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"I bored me a road there with Rati's tusk and made room to pass through the rock; while the ways of the Jötuns stretched over and under, I dared my life for a draught." Håvamål Picture Gallery Home Promoting the BC Viking Ship Project Building the Boat Shed Lofting, Plans and Templates Building the Viking Ship Keel Keel Raising Ceremony Hull Planks Building the Viking Ship Hull Building the Viking Ship Oars Building the Viking Ship Shields The Unveiling Ceremony The Launching Ceremony Sailing "Munin" |
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BCVSP Picture Gallery - Keel Building Pictures
Hi there! Welcome to the Viking Ship keel building picture gallery! Here's where you can check out the BC Viking Ship Project in action building the keel. All thumbnail pictures are clickable and will bring up a full size picture. This page has these sections:
About the keelThe keel of a boat, any boat in general and our Viking Ship in particular, is the backbone, the central core holding everything together. A strong keel, well laid and with fair lines is a prerequisite for a seaworthy ship. Building the keel is one of the most exiting phases of the whole project. It begins amidst much anticipation and hope and expectations for the ship to be. What was long just a gleam in someone's eye, will now become reality. Everything is possible, the future looks bright and nothing is impossible. Then reality sets in, as it must, with all its practical problems and worries of all kinds, large or small. Money not the least of it, although, truth be told, just the magnitude of the task ahead may easily daunt the faint of hart. Such faintness frequently being spurred by a disparity between dreams and abilities. Surely there are exceptions, but boat building is something unique unto its own. It has been thus since time immemorial. A boat, ship, vessel, call it what you will, invariably represents a significant investment both to build and maintain. How much, you ask? Well, the answer is simple: All you got. If you have a little, that's what you'll spend. If you got a lot, then you'll spend that too. The reasons are clear. There are hardly two boats that are the same. They are almost all unique in some large or small ways. This means custom work with all the budgetary and estimation issues that entails. Add to this that most owners have an unerring tendency to go for the biggest hull they can get away with. This is a mistake. As hull size goes up, costs grow exponentially. The physics of wind and water in relation to the relative strengths of the available building materials see to that. In this area, nothing much has changed in a thousand or more years. Human nature is amazingly constant. The Vikings who built the ships we recreate today, invested heavily of their personal and communal resources to make their particular dreams a reality. We may think that it couldn't have been such a big deal. The wood was free and so on. But that is too simplistic a view. Preparing the boat lumber took people away from other tasks like hunting, fishing, farming or tending livestock. This represented a very real opportunity cost even though it may not have been measured in cash. Besides, someone ruled the realm who probably wouldn't take lightly to just anyone chopping down his prize oaks. The iron for the rivets was scarce and thus expensive in the relative terms of the day. Same for sails and rigging. Everything was handmade. Oh yes, you see it coming, don't you? Here's that opportunity cost again. Nothing is truly free. But that didn't stop our resourceful and patient forefathers. Nor should it us. Thus we come full circle and return to the British Columbia Viking Ship Project. We are a non-profit, all volunteer project and started with an empty coffer. Our dreams and abilities were definitely questioned and we certainly encountered our share of nay sayers and doom dogs. On top of that, we searched for light in the shadow of a previous Viking Ship project which failed after having raised funds from the community. Our advantage was a team of enthusiasts who had a proven record of relevant accomplishments in professional boat building, project management and fund raising. To understand what difference the right team can make, let me share with you the fine art of guesstimating and the difference between emotional and financial accounting. Guesstimating is the art of making an informed stipulation (estimate) based on little more than a concept and familiarity with what it takes to make things like this concept a reality. (Minors please skip to the next sentence.) This is also known as a "SWAG", short for "Scientific Wild Ass Guess". Almost anyone who knows his subject well will be able to provide an amazingly accurate SWAG of the costs included in the SWAG. Anything from bookshelves to bombers are started on SWAGs. Of course, these SWAGs are usually backed up with more detailed estimates before the contract is signed, particularly as the amounts go up. What you have to be aware of, are the planning assumptions that go into the SWAG. SWAGs are often missing many aspects of the total cost of delivery. Our own project is a case in point. The first project estimate was CAD $ 15,000 for the hull. That SWAG was a-back-of-the-envelop type estimate by a boat builder who has built some 170-180 boats in his time. And it was sufficient to prove to us that we could actually do this. It didn't matter if there were other things not included. By the time we drew up the total budget with everything we though relevant for a potential total cost of delivery, we were up to CAD $60,000. Still not a terribly scary figure. I stress this total cost of delivery exercise because once started, a project like ours takes on a life of its own and it cannot just be shut down. For one thing, the community, volunteers and contributors have nothing until the project has reached some visible and concrete, completed milestone. In our case, that will be - as a very minimum - the launching of the hull. Unless we deliver, we will have failed. For this reason, we needed a good handle on the total commitment that we might be hooked into once we got started. And it's the physical start that represents the de facto act of commitment. Once started we can't quit without the stigma of being seen to have failed. Hm. We are past the point of no return. The above is, unsurprisingly, an example of the financial accounting I mentioned earlier. And the moral of this little digression, is that we need to be clear on our responsibilities when we initiate community projects like this. Let's get back to the keel itself. We spent CAD $400 on some large recycled beams to get started on the keel. That certainly wasn't a lot. Anyone can do it. So, we could with some legitimacy say that all we needed was $400 to start. In my opinion, that is an example of emotional accounting. It very narrowly looks at what you are most emotionally attached to: Starting the keel, actually doing something concrete. The end of planning and beginning of doing. Well, we have overlooked something. We needed a place to actually work on the keel. That's where the boat shed figured in the equation. That little aside chewed up two and half months of our time and came in at somewhat less than CAD $2000. In the spirit of total cost of delivery, the emotional accounting was out by a factor of five. It's such an easy trap, isn't it? Ok, so what happened after the first grand and a half? We built the keel. The keel is put together from sawn timbers bolted together from separate pieces. Two straight center pieces were joined to two pieces at the stern and three pieces at the stem. A two piece keelson is bolted down top of the keel. The purpose of the keelson is to reinforce the keel and to provide a beveled surface for the garboard or first strake (i.e., length of hull planking) to lay against for maximum support. The shape of the keel pieces were determined by picking up the lines from the lofted plans on the boat shed floor onto plywood pieces. These plywood pieces were cut out and used as templates to transfer the patterns to the keel timbers. The pictures illustrate some of the most significant keel building activities as well as the keel structure itself. While our financial account balance might have been low by the time of the last picture in the sequence, our emotional account balance was certainly way high! Financial accounting may be rational and wise, but it doesn't seem to always tell the whole story. Building the keel
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