Most of the boats I liked were carvel planked.. What I had in mind was
something like the older pre-fiberglass Lightning or something similar. I
found an older Lightning woodie with a rotten deck and chine log, but the
rest was in pretty good shape other than a couple of cracked planks.
RB



Dave Fleming wrote in message
...
I've been perusing some old boat plans, and have a question regarding
the
sizes of boards. "Back in the day" when some of these plans were
written,
lumber was actually the size it was sold to be. Now, a 1x4 may be as
little
as 3 1/4 in. wide (as measured at local Lowe's home improvement center).
How does one compensate for this when building from old plans?

I was also apalled by the prices for REALLY knotty boards labelled as
"top
choice". By the way, what is "white wood" anway??? Is good lumber
really
that scarce? About 20 years ago I worked in home construction during
the
summers, and even the cheapest boards we used as bracing were longer,
straighter, and a whole lot clearer than the junk I saw at Lowe's.

Russ B

First off, are you going to build in ***traditional carvel planked***
or ***cold moulded***?
Answer that and perhaps some reasonable answers will be posted.
So far all I have seen whilst ***good intentioned ***I am sure,is
just conjecture
Not to sound like a wise arse, yeah it does seem that way, don't it?
:-)
But the more specifics you provide, the better the replies will be to
your particular question.

PAX


http://pages.sbcglobal.net/djf3rd
Tales of a Boat Builder Apprentice

I have noted over the years that the folks in the Eastern US and
Eastern Canada find spruce, pine and fir to be rather rare and
expensive, while they have an abundance of hardwoods like oak, ash,
walnut and so on, so much that they use it for firewood. Out here in
the West, we burn the softwoods and can't get the hardwoods at any
decent price. Many of us, when building boats or furniture, have cut
up hardwood pallets to get the small bits of hardwood we need. We
can't feature Eastern factories using wood for pallets that we pay $10
a board foot for.
When I was a kid my father worked in a sawmill, and any amount of
clear softwood could be had just by picking through any pile of
lumber. Those days are gone (sob) and now I cringe when I look at
the basement structure of some old house, with all that clear fir. Out
here in Alberta there are numerous huge aircraft hangars built during
WWII on training airfields, made of fir beams measuring something like
6" by 24" and 12"x12", and sixty feet long. Clear, for the most part.
Old grain elevators are being torn down, and the lumber (laminated
2x6, 2x8, 2x10) reclaimed for fancy flooring and window frames in
upscale houses. Lumber cut from trees in the 1920s when they were
still taller than Paul bunyan.
In the 1970s I sold heavy truck parts, and a firm in India made
the best cast-iron brake drums we'd ever seen. North American
manufacturers made them of softer iron (which wore out much sooner)
and stored them outside so they got all rusty and filthy. The Indians
wrapped them in plastic, with dessicant capsules to keep them dry, and
boxed them two to a crate made of TEAK, believe it or not. It's junk
over there. Some of it found its way into my furniture projects.

Dan