The Ash Breeze, Summer 2024

By Ed Neal

Let me take you backstage and show you how the boatbuilding sausage was made. Ready?

It all started with a question. What boat should we build? The question was asked five years ago in our after-school boatbuilding club at the Davis Aerospace & Maritime High School. Six of us from the Cleveland Amateur Boatbuilding and Boating Society (CABBS) volunteered at this Cleveland public school near the downtown lakefront, and we needed a new project to involve the students.

Two students immediately knew what they wanted to build. We suspected a small sailboat, but no, they wanted to build a work boat, specifically a clean-up boat to address a floating mat of debris that builds up in a corner of the marina where the two worked. They had no good way of clearing this eyesore seen by thousands of pedestrians.

The proposed boat needed to be small enough to navigate a 200 ft. long, 10 ft. wide channel that formed a right-angle turn to another similar channel. It was here that debris collected after each heavy rainfall or a storm on Lake Erie.

We got to work with a handful of students, worked through several design iterations, and produced a model we called Cornerman. It might be described as a motorized, 10-foot decked scow with a steering console. Though we were persistent, we couldn’t get the attention of the marina owner, and there the project stopped; Cornerman faded away.

A year later, by chance I stumbled upon a collection of boat plans at the Bay Village Historical Society in suburban Cleveland. There I found plans for a 9'9" utility dinghy (a pram, actually) drawn in 1953 by a hobbyist naval architect, Henry Wischmeyer, who spent his life on the Lake Erie shoreline in Bay Village.

The Wischmeyer design seemed to meet all the clean-up boat criteria. The one-sheet drawing presented the profile, overhead and body plan views, and a few penciled-in dimensions. It lacked details, but it was just enough and ready to go. We could do this. Building this boat would energize a part of Bay Village history that is tied to the Wischmeyers. In the later-1800s, this German immigrant family brought grape cultivation to the area, began producing wine, and eventually operated a lakeshore hotel accommodating seventy people.

With support of the Bay Village Historical Society and the Davis after-school boatbuilding club, CABBS decided to pursue the building of the clean-up boat we now called the Wischmeyer Pram. Each organization would be involved and have a role in making it a successful venture. We applied for a John Gardner Grant to cover most of the boatbuilding cost.

In the six months between applying for the grant and learning we won it, our relationship with the school changed. The teacher who had been our liaison began graduate school and could no longer be involved. No one else at the school stepped forward to mentor the group. We couldn’t meet at the CABBS workspace since the school had no reliable way to transport the 4–6 regular student members. Soon, the after-school boatbuilding club disbanded.

Not to worry. We could involve the students another way. Our Wischmeyer pram was forecasted to work in tandem with two 25-foot aluminum harbor clean-up barges. Since the barges hire Davis students as deckhands, Davis students would crew the Wischmeyer pram as it went into service. Four CABBS members set about lofting the boat full-size. We had never lofted before. We made mistakes but caught them, and line by line the plan grew. We hoped we had it right.

We established some ground rules: we would build the boat as drawn. This meant panel on frame construction, not a stitch-n-glue adaptation. It meant that Henry Wischmeyer’s unusual addition of a second skeg drawn under the bow transom would be kept. No one had seen or heard of such an arrangement.

With no construction details as to scantlings or gunwale design we found we were on our own. In the CABBS extensive library we zeroed in on Edson Schock’s How to Build Small Boats published in 1952. Since it was from the same vintage as the pram design, we felt it would be a reasonable guide to what Henry Wischmeyer might’ve had in mind. The book contained plans for boats in the size range of our pram, so we interpolated and made our best guess. The book became a studied reference.

But there were still unanswered questions. In the wee hours one night I awoke debating whether to use oak or spruce for the chine and sheer clamp. Would they make the bends or would they need steam? Would spruce be strong enough? I liked the strength of oak but not the weight. Back and forth I tossed and turned. I settled the argument by deciding to go to the local big-box lumber yard when I awoke, and if I could find a fairly clear 2"x10" to rip into chines and sheer clamps, I would go with spruce.

I got to the store at 9 a.m. and went immediately to the 2"x10" pile. There immediately on top, the first board in the stack, was a perfectly clear southern yellow pine board with one oh-so-small pin knot. Very, very unusual. I had my answer.

Six members of CABBS met two evenings a week to build the pram. We ripped all the necessary lumber and set about building the three frames. We used tick sticks rather than a ruler or tape to take measurements from the lofting. In this way no numbers or fractions were involved.

A tick stick is a thin slate of wood about three feet long. The builder simply lays it on what is to be measured on the lofting. A mark is made at the start of the measurement and at the end. The tick stick is taken to the work piece and the marks transfered. There are no numbers or fractions to remember, and you have a hard copy to refer to if you need to revisit the measurement. Tick sticks also insured measurement consistency and reduced waste. Tick sticks rule!

So let’s talk about the seven-member building crew. Three members had boatbuilding experience, three had some exposure to boatbuilding, and one had neither boatbuilding nor woodworking experience. I had built a number of small boats, so I came to the project with craftsmanship standards I thought I’d apply to the pram. This was a mistake. It’s not that the crew disregarded my standards, it’s that they never had any practice to develop them.

The first few sessions I came away rather discouraged by the quality of the work. But it got better. I found I had to stop trying to make anything myself. Rather I had to focus entirely on what the others were doing and watch closely and coach creatively. With guidance, some cranked their craftsmanship standards up. Others had to dampen down their expectations. As we worked together, a middle ground arose that we all could live with. Isn’t that a part of what you call teamwork?

Each boat plan in the Edson Schock book carried a matrix detailing each part in the boat, its material and dimensions. We copied this discipline to generate a cut list for the table saw.

The benefit of starting the project with a cut list played out in two ways. First, when we needed the material, it was immediately at hand in the required size. Project momentum moved right along. Secondly, by having the actual pieces to be used, we could easily trim off an end to make actual-size tracing blocks and other test pieces. Fits were better the first time.

Boatbuilding progressed through the summer in conventional style. We built the frame of Ohio white oak and southern yellow pine, and used 18 mm meranti marine plywood for the transoms. The boat was paneled in 6 mm meranti plywood and sheathed in 6 oz. fiberglass cloth set in epoxy. Kirby paint finished her off. We found two redwood planks salvaged from a room divider and upcycled them into varnished thwarts. Every work boat needs at least one touch of varnish.

As we began painting, I discovered that the boat designer, Henry Wischmeyer, who died in 1958, was buried in a small lakefront cemetery next to the Bay Village park where we planned to launch our boat. Carved on his headstone was his birthdate. Realizing it was only four weeks away, we set his birthday as the launch date. Had he lived, he would have been 151 years old.

Over forty people attended the late September launch of our small pram. To reflect that Henry Wischmeyer grew up on a family farm growing grapes and making wine, we christened the boat with a locally produced vintage and named it Little Henry. Breakers on Lake Erie prevented more than a short ceremonial row. One of the Davis students who had initially proposed the clean-up boat idea, Quinton Oliver, now a college student, was on hand to see the fruition of his idea. Our launch party generated a front-page article in a local newspaper.

We put Little Henry away for the winter. In the spring she will be outfitted for clearing floating mats of debris in the marina channels. Davis students will pilot her. Working
together we will develop a technique for netting the debris and towing it out of the narrow channel to where the bigger harbor clean-up boats can take it on deck.

No one has any experience doing anything like this. It will all be new for everyone involved. How we succeed remains to be seen, and we’ll cover it in Part Two of the Wischmeyer Pram story. Look for an update in a future issue of  The Ash Breeze.