Busy week ahead on Chance

It has been a fortnight since we have been up at Woodplumpton and it is now time to go up to Woodplumpton again for a weeks work on Chance. 

Now that all but the masts and booms are now back at my workshop it is time to make a start on the repairs and restoration of the hull planking and ribs in the boat. 

We have investigated the boat from stem to stern and have found that Chance is in need of a lot of ribs to be removed and replaced along her length. Surprising the ribs forward on the main cabin appear to be in good order apart from a few where bulkheads have crossed over  them and made them rotten through fresh water rotting the bullhead and in turn rotting the rib.  

The most damage to the ribs is amidships down both port and starboard side. The starboard side being the worse affected with the breaks in the ribs going all the way to the transom. On the starboard side they were doubled and in some cases sistered  rather than replace the whole rib and not make the planking look like a pin cushion. The port side faired a little better and the broken ribs end in the aft master cabin heads.

The planking is another pr4oblem, as over the years, the planking as been replaced with short lengths to just remove the rotten wood at the time with no regard to the strength of the hull, which is now in a poor condition and long lengths are going to have to be replaced in order to return the strength back into the construction of the hull and get the hull back into the correct shape which has been lost over the years through repairs.

So it has been decided to make a start at the worse affect part of the hull the starboard quarter and work our way a long the hull until we go round the hull to the port quarter. While one of the working party tackles the transom and the framework that it is made from. From research done the transom was made up off the boat in a jig and the fitted to the aft end of the deadwood. once it was in place the planks were fixed to the transom after the bevels were cut and shaped on the oak frame work around the edge of the transom.

Unlike some modern boatbuilders with their modern ideas of how to re-plank a hull I am going to do the re-planking using the old time served method of removing every other plank, that way keeping the shape of the hull and not letting it distraught out of shape. I do not know where this idea that you can deskin a boat and think it is not going to go out of shape. The only way it would not happen is that as the old planks were coming off and a boatbuilder was cutting and shaping the planks as fast as they were coming off and refixing them with the correct fixings . In the case of Chance Copper nails and roves on the ribs and bronze woodscrews on the frames.  I would love to see this method done by a single boat builder doing a restoration project such has Chance. I do believe only the major boatyard would de-skin a hull and refit a new hull if they had  a double gang of boat builders doing one side each.   Screwing new planks on to old ribs and frames is not only a bad practice, but a practice that is in my mind a bodge and a practice that should be stopped  before it becoming the standard by which  boats are repaired.

So over the next few months you will see how a hull should be restored using traditional methods.