Getting Started

"A year from now you'll wish you had started today"
-Karen Lamb

I started out by lofting John Gardner's table of offsets. Lofting translates a chart of measurements into a two dimensional representation of the hull's shape. Apparently it's not a difficult process; I think it was Howard Chappelle who said "Any damn fool can learn it in an hour". I took more than an hour from which I suppose you may draw your own conclusions. I found Greg Rossel's "The Boatbuilder's Apprentice" to be the biggest help and managed to make a passable, if slow, job of it.

Everything fit on a 1/4 sheet of plywood. This, combined with the flat bottom made this design an easy first exercise in the process. Gardner's measurements are careful and accurate and they fair easily. Unfortunately in my haste to get started, I didn't paint the plywood before I began laying down the lines so everything is a little harder to read than it should be. None of the pictures of the lofting are worth posting but Sam did provide me with a point of inspiration to let me know what we were working towards.

I hadn't planned to rig her for sail, but he is somewhat emphatic on the point.

I agonized over whether or not to use ribs in the construction. I love the way the ribs accentuate the lines of a shapely hull, but are they necessary in a small boat built of glued lapstrake plywood? I have seen successful examples of the Herreshoff boat built frameless and I wanted to keep the weight and maintenance to a minimum. Eventually I decided to compromise: I would include ribs every 16" rather than 8" as designed.

I spent a great deal of time on the ribs. I traced and cut out the patterns and soaked the strips for two days prior to bending. After the soak I clamped the strips onto the bending forms and allowed them to dry for 4 days. Next I applied glue to the pre-bent strips and clamped them in place for several days.

Pre-soaked strips drying in the mold

Another frame clamped while the glue set

Finished glue up with the clamps removed

 

Everything looked great...for a while.

When I had about half of the frames glued up I noticed they were not holding their shape correctly. The longer they had been out of the molds the greater their tendency to straighten. I switched from Titebond III to Gorilla Glue with no improvement. Rats!

Epoxy might have done the job, or sanding the strips thin enough to add another layer to the glue-up. When all was said and done I decided to omit the ribs. I decided it was too much effort and expense for extra weight that was only going to make the boat look pretty. I would assemble a standard building jig and proceed without ribs.

Background

“All things are created twice. There's a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation to all things.”
-Stephen Covey

I'm building a Herreshoff/Gardner Rowboat for my family to mess about in and (perhaps more importantly) to steep my kids in the notion that a person can do anything if they find the right books.

I love spending time in boats. I'm partial to canoes, believing that a boat is used in inverse proportion to it's weight. Most of my time afloat has been spent in a Redbird my dad built (published in the original Canoecraft). It's a great design, able to haul a lot of weight, and for years I really enjoyed it. When I had a couple of kids I discovered a problem. The payload was increasing, but nobody else was paddling. Even my wife had developed the tendency to watch the scenery go by and rarely dip a blade in the water. It was hard to generate enough force to get a 300+ pound load underway, or turn it once it was moving. I decided that a rowboat would approach the minimalist experience of the canoe, but would give me a mechanical advantage to help drive us forward.

Herreshoff Rowboat (Not mine, not Green Machine)

Three years ago we took a family vacation to Mystic Seaport and I tried rowing some peapods and their Herreshoff/Gardner Rowboat Green Machine. The peapods were nice, and certainly more stable, but Green Machine was so easily driven that I was sold. Loaded with the four people in my family plus my father she rowed with absolute grace and ease. I knew this was the boat to build. I already had the plans and I was ready to buy materials and get started...


Then we moved.
Then we had another baby.

Finally this year I got underway.