Stem Out
Major dismantling of a ship: rot-filled stem successfully removed!
Proud master craftsman, new stem successfully resculpted out of rosewood.
The deeper we went, the more rot we found. Even the large timbers of the stem and stern were unsound and needed to be replaced. This presented another dilemma: that of finding hardwood in big enough chunks to fabricate replacement parts.
We heard about a man on the island who used to bring hardwood out of South America on his boat. While he had sold his boat and bought land in Kilauea, he still had a barn full of odd slabs of hardwood left over from his wood importing days.
We went to meet him, and when he heard we needed the wood for structural pieces, he didn’t want to sell it to us. This was Hawaiian Koa, rosewood, ebony, brown heart, padauk and merbau, all beautiful hardwoods used for show pieces in exotic furniture, trims and sculptures. It was a sacrilege to use it for structural components, to be hidden away from view forever!
However, he eventually gave in and we were able to purchase most of our replacement wood from him. We also got a shipment of huge Honduras mahogany planks from a hardwood supplier up in Washington state.
The stem of a boat is like a jigsaw puzzle. The angles of the cuts and interlocking pieces all add to the strength of the hull. The only piece of hard wood that was large enough to replace the old stem was rosewood and it was a work of art, alas, eventually covered up by the planking and paint as the project progressed.
