PORT HADLOCK — Students at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding have started building two 26-foot sailboats in what the school is calling the Twin Boats project.
About 18 students are working on the project, which started in January.
On Wednesday, students, instructors and interns were listening to music and sanding one of the boats with the Hammond Building’s shop doors wide open.
The Twin Boat project likely will take 2 to 2½ years to complete, said Sean Koomen, the school’s wooden boatbuilding program director.
The program is 12 months long, so multiple cohorts will work on the boats, Koomen said.
“Next year’s class will get pretty close to finishing up,” he said.
The twin boats project has been years in the making.
“A few years ago, we wanted to build a project that we could best exemplify the full curriculum in two builds, all of the different techniques we teach,” Koomen said. “We couldn’t do it in one boat, because they’re different construction techniques.”
Koomen said existing designs weren’t meeting the project’s goals, so he reached out to former Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding (NWSWB) instructor and naval architect James “Jim” Franken and asked him to design a traditional boat.
The boat is named the James Cutter, in honor of Franken, Koomen said.
“This boat exemplifies all of the traditional wooden boat building techniques,” Komen said. “This will all get built out of solid lumber, essentially, with fasteners and bolts holding everything together.”
During the last six weeks, the students have taken the designs and meticulously translated them into full-size drawings on the ground in the boat school’s Hammond Building, Koomen said.
“In this process of lofting, you have to loft at least four or five boats before you get it down,” Koomen said. “All of these projects are heavily instructor guided. In the lofting process, there’s an instructor on the floor with them every step of the way.”
Students practice lofting on smaller boats earlier in the program, he said.
“This boat’s still getting the backbone, the keel, laid out,” Koomen said.
The keel is built from purple heart wood, a rot-resistant tropical timber, and the stem is built from sapele wood, Koomen said.
The next step for the James Cutter will be to place the moulds, built from the lofting, on top of the keel and the stem, Koomen said.
The students will frame the boat in steam-bent white oak and add Western red cedar planking, he added.
“The other half of our boatbuilding is doing what we call wood composites,” Koomen said. “That’s all the epoxy and fiberglass and carbon fiber interwoven with wood. It’s still wood, but the wood is much more stable and stronger and stiffer when we do all that.”
The second boat, the Prothero Sloop, was designed at Brooklin Boatyard in Maine, based on the design of the James Cutter, Koomen said.
Koomen worked for the company for four years, starting in 2005, after his 2004 graduation from NWSWB.
“(Brooklin Boatyard) is the premiere wood composite boat building yard in the world,” he said. “In terms of using wood, as a medium, to its limits, to the outer extent of its strength and application.”
The ‘Twin Boats” share a number of design features: They are both 26-foot sailboats, both have a rounded cabin trunk and they both have a bowsprit, Koomen said.
While the boats share a number of features, their weights will vary notably, with the James Cutter planned to weigh 7,600 pounds and the Prothero Sloop planned to weigh 3,100 pounds.
Prothero Sloop is a dramatically different hull design, Koomen said. It uses bead and cove strip planking, which allows for more glue.
The next step for the Prothero Sloop will see students gluing thin wood veneers over the strip planking. The veneer will then be vacuum bagged to the hull of the boat, Koomen said.
Then the students will add a thin layer of fiberglass and paint the hull before flipping it topside up and working on the inside, Koomen said.
“The technique is called cold-moulding,” Koomen said. “Not using heat, just vacuum.”
Koomen pointed out that the Prothero Sloop is much farther along than the James Cutter.
“Part of the education is seeing how much time goes into hand-lofting,” he said. “During that period of time they built (the Prothero Sloop).”
The Prothero Sloop was built around temporary moulds that were cut by Turn Point Design in Port Townsend, based on specs provided by Brooklin Boatyard, Koomen said.
The moulds were delivered to the school in a kit on a palette. Students were building within a week, he said.
The goal of the project and the school in general is for students to leave the programs ready to enter the workforce, Koomen said. Students enter the program with a wide range of previous experience, he said.
“Our students are right out of high school all the way up to retiree age and everything in between,” Koomen said. “That’s kind of the beauty of a cohort of students. There’s a lot of life experience, and they kind of cross-pollinate. Twenty or 30 percent of our students have never really touched chisels or saws or tools or done much carpentry at all. Others are seasoned professionals.”
Mia Niikkonen said when she came to the school, she had zero knowledge of how to work with tools.
“Absolutely nothing,” Niikkonen said. “I hadn’t even touched a hand tool. No power tools before I came to the school.”
At first, she was intimidated, but the instructors were incredibly patient, kind and open, she said.
Niikkonen said the process has been empowering.
“Especially as a woman,” Niikkonen said. “To be able to exist in this space of independence, where I can do those things on my own and I know that I’m capable of not only using the tools, but also thinking it through and having the mind skills to approach different challenges, I just feel really capable and like I can do anything.”
Niikkonen attended the University of Washington in Seattle, where she graduated with a degree in environmental science and terrestrial resource management. After graduating, she worked for Amazon.
“I felt really unfulfilled,” she said. “It started with, I took apart my washer and dryer and put them back together, just off of Googling stuff, because they were broken. I had too much fun doing that, so I started looking into trades.”
Niikkonen saw an advertisement for NWSWB online.
“It seemed cooler than a lot of the other trades that I had seen, a little more romantic,” she said. “I ended up here and they taught me everything from the basics: hand tools, chisels and all of that stuff and worked all the way up through all of the power tools. I’m pretty comfortable with everything.”
After completing the boatbuilding program, Niikkonen stayed on as a Prothero intern. Koomen said the internship allows interested students to gain more instruction while working more independently.
Koomen said the first few months of the program are all about basic skill use. In that phase, the program is designed to allow students of different skill levels to move at different paces. Students focus first on using hand tools before moving on to power tools, Koomen said.
“The boat building trade is its own small niche trade,” Koomen said. “But all of the skills that we teach here, you can apply to any trade. Generically, we call it problem-solving, but it’s super complex shapes that they’re having to work through to figure out. It’s also about teaching them the work ethic of getting through those processes.”
Koomen said Off Center Harbor, a Maine-based website which hosts more than 700 videos and 500 articles on topics related to boatbuilding, repair, maintenance and other boating topics, is creating a video series of the construction process of the boats.
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@sequimgazette.com.
