Whathall Keel Rub Strip

[Tom Hoffman]

I am installing the keel on my Whitehall that I am building. I made a somewhat stubbier keel than the plan called for as we have lots of shallow water streams and of course the beaches on lakes, I did not want to create a rocker effect with the deep keel.

Any way, My keel projects down 1" is beveled 45 degrees both sides with a 3/4" flat area on the very bottom.

I was wanting to put a metal rub strip on the bottom, what should I use, I was thinking of something other than stainless steel, I wanted to keep in character with wood boats, may be use the same material for the outwale edge as a rub rail to protect against damage of docks and warfs.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

If you have a suggestions or idea, please tell me where to get it too..

I did a search at Noahs and google, got poor results.

[Thad]

Hamilton Marine has brass 3/4 inch half round and half oval. It should be possible to get silicon bronze strips but I don't know that it is, reasonably. Brass should be fine in the fresh water.

[Bruce Hooke]

Yup, I'd use brass half-oval for the keel. I would hesitate to use brass for the rubrail unless you are going to be coming up against ONLY rough surfaces. Other boat owners will not appreciate you coming alongside if you have a brass rubrail. Also metal rubrails can get dented, which is hard to fix. The traditional solution to this seems to be rope let into a grove in the gunwale. Wood alone is not a bad choice either -- it may need some protection against really hard surfaces like concrete or stone (but those are fairly rare for the most part), and if you are coming alongside another boat some care is called for, but not as much as if you had brass there.

[Tom Hoffman]

Thank you for the info. My keel is white oak as will be the outwales. Perhaps I will just leave the outwales as is.

Thanks again....

[John A. Campbell]

Tom. I would like to know more about that Whitehall you're building.......whose plans are you using, length of the boat, construction method, etc.? I have a set of plans for the 16' 2" Boston Ship's Chandlers whitehall. I ordered them from the Smithsonian and first saw the boat at Mystic Seaport Museum in 2001....it's part of their livery. I first saw documentation on this boat on page 199 of Chappelle's "American Small Sailing Craft" and have really struggled between building this boat versus the Victor Slocum..........will most likely build the V.S. first but the whitehall will surely be next or maybe even built at the same time.

[Venchka]

3/4" brass half-oval from Hamilton Marine. Finestkind! Drill and countersink for bronze screws. Hamilton Marine has those too.

Good job!

Wayne
In the Swamp. :D