Model Whaleboat

There is a beautiful model whaleboat in the boatshop at the Seaport museum. I will put up photos soon.

I bought a model whaleboat on ebay. Will put it together some day, but not now. No time. It is a copy of the Lagota half scale whaleboats at the Whaling Museum in New Bedford. They are the little green ones above the Azorean whaleboat in the foreground.

New Bedford Whaleboat

This boat is in the collection at the New Bedford whaling museum. It was used in service, but the builder is unknown. It will be a good resource for us when we build the new one for the MORGAN.


mast step

loggerhead

centerboard case

Whaleboat Images

These images are details of artworks and graphics on the walls at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Whaleboats in Watercolors

Details from seamen's sketches. I photographed these at the New Bedford Whaling museum.

New Bedford

Visited New Bedford's National Park and Whaling Museum. They have a couple Azorean Whaleboats that they raced last Sept. 2010. Click here for their webpage.

Tom, there were many designs for harpoons.

Offsets

The table of offsets has all the measurement information for distances along each labeled line. For a great post about measuring an existing boat to produce plans, check out Russ Manheimerspost about measuring SJOGIN.

Reading Plans

The plans for the Whaleboat have a table

of offsets in the corner. The offsets are read in feet-inches- and eighths of inches. These coordinates specify points on given lines. They are the given locations where a long flexible batten may be bent along to make a fair line.

The lines on the plans are drawn in three axes, or planes intersecting each other at right angles for the most part. (the diagonals make a fourth set of planes, not at right angles.)

In this view the station profiles are shown, the waterlines are the horizontal lines spaced about 6" apart, the vertical lines are buttock lines. The diagonals radiate downward from the center.

In these last two images, (not whaleboats, but good illustrations from a book called, Ships of

the Pharaohs, by Bjorn Landstrom,) you can visualize where the lines come from and how they relate to a three dimensional hull. The lofter uses geometry and battens to create full size drawings from the numbers in the table of offsets and the lines on the plans.

Plans

The plans for the whaleboats being built at Workshop on the Water and Rocking the Boat are available from Mystic Seaport. These drawings were done by R.C Allyn in 1973. They are the lines from a Beetle Whaleboat. Beetle built about 50 boats a year between 1834 and 1854. A set of lines like this gives all the information a builder needs to produce a boat with the given shape.

Stoves

Check out the Bio Diesel stove.

http://www.marinestove.com/herringinfo.htm

With the winter being so cold and snowy here I have been looking at stoves and cooking for small cruisers. Have been collecting camp stoves for a while and recently bought a kelly kettle. The house is heated with a Jotul, which keeps us cosy. SILENT MAID has a wonderful diesel Wallace stove which doubles as a cabin heater. It needs a battery system in addition to the fuel system. I was hoping to keep things more simple.

Whaleboats

The beginning of a new boat means drawing the shapes full size from a set of offsets (feet-inches-eighths) that determine points. Battens bent to meet these points are adjusted for fair curves.

My friend Tom Armstrong, has set up a new blog to document the building of the whaleboats by the seaport's Workshop on the Water. http://whaleboats.blogspot.com/