• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Patchwork an restoration work

H

heimlaga

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As requested by Mike here are a few pictures of things I have made:

Year 2024.
I jacked up a church tower and fitted some new logs and a few graving pieces.
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Turning a windshaft for a windmill on my mill shaft lathe.
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Making wings for the same windmill
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Shingle roofing and a bit of galvanized iron fitted around the chimney
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Seats and engine installation and stern tube and shaft and everything in a 20 foot motorboat which was delivered unfinished by the builder 40 years ago and not finished until now.
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Regrinding the secondhand propeller with damaged blade ends from 14 to 13 inches.
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Pouring home made putty around the home made stern tube.
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A bit of home grown timber. Logged and sawn and stacked.
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Some cooper's tools I made for a class I taught

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Logging windfalls. Mostly firewood though some trees were still good enough for timber. The sea ice was strong enough to carry tractor and loaded trailer across the bay to the mainland.
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A bit of windmill framing. I uprooted two spruce trees for the crooks that meet above the shaft opening.
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Year 2023
Decking a roof 1890-ies style with unedged boards
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The engine bed for the boat. Theese weird modern engines have the flywheel on the stern end of the block to I had to weld up a rather unconventional stainless steel engine bed.

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A bit of foundation work. The foundation boulders has sunk into the ground so we dug down to bedrock by hand and filled in the trench with rocks and placed new bigger boulders on top. After jacking up the building some 30 cm. My tractor was made in Coventry in 1971 and is still going strong.
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New keel and new garboards in a 19 foot doubleender
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A bit of maintainance on the tractor. New bearings, new pistons, new small end bushings and piston pins, new oil pump and new valves and valve springs.
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Well I don’t think you will ever be bored, looks like a super variation in the work coming in, and I can imagine your reputation spreading for unusual work will bring in even more strange stuff.
Thanks for showing us.
 
Fantastic stuff, Heimlaga. Fantastic. That's the best lathe I've ever seen! I'd always imagined that the big shafts in mills (water and wind) were shaped in the manner of a mast......endless planing along the grain, removing corners in a sequential manner.

Possibly the most impressive of all the really impressive things in your photos is the replacement garboards. To replace garboards in a carvel-planked boat is difficult enough, but to do it in a clinker-built boat is mind-boggling. The constantly changing bevels of the junction with the next board up are going to be almost blind to you, and you've got to thread the garboard up at the same time as bending it in. Goodness knows how you spiled for that (although I guess the removed board gave you most of the shape)......and goodness knows how many times you tried to wrestle it into place only to have to take it out again and shave a bit more off. Superb.
 
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Mike G said:
Fantastic stuff, Heimlaga. Fantastic. That's the best lathe I've ever seen! I'd always imagined that the big shafts in mills (water and wind) were shaped in the manner of a mast......endless planing along the grain, removing corners in a sequential manner.

Possibly the most impressive of all the really impressive things in your photos is the replacement garboards. To replace garboards in a carvel-planked boat is difficult enough, but to do it in a clinker-built boat is mind-boggling. The constantly changing bevels of the junction with the next board up are going to be almost blind to you, and you've got to thread the garboard up at the same time as bending it in. Goodness knows how you spiled for that (although I guess the removed board gave you most of the shape)......and goodness knows how many times you tried to wrestle it into place only to have to take it out again and shave a bit more off. Superb.
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In the old days many maybe most mill shafts were made the way you describe. However some were turned. Probably just the last few millimetres on some sort of makeshift handcranked lathe onsite. I have seen the toolmarks and centermarks but no man alive can tell exactly what such a lathe looked like.
I have hewn and planed one wind shaft for another windmill in the past and found that it was so laborious that I could build this lathe from scrap yard materials and turn this shaft in less time. Modernisation.

I cheated a bit with the garboards. I made the T-shaped keel in two pieces. First I shapeded the inner part (I think you call it hog in English) and nailed it in. The flat underside follows the line of the corner between the outer keel and the planking bevel. I had roughed out the bevels with a hatchet beforehand but I did the last adjustments in place using a piece of planking stock as a guide. At the ends I chiseled out the stem and sternpost rabbet where they gradually blend into the keel but kept them a bit shallow.
I made each garboard in two halves. One forward and one aft. I steamed them with a bit of overbend on a mould so when they were taken off the mould the twist was very close. 16mm spruce springs back a fair bit. A smear of pine tar helped me find the high spots.
Then I fitted one garboard half at a time. Driving them in with a mallet step by thep as I shaved off a little here and there with chisel and block plane. Until they fitted. Then I marked on the keel and on the plank above where the scarph was to be. Then I transfered those marks to each half plank and cut the scarph accordingly. Then I glued a temporary striking block to the outside of each half plank so that I could drive it in place without damage to the scarph. Then I put a mixture of pine tar and boiled linseed oil on the lands and a bit of unspun cotton on that and drove in eack plank half using the striking block. Then I drilled nail holes with an old eggbeater drill cranking back and forth so the cotton wouldn't make a ball on the drill. Then I countersunk the holes on the outside using a gouge and clench nailed with traditional galvanized flat boat nails. Then I fitted the outer keel. Tarred all surfaces that weren't to be glued and glued it to the inner keel using epoxy.
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Carvel building is beyond my capabilities. It looks difficult to frame a boat before planking it.
 
... especially when you do it in the snow!
Thank you for showing us your working world.
 
duke said:
Heimlaga, what type of engine are you using to power your shaft lathe?
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An ordinary 2,2kw 1400 RPM 400 volt 3 phase electric motor. Found at a local scrapyard. Driving through a variator and a set of gears also found at the same scrapyard.
The "flyweel" looking thing provides me with 4 locked positions at right angles to each others so I can square the shaft where the gearwheel will sit and cut the mortises for the spars all at right angles to one another
Proper guarding is still missing. I built the lathe ahead of this job and it is still a work in progress. A proper bed and a proper tool rest are also still missing. I am looking for some cheap used C or I beams. I had to test it out before building the guards and spending money on a bed.
 

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A picture from today. We put the last two sails in place on the mill. 6 local retirees turned up as volunteer helpers.

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Sometimes I rebuild machinery for my own use. As a way of saving money. This old book binder's press became a glue press in my workshop. When I found it at a local scrap yard quite a few cast iron parts were broken and the main screws were bent. They had dropped the counterweight from a scrapped forklift on top of it.
After some rather significant nickel welding I got it operational a few weeks ago. I didn't have time to repaint it so it still looks a bit shabby but technically it is absolutely sound.
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Mike G said:
See, folks, I knew it wasn't straightforward..........
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For sure it wasn't........ but thanks to sound advice from three people it was possible:
-An Englishman called Nick who is an active amateur boatbuilder and retired naval architect. He gave me some advice over the internet.
-My uncle Vidar who has built a dozen boats or so and rebuilt a few more starting in the late 50-ies.
-Rainer, a long retired very reputable local boatbuilder who probably built close to 100 boats before his health failed.

They made it possible. I did the job.
 
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