The Odyssey of DYAD II
Part 2
Posted: December 14, 2004




1. So the question is whether or not the conditions found justify trying to save the boat rather than cut her up for parts. We spent about 6 hours just cleaning out the mud and rust from the bilge so that we could actually examine the condition of the wood.

2. The decision was made to save the boat via a cost effective renovation rather than a restoration. The approach is to cut out the bad wood of each rib, and scarf in new wood via lamination. With regard to the existing sisters we found that most of them were still intact but a few had a de-lam problem; so we decided to remove the de-laminating strips and replace them too. Finally each scarfed in rib and repaired sister would be �capped with a single strip of oak laminate.

3. Here you can see both a rib and sister having been cut out and awaiting scarfing by lamination.

4. Here you can see the remains of ribs cluttering the bilge.

5. When the sister is intact, but the rib is shot, the task involved carefully cutting out the bad wood (usually at the break in the rib) with sharp tools.

6. There were about 26 such situations in the bilge.

7. Here you can see the result of having new wood scarffed into the rib with the sister remaining intact.

8. This shows the result after placing the �cap� on both the scarffed in rib and the sister. Keith used bronze nails for the laminating.

9. Boatwright Keith Smith was careful not to take on more than one or two rib/sister situations at a time so as not to compromise the shape or integrity of the hull.

10. Here is a view aft with all the repairs having been accomplished

11. This is the view forward. There is only one cracked rib under the mast step. The next task is to double fasten the planks to the hull as the original fasteners are either so brittle or non-existant as to be useless in holding the planks to the ribs. We are also now challenged to figure out how to connect the floors to the new ribs and re-laminated sisters. We have a plan on that and will show it in the next few installments to this story.