Tag: designers

What John Welsford does with mashed potato

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The transom for John Welsford’s new cruising dinghy design, Pilgrim. Read
about this interesting small boat at his Pilgrim Diaries

Well known New Zealand boat designer, builder and cruiser John Welsford has written tell us about a technique he has developed for testing the rot-resisting properties of unknown timber and plywood:

‘Hi Gav,

‘I thought that you might like to put my comment about mashed spuds in connection with rot testing.

‘Just to stir things up a bit you understand!

‘Rot is due to fungus and needs food, moisture and oxygen in order to grow and spread. Cut off one or more of those and you don’t get rot.

‘Also, rot, like most fungi, spreads far more rapidly in warm conditions.

‘My test method involves placing the sample on a dish in the warmth of the kitchen, and covering it with mashed potato. Potatoes are almost all starch, a form of sugar, and mashing it up with milk brings even more sugars. Mashed potatoes also hold moisture and, being light and fluffy (if made properly) they admit oxygen. So a layer of mashed ‘taties accelerates the rate at which rot takes hold and multiply and is a workable if unusual method of testing wood for susceptibilty for fungal decay. You should see what I do with raspberry jam!

‘Yours, John’

Many thanks John. I might try it some time, though I’d be a bit concerned about this as a practical test. Done properly, it would demand not just well made mash, but would also require brewing up quite a number of different samples. It’s a very interesting idea, but could also be a recipe for trouble in the kitchen that could test more than a piece of wood!

I wonder whether it would work if conducted where no-one goes, round the back of the shed in the summer, and under a plastic sheet?

For more intheboatshed.net posts relating to John Welsford’s boat plans, click here.

For more on John’s plans, see his website; also, there’s a nice new weblog about building a small cruising yacht to his Fafnir plans here.

Boat Building Academy student boat launch day December 2008

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Launch day at the Boat Building Academy. As usual, click on the
thumbnails for much larger photos

Boat Building Academy principal Yvonne Green has written to tell us about her students’ big launch day down at Lyme Regis. It looks and sounds wonderfully jolly with such nice weather and such a big crowd of supporters, and it must have been quite an emotional event too.

‘The Boat Building Academy launched seven boats at noon on 10th December – more than from any previous course.

‘The fourteen students who built the boats started the 38 week course on 17th March 2008. The first twelve weeks was spent developing their woodworking skills (some started with none), painting and finishing, making oars, building clinker sections and laminating the stem sections that make up the City & Guilds assessment pieces – they take the Level 3 City & Guilds 2451 technical exams as well as learn how to build boats, and they all passed – in addition to time in the classroom on theory, deciding what boats to build and lofting them.

‘They went down onto the main workshop floor on 16th June this year and started the builds; one traditional clinker, three glued clinker, one strip plank, one stitch and glue and a cold-moulded wherry spiled to simulate carvel. Two of the boats were designed by main instructor for the March 2008 course Mike Broome, and two sets of plans came from the Mystic Seaport Museum .

‘To say we’re proud of the course’s achievement is a massive understatement. Over the last 38 weeks of the course the workshop has not been a beach-side oasis of peace and tranquillity, but the product of all that energy is superb.

‘About a hundred and fifty people walked the boats down to the harbour in brilliant sunshine. Academy director  Tim Gedge said a few words, followed by the Mayor of Lyme Regis, before the real business of the day began and the boats were launched one by one into the water. They all floated, we all cheered… ‘

For more intheboatshed.net posts relating to the Boat Building Academy, click here.

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The boatbuilding bug bites another victim

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Ed’s 10ft Maine Skiff, built from plans and instructions
supplied by Duck Trap Woodworking

Ed Engarto in New York State is one of the many people who build a boat, only to discover that it can be a life-changing experience.

This seems to happen a lot. I know there’s a lot of satisfaction to be gained from building even the smallest boat and then using your creation on the water, but I think there’s more to this phenomenon: perhaps it’s the fact of slowly over time creating a tangible object, the quality of which the maker can judge and come to terms with as they proceed, perhaps it’s the discovery that, after all, one can learn new skills and complete a new category of projects, or maybe it’s the result of all those quiet hours the boatbuilder spends working alone in quiet contemplation.

Ed seems to me to be a typical convert to amatuer boatbuilding. I hope he enjoys his second project as much as he did his first.

He writes:

‘I built this little ten foot, lapstrake row boat over a period of three plus years, ending in July of 2008. The design comes from Duck Trap Woodworking and is known to those fine folks as their Maine Skiff. I started out journaling every working session and before the molds were even finished, the entries began to touch on life experiences, the trials of a large project, the virtue of commitment, and some thoughts about events that took place during the skiff’s construction. It actually became a mechanism through which I shared the most influential events in my life and therefore is much more than a sequence of construction steps explained. I learned so many boatbuilding skills and enjoyed the project so much, that I have become a lover of wood and water and am already looking towards my next boat.’

See the Duck Trap Woodworking website.

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