CDR_Ret

Well, I've spent some of my time during the past two weeks self-isolating from coronavirus exposure to sort through the rabbet question. After taking a look at the DELFTship model as I left it last Fall, I realized that there was very poor fidelity between the model and the original Berger lines plan. So I basically decided to work over the model lines again to attempt as much as possible to approach the original lines. After several iterations, I realized that the lines in the halfbreadth, elevation, and body plans simply were not compatible, so I did the best I could to at least approach the hull shape that produced fared station, waterline, and buttock curves. Considering that I basically had to build the aft end and transom from scratch using reference photos and the real ship had a 5-inch hog, the results were pretty gratifying. As a result of this work, I am posting several other new items pertaining to the Galilee plans elsewhere in the forums. All that to say that I needed a fairly stable set of station lines so I could determine the angle of the garboard strake to identify the rabbet lines. The results are shown below. As we discussed, the back rabbet line curves upward along the middle run of the keel and becomes nearly flat at the ends before reaching the stem and sternpost. The thickness of the strake is full thickness at 6 inches while it thins down to 3 inches, which is the hull planking thickness, at the ends of the hull. Terry

Nice looking masks, Bob. My wife says she has enough elastic for the apocalypse, which she has been collecting for decades.

Well, with the coronavirus panic-buying depleting all the dust masks at our local home improvement stores, I was at a standstill with some of my workshop projects. However, my wife has been following some fabric arts forums where they are discussing making masks for hospitals to supplement those needed for non-critical care situations, so they can use the N-95-esq masks for critical care/COVID-19 cases. So, she found the pattern, we selected a fabric, got the elastic bands, and I made a nose-bridge support out of a piece of copper wire. The result looks like it will work fine!

I ran across this article in The Atlantic. Very sobering to contemplate that the US could end up in the same situation. My wife and I and my son's in-laws would be in the category where treatment would be denied.

This document from copyright.gov may provide guidance. I'm not a lawyer, but creating a detailed lines plan for sale from general lines plans in a published reference may not be considered a derivative work exempt from getting permission. Terry

Thanks, Wayne. Excellent summary of the problem. I haven't done much of this kind of research, so everything you said makes sense. Appreciate the input. Terry

All the toilet paper rolls are being sold on Ebay and Amazon ... at 3X the price. Go figure.

Thanks, Bob. I'm in complete agreement with your assessment of the DTM draftsmen. During the field assessment, the engineers may have been able to obtain some verbal description of the hull's construction to add to what could have been visually verified from inside the hull. But trying to put all that together into dimensional drawings may have included some guesses. As I noted in several posts in my Galilee thread, Berger's plans, or at least the subject, seem to predate the HAMMS project, which occurred in 1936–37. That idea may be in error. Berger's plans show her as a brigantine, but by the early-30s she was a an aging three-masted fishing schooner and had many alterations to support the fishing industry. According to her history documented in R.A. Stradford's Brigantine, Schooner, Houseboat: Journeys of the Galilee, the vessel was purchased by an ex-pat British captain named John Quinn, who with his wife used it as a houseboat, beached in the Sausalito mudflats from 1934 until the late 1950s. The Berger plans include a note thanking J. Quinn as the last owner of the Galilee (as well as Ray Bowes) for assistance in the production of the plans. However, the plans show the ship as a brigantine, so he must have used the ship-as-houseboat mainly to confirm her overall dimensions and arrangement. His plans, which are now part of the HAMMS archive (and are copies of copies of copies ...) look very similar to C.G. Davis's Rudder magazine drawings from 1899, including the erroneous transom shape. With the ship moored and/or in the mud, I'm not sure how Berger could have validated much of the keel configuration. So, I think I will do the best I can to map out the rabbet assuming a more-or-less rectangular garboard strake that tapers from 6" to 3" thick in the vicinity of the bow and stern. Terry

Hi all. After a hiatus of nearly six months, I have been able to get back to working out some of the details of Matthew Turner’s brigantine Galilee. While attempting to clean up the rabbet along the keel, stem, and sternpost in DELFTship, I ran into some issues that call into question the original G.C. Berger plans I obtained from the Smithsonian. This isn't the first time this has happened. Check out my research and design log on this ship. So the following is a series of technical questions about rabbet lines and garboard strakes. Let’s start with a description of the rabbet at the dead flat. The following diagram was created by the scientist-engineers at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution, Washington, D.C. (DTM) sometime around 1904–5, when they were planning the conversion of Galilee from a merchant ship in the Tahiti trade to a magnetic research vessel. They needed to know where all the ferrous hardware was located in the hull to figure out the magnetic constants for the ship. For that reason, they took fairly good measurements of the hull, though their drafting skills could have used some work … Note that the inner rabbet line lies at the point where the frame intersects the face of the keel. This is a key factor in the following discussion. The back rabbet and rabbet as shown in the first diagram do not conform to the shape shown in many references. In most diagrams, the back rabbet line lies on the face of the frame, which intersects the rabbet at a right angle. Instead, in this diagram, the top surface of the garboard is beveled at the inner rabbet line, giving the inner edge of the garboard a point. The top surface of the garboard strake ends at the inner rabbet line, the “point” is at the back rabbet line, and the bottom corner is at the outer rabbet line. I’m not sure how the non-naval DTM engineers knew to draw the rabbet profile like this unless they obtained that detail from Matthew Turner himself. According to the DTM drawing, the garboard is about 6” thick. However, the vertical dimension of the rabbet as seen in the side profile view from the outer to inner rabbet lines should vary as the angle of the frame increases or decreases along the keel. The flatter the frame, the closer the distance between the inner and outer rabbet lines should approach the thickness of the garboard. The steeper the frame (e.g., toward the bow or stern), the wider the outer to inner rabbet line distance should be. This diagram illustrates the geometry: © Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution, Washington DC Curiously, the Berger plans don’t indicate a significant divergence of the outer (solid) and inner (dashed) rabbet lines except at the extreme ends of the keel: © Smithsonian Institution Now, let’s consider the thickness of the garboard in the first diagram. As mentioned earlier, the garboard strake is 6 inches thick. The lower hull planking is 3 inches thick. This makes the garboard twice the thickness of the adjacent planking. According to Rules for the Construction and Classification of Wood Ships (ABS, 1921), garboards must have the full scantlings for at least three fifths of the length amidship. Granted these rules were promulgated thirty years after Galilee was built, they seem to agree more-or-less with other contemporary references I have found. So, if the garboard strake stays the same thickness along most of its length, the inner rabbet line is going to curve upward as the frame angle increases. Only if the garboard thins gradually as it approaches the stem and stern areas, will the inner rabbet line stay more or less parallel to the outer rabbet line. Another factor is that several views of the Berger drawings show dashed lines inset at about 3 inches from the sides of the keel as shown below. These seem to indicate the depth of the back rabbet line. If the garboard strake’s thickness remains the same for most of the length of the ship as noted above, then the back rabbet line’s depth from the sides of the keel would also vary as the frame angle changes. (Another possibility is that the dashed lines show only the back rabbet line inset at the stem and stern, though they are visible in the plan view of the keel as well.) © Smithsonian Institution So, either Berger erred in drawing the inner rabbet line as a straight line for as long as he did along the keel, or the garboard changed in thickness as its angle to the keel changed to maintain that straight line. I'm in a quandary as to what the right answer is. Does anyone have thoughts or critiques of this analysis? A good resource for this question is this video of cutting a rabbet along the keel of a modern 150-foot wooden ship using traditional techniques. Also, check out the other links in the left margin of the video page! Thanks for the assist. Terry

This page may be more to the point. Looks like someone thought having a ship module (workbench?) would be a good idea, then abandoned the project.

I haven't checked this out yet, but there is an effort to incorporate a naval architecture feature into the FreeCAD software. The website owners are pretty up front with the fact that their work is buggy. Terry

Julie, I know exactly where you are at. Hope your trip goes better than mine did... Because of the lack of docks or moorings at the Naval Base in Charleston, we had to berth our Catalina Screamer (named after my G-G-Grandfather's packet ship) at a small marina on Stono Creek, well inland from the south shore of Charleston Harbor. I and my family, consisting of my non-boat-person wife and two children under the age of 10, took delivery of the boat at the Naval Base Marina. We had minimal gear, mainly life vests, a chart, and some snacks. I had decided to remove the main sail for cleaning, but kept the big Genoa jib rigged, but furled. After having the boat put in the water and gassed up on a Saturday morning, I checked out what equipment we could—engine, bilge pump, fathometer, etc. Plotted out our route to the Stono Creek berth on our chart and then away we went under engine only. Strange boat. Untrained crew. No cell phones (this was 1990)—just a low-powered bridge-to-bridge radio for comms. What could possibly go wrong? Things seemed to be going well until we were off the Battery of Charleston. Then my daughter yelled up from the cabin that there was water sloshing on the floor and smoke was in the cabin. I jumped down and checked things out. After some panic I discovered that the engine's mild-steel exhaust pipe had broken at a rusted threaded joint. Both the exhaust cooling water and exhaust gases were dumping into the engine compartment which adjoined the cabin. The bilge pump was able to keep up with the influx of cooling water, but the cabin quickly was becoming uninhabitable. I decided to kill the engine and try to continue making progress under the jib alone. Well, that required unfurling the sail that was equipped with a roller reefing rig, which I had no experience with. Finally got the jib set, but none of the rest of my crew knew what to do about steering the boat while I was forward dealing with the jib. We ended up doing several jibes right off the Battery (that's a jibe with the jib). Practically wrapped it around the forestay several times. I'm sure that grabbed anyone's attention who was watching us. On top of that, soundings got down to five feet, and I just knew we were going to go aground on the Battery, on top of all our other troubles. I finally got the boat under control and the wind was fair for Wappoo Creek. But once we got into the creek, the wind died. I had to use the engine again and just live with the toxic smoke in the cabin. To make a long story endless, we eventually made it to our temporary berthing, which included having to communicate with a drawbridge, which didn't go well. After that experience, we-the-family were not very happy with our first boat outing. Over the next few weeks, I repaired the broken exhaust pipe and moved the boat back to the Naval Base Marina once they had a mooring ready. I think we had one day on the boat as a family before we sold it, and that was under engine power only. I still love the idea of sailing boats, I just don't like the idea of owning one anymore! Best wishes.

Heh. And how is that "hole in the water into which you throw money" working out for you? I bought a 27-foot Catalina sloop when I was still in the Navy, stationed in Charleston, SC. This was shortly after Hurricane Hugo, and there was virtually no intact dock space available anywhere in the area, so I had to moor it out on a buoy. The Navy marina was about 20 miles from where I lived. Every time a thunderstorm kicked up, I was worried that the mooring line would part or some other disaster would befall the boat. I put it back on the market two months after I bought it. After a lifetime of dreaming of what it would be like to sail my own boat, I discovered that the little time I had to spend on it wasn't worth the worry and expense of maintaining it. Hope you find yours more of a pleasure. Terry

Thanks, and these are in addition to homeschooling three of the G-kids in science and math, and holding down a Board position with our HOA. I actually looked for a local job when we first moved here. But now that I'm fully retired, who has time for a job?

This thread was made for me. I have been working on reconstructing the plans for the Galilee since around 2000. My son calls this work the 30-year ship model. However, since moving to Colorado Springs in 2017, there are other things that have demanded my time. Refurbing my back yard: No. One Grand-daughter's Leaf Press: Outfitting a Young Knight with an Authentic Shield: Tearing Down and Rebuilding a Deck (almost finished): No. Three Grand-daughter's Paper Press: And most recently, No. Two Grand-daughter's Puffin: Besides all the honey-do items and planting new shrubs, who has any time for a ship model?