Firing Up a 70 Year Old Steam Generator - Episode 214 - Acorn to Arabella: Journey of a Wooden Boat

Thank you to EcoFlow, https://us.ecoflow.com/products/delta-mini-portable-power-station?aff=264, who sent us their Delta Mini Portable Power Station to test. We’ve been wanting to monitor the refrigerator’s performance and actual electrical draw, and it’s been such a good tool for that.

We start this week with the shop itself. It’s been a long while since we had a big visual change to the boat shop, and this week, we make preparations for installing the last three planks (sheer strake, second strake, and whiskey plank, from top to bottom, respectively). We needed the staging to facilitate constructing the interior, and we’re finally back in epoxy friendly temperatures, so we’re able to glue the scarfs for each strake.

Steam generators seem to have personalities and steam bending wood is a bit of an art. There are tried-and-true methods, of course, having to do with wood thickness and species that are good for bending, but then there are the machines to do it, and for that we called in Andrew Guest of Restoring Rosalind who owns THREE of these: One of his own making, and two he’s acquired from friends of his boat restoration project in Mystic, Connecticut. If you can recall from a couple of weeks ago, we need to bend some of our locust covering boards (the outermost deck planking that covers the top edge of the sheer strake planks) to make the most of the locust we have left.

Annie B made a couple of videos about the steam generator Andrew built. Here’s one of them: https://youtu.be/F6Qpb2cB7UM

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Acorn to Arabella is a boat building project taking place in Granby, Massachusetts. Steve started as an amateur boat builder building a 38′ wooden boat in his backyard: designer William Atkin’s Ingrid with a Stormy Petrel’s gaff rig. These videos follow the journey from tree felling, to lumber milling, to lofting, to the lead keel pour and beyond—sharing details of the woodworking, carpentry, metal smithing, tool building, and tool maintenance that wooden boats command. This ultimate DIY project will continue well past launch, when he and the crew will travel and learn to cruise aboard the boat that they’ve built. Just kidding about all that, this channel is about a Siberian Laika named Akiva.

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