Master shipwright Walt Ansel of Mystic Seaport will take students beyond the traditional introductory boatbuilding and boat repair courses offered here at WoodenBoat School with this challenging and very exciting project. CINDERELLA, a lovely 25′ sloop designed and owned by Henry Scheel, is the centerpiece for this two-week foray into wooden boat restoration. She has been lovingly restored over the last three seasons and will ultimately be relaunched here in Brooklin. The techniques students will use to document, stabilize, and rebuild the hull are the exact same methods used at Mystic Seaport and other professional boatyards around the country. The goal throughout the restoration is to have a strong, longlasting, aesthetically beautiful vessel, faithful to Henry Scheel’s original vision.

Walt’s approach to CINDERELLA’s rebuild will concentrate on accuracy close preservation of her hull shape and scantlings. She was built of Atlantic white cedar over oak frames and backbone. Unfortunately, the keel and floors were all iron bolted. This has resulted in extensive iron rot, necessitating replacement of these timbers and frames. The cedar planking, with its noted durability, was fastened with Everdur bronze and is 90 per cent salvageable. The challenging and interesting task will be to replace all of these internal skeleton parts without having the hull distort, lose its sheer, or become a differently shaped boat. The class will have Scheel’s original lines and offsets to work from.

Our 2008 restoration class was the third session of a planned five-year series of courses. This class accomplished an astonishing amount of work over the two weeks. Twenty new white oak floor timbers were scribed and fitted to the planking and bolted to the keel and new frames. These effectively retied the hull together across the new keel, allowing us to remove the half molds we had put in place in 2006. Old butt blocks were carefully removed and new ones were riveted in place. CINDERELLA’s new mast that was glued together in ’07 was cleaned up, shaped, and bored for mast tangs. All of the elegant, original Merriman hardware, with its distinctive trident logo, will be installed on the mast this coming year after applications of varnish.

The boat’s transom was the subject of much pondering and classic wooden boat problem solving. Due to fresh water intrusion over the years, Walt and the students decided to make patterns and laminate a new curved transom blank out of three layers of mahogany. A big challenge the students faced was building inner transom frames which were curved in both planes to accurately fit the inside curve of the transom and the plank hood ends. As with all of the work students have accomplished over the past three years, the new transom was a work of art.

CINDERELLA’s centerboard trunk had been fabricated in steel and had already been replaced in the 1970s. This was a poor design for the saltwater environment and had rusted through once again. One of our students, an architect with brilliant CAD skills, drew up a scale plan of the keel and centerboard over which the students designed a wooden trunk to be made of locust and fastened with bronze. This is faithful with the restoration goal to eliminate all the iron fastenings in CINDERELLA that come in contact with salt water. On the very last day of our 2008 restoration course, this new trunk was successfully mated to the keel.

Designed in 1948 when Scheel had a New York office, CINDERELLA was intended to be a stock pocket cruiser of exceptional quality. She was built by the Island Creek Boat Shop in 1949. CINDERELLA is 25′ long, 22’3″ on the waterline, with an 8’8″ beam and a 2’20″ draft. Shoal draft and speed were high on Scheel’s list of priorities. The hull has an almost plumb stem, inboard rudder, iron centerboard, and a finely shaped raked and curved transom. This, coupled with a very long, flat run and sharp entrance, made her a Class B winner in the Off Soundings races in eastern Connecticut in the mid-1950s. A marconi-rigged sloop with a short bowsprit and boomkin, CINDERELLA has a low cabin trunk ending in a point at the forward end.

The repairing and rebuilding of wooden boats is a journey that can provide great personal satisfaction. Whether you own a wooden boat, are thinking of buying one, work in a boatyard, or just enjoy solving problems with wood, this course and outstanding instructor may be just for you. We invite you to come help us put this sweetheart of a boat back on her feet so that she can, once again, kick up her heels and sail!

Tuition: $1150 two-week course

Note: Previous woodworking and some boatbuilding experience is required.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Does Employee Theft Exceed Shoplifting?
• Luces LED para motos
• LED light information
• Prosecution: The Best Choice for Retailers
• Is it Possible to Profile a Shoplifter?