Fixing Fuckups

Wonder of wonders the major sewing is finished. Now I get to do what all conscientious craftsmyn do, fix my fuckups.
Everybody fucks up. The mark of spiritual maturity is how much honest energy you put into fixing those fuckups, and how cheerfully you address the issue.
After finishing the canvas work and laying the finished product out in the hall for measurements I immediately took the thing down to the laundry room here at Williams Plaza and ran the new sail through a hot wash with Arm & Hammer detergent and an hour in a hot dryer.

After an hour on the ironing board in the panic of near despair, I finally got it took look halfway like it should have all along. The way I laid out the reefing band is probably going to prove to be a world-class fuckup, and I did it that way out of sheer vanity, knowing full well where that shit usually gets me.

I need to get the sizing out of the cloth so it will take the tannin uniformly, and I figured I had better get the inevitable shrinkage out of the way before I stitch on the bolt-rope and work in the grommets and cringles.
There's a fuck of a lot of sizing in brand new canvas. One washing by this front loader machine got maybe half of it out. The last time I had new sheets it took three to make them actually feel like clean cotton sheets and not like crumpled aluminum foil.
So I wasn't really surprised when I opened up the dryer and found an ugly crumpled mass still obviously half-full of sizing. I will definitely need to repeat the washing, and maybe again after that. I won't run it through the dryer again. I will try wet-ironing it instead.
As it was I had to iron the shit out of everything with the iron as hot as it would go and a squirt bottle of water in one hand, which made the thing look more or less like it is supposed to. Even the corner patches, six layers thick in places, were like dried seaweed.
So I laid it out in the hall and measured. The cloth shrank like a bastard in length, 111 to start and 98 after, 10 % along the leach. The width at the foot only lost 3 inches,  around 3 % somewhere,

That's the belly band running at the diagonal there, wrinkly as shit and totally interrupting the shape of the cloth. Major malfuntion, which in my infinite vanity I believed wouldn't happen, wouldn't matter if it did, and that I can fix it. Denial. Shit.

  The worst thing is the reef band across the belly 30 inches up. I had a continuous strip that was the full LENGTH of the cloth which I ran the WIDTH of the sail which totally fucked things up.. I should have known, it shrank way more than the cloth under it. Oops. I'l have to pick it off and re-stitch it. It's shrunk now, so I might as well use it.
Then comes all the fun stuff like roping and eyelets and grommets and the finish work where I can show off all my sailor-Jack bullshit.
Tomorrow is my 65th birthday.

Planning Stage

Those are spritsails on the dory lollygagging across the background, not everybody had them. At least the guys in front are getting some fish. All that crap in the boat and there's still room for a ton of codfish.

These guys have a sprit sail rolled up on the mast laying alongside the oarsmen, but there doesn't seem to be that much wind right at the moment. Very impressive mittens, among the many bits of gear worth studying in this photograph.

I get these ideas, see, and they fascinate me somehow, bordering on obsession. Riding the bus, falling asleep, having coffee, lurking on Reddit, my little mind will not shut up about it but I do make progress sometimes and the idea gradually works itself into a recognizable shape. When I am lucky, that is, lucky and honest with myself.
I have never actually seen a working Grand Banks Dory with spritsail complete. I am developing this thing based on what I know from the small craft I have seen and the book by Pete Culler, Skiffs and Schooners kind of the bible for the theory of the thing with a lot of nice drawings.
But not of the "partners", the construct that holds up the mast. In his drawings it is just a hole in a thwart and a block on the floor. The actual ins and outs of mast support aren't mentioned.
I won't have a thwart handy.
There are three in the dory, 2x8 cedar, just planks with a taper on the tips and a notch to locate them at a particular rib (frame) to sit on and row or if you are lucky, to sit on while somebdy else rows. They fit on the third, fourth and fifth frames.
I want the mast to go on the second frame from the bow.

I think I will have only one of the little arches and the horizontal breadboard type slab wiith the hole in it. But this is the idea that solved the most of the problems.

SO the necessity turned my mind to possible solutions, and I considered one thing and another, ways you could get a cross piece on there with a place to secure the mast. The block on the floor is a given as long as it spans enough width to spread the force across enough planks to even out the load.
I made a little drawing, which is not, I should warn you, an architectural plan, but a concept sketch. I liked it.
It seemed to me that the seat-plank type deal wasn't very high in the boat and that there might be too much leverage against it if the wind started to cook like it hopefully does, after all I have a reefing band and if you reef your sail the wind is cooking for sure.
Another trip over to the salvage yard, where they soaked me 16 bucks for a slab of old  growth 2x8, which I brought home on the bus. People looked, but nobody laughed.

I'm pretty good at working things down gradually enough to make a snug fit. I made a big bedstead once that had no fastenings or glue. You assembled it with a mallet. Anywaythis bracket will be easy enough to make, with notches and tabs and insert part B into slot A type thing.

 Later on the drawings and planning changed from the support to how to hold  that up in some kind of way that would allow the whole thing to come off and stow away.

This is the part that kept me obsessed with the subject, but I think you could make part of this bracket rotate like the latch on the door Almanzo made for Laura and Ma's Little House on the Prairie.

Some time soon we will have a nice discussion about how this shit actually corresponds with reality...

Dipsomania

Jim Lemay loves his chainsaw.
He got a new one this fall and it is a crackerjack.
He and my sister Mel live in the foothills of the Siskyous down by Ashland, and there are many trees on their little hillside rancho.
Ex-logger + giant new Stihl chanisaw + trees = noise of small engine and crashing and now and then a real  substantial THUD.
I've got all this canvas and hemp both of which are notorious rot magnets, and in the old days some sailors tanned their sails.

St Johns Nova Scotia a fish store painted with the old codfish ocher paint, several years after the last coat was applied.

In Nova Scotia, home of the Grand Banks Dory fleet, they would mix up a gallon of cod liver oil and about five pounds of powdered Red Ocher clay and some pine tar and lay their sails oot on the gravel and paint a generous coat of this shit  throughout, and go fishing the next day. Not me. Too stinky and sticky. But a beautiful color, kind of a lively bright raw red.

Not the effect I am looking for. Lively nonetheless. Ocher is basically hematite in clay, much to the delight of East Africa.

Me and Jim set out to harvet some Black Oak bark chips, which took about seven minutes with that giant saw. Jim merely touched the spinning chain to the inch thick bark of an oak stump and the sawdust flew in a  flurry snowdrift onto a sheet of cardboard we had laid out to receive. The chips were a kind of a creamy white in color.
However by the time I got two gallon sized ziplocs of them home, the chips were a delicious shade of scarlet.

And so was the water that I soaked a cupful in just to see what was going to happen to my test-patch of canvas.

 
Not much, but it did start the deal, and a couple days later I did a second soak, just like you do with a deerhide in the tanning process. With the cloth you rinse, dry, repeat, until you get the shade you want.
I know from my previous exeriments that tannin residue in the cotton canvas cloth inhibits rot to a surprising degree. And the second soak was a bit darker in result than the first, so I do think I have the process I will eventually use.

Much better color after the second dip.Although the fungicide properties of the tannin are infused in this test patch, the color isn't there yet. I have a secret strategy for getting the color to the traditional shade of red that involves logwood chips, a traditional red dyestuff.

Sequence

Yesterday at the Powell Paint Center, my new favorite place in Portland,  there were 3 guys behind the counter and no other customers in the store. Each of the 3 guys thought the other was helping me, and nobody wanted to poach, so after I wandered around for 10 minutes oohing and ahing as the significance of all the little doodads and professional painters' gizmos came back to me in a dense and sweet nostalgia, I stood at the counter for quite some time as the three men avoided eye contact, busy with small things in their own 3 little worlds.
Finally, trying not to sound as annoyed as I was starting to feel, I asked if somebody could please help me.
They all exploded in embarassment at once, and I immediately saw what had happened and I was able to  help smooth feathers and milk the humor in the situation.

A brush worthy of the work that went into my project. That's all I wanted

 The guy I wound up with was such a helpful nice man, a pro, a working man's resource, old-timer at 45 or 50 ( It breaks my heart that I am so much older than such mature men) , sympathetic and knowledgeable, spent a very agreeable half hour talking the business with me. I had been looking for a 2 inch straight cut hog bristle brush of good quality which I could not find. I suspected I was looking right at it but there's this thing where I'm right on top of shit and it will not break into my notice. Happens a lot. Sure enough there it was, a beautiful brush, well formed, soft, nice stainless ferrule.

This morning I rinsed it in some Penetrol, to prime the bristles and condition them to take and release the material more readily, and with it I applied the second coat of boiled linseed oil to the now finished mast.
Linseed Oil is a surprisingly robust finish for Doug Fir, and you can spend a lot of money and a heck of a lot of time before you surpass its durability and quiet handsome gleam..which is to say the mast is done, done fairly well, looks like the real old-time thing, and it deserves that kind of understated covering material applied with such a brush worthy of its task...

Smells really nice in here now.

Here's a retrospective in photos of the whole project:

Pete Culler says, and I agree,  you should never cut to the exact length until you absolutely have to. There was 4 feet of extra material to remove. It made me nervous, so I left an extra  few inches on the stick, which I never have cut off. The markings for the rip layouts showed up nice on the kerf. This was my first look at the grain of the stock, and I was thrilled.

Measure, mark and remeasure. I almost got in trouble right off.  I couldn't find my straight-edge batten and the board I used was warped like the dickens. I finally calmed down enough to hang a string and go from there, working off a centerline. I don't know why it takes me so long to start doing it right.

And then do it all again on the fresh surface. I learned a lot about tool control. I have a new respect for the craftsmen who built stuff back in thedays of Henry The Navigator before measurements were standardized, and an ell meant from your elbow to your fingertips and an inch was a knucklebone.

This is a rare view of a newly exposed face of the butt taper with no markings on it whatsoever. I have a bad habit of making hasty mistaken marks and ending up with a mishmash of erasures and crosshatchings.

And then I started in with the planing.

Double Taper

The little 6-strand Round Sinnet halyard I made out of hemp will thread up through this pully some day.

Finish

Just one coat of linseed oil brought out the rutilations, a term referring to the shimmery striations running across the grain at right angles, barely visible in this photo, in this old Douglas Fir like on a star sapphire, only these don't converge in a star effect, they are parallel. The cedar filler pegs look like the moons of Saturn in the rings of unsolidified interstellar gases...

I did find a place to hang my newly oiled  mast out of the way, against the wall behind my worktable, a kind of a tableux shrine of all the best-loved things remaining in my world. That's my kid on the wall, goofy in his Junior year at Marshfield High. The little doily contains symbolic gilded relics of my trip to Thailand, a shrine to an old guru, a beech-nut from Mark Twain's yard and a sponge from the beach at Key West. There is an  Orthodox crucifix  (Ethiopian, not Russian)  of Ebony set with precious stones that I made many years ago during my Rastafarian period, and a marble relief carving symbolizing illumination from even earlier than that, when Jeff was a baby.
Off to the right is my voodoo doll by the medicine chest I made  in a creative frenzy over a couple of rainy days on Felicity Jane two  winters ago.
I'll do another couple of coats of the boiled Linseed oil, it has a very agreeable odor and a very forgiving nature for its application. It tolerates an unsteady brush and a bump or two without complaint.

Round and Round

Turns out I didn't need as much 80 grit sandpaper as I thought.
Wandering around inner Southeast Portland in the rain the other day I stopped in at the Miller Paint store and confirmed what I already suspected, they are the paint bullshitters of Portland, with upscale creepy exhomeimprovement management assholes behind the counter, and homeowner material on sale, unlike the old days when they were the real deal. Not any more. I wanted 80 grit paper, they had it only in packs of 100 sheets. They did have those half-assed variety packs and they included 60 grit only, and a woodworker can't use it. Homeowners do, but its a false economy. Sure you get the old shit off off there fast, but you pay for that with deep scratches from the big grit and it takes you far longer to get the scratches out than it would have...They don't sell metal workpots anymore, and the chick tried to tell me they don't make an oil-based enamel primer.. I now officially hate those bastards, even though the primer, Pure Paint, that they actually do still make is the best in the business.
The little Ace Hardware (chain-2 strikes already) that used to be in Uptown and is now down in the hardware ghetto by Chowns down by the freeway, amazingly had paper by the sheet, so I got 5 sheets 80, 2 sheets 120 and a 180.
The little mast is done, even the sheave in the masthead came out nice, all the holes and the marking of same done a bit on the voodoo side since nothing is parallel anymore, but they lined right up and it looks just like the big boys.

With a rat-tail rasp it was easy to file a groove around a  chunk of seasoned Cherry branch I had on stash for carving spoons. Slabbed that off like makeing a cookie from frozen cookie dough, drilled a hole in the middle, and that made the sheave. The axle is a chunk of #4 copper wire thrust through a gob of tallow and peened over a pair of washers to make a  very functional improvised rivet.

When all that crazy handsaw workout was over, I made a little jig to mark the tapered slab, 4 sided, with paralell lines so that when you plane off the corners, voila, 8-sided and good to go.

My new Canon copier was just the right height to carry one end. I'm having a war with HP, but I'm too lazy to change them out, so I have the Canon nearby to intimidate my HP into acting right. So far so good.

The dips and wiggles from the handsaw made those guidelines  an approximation, but it did tend to agree with itself, so I took it down to the octagon with Bob's supersharp jack plane and its #4 pal. The big boys do it again down to 16 sided, but it was pretty rough, and my jury-rig marking jig was too general to get that specific so I took it the rest of the way by eye, which worked out ok.

I found this diagram after I had the thing done just to show you what its supposed to look like and yes to brag a bit about the halfassed thing I made and used

1979 Wooden Boat Symposium I heard a lecture by Harold "Dynamite" Payson who described this sparmaker's jig among other extremely usefull doodads for the shop. I used them all, but I waited 33 years to make this one. It did the job I did look around on the web to refresh my memory, but I didn't find much until it was already over. Dynamite Payson is one of the Greybeards of traditional boatbuilding and an accessible and truly nice guy.

 I did have to watch myself, I was having so much fun with those sharp-ass planes I could easily have gone too far in a very short time.
But I did the last tiny soft shavings with an even smaller one-handed affair, a little block plane given me by my pal Nan Kitchens whan I was in Key Largo last year, and I managed to get it sharp as the others and it did the trick.
I dragged the stick out to the backyard to the smokers' pavillion officially known as the Barbecue Shelter (no barbecue allowed, another strange tale) and I spent an agreeable if slightly chilly and damp afternoon and only one sheet of 80s and by god the thing was round, tapered, and looking like it had always been that way.
Yesterday I rigged up a dust collector which was really only the hoover hose hung from a string pointed right at the work at my knee to keep the dust from the 120s under control as I made all smooth.
I was like a little kid, I couldn't stop look at it and petting it like you do the baby's forehead wondering how something could be so soft and smooth.