Annual Rings

Trees are round and boards are square. Herein lies the problem with lumber. How your board will behave during it's life depends greatly on where the board came from in the tree and how the annual rings are oriented in the final cut of wood.

Trees are cut up in two typical ways: 

• Flat sawn
• Quarter sawn.

Flat sawn, also called live sawn, slab sawn and plain sawn, is where the tree is sliced into a stack of boards. This is the most common method for boards to be cut as it results in the least amount of waste. Since more wood is recovered from the tree, this method of sawing wood is quite popular. The top and bottom cuts will have arcs in the end grain that look like rainbows and will lead to the formation of cups as they dry, leading to warpage as the wood dries

As you move further down the stack, you will have more diagonal rings on the outsides of the boards and more arcs towards the center. The outsides of the boards will resist warping while the middle will cup.

The middle cut of the tree will have vertical rings from the bark to the heart, then vertical rings on the other side until you reach the bark on the other side. These boards will not warp, the the heart will check. 

The boards below the heart will exhibit the same grain patterns in reverse until you reach the bottom plank.

As you can imagine, these boards will warp over their life and can result in problems on a boat. For these reasons, the use of flat sawn wood is discouraged on a boat.

The alternative way to cut the tree is called quarter sawn, where the tree is cut into quarters and every board that comes out of the tree has diagonal grain. This will yield the best lumber from the tree, but up to sixty percent of the tree is lost to waste.Since most of the tree is lost to saw dust, this method of sawing lumber is unpopular with lumber mills and quarter sawn lumber is hard to find. If you are lucky enough to find quarter sawn lumber, you will feel like your luck has turned the moment you see the price tag!

The alternative is to buy flat sawn boards and make it quarter sawn. If you get a board that is near the top of bottom plank from the tree, rip it in half. Now you have two thinner planks that no longer have arcs, but instead diagonal rings that run less than 45 degrees but still diagonal.

The closer the board was to the heart of the tree, the better the grain orientation will be. As you approach the heart, the rings will be closer to 45 degrees and resemble quarter sawn lumber. This method works well for situations where you don't need wide boards, as you are taking your wide boards and ripping them in half. A 2x12 becomes two 2x6's. While the loss of width is apparent, most boat timbers don't need that much width. If you do need the width, the ripped boards can be joined back together with drifts or dowels to reinforce them from sheer forces while changing the grain orientation to reduce the risk of warpage. Instead of cupping, which is what flat sawn wood does, your quarter sawn lumber will stay relatively dimensionally stable. This means that your lumber wont warp when it gets wet and dries again, which is the life of any wood on a boat!

When shopping for lumber, try to find flat sawn boards that you can rip into quarters sawn lumber. This will save yourself the cost of buying premium quarter sawn lumber allowing you to purchase more wood with your money. It takes a bit more effort to get your lumber ready, but the end result is quality lumber while paying the price of economy boards.

Battens and Siding

The battens that hold the wrapping in place need to be removed as you install the new siding. You may be tempted to just install the siding over the battens, but this will lead to long term problems. 

Siding installed over the battens will look undulated. The battens would be high spots and the gaps between would be low spots. The result is a wave look to the walls that is only remedied by removing the siding, removing the battens, and installing new siding once again.

Removing battens is very easy. All you need to do is rip it off! The batten will bend easily and snap off at the next screw that holds it in. Be sure to remove the screws as they will also lead to the same wavy look you are trying to avoid.

You don't want to remove all the battens before you begin because the battens do help hold the paper in place until you reach there with the siding. 

You can see the torn batten showing at the top of the picture. The dark black lines were where the freshly removed battens were covering the tar paper. The tar paper under the battens was shielded from the sun and never faded.

Removing battens is very easy and can be done incrementally as the siding goes on the tiny house. As the siding reaches the next set of screws, the battens are simply snapped shorter and the screws removed. Then the tar paper was instantly covered by the siding planks, tucking them away behind the siding forever removed from sight.

Medullary Checking

Medullary checking occurs perpendicular to the direction of the annular rings in the wood. As wood dries out and seasons, it will shrink. If the wood shrinks too quickly or too drastically, it will split and open up into what are called "checks". They are very visible on large timber and posts, as these timbers will shrink considerably and quickly, resulting in the development of checks.

While checks can be unsightly on fence posts, they present more of a hazard on boats. First, these checks will allow water to pass through the wood and cause leaks to form. Second, any fasteners that are in the check will become loose!

To reduce the risk of checking, some easy steps can be followed:

• Don't use boxed in heart wood.
• Don't use green wood.

The heart of a tree will almost always check in a characteristic plus sign. The checking will usually run all the way out to the sides of the timber, resulting in a piece of wood that wants to be quartered. If you select a timber that does not have the heart boxed in the center, the risk of checking is greatly reduced. If the timber has a heart, try to orient your cuts so that the heart will be cut out of the finished product. This will remove the heart and the risk of severe checking as the wood dries out.

The other method to avoid checking is to properly season your wood. If you use wet, green wood, it will dry out too fast and shrink. As it shrinks rapidly, it will check and ruin your finished product. To reduce this issue, you want to season the wood slowly. Seasoning is simply the act of drying the wood in a controlled manner. The rule of thumb is one inch per year. If your lumber is 1 inch think, it will take a year to dry out properly. If your lumber is 2 inches thick, it will take 2 years to dry out properly.

This is a rule of thumb. The truth is the wood is dried by the relative moisture content of the room it is stored in. Letting the wood dry slowly will prevent checking by controlling the rate at which it shrinks. If your storage area is rather humid, the wood will dry slower. Likewise, if the room is bone dry, the wood will dry out very quickly.

You may be wondering what difference does it make if the wood seasons in a room or on a boat? It dries just the same, right? Wrong. The reason seasoning reduces checking is the wood dries evenly. If you take a green piece of wood and install it on the boat as a frame, the three sides that face the inside of the hull will dry out as they are exposed to a lot of air, but the side facing the planking will not dry. Three of the four sides will dry out quickly and shrink while the fourth side will remain wet and not shrink as much. The irregular shrinkage will lead to the development of checks. If the wood were allowed to dry out entirely in a room where all four sides are exposed to the air and can shrink together in a controlled manner, the incidence of checking is greatly reduced.

If you do all of this perfectly, and use wood with no heart that has been well seasoned, the risk of developing checks in the future is greatly reduced but not eliminated. 

To mitigate the risks of fasteners coming loose because the wood they are in checks, make sure that the screws are oriented properly to the grain. If you insert the screw with the grain, so that the screw runs parallel to the rings, the screw will have very little holding power and runs the risk of causing the wood to split along the grain. If you insert the screw perpendicular to the rings, it will have the most holding power, but will also be set in line with the medullary rays. Medullary rays run perpendicular to the rings as do the medullary checks. While the screw may hold well at first, it may lose holding as checks develop in the future.

The alternative is to set the screws at forty five degrees to the annual rings of the wood. This will place the screws through the rings, giving you the holding power of driving the screw through the rings while not lining up perfectly with the medullary checks that may develop. Now the screws are oriented at an angle to any checks that may develop while still offering an acceptable amount of holding power.

As you may have imagined, this is why quarter sawn lumber is so popular. You can place the screws into any of the faces and the screws will always be oriented diagonally to the annual rings of the wood. This is why quarter sawn lumber is preferred when being used on a boat.

Replacing your Halyard

Replacing your old halyards is a crucial part of maintaining your running rigging.

This halyard was originally white with blue flecks. The owner wanted to reuse the same snap shackle. 

Replacing your halyard is very easy. The steps are simple and easy to carry out.

1. Tie a messenger line to the lazy end of the halyard
2. Pull the halyard (and messenger line) through the mast and out the mast head shiv.
3. Tie the messenger line to the lazy end of the new halyard
4. Pull the new halyard back through the mast head shiv and through the mast

That's all you need to do to install a new halyard! If your old halyard is looking worn, don't hesitate to remove it and replace it.

The most important thing in this process is to properly secure your messenger line to the end of the halyard so that they don't separate part way through the replacement.

The messenger line is stitched to the core and the cover is sewn to the end, allowing us to pull it back out if needed. This makes a very secure and fair connection that wont bind on anything inside the mast during the process.

Tiny House: Windward vs Leeward Sides

The side of the tiny house that faces the tow hitch should be considered the windward side. The side that faces away from the tow hitch should be considered the leeward side. This is because when you tow the tiny house down a highway, the tow hitch side will face directly into the apparent wind and the other side will face away from the apparent wind.

Identifying these sides of the house is more than an academic exercise, it is a functional exercise. The siding on the windward side needs to be much more secure because it will frequently be faced with very high wind speeds! 

The siding on the windward side needs to be fabricated out of solid planks that run the full width of the tiny house. There should be no butt joints on this side as these joints are weaker in high winds. 

Windward side

The leeward side is much more forgiving. There will be very little direct wind on this side and butt joints are allowed. 

This side is sided by all the left over off cuts from the windward side. These pieces are simply set and fitted to one another, making them reach and fit the length needed.

You want to stagger the butt joints though, that way they blend in and disappear into the wall. If you set all the but joints in a single column, it will be very noticeable and will be considered rather unsightly.