August 2011: Work Begins In Earnest

July started off poorly and ended well.  August would invert this as preliminary work started only to be interrupted by Hurricane Irene and the start of school.

Marlin, as you've been able to tell, is just a hull- an abandoned resortation and a few artifacts that survived the fire:

 



Some portside and aft items that survived including the coming,
tiller and sole pieces. The lone surviving spar is the jib club.

 



The starboard side of the rudder was charred...







...but the blank from the previous restoration attempt was preserved.



The very first order of business was to get some the boat secure and level.  The previous restoration attempt had sought to stabilze the sheer with plywood decking (called out by the construction drawings).  Years of outdoor storage and severe damage to the aft deck beams had completely undermined the plywood's rigidity and about half the beams were broken or missing. So we removed the plywood and installed a proper set of crosspalls.

With JC's help we set up staging and got to work removing the dead plywood:

(Before anyone gets in a lather this is the only time JC has worked on the staging without a helmet.)

With all the indignities that Marlin has endured perhaps the most detrimental has been storage on concrete floors without climate control (along with improper keel support).  Most of the planking was dry with seams that had opened up- in some cases to just shy of 1/8th of an inch as shown here...

That's John Goff, Herreshoff Museum COO at the time I surveyed Marlin.

Note the daylight visible particularly on the port side.

More daylight on the port side- also a shot of that nasty plywood and yes....
 that is a crosspall on the right- theirs, not mine

.

It was readily apparent that I would have to assess the condition of the planks to see how they would take to water.  However wetting out dry planking can be tricky business, especially for a boat that's been on the hard for thirty years. Fresh water can promote or accelerate decay and rot, rapid expansion can strain frames or disort planking and there's also the consideration of wastewater.

To avoid these problems I elected to line the interior with burlap sacks impregnated with sea water and then maintain moisture with slop drip soaker hoses.

Planking rehydration kit

So that's how Marlin looked for most of August as JC and I removed beams and made preparations for lofting.  Marlin spent three weeks slowly sipping water. At that point I re-surveyed the planking and, to my surprise, most of the open seams closed up nicely.

Note the faint trace of water along the edges.

While the water ran it's course, I constructed platforms for the lofting and worked on creating a set of reference lines for the boat (more on that in the next post).  Leveling the platforms was particularly difficult since the floor slopes in two directions on either side of a central drainage grate. For that portion of the work I had help from my wife, Shelley:

Shelley helps to establish level for the platforms with a transit stick.

When I pick up from here in my next post I'll discuss the problem of lofting an upright hull- one that's compounded by being a Herreshoff.