I spent a lot of time the last month thinking about the cockpit reframing. While the 1 x 4” flat frames may look easy to bend at the turn of the bilge, it’s the other bend that re-curves into the shaft tunnel that adds a whole other worry to the process. If you’re trying to save most of the planking, you don’t have many places to put clamps for pulling in the hot replacement frame.
Experimentation has solved many boat rebuilding problems for me in the past. You can’t really imagine what’s going to screw up a process until you give it a try….
With that said, I hustled up some local green oak frame blanks from Thompson’s Saw Mill in Hopkinton RI. As luck would have it, the mill was doing a big run of 4/4 oak and they let me pick out clear pieces for the shocking price of a buck and a half a board foot. Some of this oak had a pink tinge…OK, red. But BONNY BRIDE already had been repaired with this sort of oak, which still seemed to be OK. So I bought the new stuff, and added about 30% more to allow for breakage.
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roy mandell says:
in 1972 I moved to south west Nova Scotia not far from where Bonny Bride was built.
In those days there were four builders turning out these cape islanders within five miles.
They were never the best materials, usually spruce over hackmatac with galvanized fastenings and not expected to last longer than a dozen years fishing hard through the winter. But the design was great for the purpose and ought to be considered by anyone wanting a truly beautiful cruising boat. Imagine it in the best woods with bronze.