Lead-pouring disaster (Rebuilding Tally Ho EP101)

[Music] hi my name's leo and i'm a boat builder and a sailor and i'm on a mission to rebuild and restore this 111 year old classic sailing yacht tallyho this video is going to be all about the ballast keel the big chunk of lead that is bolted to the bottom of the keel timber and so it hangs right off the bottom of the boat and provides stability and writing moment that is having all that weight down there keeps the boat upright in a minute i'm going to talk more about the work we're going to be doing on it but first thing is we're going to have to do a bit of preparation so we have to clear the area all around the ballast keel by moving some of the props and their supports around and also by blocking up the keel timber on its very forward end and it's very aft end so that we can remove the blocks which are on top of the ballast keel so the whole boat is going to be floating almost on these two points right at the front and right at the back and the whole middle section is going to be unsupported [Music] three two one nice [Music] foreign [Music] great 146.6 okay for this next one let's like pretend that it's like 800 pounds let me just pick 970 for youtube 299.8 let's be real we're not pulling anybody [Laughter] i love it an option we basically have a pile of lead behind the shop and kind of don't have any idea how much it is and figured we should probably calculate the exact tonnage we have before smelting it down and so we could have a calculated controlled uh pour right because everything we do around here is calculated uncontrolled right to the to the nth degree exactly what's the rule about tolerance like if you're doing a carpentry it's to the nearest quarter inch and cabinetry is to the nearest 32nd of an inch right in boat building it's to the nearest boat that's it is that the rule that's it [Music] [Music] [Music] quack [Music] [Applause] [Music] so for some time now i've been considering trying to add some extra weight to the ballast keel now it's not something i really want to do because it's quite a bit of extra work but there are a few reasons why it could be a good idea now one is that the original keel has been banged up and bashed around and it's actually lost quite a bit of lead off of the bottom of it off of the front from it just being knocked off on reefs and so on this bits had a really hard life and the ballast keel has suffered so it's not as heavy as it originally was and it's not as heavy as it was designed to be now obviously the ballast at the bottom of a boat helps to keep it upright i'm not going to get really deep into the technicalities but basically it all has to do with the center of gravity of the boat and the weight distribution and so the lower the ballast the more effective it is if you have ballast near the middle of the boat it wouldn't be doing its job and so by the same sort of thinking the more weight you have up high in the boat so the more weight you have up in the rig the more ballast you need at the bottom of the boat to counteract it so another reason why it might be a good idea to increase the weight of the ballast is that the rig was enlarged in 1927. i want to replicate that fastnet race winning rig of 1927 and so that rig is going to be taller bigger and heavier than the original design not only that but in this rebuild i have increased some of the scatterings of the timbers that just means their dimensions basically so some of the frames are double sawn rather than single sawn because of the stock i had available and the timbers that i've been using have been heavier than the original timbers would have been so there is going to be a bit more weight sort of evenly distributed around the hull which is going to raise the center of gravity look at that two one oh [Music] so we've now taken all but one of the props out from in between the keel timber and the ballast keel so almost all the weight of the boat now is on the very front and the very back of the keel timber as well as a little bit on all the props around it and we just got this one bit of blocking right in the middle of the ballast keel so we're going to take that out now and hope for the best and then yep get along now originally this ballast keel would have been just under five tons and the boat was designed with eight tons of interior ballast and so that means eight tons of loose lead inside the bilge of the boat inside the boat underneath the soil boards the floorboards if you like there's just a lot of loose lead and you may have been sort of fastened down with boards and things um but essentially it was just lead that could be moved around in the bottom of the boat so our idea here is actually to take some of that interior ballast and move it outside and add it to the exterior ballast keel and what that will do is move the weight lower in the boat and therefore increase its effectiveness as ballast and lower the center of gravity now not only does that actually decrease the amount of overall ballast we need because it's going to be lower and more effective but it also frees up space in the bilge underneath the soul boards this is important for a few reasons one is that i want to lower the sole a little bit because back in 1910 people were generally shorter than they are now i'm six foot and i don't want to hit my head on every deck beam so i'm going to be lowering the sole to give six foot of headroom so there's going to be less build space anyway but also we want to keep as much of that space free as possible because it's actually really valuable tank space for water tanks and so on it will also mean the boat will sail better having a lower centre of gravity will help the boat be stiffer and be able to carry more sail and sail better and faster in stronger winds now i discussed this idea a lot with um my engineer uh also with different naval architects and the yacht designers and so on and i was hesitant for a long time but after talking to a lot of people and a lot of really experienced sailors as well basically all the really experienced people that i talked to said that this would be a really good thing to do and couldn't really see any disadvantage with it so the idea is basically to pour some molten lead on top of the ballast keel just a few inches and then it'll be bolted up to the boat and the shape will be fed in underneath and by faring that shape in to more or less the original shape on the design will be faring away the damage on the bottom of the keel where it's all pitted and rough and so we'll end up with a smooth keel which is closer to the original design but a little bit bigger a little bit heavier and will hopefully make the boat sail a little bit better [Music] do [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] we have a shield oh dude [Music] [Music] know [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so for the actual mould which is going to contain the molten lead on top of the ballast keel we're going to use timber these particular boards are rejects from planking because they've got a lot of defects in them we're going to clamp them fasten them make sure they're really secure we're going to scorch them and we're going to cork the join between these boards and the lead keel with a sort of fireproof uh cement or mortar for repairing fireplaces so it should be heat proof i am making a template of the bottom face of the keel timber so that we can make uh make the top of the lead ballast keel match with the bottom face of the keel timber and i'm adding 3 16 to account for the shrinkage of the lead so that it'll shrink and match exactly up with the keel timber hopefully oh yeah um so i've been working on fabricating the pot for the lead casting the pig as well we've nicknamed it so it'll have some ears and a tail eventually um yeah so i've done quite a bit of welding uh put all the legs on cross members just trying to make it super strong because about 5000 pounds of lead is going to go into this thing to be melted to add to the kill [Music] he would be proud use the forklift he says hey what are you doing i'm drilling the hole i'm drilling the hole feeling the butt hole in the pig like that that's perfect okay i got a big gap to fill here she's flying hey megan over here hi i'm cleaning out the hole we drilled for the gate valve uh we're gonna try to run a bead of weld inside because the outside one's leaking a little bit so i got this thing and trying to clean it up how does it feel to be dremeling inside a pig you know uh i've dreamed about this day for a while now no it's fine it's a little cramped in here but uh getting my yoga in for the day i guess nice yeah [Music] one two [Music] thank three [Music] [Music] now obviously some people are going to have concerns about safety with pouring lead so it's a couple things i want to point out lead is poisonous and so when you ingest it into your system it builds up and you can't really remove it from your system or at least it's very difficult to if you get severe lead poisoning it can cause all sorts of really bad health issues so it has to be taken very seriously but there are a few misconceptions about lead so for instance it cannot be absorbed through your skin touching lead is not harmful however eating it is so obviously after touching it you have to wash your hands really carefully now many people don't realize this but lead does not actually give fumes off until it reaches quite a high temperature so it melts a long time before it gives off poisonous fumes however when melting lead there's often other things in it which do give off fumes there could be all sorts of other crap inside the lead so it is always advised to wear proper vapor masks which can protect you from all sorts of noxious fumes now i'm not exactly sure what temperature this lead's going to be so as soon as we start melting it we're going to be wearing you know really good protective gear which is going to stop us from inhaling anything that could harm us at all generally though melting that outside even if you are producing fumes those fumes will be completely dispersed within just a few yards so there's no danger to the neighborhood or anything like that if lead is spilled and goes into the ground obviously that's not ideal and we're gonna make sure we avoid that but it's not actually as harmful as a lot of people think it doesn't leach out into plants or anything like that it's generally very self-contained and it will just remain a piece of lead in the ground it's very inert now where lead is very dangerous is with lead dust because the dust can be very easily breathed in and from there from your lungs it can very easily go into your bloodstream so that's why there's so much fear and carefulness around lead which is a good thing because a lot of old paints have lead in them and so it's very common for people to sand or scrape old paints not realizing that they have lead in them and make lead dust which they can then inhale the other danger with melting anything of course is just you know heat fire around a wooden boat especially and with wood chips on the floor but we will be making sure that our skin is covered up and we'll have plenty of fire extinguishers and fire blankets around we'll be wetting the ground in the area where we're doing it and we'll be covering the the sort of flammable areas of the ground where there's sawdust and stuff so we're going to be trying to reduce any risk of fire or damage from heat we're going to have heat shields as well around the fire and between the fire and the boat to make sure that the boat itself doesn't get too hot from having the fire that close to it [Music] [Music] [Music] so i found something quite interesting today when i was uh cleaning out these kilbot holes they've already been blocked off on the bottom and i was just doing a last vacuum to make sure there was no dust and dirt sawdust in there and in this hole i noticed a few inches down there's actually a void inside the keel it's maybe three inches down and it's a couple of inches wide and a couple of inches deep and it actually goes i was able to get the vacuum hose in there and i was able to get about eight inches along it probably so there's a sort of quite a long void inside the keel under here and actually if you look closely at the top you can see there's this area where there's a sort of pool of extra lead poured on top and so i think probably what happened was that when they originally poured this keel they had some contraction of the lead um it sort of probably was went in in the center just in this area and they've tried to fill that void i think by pouring more lead on top and they may or may not have realized that they didn't quite fill the void there was still actually a hole underneath here so it obviously didn't do any harm a little void inside the lid isn't really a big problem but it's quite interesting just to see these clues about how they built the boat and you know maybe mistakes that were made or different solutions that were tried um and we're left with this sort of a little bit of history here [Applause] [Applause] [Music] oh [Applause] so now we've got the old cubot holes plugged up and the pig is nearly ready for action it's time to lower the keel down to its final position we've got to lower it quite a bit both to get it away as far away as possible from the keel timber above it so there's not too much heat going up there and also so we can get a decent angle on the pipe through which the lead is going to run from the pig onto the ballast kill [Music] foreign [Music] do [Music] we're making an emergency bung for the pig we're making a plug that we can just ram in the in the out hole [Music] we're about to we're just gearing up to pour another two and a half tons of lead on top of the pre-existing ballast keel so uh we've kind of made a form here with some extra wanna planking and uh we're just putting i'm putting some spreaders in right now so just screwing two by fours to the top of it i'm checking our the width of our keel timber and comparing that with the top of our form and pushing it out a little bit or pulling it in a little bit to make a map so when we put it up there we don't have to do too much filler fairing [Music] [Music] okay so it's been a lot of preparation but today is the day we've just started the fire underneath the pig so from now on we're going to be wearing our protective gear we've just had a pretty good safety briefing with everyone we've got quite a bit of lead already in the pig and we've got some more to go in when it starts melting we've got our pipe which runs from the pig to the keel we've got a valve on it we've got a big bathtub underneath the valve because we think that is the most likely possible point of failure although we have tested it and we think it's going to be fine we've got these heat-proof blankets laid underneath the keel timber to stop too much heat coming up onto that wood from the molten lead underneath it we're actually going to double those up put some more half blankets inside them and we're going to be putting those fireproof blankets underneath the keel as well on top of our plywood to make sure if we do have any leaks there's going to be no burning and no contamination of the ground if anything goes wrong we've got a couple of things we can do we've got some tapered plugs and once the lead is molten we actually will be able to stick those in from the top and actually bung up the the out hole from the inside of the pig and stop any more lead coming flowing out hopefully or at least really reduce that flow another technique we might use if we need to stop the lead as well as doing that is to cool down the pipes and that will block them up as the lead solidifies inside them the fences that make up the mold are made of timber and we're going to char those to get any excess sort of moisture out of the side so they won't burn when the lead first touches them the thing i'm most worried about apart from some catastrophic failure of the valve or one of our fittings is the possibility that the lead is going to cool down too quickly and either block up the pipe or not flow to the ends of the keel and so to try and help make that go well we're going to be using oxy acetylene torches and propane torches to heat up the pipe and also to actually heat up the lead or keep it hot as it flows out of the pipe and as it flows to the ends of the keel it's uh it's pretty exciting and also pretty nerve-wracking to do this so we've all got our fingers crossed and hopefully nothing goes terribly wrong our main priority is to keep everyone safe and our next priority is to make sure we don't have some kind of catastrophic failure that results in contamination we've taken as many precautions as i think we reasonably can so those are our two main goals and after that of course is the hope that we pour our keel effectively and it goes well first time we don't have to do this all over again [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] that's right [Music] so oh stop coming out okay so our first attempt at pouring the keel did not go as planned it could have been a lot worse but uh it could have been a lot better too so basically everything worked really well except for one thing that we did not think of and we did not think was going to happen what actually happened was that the really hot lead coming out of the spout under pressure it actually jetted a hole into the existing lead keel and it didn't uh burn the wood or anything the wood stayed there but it just dug a hole all the way through until it came out underneath the wood pretty much at the bottom of the keel i actually didn't have a camera on that part so i didn't get footage of that waterfall coming outside of the mould but it was pretty dramatic of course as soon as we noticed it we yelled at megan who was in control of the valve and she closed the valve and that it all worked effectively and it did shut off the flow of new fresh lead coming into the mould i was also ready with our emergency bung to actually plug up the outlet from the pig but luckily the valve worked and that wasn't necessary a hole at the bottom and the side of the keel where the lead was pouring out it continued to let let out for a little while and then it uh sort of sealed up as the lead slowed down and it was able to cool and actually sort of sealed that hole itself a lot of the lead had already spread out so we had sort of about a one inch layer over part of the keel which sort of tapers down at the ends where it hadn't got to the ends yet and of course the big concern is where all that lead is going as it's pouring out the keel and luckily because of the precautions we took with the plywood and the heatproof fabric the fire blankets that we laid out under the keel that did actually catch all the lead which came out and of course we were looking very carefully for anywhere where the lead hood uh sort of overflowed from our boards that we put down anywhere where it could be smoldering or causing any sort of fire hazards i'm really pleased with how everyone handled it everyone was really on point really focused on their jobs and all the safety protocols we put in place worked really well we were able to shut off the flow we didn't need to use our backup which was there if in case we needed it and we managed to contain all the lead and we managed to all stay safe so at this point things have started cooling off everyone's gone home we've cleaned up and we're just going to let everything really cool down i'm going to keep an eye on the fires as they die down tonight and then tomorrow we'll have to come in and clean up peel all that lead off of the fire blankets and off of that plywood and sort of assess the damage and assess what we're going to do next [Music] wow [Music] well a little time has passed we've had a moment to think about what happened and talk about it and well the most important thing i think is that i'm really glad that nobody was hurt and the boat wasn't damaged and that we didn't cause any sort of wider problems i'm really glad that we put all those safety precautions in place and we were careful and that everybody was so on the ball um i do realize also though that we were lucky uh it could have gone a lot worse and so like a lot of things it was sort of a mix of good preparation and luck i think that avoided a real disaster but it is very frustrating that this has happened um you know after all the preparation and work went into it and it seemed to be going so well right up until the moment when it was really not going well at all i'm sure that there'll be people out there who'll be saying that they could have told me this would happen but it's not something that we were able to predict and you know all the people that i talked to when preparing for this people who have experienced with pouring lead didn't predict that this was something that could really happen like me most people thought the opposite would happen that the lead would cool down too quickly you know because the ballast keel underneath it is such a heat sink it's such a heavy mass of cold metal anyway from here going forward there are two real options the first is to basically try again with the same setup and we obviously have to do things a little bit differently and that has some advantages you know one of which is we'd still be able to use the original ballast keel without changing it too much and the other advantage is that we've already done most of the setup work we've already put all that work in so it potentially wouldn't be too much more work but we would have to find a way to stop this happening again maybe a metal plate sort of to disperse the hot lead as it falls down which would end up getting cast into the keel um or sort of multiple outlets which can drop lead in different areas more careful temperature monitoring perhaps but it's going to be really hard to i think to get it hot enough that it's going to flow everywhere but cool enough that it's not going to melt straight through the lead underneath the disadvantage to doing that is that you know now there's a hole in the lead which we'd have to fill so that would be a weak spot there's already the crack that we identified further aft and there's several more cracks that we've noticed um and then also the the pour on top you know obviously it's not going to bond completely with the original keel that's okay if it's all bolted through but you know with all these sort of different weak spots all over the place it's starting to feel a little bit like a hodgepodge it's not necessarily structural as long as it's bolted and it stays there it's okay but um you know you don't want a ton of cracks and holes in your battle skill either and then even if we do pour more on top and it goes successfully which you know we're not sure about there's still lots of things that could go wrong then we still have to do a lot of planing and fairing on the bottom you know if we can get it up into place without breaking it further now the other option is to basically take this keel and recast the entire thing so we would drop it into pieces and build a mold and recast it into the original shape in the design but just a little bit deeper and that also has advantages and disadvantages advantages are that it would be one solid coherent mass one piece so it should be really strong um we can also have the mould the exact shape that we want so there should be very little or no fairing required and once it's bolted to the boat i'm gonna have no worries in the future about sort of cracks or weaknesses or you know possibilities that it's going to fall apart or fall off in the sea which is unlikely but it could play on my mind i'm sure the disadvantages of recasting this keel are obviously that it's a lot more work to you know make another mould it's gonna take a bit longer to do that and the other thing is that it is changing the form of this original kill um a little more so you know it could be regarded as changing it from the original keel although it will still be the same lead and you know honestly even if we don't do that we'll still be fairing it so we'll be changing its shape but you know in the question of originality i do really like saying it has the original ballast keel and so i'm definitely hesitant to sort of change that too much so right now i am feeling really stuck on this decision i'm really not sure what the best way forwards is it's quite frustrating so i would be interested to hear what you guys think um you know not that i'm going to be putting something like this to the vote but it is interesting to hear different opinions and different points of view and it does sometimes allow me to see things from a perspective that i hadn't thought of so do let me know what you think and hopefully i'll be coming to a decision sometime soon okay well that is about it for now i am disappointed not to be ending this video with a finished ballast keel being bolted to the boat which is what i had planned but there we go that's life setbacks happen and it's not all bad no one got hurt the boat's not damaged we all learned something about pouring lead and various other things possibly and regardless of what's going on you know even in these sort of hard frustrating times i am so so grateful to be able to be doing this project it's really quite amazing and i'm completely blown away by the support from you guys that actually makes this all possible so thank you so we're going to focus on setting up the new workshop and moving some stuff down to port townsend while we sort of think about this keel situation and hopefully by the next video we will have come to a resolution so i'll see you then cheers [Music] you

Channel: Sampson Boat Co

Views: 1,102,802

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Id: IrTWP-du9Mk

Length: 41min 18sec (2478 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 04 2021