Want A Steamboat?

Of these, the last has a lot going for it : Borrowing one relieves you of the onerous responsibility of ownership, of maintenance, of the ongoing expense associated with boat ownership in general. The old saw “A boat is a preferably wood-lined hole in the water that you shovel money into” (my italics). Not owning your own boat and going out on some other poor soul’s one means that while he is cleaning up after a day’s sailing, polishing the brightwork, sorting out the mechanical defects list and making good the knocks and scratches, you can hop off home and relax for the rest of the day.

Ownership is fulfilling. You get a lot of use of your boat. By this I do not just mean actual physical use . At odd times in the day, you can use your boat just by thinking of it. When you wake up at dead of night in a cold sweat because of some tedious daily occurrence (be it business or other) you can imagine your prize possession and all the fun you will have with it one day when time allows.

This is why ownership, building or running your own boat beats the other options hands down because nobody can take it away from you. It is yours alone to use and dream about as you see fit, and pride of possession is paramount

So how do you go about getting your boat? It starts off as a dream and many people –called “dream steamers” – never get past this point. That’s ok, sometimes the dreaming of the acquisition is the best part. The reality is a let down for these folk.

So let’s consider how to get you steaming in a boat of your own.

IMPORTANT DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS

There are three guiding principles in steamboat design and, rightly or wrongly, I have laid them out as laws:

FIRST LAW: “Steam boating is primarily a time-occupying activity” Do not waste time trying to speed the process up.

SECOND LAW: “Fun derived from a boat is inversely proportional to the waterline length.” Maybe you might have more fun with a model boat

THIRD LAW: “As it becomes more efficient, a steam plant becomes less interesting”

This is Durham’s Inverse law of Thermodynamics which was propounded a long, long time ago by a wise man Bill Durham who was pioneer editor of the first steamboating magazine SLOW Bell and then Steamboats and Modern Steam Launches. The latter is still in print and readily available in bound form. You should get a copy.

To give an example of Durham’s Law : By far the the most efficient steamplant of all has to be the nuclear power plant. Steam is made by nuclear reaction in a reactor hidden away from your gaze swaddled in a protective sheild. The steam produced by the heat goes in a turbine and that’s it. Virtually you see nothing but a mass of lagged insulated shielded machinery. Would you give it house room? I don’t think so

So if you want efficiency, go nuclear or put a little diesel engine in your boat and just go places. If you still want a steamboat, let’s get down to reality in this process, lets consider the components.

HULL

There are several parameters here. Because you have a powerplant that is unlikely to be producing a lot of power, the hull is best if it slips through the water with little disturbance. Because of the lack of disturbance, you are not wasting scarce horsepower generating a huge bow and sternwave. You will have noticed that the old time steamboats were long and thin and frequently had a counter stern. Now, best beloved, you stray from these desiderata at your peril!

The counter (or as our American cousins call it a fantail) has a good purpose. As the old hull gathers weigh, the sternwave flows up the counter increasing the immersion of the propeller. A propeller works better in denser water and the deeper, the denser. Anyway, if nature gave ducks a stern like that, there must have been good reason.

ENGINE

Ideally, you want an engine that you can see all the parts of, and one which revs slowly. Unfortunately, even a relatively slow moving steamer is going to be a blur of moving parts. As they get bigger, the individual parts appear to move slowly, but yours is likely to be small so live with it, it is going to be in the rev range 250 – 500 rpm. At these sorts of speeds, you will have a lot of torque so your propeller is going to be of big diameter and coarse pitch. Remember:

Dimeter gives you power
Pitch gives you speed.
So here you have a small difficulty, most motor boat hulls have a propeller aperture for a small diameter high revving propeller. You won�t find too many steamboat hulls but they are recognisable for the large propeller aperture. Early motorboats also had to deal with the low revs high torque issue.

People think in terms of step up gearing to allow a small propeller, but this then becomes an added complication. Why not just start with the right hull and do it properly?

BOILER

This is the most interesting part of your boat and there are several variations all of which have their rabid devotees. They are as follows –getting progressively heavier and containing more water and (probably) both steam and reserve.

Monotube or flash –essentially here is one long hot tube making the steam

Watertube –the water goes through the tubes the fire is outside of these

Firetube –the fire goes through the tubes

In addition, there are various firing methods again with their (again rabid) followers who would use no other than their chosen method.

Solid –wood or coal etc
Liquid –oil be it kerosene, petrol, heavy oil, biofuel or recycled cooking oil.
Gas –propane butane LPG
Again, hark back to Durhams law, shovelling coal is (to me) a lot more fun than twiddling valves on an oil or gas line. But, hey, whatever turns your crank.

The proponents of the water tube and flash boilers extol the speed with which steam can be raised. This is all very well, but if you want to be off and away, why not just get an aluminium dinghy with a super efficient Honda outboard? Why muck about with steam? My present boat can be brought into steam in 20 -40 minutes. That time is spent in a solemn ritual of relaxation, contemplation, oiling the engine, pumping the bilge and polishing the brass. This latter activity is not one of my great activities as friends will attest.

CREATURE COMFORTS

This is whatever space you have left in the ship for sitting down and relaxing as you steam along or for apres steam. It follows that the bigger the ship, the better the creature comforts but watch for complications setting in.

CASE STUDIES : LET ME TELL YOU A STORY

This is about my first steamer Gypsy. She had a long metamorphosis and it goes like this in the retelling.

I was infected by steam at age 3-4 years old when I saw my first traction engine. 20 odd years later, with a well established steam addiction and living on the edge of a tidal bay, I thought that a steamboat would amalgamate my hobbies into one focus. I had a 12� clinker hull and started to make a steam engine for it. It was a twin cylinder to a nice little design by K N Harris (K N Harris Model Stationary and Marine Seam Engines London Percival Marshall & Co Ltd Revised ed 1964 p147).using Stuart Turner cylinder castings 2.25 x 2.A design for a vertical coal fired fire tube boiler produced by Graeme Wilkinson was built and found to be too heavy and big for the hull. I scoured the area for a suitable hull. All were too rotten or had too small a propeller aperture too big too small etc. I briefly had Billy Boy -a 24′ clinker hull made by Ralph Sewell as a steamer in the ’60s. She was just right but too big for engine and boiler. Shortly after, I bought a Stuart Model 6 compound engine and fitted it with Stuart 6A feed and water pumps. This, together with the boiler was just right for a hull about 17′ long. I was sick of looking at dodgy old boats that were just not right for my purpose and likely to be leaky old expensive wood-lined holes in the water. I wanted a good hull that did not leak.

So I set about finding a suitable design. Designs for little steamers were quite rare back then and one finally came to light in the pages of a local traditional boats news sheet. The lines were taken off a 17′ clinker boat kept at the Auckland Islands (a group of barren islands in a very wild area south of NZ) and a local Auckland boatbuilder David Jackson built her for me in 1985. Everything was just right. She was launched one damp blowy day in 1986 and served me faithfully for 10 year until I sold her to a fellow addict. She is still going strong.

So, obtaining your steamboat can be a journey and is fraught with frustrations. Just remember a house is a boat so poorly built that you would never go to sea in it.

Subsequent to the pictures in the last issue, I fitted her with a pram hood with laminated wooden bows and brass iron works. Khaki canvas completed the weather protection. We had a Windermere kettle and were never short of tea – “Oil Grey” was the favoured brew. I fitted a steam lance for tube cleaning but we never got as far as steaming shellfish with it. Creature comforts drop off as the boat gets smaller but the hood was one of the better things. Funnily enough, there were few times that I used it. Several times when the seas were coming green over the bows and the coal and crew were getting wet and one momentous time when we couldn�t get her to produce steam. We were late autumn steaming on Lake Taupo – a big lake in the centre of the north island of New Zealand. The mountains to the south were snow covered and we were well hunkered down in the woolly jackets. Gypsy just wouldn�t steam. I blamed the coal quality, my stoking ineptness, whatever and I decided to head back for the slip. The moment we went about and had the wind astern, she picked up and I trigged to the cause of the problem. I put the hood up and this kept the icy blast off the boiler. She steamed well for the rest of the day. Funny, I thought the lagging was sufficient. Another advantage of the hood is that the cover can pick up on the erected hood giving more shelter and keeping the cover off the boiler if it is hot. However, last episode, I quoted Arthur Ransome – he of “Swallows and Amazons” fame. The great children’s author and sailor said that “a house is a poorly built boat that one would never go to sea in”. This quote took my fancy because, after nearly ten years of steaming, we started building a new house. Well, boats get in the way of this sort of family activity (so wives say) and Gypsy was offered for sale. I felt sad as Gypsy left my life and took up in the hands of a fellow enthusiast in the Auckland Steam Engine Society – a bit like seeing an old girlfriend in the arms of another. At least we had money for the luxuries in a new house, such as the roof, windows etc. However, my time with Gypsy taught me a few things:

It will take you a couple of years to get a steamboat together if you work hard. If you don’t work at it, it will also take a couple of years not to get a steamboat. (Quote pinched from a recent WoodenBoat and altered somewhat.)

A new hull is a dream compared with an old one. Less maintenance, no leaks. You can concentrate on the real issue – steaming.

Steering gear needs to be reliable. Gypsy’s cables slipped sometimes.

A hood forward does give a bit of shelter when you�re punching into it or if it’s raining.

A compound engine is probably an unnecessary complication in a small boat. A twin simple is easier to live with if you must have multiple cylinders and reversing is easier.

A Windermere kettle is so useful for warding off dehydration.

A steam lance helps keep small fire tubes clean. You can steam shellfish too.

You need a decent whistle.

Coal firing is dirty.

ALONG CAME ROMANY

That picture in the last issue with me standing proudly at the helm was taken on the Ngunguru River somewhat north of Auckland. Another boat with us, the steamer Romp carried the man who took that pic – and beside him was the well respected Whangarei boat builder Alec Baxter. Alec was just ecstatic about steamboats – well, traditional boats in general. He took many pictures and videos of us and that night,I believe, he lofted out and laid the keel of his own steamboat. Work progressed on her from time to time as seafarers sought him out to repair their boats. He had finally all but finished Romany’s hull when he fell seriously ill. His boat was obviously not going to be needed and, before he died, he let me buy her in her unfinished state.

I had a suitable engine that we had used for a season in Gypsy while her Stuart was being fettled. A local boiler maker built a wet firebox vertical fire tube boiler to an old Stuart design that had been updated for the NZ Boiler Code (ie imperial dimensions con- verted to metric so the kids could understand it.) I was finding the pipe work easy by now. It all came together quite nicely in the new garage at the now “almost completed” house. The house is still now “almost complete but more “almost completed” than when I bought Romany. The new boat was heavily built in the traditional way. She had a hardwood keel, Australian spotted gum ribs, thick NZ Kauri planking all held in place by copper nails and roves properly rivetted. To paraphrase David Kasanov of Wooden Boat magazine “A wooden boat is an assemblage of strangely-shaped pieces of wood so arranged as to retard the ingress of water” The coamings were varnished hardwood and she was just beautiful. Still is.

LESSONS LEARNED

Traditional planked hulls with ribs provide many nooks and crannies for coal

and clinker to lodge. Harder to keep clean than a cold moulded.

You probably can�t carry a sail when steaming – it affects the stack draft.

You need a fitted coal bunker – old wooden nail boxes are not adequate.

A feedwater heater gives better economy. The boiler pressure doesn’t drop so fast when you are feeding hard.

There is usually an abundance of steam when you don’t want it.

An injector will always “quiet” a boiler quickly when it’s producing a lot of steam.

Most of the heat transfer in the boiler is at the wet firebox and lower tubeplate. Big tubes help the draft, don’t clog easily and do not necessarily spoil heat transfer which probably happens low down in the tubes anyway.

We had a stainless stern tube and there was little clearance between the shaft and the tube. A little engine mis-alignment caused the shaft and tube to fret and ultimately pick up and seize. The old copper stern tubes never used to do this with a bronze shaft.

Coal firing is still dirty but smells good and is fun.

Some of the guys in Steamboats and Modern Steam Launches were great people.