Getting there!
Episode 3 follows, together with a couple of photos showing boiler and engine - a bit out of sequence in the build, but it ties in to the text.
We'll be into the build proper in episode 4
‘Natterer’ – A shipbuilding Odyssey? – Part 3
You could have heard a feather drop – ‘What do you mean you don’t like it? What’s wrong with it? You’ve fallen in love with a bat?- Oh, you mean the steam launch ‘Bat’’
I suppose I should have realised, as we are both members of Durham Bat Group (Yes, really, the little furry things that fly at night) and once she had seen this little boat with ‘Bat’ on the bows, that was it! It wasn’t really that she didn’t like ‘Dolly’; more a case of preferred ‘Bat’.
Now model steam launches are expensive to build, so the more realistic amongst you will realise that it is very necessary to keep the better half (or third in my case) fully committed to the project. That is to say, what the chancellor wants, the chancellor gets!
Actually, I have to admit I was in two minds about ‘Dolly’ in any case, as even with all the ‘modifications’ I had made to the hull lines the calculated all-up weight of the boat was still very close to the waterline displacement, and you inevitably find the weight increasing during the build. In addition, the unusual lines of ‘Dolly’, and the still relatively small metacentric height meant her stability was likely to be poor.
So I wasn’t really too worried about going back to the drawing board, and we went across again to Windermere (any excuse) to have a close look at ‘Bat’. I’d always liked the look of her, and had even bought the small scale set of lines from the museum some years before.
Close study of these, and a couple of days spent measuring up the hull confirmed that she was likely to be a far better bet in terms of stability, so a start was made on some full-size (model) drawings.
I used the same techniques as for ‘Dolly’ and again ended up with a six foot hull! That was fine, but I started to run into a few problems with regard to the boiler, as whilst ‘Dolly’ had a straightforward Scotch Marine, ‘Bat’ employed a Lune Valley paraffin-fired boiler for fast steam raising. It would have been impossible for me to duplicate this with my rudimentary boiler-making skills, so I had to set to and design a suitable vertical boiler for gas firing. The extra weight of this, and the extra height to allow all the necessary internals to be stuffed in meant that I had to increase the draught by about half an inch, but this had the advantage of giving me extra displacement and a more stable hull.
So far, so good! The small-scale set of lines weren’t too inaccurate this time, and I was soon able to push and pull them around to produce a hull shape that was reasonably in line with the original. The scale ended up at 1 to 4.5, but everything was going to have to be made by me, so it didn’t really matter.
By now we were in 1996, having started in 1977! Just too many other things to do! I had bought a huge stack of good quality lime timber sometime around the early eighties, but in 1996 I had a stroke of luck when Bryan Young, a very good friend and well-known contributor to the Mayhem Forum offered me some old mahogany flooring in strips about 80 x 20 mm by 2000 long at a nominal cost. The boat really cried out to be built in mahogany, but I will not buy new mahogany on principle, as we are doing so much damage to the rain-forests. I don’t have the same problems with re-cycled materials, provided I know the provenance.
The band-saw and the Unimat lathe, set up as a planer, reduced the majority of the timber to 20 x 3mm strips, albeit rather slowly, but with less wasted wood than having it done commercially. This was an important consideration, as I worked out there was just enough material to do the job.
So far, so good. Then in 1997 I happened to visit Bryan again. (The same friend who had supplied the timber – keep up!) ‘Have you seen the boiler for sale at Allen’s?’ (Model Shop in Whitley Bay) Visit cut short, and a quick dash for the model shop. The boiler was a Scotch Marine Dryback, Inglis modification, and the workmanship was superb. The only trouble was that it was a horizontal boiler, whilst ‘Bat’ should really have a vertical, as noted above. On the other hand, the construction of the boiler was the one part of the build that was really putting me off, and in reality was probably the reason why this project was taking so long.
Allen allowed me to take the boiler home, and an intensive evenings’ measurement and calculation ensued. The boiler’s capacity was found to be adequate, and very careful calculation showed that I could actually get it into the hull. Close inspection confirmed the workmanship as being as good as anything I had ever seen, the silver soldering being incredibly good.
The chancellor disappeared to work on the household budgets, and agreed it was an exceptional purchase at £195, when I had commercial quotes for my designed boiler in excess of £1000, and a quick pricing of the materials and all the fittings that came with it was in excess of £500. (And these were at 1997 prices!)
That did it. I bought the boiler the very next day, just ahead of three other people who were very interested.
By this stage, I’d come to the conclusion that since I had modified the hull lines, changed the boiler and decided that I didn’t want to paint the hull, I could hardly claim she was a model of ‘Bat’! So we had a think, and better third (aka The Chancellor, and therefore highly involved with this boat) suggested we called her ‘Natterer’, the name of another species of bat. I rather liked the idea, particularly as it brought to mind the distinctive sound of a steam plant happily ‘nattering’ along. So ‘Natterer’ it was to be, representing a typical Victorian gentleman’s steam launch of about 1890. The steam launches on Windermere were largely owned and run by the newly wealthy Manchester industrialists, both for pleasure and to demonstrate their success. The boats created a “Golden Age” of steamboating on the lake.
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Topic: Natterer - A shipbuilding Odyssey? (Read 23107 times)