Construction Log: Tanks, Decking, Cabin Sides and Debt - May-June 1981

Tanks: 

Rainy day work, under the tarp, included engine attachments, galley counters, and tank installations. Note the laminated yellow cedar hanging knees that support the deck beams.  This view is from the main cabin, looking aft over the main cabin's aft bulkhead, across what will be the starboard-side galley to the stainless water tank outboard of the cockpit.

  

By mid-May, 1981, Richard had plumbed in Abrazo’s stainless steel water and fuel tanks with bronze deck fittings contributed by my dad’s old friend Chet Piotrowski of Schwenksville, PA.  Chet had been a salesman for a certain bronze factory Back East, and during our 1980 Christmas visit to my family’s farm in PA, Chet had given us those deck-fittings, along with some rectangular porthole frames and all the deck cleats.  Everything was chrome-plated, which did not suit our concept of Abrazo as a “work boat,” so Richard took the fittings to Queen City Plating to have the chrome removed. 

Ballard Sheet Metal made the stainless steel tanks to Richard’s specifications.  He wanted stainless because of his experience with other boats.  Rust corrupts ordinary steel.  Aluminum was implicated in causing Alzheimers-style brain damage. (I had convinced him to abandon his aluminum pots and pans.)  Richard had lived with plastic tanks on Sea Lark and knew he didn’t like the taste of water from a plastic tank.  Fiberglas was totally unacceptable.  Stainless steel seemed the very best option. 

 Photo shows the top surface of the starboard side water tank installed between the main cabin bulkheads.

Abrazo has a large water tank under the starboard main salon settee, and a large fuel tank under the port main salon settee.  Saddle tanks in the stern include 35 gallons of water on the starboard side aft of the galley, and 35 gallons of fuel on the port side aft of the chart table.  An additional water tank on the port side under the foc’sle berth could be used as a retaining tank when/if Abrazo was equipped with a marine head.  A small hot water tank outboard of the galley's wood stove was installed in the year after the boat was launched.  

In retrospect: 
1. Maybe the boat did not need quite so MUCH tankage.  Abrazo’s new owner sailed the boat in 2019 from Puerto Montt, Chile to Sitka, AK using only 55 gallons of fuel. Also, Richard installed a watermaker in 2009, which made Abrazo’s water tankage capacious. 

2.  A design modification to insulate the settee berths from the sound of the tanks underneath would allow for quieter sleep underway.  The sloshing of liquid – fuel or water- can become an irritating noise, depending on the point of sail.    

Corking

Richard corked the new boat’s decks with cotton, using the corking mallet and irons Roy Pihlman had loaned him back in 1976, when Richard repaired the F/V Rauma’s decks and planks in Bellingham. I don’t know where Roy got those tools in the first place, but Richard made good use of them for many years on many different boats.  (Note:  He returned the corking tools to Roy last year, 2019.  Roy has since sold them to another shipwright.  Long may that iron and mallet ring.) 

Photos of irons and mallet are from the Internet.  

A corking mallet has to have a certain bounce to it. 

First, you prime the seam with linseed oil and tuck a rope of cotton into the seam.  Then tap the cotton home, filling the inner seam.  Finally, use pitch to seal the seams, and clean up the mess by scraping the deck.  

The corker at work.

By the time I took photos of the pitched deck, Richard had the cabin sides up.

Foredeck pitched. We got it scraped clean, finally, in time for the launch.

Here's a corking detail for you:  In 2005, when Richard and I made our first trip to Chile, he was fascinated to see Chilean boat-building techniques in practice near Ancud, on the island of Chiloe, where they build their boats on the beach.  We watched a Chilean shipwright cork the seams of a new boat using the bark of the Alerce tree, aka Redwood, instead of cotton.   He used a piece of “leaf spring” as an iron, and a chunk of firewood as a corking mallet. Seemed primitive to us, but he got the job done.  

For more on Chilean boat-building techniques, see:Shipwright Lou in Chile

For further advice about corking:  Wikihow - Caulking

Cabin Sides

Corking is dry weather work.  When wet weather interfered, Richard began to raise props with clamps and imaginary beams to approximate the cabin sides, while we worked inside to determine our floor to head distances.  I’m 5’9,” and after living aboard Sea Lark for almost a year, where there was “head space” only in the center of the cabin underneath the skylight, I wanted to be able to stand upright in my galley.

The original Campos design shows a cabin that extends forward of the mast; but Richard had already changed that, stopping the cabin aft of the mast, and incorporating a mast step for stability.  Note that Campos’ design shows cabin sides higher at the aft end where the companionway allows descent into the galley and navigation station. 

Richard knew from experience that a shipwright had some leeway in exactly how to measure and mount the cabin’s walls. 
Old Story:

Back in 1966 or ’67, after working for nine months straight as a fabricator-manager at Boeing on the original 737, and before tackling the woodwork for Delta Marine’s production of fiberglass boats for the Alaska fishing trade, Richard - aged twenty!- worked for a time at Ballard Boat, looking to make the grade as a marine carpenter.  The boat under construction in Ballard Boat's shop was a unique design:  a power boat with three layers to its hull:  diagonal planking in the interior of the hull; carvel planking on the exterior; and a layer of thiacol rubber squeezed in between. Richard worked with a Russian guy named Wassil Melnick, on the outer planking.  
The power boat design called for planks spiled to the shape of the bow, with a “straight run” to the stern.  Richard’s job was to manage that straight end, also known as "the ignorant end” of the plank. "Raise up!" Wassil would shout, while they worked together to fit the plank.  Melnick was a Puget Sound boat builder of some standing, known to Bill Modrell.  He taught Richard how to say, in Russian, “The eagle shits on Friday.”  (Which, I’m sorry, I cannot reproduce here.)

But the important character at Ballard Boat was a German supervisor who taught him about building cabin sides.  Cabin sides have to have a certain slope or declivity.  You angle the cabin sides in some 3 to 5 degrees to make the cabin look correct when the boat is seen from afar.  

“If there is one thing worse than a cabin that leaks, it is one that looks like a box."  DIY Wood Boat   

Along with propping the cabin sides correctly, a boat-builder has to mock-up the beams for the cabin top.  Once that power boat's cabin sides were up, the German supervisor assigned Richard the job of putting up the "jo-pokes" to hold the cabin beams in place. Richard put in a set of sticks from the interior of the boat to hold up the cabin beams, but when the “Super” observed the work, his verdict was “Do it over.” He demanded that all supports be plumb in both directions.   

When Richard told Bill Modrell about this experience, Modrell laughed.  He recalled "Old Flem," the  Ballard boat builder who had, in fact, built the original F/V Rauma.  Flem worked without a level.  "Line 'em up on those pilings, boys."  

The difference between the precise and the approximate?  Maybe it all depends on what works.

A certain VP with SE Airlines had commissioned that vessel Ballard Boat was building back in 1967, and had dictated many specific requirements.  Once the German supervisor determined that Richard did not have the necessary carpentry chops, he assigned R to the plumbing task of putting in the gold-plated bathroom fixtures.    

Back in Bellingham: 

In mocking up our new boat’s cabin, Richard and I did our best to observe Abrazo’s proposed cabin sides from every point of view we could get.  He trusted his eyeball a lot more than I trusted mine.  We did our best to get perspective to make our judgments.  

“That’s true all the way through life,” says my captain.  "Get some Perspective.” 

As of June 7, 1981, a Sunday, after fiddling with adjustments to the mock-up of Abrazo’s cabin, we climbed up on top of the dumpster in the boatyard’s parking lot so we could get a more or less level view.  My immediate impression was that the peak at the after end of the cabin was cartoon-like.  Richard responded that she was definitely a folksy boat. 

He had some frustrations with the material for those cabin sides.  The re-saw folks who split the thickness of a long fir plank into thirds had not been exactly accurate.  Richard had planned to rip one thinner plank lengthwise, laminate a strip to each of the first two planks, and that way get the extra height needed at the after end of the cabin.  He did go ahead with this plan, but had to plane away some of the thickness to get equal sizes.  Abrazo's cabin sides are 1 1/2" thick, of beautiful, fine-grained Douglas fir.  

Cabin side, bulwarks, chain plates.    

Debt

Once the sale of Hank Baila’s Seattle home was completed, we took out a loan from Papa Hank, committing to $350 a month in order to pay off that loan in five years.  The debt terrified me, as our already minimal “budget” wobbled from month to month.  But what was to be done?  We needed so many more fittings and accoutrements and supplies to get this boat ready to launch.  

Richard had carved patterns in yellow cedar, and Union Foundry in Bellingham used these molds to cast chain plates of manganese bronze.  Pintils and gudgeons for the rudder would also need to be cast.  The new boat had to have Gaco Flex paint for the cabin top, primer and finish paint for the hull and interior; and copper bottom paint, along with an endless flow of sand paper and varnish.  We'd need a propeller on the engine shaft.  Soon enough, we'd need wood for a mast. 

Richard had found a fine source for that mast wood.  And that's the next story to tell.    

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