Spars, paint, and hardware
Part One described the start of the restoration of the Snafu II, a 78 year-old Cotuit Skiff built by my grandfather, Henry Chatfield Churbuck in 1947 for my father Tony. The first phase focused on removing the old paint from the hull so I could get a good look at the underlying problems; the removal of the coaming that had started to crack at the apex of the forward port curve; and stripping the canvas off of the deck which had torn in several places.
Henry Chatfield Churbuck
When the paint was peeled off with a heat gun it revealed some bad rot in the lower portion of the white oak transom near the lower gudgeon, or hinge point for the rudder. That became the first priority and involved some careful surgery to remove the plank and refit a new piece without compromising the shape of the hull
A new Dynel deck was laid on, followed by the steaming and screwing in place of a new ash coaming. A coat of custom “Churbuck yellow” paint from the George Kirby Jr. Paint Company in New Bedford was applied over a coat of two-part TotalBoat primer, followed by the shaping and installation of new white oak rubrails. As temperatures dropped in late November, work ceased for the winter.
The Worklist
- Coaming: refasten the screws and drill deeper holes so the screw heads may be bunged and varnished; consider cutting down the top edge of the coaming about 1/2”-1” to make it easier on the backs of the crew and skipper’s thighs; install a 6” long piece of bronze half-round into the forward starboard edge of the coaming where the halyards will chafe; shape and merge the bottom edge of the coaming where the fore and aft sections are butted together; finish the coaming with 4 to 6 coats of varnish.
- Rub rails: fit starboard rub rail , bed in Dolfinite and fasten to boat, shape and sand transom pieces, set bungs and vanish 2 coats.
- Deck hardware: install the bow chock, mooring cleat, pad eye for centerboard pennant, order and install new towing cleat on starboard quarterdeck, frame the mast hole with bronze strips
- Centerboard thwarts: remove existing pine seats and replace with cedar or mahogany
- Cockpit: Strip varnish from centerboard trunk, re-finish trunk. Cut and install knees under thwarts and under deck forward of the centerboard trunk.
- Rough out the spars: cut down 9”x8/4×16’ Sitka Spruce limber into two 4” slabs; glue and clamp, then mark with spar gauge (need to make a spar gauge), and build a jig to plan the corners off. Cut down 9”x8/4×14’ Sitka Spruce to make gaff and boom (to be scarfed) into a 17 ½’ length
- Taper and shape spars, sand, cut tenon into the base of the mast, make white oak spreader and install spar hardware.
- Make the sail track for the mast. I DESPISE gaff jaws and lacing and prefer the old “Senior” track as used on the Wianno Senior and #36 when I raced her. That means cutting a narrow piece of hardwood and routing two grooves along the aft edges to accept bronze sail slides, and placing a 1/8” bronze bar on the upper end of the track where the gaff fitting will be attached and most of the pressure will be focused. The gaff and boom will use standard bronze sail track which is $20 a foot and hard to find.
- Stern seat – drill and bolt lower gudgeon, make shoe-socket for boom crutch from oak and epoxy to keelson; cut rectangle into stern seat to accept boom crutch, reassemble stern seat, finish boom crutch
- Tiller – make new tiller from 8/4 oak or spruce – use original tiller for template; cut out with jig saw, round off and shape with a spokeshave plane.
Materials
I’m a curmudgeon when it comes to wooden boats and hate to see traditional designs trashed by cheap stainless steel fittings and multi-colored synthetic ropes. As one bronze supplier quipped, “It’s like wearing running shoes with a tuxedo.” I tried to use only bronze for this restoration. Alas, the old manufacturers of the great traditional fittings went out of business long ago. Bronze blocks (pulleys), cleats, forestay turnbuckles, sail slides and tracks, mast hoops, goosenecks, and other assorted fussy little parts are nearly impossible to find, and when they can be located are priced at the level of boat jewelry. I have a collection of some bronze hardware scavenged from other boats, and others that were cast by my grandfather when he was building boats after WW II.
Fortunately J.M. Reineck & Son, a Halifax, MA company, has revived the original Herreshoff Manufacturing Company’s bronze designs as well as some of the lamented hardware by the defunct Merriman Company. I ordered a block for the throat halyard from Reineck and will add additional hardware in the years to come as my budget allows.
All lines (ropes) for the halyards, mainsheet, centerboard pennant and outhauls I’ll bought from R&W Rope in New Bedford. I can’t say enough nice things about R&W. Visiting the shop is always an adventure as they stock everything from rock climbing rope to tugboat hawsers. I used double-braided Novabraid XLE in a traditional tan color that mimics the old manila hemp lines the skiff came with when I sailed the boat as a boy.
Wood is a challenge. Marine plywood I can pick up from Plywood Specialties in Hyannis, but boat lumber is all but impossible to find in the local lumberyards which only seem to stock pine, some poplar, and western red cedar. There are some fantastic lumber supply houses: Boulter Plywood in Medford is one option. Condon’s in White Plains, NY is amazing. But the best discovery throughout the entire restoration was Reader’s Hardwood Supply in East Taunton, a mere 45 minute drive over the Bourne Bridge off of Route 25 on Route 44. There I was able to source a 16-foot 8/4 plank of Sitka Spruce for the spars along with some great white oak and clear ash for the coaming.
Spars
My first experience working in a boat shop happened when I was 12 years old and made some spars for Optimist Prams in my grandfather’s shop for friends who broke their masts, booms and sprits in the yacht club’s sailing program. That involved cutting fir banister rails with a handsaw, drilling a hole through the top for the sprit rope, and screwing on the old cleat and bronze pad eyes from the broken mast. I think I charged $5 for the complete mast, varnished of course.
I made one skiff boom years ago — a “T” boom fashioned from two pieces of fir — but never a round mast, gaff or boom. After watching a few how-to videos on YouTube and building a nifty spar gauge based on some plans I found in the archives of WoodenBoat Magazine, I headed to Reader Hardwood Supply and bought an expensive 16-foot plank of Sitka Spruce for the mast and boom, and a ten footer for the gaff. The spar gauge was based off one used by a spar maker at Mystic Seaport, and was designed to precisely scribe two parallel lines to guide the shaping of the spar into an octagon. I could (but won’t) go on and on about the week’s work that went into making the gauge. It was a challenge and involved cutting stainless steel bolts length-wise, drilling them for screws, and resulted in a tool I am inordinately proud of.
Spar gauge
I ripped the 16-foot plank of spuce down into two 4″x2″ pieces and then epoxied the two together in a sandwich to made a 4″x4″ square cross section. The 2″ wide off-cut was saved for the boom.
I ran the spar gauge down the four sides of the mast timber, scribing two parallel lines on all four faces with the tips of two bronze screws (golf pencil tips break off too easily). I clamped the piece to a pair of sawhorses in a crude jig and with a power plane whittled off the four corners, creating a massive pile of shavings that are still blowing all over the back yard and which get stuck between the toes of my bare feet and follow me inside of the house. Mrs. Churbuck is to be praised for never once complaining about such a mess.
The top third of the mast tapers from 4″ to 2″ inches, so with the power plane whining away I whittled the spar down to a rough octagon, finishing the shaping with a reversed 60-grit belt sand belt attached to a roller drum with a handle set into the chuck of a cordless drill. The mast took about six hours of careful planing (both power plane and hand plane). The boom needed to be lengthened to 17 1/2 feet, so I cut a 12-to-1 scarf in the end, and epoxied a second piece to get it to the right length. Skiff booms are over 17 feet long, giving them their distinctively over-sized gaff rig.
Shaping the mast
I overbuilt the gaff in the belief it is the weakest of the three spars. I tapered the throat end down to a wedge shape to accept a bronze gooseneck fitting donated by Conrad Geyser. Given my hatred of gaff-jaws (they chew up the mast by grinding against it) and laced-on sails, I went with the original “Senior track” configuration to attach the gaff and the luff of the sail to the mast and scavenged bronze sail track to attach the head and foot of the sail to the gaff and boom respectively. For the mast track I cut a 1/4″ dado into a seven-foot length of white oak and epoxied it to the aftside of the spar, taking care to make the slots the right size to accept the bronze gooseneck fitting and the five U-shaped bronze sail slides. I made a spreader for the forestay out of white oak, spliced a loop into the end of a 3/16ths length of stainless steel wire rope (splicing wire rope is NOT fun), wormed and parceled the loop, and fashioned the forestay through the uppermost pad-eye for the peak block at the top of the mast. Getting the goosenecks onto the boom and the gaff were an opportunity to learn how to peen 1/4″ bronze rods into “rivets” with smooth heads as opposed to cluttering up the end of the gaff and boom with a series of bolts and nuts.
“Senior-style” bronze gaff gooseneck fitted to the mast track
Bronze turnbuckles are hard to find and the best price I could find for a new one was a staggering $250, so I turned to eBay and discovered the used bronze market has caught onto the shortage of bronze boat fittings with prices far over what they should be. I ordered two turnbuckles, but they were over-sized and will collect cobwebs in the shop for the foreseeable future. In the end I scavenged a bronze forestay turnbuckle off of another spar, along with a lot of old sail track which is priced at an eye-watering $15 a foot new .
The spars all received eight coats of Epifanes varnish. The first coat was thinned 50-50, the second 25-75, the third 15-85 and the last five were all full strength with 400 grit wet sanding and acetone wipe downs in between coats until the spars looked like candy apples.
Hardware
The devastating impact of West Marine on the small marine hardware suppliers can’t be overstated. A trip to the local stores is always an exercise in futility. There is no bronze. The staff knows very little about anything nautical. And the prices are absurd. Taken together with the decline of wooden boat production in the 1960s when soulless fiberglass took over, a lot of traditional parts suppliers have gone out of business, most notably when it comes to bronze hardware. Learning how to cast bronze is on my list of future projects, but until then I’ve resorted to pilfering hardware from old boats and spars to meet my needs.
Stainless steel hardware and the disposable dreck carried by West Marine simply looks terrible on an old wooden sailboat. There are a few mail order/online sources but the prices of bronze are hard to swallow. Davey & Company in the U.K. produces beautiful work, as does JM Reineck & Son in Halifax, Mass.. There are some outstanding foundries that do custom work, notably the Port Townsend Foundry in Washington state. Bronze fasteners used to be readily available on Cape Cod from chandleries at local boat yards, but alas, stainless steel has taken over and my go-to source for bronze screws, nails, bolts, and washers is Fairwind Fasteners in Newport, Rhode Island who make excellent hardware and have outstanding customer service.
Fortunately for my wallet I had a good collection of bronze cleats and the original hardware from the Snafu II to work with.
The final weeks of the project before launching were spent carefully fastening blocks, chocks, and cleats back onto the hull and the new spars. The amount of “fiddly” work involved tried my patience, but I took my time and made multiple orders from Fairwind Fasteners rather than compromise and head to the local hardware store for stainless steel facsimiles.
Over 150 of these little suckers were hand-screwed into the boom and gaff to pin down the sail track. My hand is still cramped from the ordeal.
Paint
I used to hate painting but after getting into half-models and learning a lot from the master of boat painting — Malcolm Crosby, the former head of the paint shop at the Crosby boatyard in Osterville — from his daughter Betsey Crosby Thompson’s excellent series on YouTube, I find painting to be the most zen and rewarding aspect of boat restoration.
After giving the new spars their eight coats of varnish I turned to the hull and used a laser level to strike a line for a new boot top over the waterline. I painted the hull with the custom yellow sourced from George Kirby Jr. Paint (it required four coats to cover all the underlying dark spots, some of which still peek through), the bottom with Petit Vivid antifouling White, and the boot top with green Epifanes waterline paint. The boot top leaves a lot to be desired — I need to invent a parallel masking tape contraption to keep an even spacing between the top and the bottom of the line )assuming someone hasn’t already invented one).
The final steps included rebuilding the stern seat from planks of western red cedar, fitting the boom crutch and the new tiller, and repainting the interior of the boat with Seattle Grey.
Centerboard trunk and keelson stained and varnished, with new (vintage) bronze halyard and centerboard pennant cleats installed.
Rigging
A few days before the Fourth of July I gathered sons and son-in-law and carried the boat out to the yard where I stepped the mast, cut the forestay to the proper length, and rigged the halyards, sheets, outhauls and sail to be sure everything was more or less ready to launch. Bitter lessons from the past have taught me to get everything adjusted before loading the boat onto the trailer and launching it, as working on the beach is a nightmare of tools and parts falling into the water, dying batteries on cordless drills, and many trips up the hill to find a missing shackle or piece of light line in the boat shop.
I mounted the centerboard, easily found the right holes and banged the bolt through with a rubber mallet, backed the fender washers with leather washers slathered with silicone goop, and then turned my attention to the trailer, giving the tires a blast of air before unrigging everything and getting the boat lifted onto the trailer.
I launched on the morning of the 4th of July. In between killing a dozen horseflies taking biopsies of my calves and ignoring the Joe Dirt Jet Ski armada loading up for an afternoon of intoxication at the bird sanctuary, I had the boat on the mooring in time to make the parade. That afternoon I finally found a few minutes to row out to the boat and take her for a sail, the first time I’ve been behind the tiller in more than three decades. Alas, there was very little wind, so I bobbed around looking for a puff to fill the sails so I could see what needed adjusting to get it to set perfectly.
The next morning a very sporty breeze was blowing from the southwest, so I went out again and had a nervous sail that tested the strength of the new spars and revealed a serious crease along the battens that means I must tighten the gaff bridle to get the peak up a few more inches. Other than that, and a little leaking, she looks very pretty. Next up: another one of my grandfather’s skiffs, the old Dolphin owned by my cousin Peter. That can wait until the fall.
