Cathead

The next step was to wrap these guard beams with an outer strip of wood; I have no idea (or have forgotten) what this was called in practice (anyone know?). It's functionally like the wales on a regular sailing ship, though it's not part of the hull. For these, I transitioned back to my own homegrown wood. I carefully milled some thin strips of maple whose width roughly matched the average thickness of the guard beams. One of these I soaked for a while, then carefully bent it around the entire bow, clamping it in place and using an electric plank bender to apply heat to the curve. Having not used this tool in a while, I carelessly applied heat to a finger as well, requiring another local plant-material harvest, this time a piece of aloe. Once I was happy with the curve, I applied beads of glue to the end of each beam, then thoroughly clamped the bow curve in place. Once this had hardened, doing the two sides was quite easy, just more beads of glue and more clamps. It was entirely a fortuitous coincidence that the width of the guards was just about the same as the depth on these clamps, though I ended up placing another thin strip outboard of the glued strip just to ensure that the clamps fully held the "wales" onto their beams without the clamps nudging up against the hull and leaving a slight gap. It would have been really smart to think about that and make the guards slightly longer! I didn't photograph this step, but here's the finished result: I'm really pleased with this. The maple is obviously harder and smoother than soft basswood, and takes a curve with no flaking or cracking. It's starting to look like something. For fun, I held the hull at this stage up to two reference photos, so you can judge for yourself how it recreates the lines of the original. The next step is complicated. My plan is to lay the decking, which will rest on the "wales" and be sanded smooth to match that curve. I'll then lay a second layer of "wales" around the outside of that, wide enough to cover the lower layer and the planking, essentially sealing it all in. But I have two ways to proceed in the long run. One is to lay the decking first, then lay out the superstructure and just built it on top of the decking. The other is to lay out the superstructure now, and build some guides or markers into the decking before doing the planking. I dabbled in this second way when building my Arabia, as shown in the photo below, where you can see how I laid strips a bit thicker than the decking to guide later placement of the aft superstructure and wheelhouses: Here's another view with the deck completed: My recollection is that I found these guides pretty useful, and am leaning toward doing this again. It also has the benefit that I can mark up the current sub-deck surface with pencil all I want, rather than trying not to mark up the nice maple deck I plan to lay. I'm also leaning toward doing something I didn't do on Arabia, which is to lay out where all the forward support posts go as well, and potentially planking around them so they sit in a slight recess into the decking rather than sitting on top. This would be a lot fussier but I think would look better and be a bit stronger. It would also help solve the problem I noted earlier, in which not fully filling the guard beam slots means that some deck posts might be left hanging over an empty slot. Laying them out first would mean I can fill a slot with scrap wood if needed, to support a given post. Thoughts/input welcome. Thanks for reading, liking, and commenting!

I agree, Roger, it's something that's always drawn me more to these working boats than the big showy ones. A fun twist on this for Peerless is that she was built the same year the MK&T railroad began building its line down the Missouri River. Until then transportation for communities on the northern side of the river was still river-based, as roads were few and the terrain was pretty rugged. It's possible that she helped carry supplies for the railroad crews upriver, contributing to the very project that would eventually undermine her economic viability. Not to mention, road bridges were especially rare over a river as big as the Missouri. The MK&T bridge at nearby Boonville was one of the first built over the lower Missouri, and a road bridge didn't come along until much later. Without ferries or other steamers, the opposite side of the river might as well have been the moon. Even today you have to drive a long way between road bridges over the Missouri. And like the Ohio River, much of the terrain along the lower Missouri was/is quite rugged, making river travel essential. Railroads were very late to penetrate the especially rugged Ozark terrain south of the Missouri, making steamers like Peerless last in service much longer than in more accessible areas.

That looks amazing.

Looks good so far! Great choice of prototype.

And the guard beams are finished! To form the curve at the bow, I soaked and clamped a flexible piece of wood into the approximate curve I wanted, and used it as a guide. As you can see, it didn't bend evenly, so I focused on the port side (right in the view above) as the curve there was smoother. Above, all the beams are just being test-fit. I installed the guides the way I wanted on the port side, then used calipers to transfer the same measurement for the length of the starboard side. Once the glue was dry, I did more test-fitting with the wooden strip and did some sanding and shaping of the beams to ensure they'd hold the curve I wanted. I used the same procedure at the stern, which was much easier. So here are the completed bow, stern, and full hull.

With each day, we raise the temperature in the oven a bit. 300...350...400...450...by the end of the weekend we should be up in the 700 range and ready for pizza. We're taking turns working outdoors (the joys of being work-from-home "laptop class"), while keep the fire gently fed. We fire it every morning, work outdoors until midday, then close it up until evening, when we fire it again. It's already holding heat nicely; even after being left alone overnight it's still reading an internal temperature of 200-300 the next morning. This is and will be our hottest week of the summer, and indeed probably the hottest week we've had since 2012, with daytime temperatures over 100 and heat indices closer to 110. But the shade of the kitchen structure does wonders, and that's why we're taking turns! The best part about it starting to hold heat properly is that it's now stable at temperatures suitable for normal cooking, if not yet proper pizza. So this morning we inaugurated the oven with a batch of homemade biscuits, shown below going in and coming out, baked at a nice comfortable 400-450. If you're wondering about the wood off to either side in the oven, we're stacking a few pieces at a time in there to super-dry from the oven's heat. This makes them burn all the better, and indeed is the long-term cycle: once you're finished a round of cooking, you stuff the cooling but still-warm oven with firewood to kiln-dry for the next time. And here's the first meal based from the oven: biscuits with homemade elderberry and blueberry jams, fresh local peaches, and fresh apples from our orchard. And no oven run in the house to counteract the A/C during this scorching week! Tomorrow the oven will be hot enough to bake an inaugural loaf of bread. It's so exciting to finally be producing food from this year-long project!

Ask and ye shall receive:

Sorry, Keith, I don't. Can ask him when he returns in fall. He's on Facebook, if you have access to that (I don't) you might be able to learn more. https://www.facebook.com/BristolBayNerka/

Anyone who's in the area is welcome to visit!

OK, wisdom of the crowd wins. I went ahead and cut/glued most of the guard beams as short segments, doing all those that form a straight edge. To fore and aft, their length will change to support curves at bow and stern, so I'll do those once these dry so they form a solid base for forming the curve. If this doesn't end up being the right decision, it's now all your fault! You might notice that, at the bow, I kept the line straight beyond where the hull starts to bend inward. That's because the shape of the deck should form a rounder curve into the bow, not a sharp point as in the hull. This creates an especially broad overhang on either forward quarter, which you can see especially well in the photo below. I also finally got around to printing out some of my favorite reference photos and pinning them to the tack boards above my new workspace. So here's the current hull with its inspiration. Another evening this week, I should be able to finish the rest of these beams. Thanks for reading, liking, and commenting!

I found, when rigging, that it added quite a bit of enjoyment to work at understanding how rigging actually worked in general, so that I understood what I was setting up and just not assembling a mess of lines. Doing so also helped me catch what I felt were a few errors in rigging plans, and make changes that made sense to me in terms of how the lines would actually function.

Oh, I took it as a joke and meant my reply to be lighthearted as well. Apologies if that wasn't clear. He fishes Bristol Bay, brings it back frozen. Sells most of his catch word of mouth across Missouri, delivering around the state in the fall. I agree, unless you live by the dock, buy frozen in general. Especially with modern flash-freezing, I was talking to a Gulf shrimp fisherman years ago and he was very happy with the quality preservation modern freezing could achieve.

As a geologist, I have no argument with climate change as a real process. But sourcing both the meat and wood on-farm as part of our forest improvement work buys me all the carbon credits I could want! OK, I didn't get the salmon on-farm. But I did get it directly from a Missouri resident I know who teaches here in the winter and runs an Alaska salmon boat in the summer. We usually buy about 30 lb from him every fall when he comes back south. Far higher quality than the store.

If I didn't live so far away from most of you, you'd all be eating me out of house and home claiming you were just here to see my models! Truth.

And the oven structure is done! Here it is with the final coat of stucco: If you're wondering about the odd pattern on the base (just one base wall with stucco), there's a reason. We eventually intend to cover the base and dome with creek rock held in place by mortar. So there's no need to finish the concrete block base with anything for now. The dome needs its full stucco coats to retain heat and be usable. The reason there's a stucco coat on just that one base wall is that we'll be building a large firebrick grill right up against that wall, so it won't be getting the creek rock treatment, so we decided to seal it in with stucco instead. It'll be all but hidden when the decorative work is done. But now it's time to start building fires. The idea here is that there's still a lot of moisture in the concrete dome and surrounding stucco, and that needs to be carefully driven out to fully cure the oven for high-temperature cooking. So the official process is to start by building small fires in the oven, keeping the initial internal temperature below 300ºF, and then over the course of a week slowly build bigger and bigger fires. If one builds fires too hot, too fast, the danger is that the moisture isn't gently driven out of the dome, but instead steams off, causing cracking or other structural damage. By next weekend, if all goes well, we should be able to cook in it. So we're spending today maintaining a small kindling fire within the dome. Here's the first-ever flicker of flame within, followed by a typical view of the first day's curing fire. I can absolutely see the value of purchasing a professional dome rather than trying to design one ourselves. Despite the very tall chimney (something like 10'), the oven drafts beautifully, drawing in air low over the firebrick and spiraling the smoke and heat up into the chimney. It would be very easy for a poor design to just spit the smoke back out the front arch, choking the fire and the user, but this works exactly as designed. Since we have to pay close attention to the fire today, to keep it going but not too hot, we doubled down on kitchen duty and fired up the adjacent smoker, where two venison loins (about 5.5 lb total) and a couple long salmon fillets are gently smoking. This is an old-fashioned barrel smoker that I run with hickory, oak, and fruitwood cut and cured on-farm. No charcoal, gas, or other fancy stuff. Just carefully managed wood and smoke. Unfortunately, this coming week is forecast to be our hottest yet for the summer, highs near 100ºF from Tuesday through at least Saturday. Not the ideal conditions to manage careful fires, but that's life. One great value of working from home is that it's so much easier to manage projects like this. Hopefully this all goes well and we have an uncracked and cooking-ready oven by next weekend! Thanks for reading.

The only downside I thought of overnight, is that I'll be mounting various small vertical posts along the deck and was planning on using small pins to help anchor them. Where those happen to go through one of those slots, there won't be much support. I guess I could just use long enough pins to ensure they go down into the hull proper. Also, technically I'm still using wood from my scrap box for these beams. Once I start on the superstructure I'll be making my own wood again.

I've started test-fitting the beams that support the guards. I'd initially planned to use single beams run all the way across the hull, set into the slots I laid out. But I got to thinking, does it need to be that way? It'd save a lot of wood to leave the center of each slot open and use a shorter piece on each side. The photo below shows both options: I'm thinking the right-hand option makes perfect sense. The deck planking will be plenty well supported; is there any need to actually fill all that middle space? Here's one side of the guard beams (mostly) test-fit this way. Notice the spacer block I'm using to get the ends parallel. What do you all think?

Fantastic work. Getting anyone DMing you about custom workshop jobs?

Kurt, no worries, you haven't missed much! Happy to have your insights as I proceed.

Yep, that's why I'm not worried too much about minor flaws in artisanship. I want this vessel to look cobbled together, well-used, and very local.

Planking is finished. Took many small bits of time, a few planks here and there in the evening, letting the glue set and coming back to do another. Once I had them all on I sanded things reasonably smooth, including knocking back the filler pieces to match the edge of the planking. The hardest bits were the parts where the planks dip past the waterline at the bow and stern. For these, I just glued full planks past the bottom of the hull, then carefully shaved them down flush once the glue dried. Next I gave a first coat of white paint. I plan to sand this down again and reapply another coat. Paint tends to bring out small imperfections in the planking, but on the other hand, this was a rough-built boat and these may actually give it that feel. A too-perfect hull would look awfully...naval. And again, most of this will be in the shadow of the overhanging guards. I also painted the bottom black, to help create a shadow effect underneath when viewed from the side, hiding any slight unevenness of the hull bottom or sides. This photo has a messed-up color balance because of the white/black contrast but you get the idea. Next step is a light sanding, another coat of thin paint, and another sanding. When I'm happy with it, I'll start adding the guard/deck beams. Thanks for reading!

Best wishes and glad to see you back at work!

So very, very cool. I look forward to a full photo essay when she's truly complete.

I think every one of my models has some of my blood in it. I've decided that's a good thing.

Hmm...I think my concern is that cosmetics and house-cleaning products aren't meant to have a long life when applied high-value surfaces. Both initially stay in tight containers, then tend to get washed off pretty quickly after application. Unless you know any women who keep their makeup on for 30 years without taking a shower?