Muscongus Bay Lobster Smack by Kenchington - Model Shipways - 1:24

[Kenchington]

I do not intend to log my build of the Muscongus Bay boat in the same detail as I did with the Norwegian pram. For one thing, there are MSW members who know the full-size boats, or at least the Friendship sloops which evolved from the centreboard boats, whereas I have never even seen an example of either type. So I won't have much to offer that would be unique. Still, I figured I should open a new log, so that I can post whatever comes up. Right now, I'm just scanning previous build logs and preparing notes to supplement the kit instructions!

 

Trevor

[RVB]

Fun and enjoyable build without a lot of headaches. Enjoy and will follow your build. 
Best Rick. (RVB)

[GGibson]

4 hours ago, Kenchington said:

So I won't have much to offer that would be unique.

 

Hope your Lobster Smack build goes well, Trevor!  And I think posting your build progress would be valuable to others.  As I recall, there were just enough nuances that individuals encountered in their builds, whether it was due to manufacturer quirks in their laser cutting or how each of us did something slightly different that made our boats unique, that having several resources to look back on were ever so helpful.

 

And with your fine work on the Norwegian Sailing Pram as evidence, your Lobster Smack build will also shine.  Looking forward to whatever updates you provide on this build.  It was a frustrating build for me as an inexperienced builder, but it was enjoyable!  Have fun with it! 

[Kenchington]

Scanning of other people's build-logs completed and I now have a satisfying amount of annotations scribbled into my instruction booklet. It is very helpful to see the various problems previous builders of this kit have run into and the solutions developed!

 

Thinking as I read, I've come to a few decisions for my build that will shape the way I proceed. No need to go through everything now but I will start with one issue:

 

Aside from the learning experience, somebody might want to build the kit simply to produce a beautiful art object to decorate their home. Fair enough for those who choose that path. Even give the sloop a gilded figurehead and a crew of kittens decked out in faux-pirate costume, if you wish! But that's not me.

 

More often, those who have logged their builds seem to have aimed for how a centreboard sloop might look if fitted out as a yacht -- as many Friendship sloops have been. Lots of emphasis on attractive colour combinations in the paintwork, mahogany-like fittings, shiny brass and neatly faked-down lines. Of course, no original Muscongus Bay centreboarder survived to become a yacht, while the only full-sized replicas yet built weren't fitted out that way. And I can't see why anyone would want to devote the middle quarter of a recreational boat to be a pair of huge live-wells. Still, if a yacht-like finish meets someone's the need for a decorative artwork, go for it! But, again, that's not me.

 

I am a fisheries scientist by training, with an interest in the history of fisheries. So, faced with this kit as part of the Shipwright-series learning experience, I want to build it as a 19th-Century Maine lobsterboat that looks like a lobsterboat. And that doesn't mean just adding a couple of traps on the deck of the finished sloop. In fact, my choice will affect the very first piece of basswood cut out and will go on affecting my build until I do indeed add the lobster traps.

 

In the kit instructions, Step 1 is the first part of assembling the spine of the hull but Step 2 is adding the centreboard and that can't be added until it has been painted -- at least a strip across it that would be visible in the model but hard to reach after the spine is completed. So the very first thing is to get the centreboard out, shape it a little and then paint. 

 

But (unlike the dory and pram), the sloop's prototype had to spend much of her year afloat and that meant an underwater body coated in antifouling paint. Given the time and place, that probably meant products of the Tarr & Wonson Copper Paint Factory, in Gloucester -- the company having been established in 1863 as America's first manufacturer of copper-based antifouling. So the model's underwater body, including the centreboard, needs to be finished with that distinctive shade, slightly on the scarlet side of brick-red, that was typical of ships' hulls for a century.

 

Maine lobstermen certainly cared about the visual appearance of their boats but they did not need to worry much about colour contrasts between the topsides and antifouling that was largely hidden by water. Models, however, are displayed with their underwater bodies very visible and hence the visual appearance does depend on bottom and topside compatibility. Hence, my choice to portray a working lobsterboat not only dictates the colour below the waterline but also limits options for the entire colour scheme.

 

Trevor

Edited Tuesday at 10:36 PM by Kenchington

[JacquesCousteau]

Looking forward to following along with this build! I'm very curious to see what you do to make it a working boat rather than a yacht.

[Kenchington]

We shall see what develops. One thing I won't be doing is giving the model the hard-used look of an active fishing boat. I know that's contradictory but I don't have the skills in "weathering" and, besides, I like the products of my hands to look good. So I will be modelling a new sloop, as her proud owner might take her on her first lobstering trip, after accepting her from the boatbuilder. That way, I can have everything pristine and yet faithful to my subject.

 

Trevor

[Kenchington]

On @Venti's build log:

 @Dee_Dee has made the point that the Shipwright-series Muscongus Bay boat diverges from the lines published by Howard Chapelle, which the (much cruder) Midwest kit does follow. Whether David Antscherl intended it or the Model Shipways production team changed things, the Shipwright kit builds into a hull with a deeper keel, hence tending towards the later Friendship sloops. I don't have a way to check but I'll not dispute the conclusion. However, in case anyone cares to ask how I can build a model of a centreboard lobsterboat if the kit does not follow the only lines plan we have of a centreboard lobsterboat, I will explain my reasoning:

 

On his build log,

@JacquesCousteau has explored the history of these boats in some detail:

 

He quotes a source as suggesting that the impetus for developing the centreboard boats came from the extensions of railways, allowing the supply of fresh fish to Boston from outlying parts of Maine. That may have been part of it but there were also major changes in the lobster industry.

 

Well smacks had been sailing down from Boston and collecting live lobster for the city's market from the 1840s, gradually extending their reach eastwards. Canning of lobsters had been tried from 1842 and took off after 1852. All of that increased demand put more money in fishermen's pockets, which could be invested in larger boats. More especially, a winter fishery for lobster began around 1845 and, at that season, the bugs withdraw from the coast, so the fishermen had to go out into the open Gulf of Maine. Clearly, they needed something more capable than the open dories and (lapstrake) peapods used in summer fishing within the bays and around the islands.

 

What they needed was deep-keel Friendship sloops but it took time to develop such a radical change.  First, open boats could be given small foredecks, afterdecks and sidedecks, with a coaming around the cockpit to reduce the amount of water coming aboard. Then the foredeck could be extended until a man could crawl under it for a bit of shelter, later developed into a closed-in cuddy, which later still could have a coach-roof to provide sitting headroom. Somewhere along the line, live wells were added, to prevent the lobsters dying during the longer trips back to shore. And, most important, the boats were given centreboards so that they could sail to windward. As sailing came to dominate over rowing, new designs could have fuller bodies and some drag to the keel, as well as some flare to the bow for riding waves. Gradually, carvel construction replaced lapstrake.

 

The final step was to go for a deep keel and abandon the centreboard -- producing a Friendship sloop.

 

When Howard Chapelle came to study these boats, little evidence of the earlier types remained and the one example he could really study was, inevitably, one of the later ones, closer to the final Friendship design. But that was only one example amongst a great diversity of designs. As @JacquesCousteau has said, there was no one kind of Muscongus Bay sloop, rather it was "something of a moving target" -- a series of boats built during a phase of development which, following Chapelle, we choose to classify by their being more sailing boats than rowing ones, while having centreboards rather than a fixed deep keel.

 

If the Shipwright-series rendition is a half-step further along that progress than the boat that Chapelle examined, I'm happy with that. I am planning to build a generic lobsterboat of the 1890s, rather than any particular vessel.

 

Trevor

Edited Wednesday at 02:44 AM by Kenchington

[Kenchington]

I have already written that I won't be "weathering" my sloop, mostly because I don't have the necessary skills.  I did wonder about building her with some opening of interior areas but I have decided against that too.

 

An open cuddy hatch could add a lot of interest by revealing hidden detail and I do understand the attractions of constructing "doll house" miniatures or reproducing the intricate complexities of a fighter-aircraft's cockpit. The trouble is that fishing-boat cuddies don't have standard sets of controls and gauges, like a plane's cockpit. They end up a mess of spare clothes, rumpled bedding, discarded wet (oilskin) gear, spare parts, maintenance tools, food and drink, some sort of a lantern, maybe a book or two -- some of it stuffed in odd corners, some rolling around on the sole, much half-forgotten by its owner until needed. Figuring out quite what might have been in a Muscongus Bay boat's cuddy in 1895 would be pure guesswork, so opening the hatch would provide opportunities to display modelling skill but would only add to the accuracy of the model by chance.

 

I know that some builders of the kit have chosen to leave one of the live-well hatches off instead. But what would that show? With the sloop in use for its design purpose, all you would see is a water surface, sloshing around with the sloop's movement. Hard to model and visually uninteresting.

 

There is a reverse problem in the cockpit, in that it is already open and hence needs to be fitted out. But that leads to an immediate problem: The kit has a plank-on-bulkhead construction, not plank-on-frame. Where the bulkheads are cut back in way of the cockpit, we are left with a few bulky "frames" showing under the sidedecks, not the many more but much thinner & narrower frames of the full-size boat -- and they do show, as the photos in multiple build logs confirm. That's a bit unsatisfactory but I don't fancy trying to convert the cockpit area into plank-on-frame, especially when the stability of the part-built hull relies on having the deck installed before planking begins. I may extend the coamings downwards until they hide the hull structure entirely, but I haven't yet decided.

 

That would give the option of presenting the cockpit seats as locker tops. In turn, that presents the possibility of having one locker open -- perhaps revealing a coil of anchor warp. Maybe I will go that far. 

 

Trevor

[Kenchington]

Step 0: Centreboard -- or, to use the authentic terminology of the men who built and used the prototype: "Centerboard".

 

Yesterday, it was time to escape all the words and start sanding basswood! In truth, the board needed no more than removal of char and gentle rounding off of corners. Then a spray of primer and two coats of paint. I used the kit-suppled ModelExpo "Hull Copper Red". Not the best quality, as others have found before me, and the final colour isn't quite as bright as I would like, though also not as bad as in this image:

I will try for something better when I get to painting the hull but the hard-to-reach parts of the board will be fine without another coat on top.

 

Trevor

[Kenchington]

Step 1: Spine

 

I wasn't expecting to have useful suggestions for this build but, here goes ...

 

As anyone who has built this kit is very much aware, the hull is built on a "spine" (what other kits too-often bizarrely call a "false keel") and it is a spine built up of three layers, to leave the centreboard trunk open between the outer two. Those outer layers are very thin, with many fragile tabs. Gluing the layers together means a whole lot of white glue but the water in that warps the thin layers, causing trouble from the start of the build. The kit instructions suggest using weight, rather than clamps, to hold the parts while the glue sets. But that brings another problem, at least for me: Before it sets, white glue lubricates. Putting a weight on top makes one layer slide over the other, while the weight hides the error from sight. Bad news when you lift the weight off and find non-aligned parts firmly held together!

 

The kit does come with spacers to help with alignment but they are thicker than the spine itself and so limit where weight can be placed. And I found that they made it hard to see whether the parts were truly aligned.

 

So I drilled two 1/16 holes in out-of-the-way parts of the (rather thicker) central part of the spine, carefully lined up one side piece and drilled that too. Then chopped off short lengths from left-over brass tube from the pram kit and inserted those in the holes of the central part -- though that took a bit of enlarging of the holes:

 

Add glue, push side piece over brass studs, add weight and:

Came out very closely aligned and very straight, so OK thus far. There's a second central piece of the spine to go abaft the centre plate trunk (and a third, little one abaft the sternpost). Have to see whether those work OK too.

 

And the fragile tabs? Only broken one so far. (I was focused on the end where I was working and ignored the rest: Bad mistake.) Fortunately, the broken bit will have one side glued to a central piece and the other spanned by a stiffening/reinforcing piece, so repair will be trivially easy.

 

 

Feels good to be back to building boats!

 

 

Trevor

 

 

[Kenchington]

Step 1 continued:

 

Previous builds of this kit have run into another problem: There is a curved slot in each of the side pieces of the spine, in which the control rod for the centreboard is supposed to move. However, if the spine is assembled from the production-kit's parts but following David Antscherl's instructions, the rod does not line up with its slots. To solve that, past builders have cut away the after edge of the slot, at the cost of making already-fragile parts even weaker.

 

I dry-assembled the pieces, looked at the geometry and found a different solution: Simply move the centreboard pivot 3mm forwards from the laser-cut hole for its axle. That means drilling new 1/16 holes in each spine side-piece and trimming a bit off the forward central piece of the spine (trimming inly from what will become the interior of the centreboard trunk, so exact cuts are not necessary). All that has to be done before assembling the spine but, once done, everything lines up nicely. The next problem, of course, is that a pair of close-set 1/16 holes in very thin basswood will break into one another. One of  mine already has. I will fill the gap with epoxy and re-drill, which should fix the problem.

 

Another alternative that did not occur to me until too late, but someone might try, would be even easier, if the geometry works. (I haven't checked and now cannot.) That is: It might be possible to just drill an alternative hole in the centreboard for the control rod. Worth looking into anyway.

 

Trevor