standards of a shop equipped with modern machine tools the workmanship seems crude, but what these craftsmen accomplish honors human intelligence and culture. They create boats that fit their needs, and do it well.

 If those needs don’t include building monuments to their egos, then they may be more enlightened as to the spirit of true craftsmanship than those of us who still struggle with perfectionism.

 A German artist named Samuel Buettner said: “The perfectionist gives his best out of fear. Those who strive for excellence do it out of love.”

Completing the boat

And in response to my admission at yesterday’s yacht club talk that my Winter Wren hull is about ¾ of an inch out of symmetry, an old sailor snorted, “So what? You see any people who are exactly the same on port and starboard?”

A BSO — Boat-Shaped Object—has now taken residence in the shop:

The wire stitches are still holding the panels together, awaiting epoxy (the next step). The four planks spanning the hull are temporary spreaders, necessary to force the hull sides to the correct span apart. They’ll be taken out when the bulkheads go in.

Alert readers may note that the stitches were supposed to be removed and the epoxy/fiberglassing done in November. But as usual—no, always—when an amateur builds a boat, seemingly simple steps consume prodigious amounts of time, bungled pieces have to be remanufactured, processes have to be rethought.

Case in point: the transom.

Before sawing into a $110 sheet of marine plywood, I made a trial transom from a sheet of $12 Home Depot pressboard. Of course it didn’t fit: 

I measured the gap and angle of the hull bottom and transferred this information to the marine plywood. By all the laws of physics and mathematics, the resulting piece should have fit perfectly, which it didn’t. But it was at least close, and with a couple of cheating shims epoxied in, I was able to stitch the real transom in place.

Notice in the photo above there’s also yawning daylight between the two-by-four building cradle, which is supposed to be supporting the stern, and the hull.

Back in October I had built four such cradles, extrapolating their height and support angles from the boat plans. None of these fit, either. So I spent a full November week taking them apart, rebuilding them, and leveling the hull. It’s essential that the boat be perfectly level—projected waterline parallel to the shop floor—because the only way to install the bulkheads so they’re precisely vertical is to use gravity as a measuring device, lining each bulkhead up with a plumb bob.

 Here’s one of the remanufactured  cradles. 

 Note that I had to dedicate several of  my c-clamps to the cradles, because  the middle two turned out to be too  cramped to be able to install wood  screws in the triangle supports. A  right-angle drive for the drill would  have solved the problem, but Festool, if I recall, wants a stunning ransom of $115 for that accessory. Eight C-clamps at $5 each were a more palatable investment.

Finally, I also had to do a lot of the stitching over because the first attempt didn’t pull the hull side panels into the correct alignment. I’d imposed on a kind neighbor to torque them into place while I stitched, but I was so concerned about his discomfort that I rushed through a sloppy job. For the second attempt, I cobbled up a ridiculous contraption of stepladder and clamps to simulate a human grip. Although I had to move and adjust it after each stitch, this worked better because it exhibited infinite patience. 

Which is something I don’t have. All through November I felt irritated because of the mistakes and retracing of steps, and the drudge work of rebuilding the cradles. But if your prime character defect is impatience, as mine is, boatbuilding supplies an excellent way to work on it. I can’t think of any other enterprise where patience is so tangibly rewarded, and impatience so directly and forcefully punished. 

One final thought as we enter the season of glad tidings, epoxy and fiberglass: 

In building a boat, as in taking on any big and intimidating project, it’s important to be prepared for the inevitable peaks and troughs of emotion you’ll encounter. If you expect the discouraging times, it’s easier to slog through them, preserving vital momentum. They don’t last forever. I think there is, however, a correlation between the size of the boat and the span of the troughs: the bigger the boat, the more you should plan to endure.

Winter Wren, at a shade under 19 feet, is looking colossal.