WoodenBoatMuseum.comOver decades of cruising along the Newfoundland and Labrador shores, the author was captivated by the region’s ubiquitous and revered trap skiffs.
The remains of elegant and purpose-built trap skiffs are ubiquitous along the Newfoundland and Labrador shores. Most fishing harbors have a wreck or two left as evidence of the fine eye of a builder, good workmanship, durable wood, and a hard but purposeful living. Whatever it is that lets these sculptural relics endure, there is a nostalgic appreciation for the craft inherent in them that seems to prevent their removal as so much blight.
And so it has been with me. As I brought my outsider’s sensibilities to these coasts in the course of several visits, I was struck by the sweetness of line, the simplicity of structure, and the enormous carrying capacity in such a small craft. Not unlike the way the ancient Greeks produced a lasting architectural standard based on the mathematical ratios inherent in the way humans fit into nature, these old trap skiffs have an enduring elegance that requires no understanding of naval architecture to appreciate.
So, silly me, back in New England having sold my wonderful old Aage Nielsen–designed sloop ELSKOV, in which I’d made several visits to Newfoundland and Labrador, I started to wonder if anyone was still building these boats in Newfoundland and if I could get one. It seemed to me that their obviously easily driven hull shape would be perfect for motoring about the ledges and islands of Muscongus Bay, Maine, where my wife, Trish, and her sister have a toehold on its rocky western shore. I found a wonderful trove of information on the website of the Wooden Boat Museum of Newfoundland and Labrador in Winterton, Trinity Bay (www.wooden boatmuseum.com; see WoodenBoat No. 274). There was all sorts of history, oral and written, with just one shortcoming: No one was actually still building these boats. On the other hand, there was enough information here that someone like me with time on his hands might just be able to build one himself.
So it was that the project began. The idea was to get started, then move carefully (or not) through the various steps, never committing to more than what I could see in front of me. The Chinese call it “crossing the river by feeling the stones.” If that all ended up in a boat, terrific. Meanwhile, the work would be a marvelous challenge.
WoodenBoatMuseum.comWhen he sold his cruising boat, he resolved to build this 19-footer, whose shape was recorded by the Wooden Boat Museum of Newfoundland and Labrador during the summer of 2013. The lines shown here are to the outside of the planking.
The museum in Winterton had two or three lines drawings in its collections. I found one I liked, in PDF format on the website, showing a 19′ “motorboat” built by Calvin Meadus. I printed this out and then blew it up to 1⁄16 scale, or ¾” to the foot. But that was it. There was no construction plan, no table of offsets, and not much other information on how to get from here to boat.
But there were other inputs I could bring to bear. I had an understanding of lofting from my experience creating a half model of ELSKOV. I had also taken a two-week boatbuilding course with instructor Sam Temple at WoodenBoat School. To this experience, I could add two invaluable guides: Building Small Boats, by Greg Rössel, and Boat Building in Winterton, Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, by David A. Taylor. The latter was originally a master’s thesis for Memorial University in 1980. It is as much an anthropological study of the culture and community of boatbuilding as it is a “how to” guide. It is available through the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Québec, which published it in 2006.
How, then, would I enlarge my scaled lines drawing to a full-sized lofting from which to derive molds and other construction shapes, placements, and sizes? I decided I needed to create a table of offsets. This would provide the basis for the molds. Any lack of fairness resulting from an inaccurate take-off would get resolved by eye on the lofting table.
I decided right off that I was not going to loft the boat on my hands and knees, so the first order of busi-ness was to build a lofting surface over which I could stand. This became a 24′ × 4′ table supported on 36″-tall sawhorses in a corner of my building space, which was a 33′ × 100′ airy, empty old Vermont dairy barn with doors wide enough to let the boat out if the time ever came. The table surface was smooth birch plywood, painted white.
I also decided, for better or worse, that I needn’t bother with more than the profile with waterlines and the body plan. Half-breadths seemed somehow redundant. This was hubris, perhaps, but in the back of my mind was the fact that the Newfoundlanders who built all these boats did no lofting at all. They had a certain shape and construction they built to, starting by setting up the backbone and transom. Then they had three adjustable molds referred to as the “forehook,” “after-hook,” and “’midship bend.” These were constructed of curved pieces of wood joined by bolts in slots enabling one to place them at one-third intervals on the back-bone and adjust their curves by eye to the desired shape, or, more often, to repeat a prior shape used. My method involved pencils and battens, and over a few days resulted in a set of elegant lines on my clean white table. I was already delighted. Even if it went no further, just getting to this point was interesting and rewarding.
The next step, if this boat was to become a reality, was to find the timber needed for a backbone. Looking online for appropriate-sized white oak in Vermont yielded nothing useful, but this magazine’s classified ads led me to New England Naval Timbers and Duke Besozzi in Cornwall, Connecticut (see WB No. 213). It turned out that he had spent many youthful years in Inuit, Labrador, and knew right off what I was talking about when I told him I had in mind to build a “trap skiff.” He also had a yard full of appropriate oak to mill to the 3″ × 10″ rough dimension I wanted.
Building the Backbone
Once the timber was back in Vermont, it had to be resawn with a chainsaw and bandsaw, then smoothed with an electric hand plane. Then the magic of lofting began to reveal itself. I could lay the timber on the full-sized drawing and mark out the curves and bevels for the three-piece stem and keel. I could place the bronze rods that would hold things together, and I could lay out the stopwaters. Finally, I could lay out the rabbet and appropriate angles at which the planking would meet the stem and keel at various locations.
Cutting or carving the actual rabbet was chisel-and-mallet work down the stem and through its curve until the straight part of the keel was reached. This work promised to be a long and tedious process of chipping out an endless series of angled mortises, then further chipping out the waste material between them. In reality, though, thanks to sharp tools and low expectations, this turned out to be remarkably expeditious and satisfying work. Through the more gradual curve of the keel up to the transom, I was able to rig a router jig, which made quick work of the remaining rabbet. I will admit here that I still don’t understand cutting the rabbet properly at the turn of the stem where the garboard plank turns from hood end to edge, but I solved my immediate problem by not cutting any rabbet at all here until I got to the planking step later and could just eyeball what needed to happen.
I took the belt-and-suspenders approach of assembling the backbone timbers with epoxy and also bolting them together with 3⁄8″ bronze threaded rod. Boring for the rod was its own adventure, in some places through 18″ of white oak. Care is needed to keep drill and bit straight; it’s a mistake to just plunge into the task and drill right through. The bit must be withdrawn often to clear the chips. Two bits got stuck, and I broke one of them.
In the deadwood, I offset the vertical bronze bolts to allow plenty of room for the bore for the propeller shaft to pass through cleanly. I’ll return to the shaft bore below.
Transom and Molds
I built the boat right-side up, which is how the boatbuilders in Winterton worked. Also, this way I could bend the frames to the insides of the ribbands, and thus only had to account for the planking thickness in cutting the molds—not planking plus ribband thickness.
Setting up the backbone on a simple strongback brought a moment of immense satisfaction, because I could see the boat’s profile just as I had imagined it. The strongback held the boat level on her waterlines, another truth taken directly from the lofting. The transom was glued up of 5⁄4″ mahogany decking from a local lumberyard, its shape again derived from the lofting. Its profile was fine as drawn, but I waited until ribbands could be sprung around the molds to confirm the bevels along its edges, where the planks would land.
To transfer the mold shapes from the lofting to the mold stock, I used the time-honored method of laying small-headed nails along the body plan lines, then pressing boards onto the nails. The resultant impressions could then be used to place nails to define a curve, then bend a batten to the nails along which I could trace a fair line to be cut.
It sounds tedious, but it is a surprisingly quick way to establish all the requisite shapes, which were cut out, checked against the lofting, traced for matching mirror-image pieces to be cut out for the opposite side, and then assembled to form a complete mold. Setting up the seven molds, each plumb, level, and spaced 2′ apart perpendicular to the waterline, took time and careful bracing. The completion of this task was another great moment, a vision of the completed hull in three dimensions.
Ribbands and Frames
For ribbands, those fore-and-aft pieces to which the frames would be bent, I chose lumberyard spruce strapping. This was not a great choice, because the stock was full of knots, and I thus worried that it was not bending to a fair curve. But that is what I used, and the boat did come out perfectly fair. The ribbands, being temporary, were fastened with sheetrock screws.
Now to the frames. Traditionally, these were sawn out of spruce or tamarack, using natural curves in the grown stock where possible. I decided to steam-bend my frames in oak, so it was back to New England Naval Timbers for proper bending stock of clear white oak with flat grain in way of the bending. These were finished to 11 ⁄4″ × 2″ in the thickness planer. There was a bit of a wait for this material because it was winter, and Duke was cutting trees in the woods while the ground was frozen and didn’t want to stop to go back to his yard to saw out my small order. But it was ready soon enough, and it came to me perfectly as ordered. Meanwhile, I had to make up a steambox. This evolved as four 1″ × 10″ pine boards screwed together with a door on one end and a few dowels run through for a “rack.” This box was set on sawhorses with a steel gasoline can—free of any trace of gasoline, of course—underneath joined to the box with radiator hose. The can mounted on a propane space heater topped with an old barbecue grill.
I planned to place the 1″ × 2″ frames 12″ on center. Steaming and bending them into place was a two-person operation, so Trish assisted me. Steaming each frame for about an hour seemed to work, after which I would pull the frame out of the box and pre-bend it over a curved form (a five-gallon plastic pail in this case), then climb inside the boat where I used my weight to “walk” the hot frame into position. Trish would then place clamps strategically until the frame was secured. I then temporarily fastened each frame to the ribbands with sheetrock screws. We broke six or seven of the 32 frames in this process of bending them, which, though frustrating, seems to be a normal rate of breakage.
Floor Timbers
With the frames now in place, it was on to floor timbers. I made these up in red oak from a local sawmill near my home in Massachusetts. Once fitted, these were fastened to the keel with 3⁄8″ bronze drifts, and to the frames with two 1⁄4″ threaded bronze rod on each side. Someone suggested to me much later that drifts would not hold once the planking and frames started to swell after the boat was launched, meaning that the floors would separate from the keel as the garboards pushed up—but that didn’t happen. That was lucky, perhaps, but I made each pilot hole 1⁄16″ narrower than the drift, pointed the bronze rod, and drove it home like a nail. It took all I had with a 6-lb hammer to do just that.
I left my frame heels 1″ shy of the keel; the floor timbers provided the structural connection. This has seemed to work out fine, and the resulting gaps have provided a healthy set of limber holes for proper drainage.
Planking
For planking, the WoodenBoat classifieds led me to Alex Hudak in Swanton, Vermont, who, for whatever reason, has an enormous stock of clear, wide Atlantic white cedar that comes to him out of the swamps in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. It is gorgeous material, all brought back in my little pickup truck one cloudless day in May.
In planning the planking, I had to think about the number of strakes and the widths of cedar I could get from Alex. In lining off the hull, what seemed to work was 11 planks per side. Some were narrower at their widest point than others, and the garboards were the widest at about 7″. This was all very anxiety-provoking for my neophyte self. I had done some spiling at WoodenBoat School, but still I had just spent a couple of thousand dollars on cedar with no certainty I could fit this material to the frame I now had in front of me. You can only imagine how pleased I was to cut out that first garboard and find it perfectly sliding into place just as if I knew what I was doing.
And on it went until the whole hull was planked. After the garboards, I hung the sheerstrakes and their adjacent topside planks, then added the first broad-strakes next to the garboards. I removed ribbands in way of the work as needed, then ran a fair batten fore-and-aft representing the next desired plank edge, and marked off a spiling batten in the space between the batten and prior plank. In each case, I was able to make a matching pair of planks from one spiling. This seemed remarkable, but it worked out and suggested that the boat was symmetrical, just as it should be—right up to the shutter planks, that is. As you might imagine, each of these planks was unique, and although the difference was slight, it was enough that each needed to be spiled separately.
Each plank was hand-planed to a fair curve both edges, and one edge was planed for a caulking bevel. The planks at the turn of the bilge had to be “backed out”—that is, their frame-facing sides hollowed out—using an old wooden bench plane whose iron I ground to an appropriate curve. I used 1¾” No. 10 bronze screws as plank fastenings.
Instead of using traditional butt blocks, I followed the conventional wisdom of scarfing planks together as necessary, using epoxy, and gluing them at dogleg angles that would accommodate the healthy curves in the finished strakes.
Inverting and Fairing the Hull
With the planking done, the rest, I was advised, would just go along easily. Well, maybe so, but there was still a lot to it. First, to simplify the job of fairing the planking and caulking the hull, I turned it over, with the aid of four handy billies, towing straps, and nine hours of careful pulling, tying off, resetting hitching points, more pulling, reaching the balance point, then lowering with care—all to turn a 6′-wide hull 180 degrees in a 7′ floor-to-ceiling space.
The hull was not as smooth as I had hoped it would be. The shape was fair, but it was difficult to refine the surface of the cedar. Rather than dressing smoothly, a lot of the grain was “pulled’’ off as the planking stock went through the thickness planer. The ultimate hand-planing and sanding to fair up the hull shape took care of a lot of this, so even the primer coat of flat paint looked good. But once the glossy topside coat went on, a lot of grain showed up again.
Caulking
Caulking became a nice husband-and-wife project as we shared the task of “knuckling” the cotton along the seams and driving it in. Once done, the seams were primed and masked-off for the seam compound, followed by priming the entire hull. Our previous experience made turning the boat upright again much faster than inverting it. The gunwales, inwales, and caps all went smoothly, produced from locally sourced dry white oak.
These boats were traditionally painted white, with a gray or green interior and maybe red or green trim. A few years ago, I had built a Phil Bolger–designed Gloucester Light Dory. Because I had known and admired Sturgis Crocker and his speedy, hard-chined raceboat FIVEPLY, which was painted black with green decks, I painted my dory, also plywood, black on the exterior and seafoam green on the inside. And because her oak rubrails looked so good natural, I varnished them. Trish said to me, “Those are our colors. Of course, you will finish the trap skiff black with green interior and bright rails.” So I did.
Boring for the Propeller Shaft
The next challenge, a somewhat belated one, was to bore the propeller-shaft hole. The reason this came so late in the building was that I had started this project not really knowing what sort of power plant I would give the boat. As I went along, it became more and more clear that only the traditional “make-and-break” engine from Canada would do. A call to my friend Henry Fuller of the erstwhile Cape Breton Boat Yard in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, led eventually to Dave Trickett, a retired RCMP officer near Saint Johns, Newfoundland, who had experience locating and restoring these old engines. Getting Dave to believe that I was serious took two or three conversations over some weeks, but in the end he found a good restoration candidate, and we reached an agreement for him to proceed. This broke a dam of indecision on just what sort of shaft hole to bore. The shaft itself would be 7⁄8″ in diameter, necessitating a 11 ⁄8″ bore through about 24″ of very dry white oak. I still don’t know if there was a better way to do this, but online I found a 30″ utility lineman’s 11 ⁄8″ auger bit for a reasonable cost. I set up a jig, eyeballing and measuring as best I could a straight line through the deadwood from the outside in just the right place to line up with the engine. That “right place” was again determined by the lofting. Now that I knew what engine was going in, Dave provided me with a schematic of dimensions for the Lunenburg Foundry Atlantic he was working on for me, and I just added that information to the lofting. I was astounded that it fit so well, but I should remember that I was copying an exact plan of a boat that probably was powered with this type of engine originally. Of course it fit—boat and motor were built for each other. With everything ready, and Dave done with his work, we had a happy excuse for a road trip to Newfoundland to pick up the engine.
Motor
When we arrived at Dave’s shop, there was the engine on his shop floor chugga-chugging gaily on a wood skid. I’m gradually learning how simple and reliable these workhorses are. It’s a single-cylinder, water-cooled, dry-exhaust, two-cycle gasoline engine with a fuel-to-oil mixture of 30:1. It is fitted with the equally antique Schebler carburetor touted by its manufacturer as “ideally suited for marine motors and all motors where extreme low throttling conditions are not required.” The “make-and-break” spark is provided by a 6-volt battery connected by wire through an enhancing coil to an ignitor in the cylinder head, which is actuated by a spring mechanism connected by linkage to the crankshaft such that as the piston rises to the top of compression, a circuit is made with the battery current. This circuit is no sooner made than it breaks. The resultant coil-enhanced spark ignites the fuel-air mixture from the carburetor, and the motor turns. A flywheel weighing maybe 160 lbs both starts the engine, then keeps it running smoothly while generating the full 4 hp. That is, one spins the flywheel to turn over the motor; once it fires, the inertial force of the heavy wheel keeps it going. It is a perfect demonstration of Newton’s first law of motion.
Back in the Vermont barn, there came the issue of getting the 250-lb engine up and into the boat. Here the handy billies again loaned their mechanical advantage to lift the engine up over the gunwale and set it down onto to two hardwood bedlogs installed across three of the floor timbers. I shimmed the engine to align it with the propeller shaft, and it was done. Of particular interest, these boats and engines rely on an external stuffing box. That is, there is no stern tube or Cutless bearing, just the hole bored through the dead-wood. The reason this works is that the standard old-fashioned stuffing box mounts to the outside of the keel, where the shaft exits, not inside. It’s not readily adjustable, should it weep, but it is a simple system.
After installing a two-quart plastic gas tank, two small batteries (a 6-volt for the make-and-break spark and 12-volt for a bilge pump) in boxes, plus wiring and a fuel line, I was in business.
Launching the Trap Skiff
On an early-afternoon high tide in Round Pond, Maine, 20 family members and friends gathered to watch the boat’s launching and to help. My heart was firmly lodged in my throat. Would she float off the trailer? How much would she leak? Would the stuffing box be adjusted more or less right? Would she float on her lines? And could I get the engine running?
These Atlantic engines operate in direct drive. There is no transmission. If the engine is running, the propeller is spinning. Not only that, although it starts mostly with forward rotation, it can and will run in reverse. This is unpredictable upon starting; one must be ready to go when the motor starts, in either direction.
My nerves were a-jingle, and then there was a huge easing of tension. She went in as smoothly as a seal off a rock, sat right on her lines, and didn’t ship any water except for a minor weep through the propeller shaft. The engine started up, and off we went, a noisy but smooth 5 knots at hull speed with no wake—a perfect displacement hull. It was absolutely astonishing.
I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. A few weeks later a friend asked how it was going. I sent him a video, to which he responded, “Wow, you’ve just built a brand-new antique boat!” Indeed, I have, and it’s about as useful as a Model T Ford. Where it goes from here is a whole new question.
Finley Perry is a retired residential building contractor, amateur yachtsman, and now boatbuilder. He lives in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.