("Tahiti, The Hard Way" by R.Jackson, pg.2)

The tire weights were now one solid lump of lead - 10,000 lbs. worth. And that was fun. After acquiring enough tire weights, I drove the '51 Ford pickup over to the Black Diamond and brought back a half ton of coal. Borrowed and bought two cast iron bath tubs and arranged them on a box of gravel so the pour would be where the keel would stay. All I had to do was jack it up on the forward end after it was out of the mold. In order to get the weights into the bath tubs, I built an a-frame tower with a platform about 12' above the ground, with a hole in the middle large enough for the buckets to come through. At the top, above the hold, was a large block and the ropes ran down to a block at the base and from there out to the front of the shop where it was tied to a Datsun pickup that belonged to a friend. The morning of the pour, a Saturday, half a dozen friends assembled. Lee Zarkaides, an advertinsing account executive, Chad Kirk and architect, Rod Tagart, a tinkerer, Bennie McCaskill, a friend from Detroit and the only one with any experience having once worked in a lead factory, Dee and I. Lee drove the pickup. She would drive forward about 12', stop, then back up and stop. She did this 86 times. Chad, who was the second oldest, insisted on hooking the buckets to the line, even though this involved real hernia-producing posture. A 5-gallon bucket of lead weighs about 150 lbs. It's a lot like trying to lift a fire plug. Bennie and Rod volunteered for bathtub duty - Bennie arranging the lead as it came down the chute and Rod using a couple of vacuum cleaners to blow the coal fires into the proverbial inferno. I, literally, had the catbird seat. Standing atop the tower, tipping the buckets into the chute. A great place to oversee this medieval looking operation. After a few hours, the cruddy-looking piles of weights were turning into rivers of mercury-like lava. 621° soup. A very strange phenomenon, when one's used to steel things sinking to the bottom of liquids, is to shovel off the top of the molten lead bone-dry dust piles of steel clips and other debris. We filled seven or eight buckets with this stuff. A few weeks later, these buckets afforded me another amusing new experience.

I took the buckets to a scrap steel yard. Drove the old Ford over the scale, then out into the yard. The crane operator swung his huge pie-shaped magnet over the truck bed and turned on the juice. I watched out the back window. Eight full buckets shot, like Cape Canaveral, to the underside of the disc. Simple things amuse... Meanwhile, back to the pour. The tubs which were fitted out with gate valves, were each about 4/5 full - about 8,000 lbs. melted - when Dee brought to my attention a badly split support beam at the lower back of the gravel box the tubs were elevated on. The gravel was being pushed out, causing the tubs to tip away from the mold. This situation required emergency action. I opened both gate valves and each tub started to empty its 4,000 lbs. of molten lead. I asked everybody to clear out except Chad. He and I did some very rapid shoring up of the ruptured gravel box, both of us working directly under the sinking ends of the hot lead. I thought of Bennie's early bit of gallows humor - "If you fall into the molten lead, the body just explodes." We worked very fast.

The pour, even though being done in two stages, was a success. The morning after was quite a sight. What the day before had been a pristine boat shop now looked like the sooty bowels of an old round house. The removal of the mold revealed a smooth shape. The top, however, looked like the surface of the moon - all bubbles and craters, plus a few errant steel clips, which were removed with torch and awl. Lead planes beautifully. These endeavors were hampered a bit by the fact that I'd cast ten keel bolts in place. Something I wouldn't do again. The holes in the keel had to be drilled oversize in order to drop the keel on the ballast, then filled with epoxy - a technique the Gougeon's swear by, but I worry.
Gradually the mess disappeared, and the shop started to look like a boat might happen. All the prefabbed pieces - keel, stem, deadwood, gripe (don't you love the names?), assorted knees and rudderpost - got together. The backbone - like some prehistoric fossil. My "A" frame tower, made for the pour, was reused to block and tackle the stem into position. Putting up the station molds was probably the most rewarding project to date. They had been constructed with the center vertical member, a 2"x4", all on the starbord side - the port side forming dead center. These were aligned against a fore and aft string. My son, Don, who is in the construction business in L.A. was visiting just after I'd finished erecting the nineteen station molds. He was standing on the keel up in the bow looking aft with an dd expression on his face. "Anything wrong?" I asked. He smiled in a warm sort of way and said, "No, I've just never seen a wall this straight before." Filled with great pride I shrugged it off, but I was pleased. He's a real pro in his world, and this was closer to his world than mine. As well as having the centerlines on the center, each mold must be level athwartship (port to starbord) and, of course, be 90° to the centerline - the latter being done with a nail on the center top of the stem from which to hook your 50'-or-longer tape measure so as to get the port side exactly the same distance as the starboard is from the nail. After which, they are all encased in a cage of fore and aft ribbands - one every foot or so from the keel to just above the sheer. Mine were constructed from 2"x4"s that had been scarphed together - three sixteen-footers giving me about a forty-four-foot length, deducting for the scarphed. Finally, I could see the boat shape. She was ready to frame up.

Two friends had offered to help with this project - steaming 82 frames of white oak 2"x2-1/4"x14'. Jack Day, who had recently finished his schooner Blue Jacket and Tom Pryor, who was just starting a 42'cutter of his own design. Tom and I had met in '61 , when we were working together on the Chevrolet account. Tom's an advertising copy writer. We worked together again around '71. I was still at the same shop. He had returned as creative director on the truck account. One afternoon I was over in Tom's office chatting about the merits of wood as a building material. He asked me if I'd ever been to Seattle. "It's a great place to build a wood boat. I've got a friend out there - Jack Day, a fireman - who's building a wood schooner. You ought to go out and meet him." I went back to my office and called Amber McCoy, our librarian. "Amber, Roy Jackson. Have you ever been to Seattle?" "No. I grew up in Vancouver though." "I'd like to do an ad out there, any suggestions?" "Well, they've got a lot of car ferries." "Hey, great. Do you have any reference on them?" An hour later a manila folder full of photos of ferry boats was on my desk. Our client had requested an ad campaign on station wagons and off-road vehicles, and this looked promising. I sketched the required products around the open deck of a small ferry called the Whatcom Chief and collaborated with a writer for an appropriate headline. Three weeks later I was sitting next to Dee, flying out to Seattle. Jack Day was everything Tom had promised. We looked him up after the shoot. He and his wife Arlene were living in a stately home that Jack had built before building the matching clapboard boat shop behind. His schooner was framed up and partially planked. She was inspirational. Meeting Jack convinced me that wood should be my medium. We had come into the kitchen, which had a fieldstone fireplace in which Jack proceeded to start a fire. "Excuse me, is that teak kindling you're throwing in there?" Jack smiled. "There's a lot of exotic scrap when you build a boat."

But back to the framing of my schooner.

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