On lofting and muppets

Originally published 16.10.2017 on the IYRS blog.

The boats made their first appearance in Restoration Hall for the lofting project, which we finished a little more than a week ago.. 

Allow me to begin with a brief tangent. They say there are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t. This is my second-favorite oversimplification of the vast array people on earth. My favorite oversimplification is Chaos Muppet/Order Muppet. Kermit, orderly, soft-spoken, and dependable, is the Platonic ideal of an Order Muppet. Animal and the Swedish Chef, on the other hand, are perfect pictures of Chaos Muppets. They are obsessive and messy and wild and leave trails of broken drumsticks or onion halves in their wake.

When I was young, I had the ambition to be a Chaos Muppet. I wanted to be wild and fun and unpredictable. (I probably wasn’t as much of any of those things as I thought I was.) As I got older and crankier and wearier, I tried to tell myself I was an Order Muppet through and through. The truth, as I’ve finally come to realize in the last couple of years, is that I—like most of us in any binary system—don’t fit neatly into either category. I am simultaneously Chaos and Order, or sometimes more one than the other, depending on how I feel and/or how many damn kids are on my lawn. I try to embrace Chaos as much as possible, because in general I think it’s good to stay on your toes. But, I recognize the importance of Order when there are things that need to be measured or institutional hoops through which I need to jump. Rather than be stuck at one pole or another, I prefer to bounce back and forth to different positions on the Continuum of Muppet Alignment as the task at hand requires.

Now that we all understand the Muppet Grand Unified Theory, I feel that we’re prepared to move on to a discussion of the lofting process, which we in year one of the Boatbuilding and Restoration program finished late last week. Lofting, like laying out joinery or almost anything else that I’ve encountered so far at IYRS, is an exercise fit for an Order Muppet.

Plumb bobs and water levels are our high-tech solutions to the problem of leveling and positioning the boats.

Lofting

Lofting is the process of creating a full-scale drawing of a boat from three angles. We turn the boat upside down and level it, then line it up perfectly on a centerline by hanging plumb bobs from the stem and transom. When it’s situated we screw it down and lock it in place with plywood cut out over the rub rails and fastened to the stand. Then we build a measuring jig over it. Just two pine planks, squared and leveled and gusseted together, supported on the other side by another upright plank and a couple of F-clamps.

The jig is up! We’re ready to take our measurements.

We take measurements by pointing a marked stick at the hull of the boat and marking where it falls on the paper covering the jig.

The boat is sliced into five stations, with the lines drawn on the floor. We set the jig at station one, double check for plumb and level, and fix it firmly upright. We cover the jig in paper and set a pointer stick on the keel, the rabbet, the sheer, and on each plank of the boat, marking the paper with a pencil, recording the measurements in this 19th-century way. We measure only one side—the assumption being that a boat is symmetrical—in five stations before moving on to a related process on the transom and the stem. Seven places to measure, eight or so measurements at each place. Each measurement gives a data point that we lay out on a full-size grid on the floor. After we’ve laid out all the points from a given station, we connect the dots with a wooden batten and fair the lines.

We turn the jig to measure the stem when we’re finished with the stations along the length of the boat.

Fairing

We are taught to trust our eye in fairing a curve. I love this about boat building so far. If a line doesn’t look “fair” or “sweet” when it’s laid down on the lofting boards, then we should assume that there was a problem with our measurement or that the boat—a restoration job, after all—has twisted or bent or otherwise come out of shape. “These boats want to be fair,” Joel told us early in the lofting process. Hans went on to say that after a year or so of boat building our eyes will zero in on flat or hollow lines on anything from a Ford F-150 to a new iPhone. We will become, he maintains, critics of all lines.

Eventually, we get some lines down on the boards.

 As we faired our curves, I saw more clearly the role of the craftsperson in this trade. A trained eye can zero in on a flat spot, but no two sets of eyes are guaranteed to have the same interpretation of the problem. Last week Joel stopped at my team’s station to help us fair the bottom of keel line. Hans came by after a few minutes and offered his perspective. He and Joel then good-naturedly bickered for fifteen minutes, and ultimately Hans solved what he saw as the problem by resting a hammer against the thin wood batten after it had already come off the board, thereby adding a bit of extra curve to the back of the line. Hans was much more satisfied with the curve with that minor adjustment, and we re-drew the line. An instant later he found another flat spot near where the stem joins the keel, and he warned us of the dangers of looking at a curve with too much perspective. “Once you go past the yellow line,” he said, referring to the end of the plywood platforms on which we’re lofting and building our boats, “it’s over. You’re in hell.”

 We may have been in hell, but that hell yielded a line that was, to use the technical terms of this new trade, sweet and fair. By simply pushing up on the end of the batten, Hans and Joel helped us round the curve and recognize how we as builders will have an impact on the way a boat looks. Even a boat like the Beetle Cat, so strictly regulated in its form by Beetle Inc., will vary somewhat depending on the eyes and hands that loft and plan and ultimately build or restore it.

The sheer line doesn’t look too bad.

Offsets, or, What kind of Muppet am I?

I heard mention of the “table of offsets” only a couple days after arriving to IYRS. I had no idea what it meant, but I liked the feel of the words. They sound geometrical and architectural, like something an engineer would say. It sounds like something far enough out of my wheelhouse that I was going to have to struggle to put it together. It turns out, however, that a table of offsets is simply a list of measurements that explains where lines intersect on a grid. So, while there were plenty of struggles laying those lines out in three views on the floor, once they were finished it was a relatively simple process to create the table.

We marked the intersections on thin strips of wood—one for each major line in the body plan view, which looks at the boat from straight on—and then set the sticks against a long ruler, calling out intersections in feet-inches-eighths. There were only a few minor hiccups, and within an hour or so we were finished lofting, with all the relevant information recorded on paper as well as on the lofting boards themselves. The next step will be to spend one day each week in the drafting room, creating first a lines drawing and then a construction drawing of our boat as well as a half model of the shape of the hull.

 Lofting is like a 3D puzzle, where making any change in one view requires further changes in the others. It can be frustrating at times, but when a line comes out fair and clean against the white of the boards the frustration and sore knees seem worth it. It’s a relatively simple process, I’ve found, where meticulousness and the order of operations make all the difference in the world. I try to be meticulous in my daily life, but occasionally my nature is more Swedish Chef than Kermit, and lofting is an important reminder that method is at least sometimes more important than madness.

Introducing myself to the IYRS community

We've been measuring the boats and lofting their lines for the last week and a half or so. The jig here is set to measure the curve of the stem. Next week I'll dive into the lofting process more fully with a new post.

Things have been quiet on the blog for a couple of weeks while we’ve been sorting out the details on a recent development: starting this week I’ll be writing for the official IYRS blog and then cross-posting here.

My first post over at IYRS is below:

Read the rest by clicking the picture or following this link.

On the foghorn and the green light

Newport Harbor in the fog

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

The foghorn has been blowing nights lately here in Newport. It is rhythmic, consistent, and faint when heard from behind and some city blocks away. But it's there, alerting passing ships of a busy harbor and a jagged coastline; both a warning and a welcome, I imagine, on a night wrapped in a pale shroud.

As I sit on the porch of my house on Thames Street (pronounced THAY-MS, as if you've never heard of the river that cuts across London) in Newport, just five minutes walking to the waterfront, I listen to the foghorn and wonder why it still blows. Between GPS systems, Doppler radar, easy synchronous communication with harbormasters, weather app push notifications, and all the millions of other high-tech methods of communicating information to ships at sea, why do we still go to the trouble of blowing a foghorn or lighting a lighthouse? Surely those other methods must be in use, so why do we cling to these outmoded techniques as well?

Foghorns and lighthouses are just a single step removed from bonfires and yelling from the beach, and yet we stick with them. We keep just enough of them maintained to back up our new digital warning and communication networks, and we sell the rest of them off to become passion projects, museums, or Airbnb rentals. But they still dot our coasts and the coasts of the rest of the world, and we hear the horns blowing on foggy nights and are reminded that our contemporary systems have antecedents in a pre-digital history, a history in which the brightness of a lighthouse lamp or the volume of a foghorn could change the fates of those living their lives on the water and the people waiting for them on shore.

---

The foghorn blows, and the fog changes light. I walked down to a deserted corner of the harbor earlier and stood on the edge of the island. Across the water a few hundred yards in front of me, a finger of land cut into the sea, with docks and cedar-sided buildings long since converted from their original industrial purpose into cafes and bars. Refracting through the water in the air, the bluish mercury vapor pole lights came to me tinted green, and I thought of Gatsby staring out over the water, seeing Daisy in that green light over the dock.

That light, turned green likely by the fog, is something to strive for, but it's unclear whether he desires the chance to build a glorious future or relive a beautiful past. As Nick Carraway reflects on Gatsby's death, he engages this circular desire. The boat sails against the current, but for every thrust forward it moves backward as well. The future recedes beyond our grasp, but perhaps if we lean forward just a bit farther we'll be able to catch its edge and pull ourselves into it. But of course, as Gatsby learns, this is a lie we tell ourselves to explain the sore muscles from all that reaching. We cannot live in any time but the present, no matter how much money or how many friends and party guests we have.

---

I do sometimes wonder if that's why I'm here, learning traditional methods to build sailing vessels from wood. I wonder if I'm chasing a past in the guise of a future. In my case the past is not my own, but a shared one, and in pursuing it I wonder if I'm running forward in an attempt to chase down something that is actually behind me.

If that's the case, however, it does seem like I'll be running alongside a lot of other people in pursuit of the same thing. I'm not a Luddite smashing the machines in the factory, but I am in search of some way to make a living and a life that has been touched and shaped and created by human hands. It's possible, however, that this life is a figment of my imagination.

My previous career brought me to many far-flung corners of the world, and I'm enormously grateful for the opportunities it afforded me, But now I'm ready for something different, something more material, something more vertically organized than horizontal. I don't want to spread myself out to cover as much of the world (or the ministry-mandated curriculum) as I can. Instead, I want to dive into things, I want to peer inside and beneath and to set myself in the ground and learn how they work and how to make them myself.

On the first week

The new year started at IYRS with some remarks from the president, the academic director, and the coordinator of student services. A hundred or so students—both new and returning—were seated around tables in Restoration Hall, drinking coffee and eating little pastries from the coffee shop across the street. We filled out paperwork and chatted among ourselves and listened to the speakers as they occupied the podium. The room was crowded but not stuffy, and eventually we were split into three orientation groups for campus tours and more talks from the job and internship placement coordinator and our respective teaching faculties.

We went through two or three days of talks and OSHA lectures and a respirator fitting—all important stuff, to be sure, but I was anxious to get started doing something. 

Finally, after lunch on the third day, we started sharpening tools, honing and hollow grinding chisels and plane irons on sandpaper, diamond stones, and fine grinder wheels.  I worked my way through eight chisels and my block plane iron that afternoon and the next morning, and soon we started on bench joint practice.

Were currently progressing through a series of lap, mortise and tenon, and dovetail joints on small blocks of soft Spanish cedar that smells like your grandmother's coat closet and tears out of you simply look at it from the wrong angle. My joints are serviceable but far from perfect, and I plan to stay late practicing as much as possible over the next few weeks, even as we move on to other projects during the day. 

Coupled with the joinery practice, we're rotating through safety training on the big stationary power tools in the machine room. This kind of thing can of course be a bit dull, but I'm glad to get the training—especially on the big planers and bandsaws I've never used before. By the end of the week I hope to have passed the safety tests and as such will be able to use the power tools in the shop after hours, allowing me to get started on some of my own projects.

It is continually apparent to me how much I have yet to learn, but I'm starting to feel comfortable in the shop and get to know some of the other students and the instructors, and I'm getting there an hour early every morning so as to have some time to practice before everyone else comes in.  

This year, in addition to the Beetle Cat and the small bench projects, they're adding a tool chest to the curriculum, which means I'll have even more chances to practice traditional joinery techniques on a piece that I'll get to keep when this is all done. I'm glad to have this extra practice, and am looking forward to having a relatively intricate piece of woodworking to keep and put to use even after the program ends.

On starting

I arrived in Newport on Sunday, driving the last short stretch down from Leicester, MA, that morning. The route took me from Massachusetts into Rhode Island and then back into Massachusetts and back into Rhode Island. It rained the whole way and was cloudy and chilly all day. I pulled into the driveway of my Thames Street rental and spoke briefly with the landlord before taking off on foot toward IYRS. I walked around the campus once, anxiously avoiding speaking to anybody, and then walked back home, stopping for a quart of motor oil and a six-pack of Narragansett Bay Lager. I unloaded my pickup in the spattering rain and met my roommate and our downstairs neighbor. We are all incoming IYRS students in different programs and we ended up hanging out on our porch until almost one in the morning.

Tomorrow—later today, technically—is the first day of class at IYRS. I have been trying to get to sleep for a couple hours now to no avail. My head is racing through all the things I do not know, all of the mistakes I will make. And yet despite the nervous pit in my stomach I am almost deliriously happy. More than two years ago I learned about this place and fell in love with the idea of it, but I never thought I would actually be able to do it. But, at 8:30am tomorrow morning, orientation will start, and my name will somehow be on a list of first-year students in the Boatbuilding and Restoration program.

In the afternoon, after the morning of paperwork and introductions is complete, I'll unload my tools into my bench in Restoration Hall, and from then on I'll be a wooden boat builder. A neophyte, to be sure, but less so every day.

No matter what time I eventually fall asleep tonight, tomorrow I will rise early, have coffee and nerves for breakfast, and then head down the street into a new world. 

On the road and the way there

“ ‘Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet have spoiled it.’

’Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee? Thou seem’st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not thou it.’”

— Herman Melville, "The Log and Line," Moby Dick

When I was in college, and even in grad school, I could drive sixteen or eighteen hours at a stretch. I would drink endless coffee and smoke endless cigarettes and set the cruise at four miles over the speed limit and go for hundreds of miles without so much as a bathroom break. On my trips to and from Missoula, I’d try to leave early—by 4:00am or at least by 6:00. It was a long drive and I reasoned that I’d prefer to do my driving in the dark while I was fresh and having my first cup of coffee rather than my twenty-first. I remember one time, driving home to Missoula after a visit to Vermillion, lighting one cigarette off another for the last two hours just to keep my eyes open—to keep me focused on something. But I could do it. Now, at 29, I am too old and gray and tired to go more than a couple hours without feeling my eyelids droop. I’m glad I’m breaking this trip up into bite-size pieces, and I’m enormously grateful for the friends who are hosting me as I pass through. Stops in Winona, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Leicester make this trip a whole lot more fun and much easier to manage.

Today, in Chicago, I walked from Jim and Lore’s house down to the waterfront near Navy Pier. I stood and watched the sailboats bob in the current, wondering how it will be to work on them, to learn to take them apart and put them back together, to learn to make something beautiful and useful. In less than a week I’ll start. It will be dovetails on the bench at first, small projects designed to give us a baseline from which to work. I think we make a toolbox and a mallet for chisels in the first couple weeks. But soon I’ll be taking planks off of a Beetle Cat and learning to loft its lines. Soon I’ll be building a pond boat for myself. Soon I’ll be building furniture—a map cabinet for Hava, a record cabinet for Dave, an oak rocker for my mother, a writing desk and more bookshelves for myself. It’s going to happen fast from here on in. Another two thousand miles or so is all that’s left.

On going

“ Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.”

— Herman Melville, "Loomings," Moby Dick

At the beginning of Moby Dick, Ishmael explains to the reader his reasons for going to sea. While my reasons for going into boatbuilding are perhaps not so dire, they are not entirely dissimilar. I was in Washington just more than two and a half years ago, staying with my girlfriend's family after cutting short a long-planned trip to Peru. We were living in Chile then, teaching English at a private bilingual school in the expensive suburbs of Santiago. Our summer was nearly over, and the February drear of Western Washington nicely reflected how we felt about returning for yet another year to the deeply dysfunctional institution where we worked. If there were still coffin warehouses rather than display rooms in carefully appointed funeral homes, I would have involuntarily paused and gazed longingly at them. (I didn't know then that I would to have the best teaching year of my career in the year to come. Instead I could think only of the lunatic brother-and-sister team that ran the school and having to smile at colleagues and give them hello and goodbye kisses.)

I was looking for a way out then, something else to do, some other thing that would allow me to pay my bills and maybe start writing again and, most importantly, decrease my growing desire to smash my head repeatedly against a brick wall. I was reading Moby, maybe 300 pages into it, when my sister sent me a text message with a link to a video. I clicked it and rotated my phone to fullscreen, watching as the camera panned over an enormous shop floor in a high-ceilinged brick building, the hulls of upturned boats painted in faded greens and reds. Young men and women were pushing planes over new unpainted hulls and pulling frames out of a steam box. The garage-style doors were open on one end of the shop, and I could almost smell the sea and the wood shavings. This was IYRS, where people went to spend two years studying the construction of wooden boats, and then somehow got jobs building them afterward. I was instantly hooked. The next day I went out and bought a copy of WoodenBoat and a few carpentry magazines. I even left Ishmael behind for a while, focusing instead on finding out more about this school and this industry and what it might mean to point myself in that direction.

Between that moment and today I could have enrolled in and completed the Boatbuilding and Restoration program, but I couldn't allow myself to get in a hurry, as much as I may have wanted. Instead, I left Chile, spent a few months working on the farm, and went to Spain for a one-year, renewable ESL teaching gig. I waited even to apply to IYRS for two full years, rolling the notion around in my head against a PhD in Northern Europe, a couple years of adjunct teaching in either the Midwest or the Mississipi Delta, and staying in Spain indefinitely. I was in Barcelona when I finally decided I was ready to apply, and on the bus ride back to Madrid I completed the application.

Over the next couple months I was admitted, went through the process of applying for scholarships, and eventually decided to attend. At first I didn't announce it; like Ishmael, I wanted to "quietly take to the ship." But eventually I decided I might get a kick out of people's faces when I told them what I was going to do. I was right. Then I scrambled to get enough work together that I could fit in around the full-time IYRS schedule and still be able to pay my bills. I've been acquiring tools for the last several weeks, and I have today reached the eve of my departure. The pickup is loaded with tools and clothes and books and a bicycle. Tomorrow morning I will set out in the rough direction of Rhode Island, shooting off the path at the end of each day to stay with friends from graduate school, from Chile (now living in the US), and from high school. I'll spend five days on the road, arriving in Newport the day before Labor Day, with classes to start the following Tuesday.

The narrative makes sense to me, writer to teacher to boatbuilder. I don't exactly know why, but it feels like a natural progression. I hope to make more sense of it here.