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In response to Bob’s blog on the masts:

Now we are looking into an interesting bit of history in Newporter construction.  The ones we built, and Bob’s present boat is one of them, and those after a few of the first boats were built, were all built to patterns and on jigs and in accord with measurements in a book or two.  Each area in our shops had their own areas of the total construction as their “area” of work to put the boats together.  This resulted in some overlaps, or…

After a few years of (hopefully) helping Newporter owners make changes to their boat I have had to scrap my thinking that the Newporter was a well built vessel.  Let me make that more clear.  When I was helping to build these boats the building technique used by Ack in the design and building of these vessels was considered high tech.  We had a naval architect come to our yard (in Leesburg, NJ) to look over our operation and interview the men on the job in his hunt for a boatbuilder to build…

I will get to work on the drawing of the fiddlehead.  This will be a redeveloped drawing in that I have no blueprints that give it.  We had patterns of many parts and I'm sure a fiddle head pattern was used to mark the wood for sawing to shape.  Now that you are going to do some work on the other bulwark you should first mark and measure, and record, the position of the gammon.  Then do the repairs and then make the new gammon iron.  I'll speak to that process later.

I wrote…

Britton, 

Given my age and the fact that it’s been a l o n g time since I’ve worked on Newporters (and a lot of new technology has been preferred since then) I am unable to speak knowledgeably to your forward bulwark rot problem.  But I do have some things to say (always, but take it with a critical eye) from what I think I understand. 

First, about the repair you have done.  That may well take care of it, but for how long I can’t guess.  Is it strong enough?  I think it…

My first twenty-five years of boating was on workboats or “yachts” that were workboat built and workboat painted.  When I started working at Stowman’s shipyard I was on the “commercial gang” that worked on workboats.  Then I was transferred to the “Newporter gang” and stayed there, eventually becoming the rigger and demonstration/delivery captain.  We wore non-marking shoes and some of us wore Topsiders.  Those shoes had wavy slits across the soles and heels to give a good grip on…