Snow Goose: Ginger rebuild Part VII, Planking

I know, this blog about the Ginger is getting to be a bit long but it did take 6 months of work to finish the boat and a few of you might enjoying reading about how it was done. For the rest of you… well, it’s going to be about another 5+/- posting about the rebuild before I go back to other mundane stuff so hang in there.

Now that the front and the back end of Ginger was replaced I could start on the planks. I must tell ya’ll that this was a despicable job. Dirty, filthy old paint on the outside and black Yuck on the inside. All of this had to be scraped off before I could start in on repairing the planks. I already had the first 4 planks off and so I started on them. All of the old screw holes had to be plugged and many of the planks had cracks or large checks(checks are the natural splitting that occurs in wood) in them that had to be router out and inserts glued into place.

Every old screw hole had to be pluged.

Then the cracks and the checks had to be routered and filled.

It was a long and tedious job. When they were repaired and ready to go on again I beveled a new edge on each one as I set them into place. It took all of my clamps to install the first few planks. After that, I had to make “rib clamps” to do the rest.

Finally, the first couple of planks were installed. They look good, the wood is repaired and the seams tight again.

A rib clamp squeezes around a rib and provides a place to lightly set in wedges that hold planks in place while you screw them down.

I made a dozen of these and they worked out very well.

As I moved away from the keel, I had to have a way to hold the planks against each other. These clamps and soft wood wedges could push and hold the planks against their neighbors while I drilled and screwed the plank down.

After the first four planks were back on the boat, I started on the planks at the turn of the hull. This area is where all of the broken ribs occurred. To strengthen and repair this area first I had to make up short, sister ribs that would ride between the old ribs to strengthen the hull in this area. To make them I steam bent short oak rib pieces and bent them to the curve of the hull. It took about 1 hour to completely steam a rib and then (in about 30 sec)I would pop them out of the steam box and clamp them into place. The entire center section of the boat had to have sister ribs installed.

These sister ribs had just come out of the steam box and are bent against the hull of the boat as they cool and assume their new shape.

The starboard side sister ribs are ready to be screwed into place as soon as the planks in this area are finished and installed.

At the same time I began to reatatch the repaired forward planks to the new front stem.

I kept installing the rest of the planks until I reached the water line where the planking was in good shape. The final plank came up short of it’s neighbor (because of cleaning up the plank edges and pushing the planks back together again) and I had to add a long strip to its edge to make up this difference. After the glue was set, I carefully wedged the final plank into place and screwed it down. Ginger was now a boat again!