Years ago, but not long before I started into bow building, I and an opportunity to work with an amazing group of craftsmen for a couple years building large motor yachts. These boats were 112’ to 145’ in length, had fiberglass hulls , and were loaded with some crazy amounts of exotic hardwoods. The crews were broken down into 3 groups. The fiberglass guys, the framing carpenters, or shipwrights perhaps?
The 3rd group were the master craftsmen consisting of luthiers, furniture specialists, and master custom cabinet builders…. Now this was back in the late 80’s, and all the woodworking on the boats was done by hand. Of course they had a cabinet shop to die for, with some pretty wild milling machines, pin routers, shapers, planers, and incredible table saws or panel saws with power feed set ups…. But…. It wasn’t huge like a factory size place. There were only 7 work benches in the cabinet shop surrounded by all these lovely toys, and only the top craftsmen had their own work bench.
I started out with the boat carpenters that did the framing on board for the first 6 months I worked there, and is not to be confused with any wood framing you see in the construction industry. The biggest challenge was everything was radius shaped or elliptical. Even all the cabin doors were radius topped, and all the framing material was Honduras mahogany, using stainless steel screws and 5200 marine adhesive to assemble. Very few nails used on these boats at all.
It was interesting work that I dove into big time head first…. I loved it. They had 3 yachts going at the same time and were finished differently with different kinds of exotic woods. After the framing was completed the masters came on board to do all the cabin paneling, build the furniture, and install the custom built cabinets. In many cases the cabinets were built in place….. All the joinery was S scarfed joints with very few exceptions. All the laminations and wood bending techniques they used were amazing to behold…. It didn’t take me long to figure out that that was where I wanted to be. I wanted my own work bench in the cabinet shop working with these master craftsmen….
Well one day I was doing some touch up work in one of the main cabins on one of the boats and framing a custom shoe rack in a closet. The main cabin had a beautiful teak paneling installed. Not to be confused with your standard sheet goods either… this stuff was grain matched from one sheet to the next coming off the stack so when installed properly the wall looked like one piece of solid wood. And the owners expected this to be installed seamlessly…. Well I could hear the boat Forman and the cabinet shop Forman arguing about what the hell they were going to do with this mess… the carpenter who installed the paneling pretty much just threw it in and didn’t fit the seems well at all, and the whole cabin was almost complete. Keep in mind this book matched teak paneling cost a bloody fortune, and would take months to replace. The foremen were pretty upset by the poor workmanship.
So I spoke up …. I told them that with special care and a bit of time this joinery could be repaired with veneer inlays rather than tearing it out. They both stoped and looked at me kind of funny, and said, “ You could actual do this?” I told them I wouldn’t recommend it if I didn’t think I could do it myself, but…. It’s going to probably take a week or so to pull it off with all these full floor to overhead inlays, and I’d need access to the cabinet shop to make my inlay jigs, and some razor sharp router bits and a trim router….. The cabinet shop foreman told me if you can pull this off, you can have your own bench in the cabinet shop and a bump up in pay grade too….
I did indeed pull it off, and spent two more years in that shop working with some incredibly talented craftsmen. It was like getting my doctorate in woodworking. The combined knowledge in that shop was unheard of….
Of course it’s all done by CNC machines now, and very little of the stuff is done by hand anymore. I went back up there years later after I moved on to talk with a friend that had taken over the shop, and it just wasn’t the same at all… operators running machines instead of master craftsmen…lts enough to make a grown man cry.
Thought ya might enjoy that story. I sincerely appreciate luthiers and master craftmen. Kirk
Topic: 2024 What did you do today (Read 35511 times)
