I’m forging ahead on the idea of a village…like Old Sturbridge Village or King’s Landing…to recreate shipbuilding in the mid 1800s. Tonight I ordered some books on traditional shipbuilding:
“American Small Sailing Craft: Their Design, Development and Construction”
Chapelle, Howard I.
“Architectura Navalis Mercatoria: The Classic of Eighteenth-Century Naval Architecture (Dover Maritime)”
Chapman, Fredrik Henrik af
“A Practical Course in Wooden Boat and Ship Building”
Van Gaasbeek, Richard M
“Boatbuilding: A Complete Handbook of Wooden Boat Construction”
Chapelle, Howard I.
They are all going to my son’s place in the US to get cheaper…read free…shipping, so I can’t start reading them yet.
My current plan is to shift the focus from one large half-finished ship to perhaps constructing smaller work-boat-style vessels using traditional construction techniques and actually completing them…perhaps one a year. I suppose they will have to be finished with epoxy or other modern preservation coatings so they don’t rot out in 7 years like the original wooden ships of the 1800s! The advantage of smaller vessels would be both reduced cost and reduced labor…if the construction can still show the process as it was 150 years ago, it should suffice. I want to run it by the Lunenberg Shipyard Alliance for ideas.