Pouring a Lead Keel (Pt 1) (Tally Ho / EP117)

[Music] hi my name's leo and with the help of this amazing community and an awesome team here i'm on a mission to rebuild and restore the 112 year old classic sailing yacht tally ho now the time has finally come to start working on recasting our new ballast keel so some time ago we tried to add a little weight to the original ballast keel because it had been knocked and bashed around over the years and lost some weight and it needed more weight to meet the stability requirements for coding so we tried to melt a layer of molten lead on top it went spectacularly wrong blasted a hole through the old keel and spilt everywhere so that was very exciting but not something we wanted to repeat and so after a lot of deliberation and weighing up pros and cons we decided to completely melt down the original keel and recast it into a new keel so having screwed up our first attempt at casting lead i was very open to advice and ideas and i was introduced to a guy who had actually made a career out of casting lead kills i had a few phone conversations with him and eventually he agreed to come up and actually help us with the the keel casting making the mould and pouring the lead and also bring up some of his equipment some of his friends volunteered their time to drive the equipment up here so we could start the preparations before doug the keel maestro actually arrived himself [Music] my name is craig smith i have a small boat shop i was introduced to leo's uh compelling story and i shared it with my landlord doug brower who i poured keels with we poured large america's cup keels in that shop we poured a lot of production keels and doug has probably poured every production keel in santa cruz he was compelled to reach out to leo and offer some advice which leo wisely took and my friend michael signed me up to deliver this equipment and it's a great uh opportunity to be part of a little tiny part of this really compelling story so it was really really good of craig and michael to spend their time bringing all this equipment up here and they helped out even more actually by using that truck to go and pick up some sand as well which is going to be part of our mould making process for the lead keel which we'll get into a little later on so in terms of the actual equipment we've got a bunch of stuff that doug used to make heels so this is the melting pot which has a capacity of i think 25 to 30 000 pounds that's over 13 tons and we've got a big old propane burner and various other things we've got a lot of channel steel channel and pipe to make the box for the mould and plumb the lead all this stuff though has been sitting outside for 10 years it's all rusty it all needs some work so we've got to weld some steel legs onto the the pot here they've got to be really strong obviously so you've got to hold all that weight we've got to get the burner working and the various other things so i think doug is going to be here pretty soon now but we're going to get started getting this stuff prepared [Music] [Music] well this leads melting pot is currently blocked up on some wood but if we're going to heat it up to the melting point of lead the wood's not really going to last very long so we've got to put some metal legs on it this this partially filled lead tub is so awkward to move around we're trying to just weld the legs on from below there's a lot of spatter and pieces of metal coming off of the weld and because i'm positioned below what i'm welding all of that spatter ends up just clogging the nozzle of the welder [Music] it's not going to win any prizes that's for sure [Music] [Music] ah [Music] done you finished i finished finally after a full day of sitting underneath this thing nice job thanks how's it feel uh i got a lot of sparks in my ears which i've never done before and uh feels painful it's also a lot of fun though now one of the many jobs we have to do in preparation for this field poor is to re-fasten this lid to the pot well with some wire so we can lift it up manually it's pretty heavy so this is just a really simple rigging job and there's a little winch on the crane there which should lift this straight up airlines and that's how leah lost his hand so rowan has been doing an awesome job working on the lead pot getting the legs welded on and so on i'm about to start working on the burner so this is a very sort of basic burner that was uh used with natural gas and we don't have natural gas here so we're going to be using propane tanks so there's a bit of dodgy plumbing it's got to happen to connect propane tanks to the burner and then we're not exactly sure if it's going to work either because of the rates of flow of the propane and the tank's getting cold and so on but the first thing is to just figure out a way to get them connected now as usual these days there's a lot of different stuff going on at the same time so while this is happening the guys are actually working on the deck structure getting more coats of varnish on and i've been working on the the keel plug that is part of the mold making process but we're going to look into that in a lot more detail later on [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay well hi i'm i'm doug brower um sometimes known as a keel builder that was a career for a long long time i'm from santa cruz california and i was introduced to the tally ho project my first video was watching their attempt to add lead to the old keel and i thought at the time i was watching it maybe these guys could use uh the experience and then hard-earned lessons of 35 years of heel building that's uh behind me and so i've gotten together with leo and his crew and i'm just arrived here in port townsend where we're going to set up and attempt succeed in pouring a new keel for tally ho i poured keels for about 35 years possibly as many as a couple thousand kills i'm not sure i didn't keep track but um the vast majority in terms of numbers were production keels where i was i could pour five or six kills a day but what uh really kept me doing it and what i really enjoyed was one-off custom keels particularly for some of the higher end maxi boats and america's cup work were both challenging and and very satisfying for me and but over those years i learned a lot about what uh what it takes to be successful and not have disasters when pouring lead so hopefully i'll be able to bring that experience to this opportunity to work on inspiring and and uh very very excellently executed project so behind me here is the original lead pig that we made up in scrim for our first attempted kill pour obviously that went awry but there's still quite a lot of lead inside this pot so we want to get that out so we can put it into the bigger pot and make it part of a new keel so we're using this opportunity to test our new burner test the whole setup and we're going to try and just melt the lead out of this pot into this bathtub now we're using a big propane tank to fuel this burner under the pig and we're also using a shop back as an air blower so it's it's uh that is increasing the flow of the propane and adding oxygen to it now i really don't know exactly what's going to happen here doug seems to think it will be okay but there is water in the pig i'm not exactly sure how that's going to react hopefully it'll all just evaporate before the lead melts fully i have also had some concerns about the lead at the very bottom melting first and expanding and having nowhere to go and the whole thing exploding so hopefully that won't happen either dog's very familiar with this stuff and seem to think it should be fine so that's reassuring and hopefully he's right [Music] what do you think doug are we ready that remains to be seen let's fire this off and see what it does all right [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] well the burner is still on behind me um it's about a quarter past five in the afternoon now and uh it is being pretty slow to melt the lead um i think because of the way we've got the delivery system set up the plumbing the hose has some restriction on the the flow of the propane and so it's not as hot as we would like it and it's not as hot as the gas supply which doug is used to we're also facing the issue of the propane tanks as they release propane they cool down they get very cold in some cases they can even ice up and that slows down the delivery so we've got two propane tanks and we're we're switching from one to the other when one of them gets too cold we've also got them fairly close to the the actual flame not too close uh it looks kind of sketchy but you can you can very easily put your hand on the propane tank and it's not hot really at all to the touch so it's just keeping them a little bit warmer and that's helping them to you know hopefully release propane at a better rate [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] oh my god well last night's test paw to get the lead out of the old pig and into the bathtub so we can move it around and get it into the new pot uh worked pretty well i thought uh the lead flowed out of the pig and into the bathtub which was the the whole goal there um we got a little bit of splatter but nothing too bad and we pretty much got all the lead out which is nice doug was thinking there's gonna be quite a bit stuck in there and the bathtub turned out to be pretty much exactly the right size which is lucky i mean which is the result of extremely careful calculation [Music] um [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] yeah i'm guessing a couple of percent [Music] it's a little softer but it's got it's got some added money but it's not real high anymore that's good yeah this is what i was worried about [Music] well this is my this is my little baby girl orange soda that i just bought last week and uh yeah i just kind of figured i wanted something to chuck out on the water whenever i wanted to and just kind of figure out how this whole sailing thing works it's a capri cyclone 1975 13 foot [Music] highway [Music] so now as you can see we've got the big lead pot going we've got the burner underneath it we've got some insulation around it all we're doing right now is uh just trying to melt the lead enough that we can actually operate the main valve or inside the pot um because at the moment it's two uh there's lead in there and it's completely jammed with lead which is normal but it hasn't been used in 10 years or something so we want to melt it all out melt the lead that's in there enough that we can just make sure it works [Music] what [Music] it actually may be frozen up in here there it goes yeah baby all right right on right on whoa that's some cool beans that seems less heck that that seems less sketch a little bit this valve than that than a bronze uh bulldog ball valve with a no bronze bronze gate valve with a bad a bad uh rubber gasket sacrifice it doug do it doug where's it for the heavy metal gods this layer trying to anneal it let's see if i can soften it yeah three somebody's got to hold the camera i guess i mean oh [Music] there we go nice yeah so that test worked really well we were able to open and close the valve so that's a big relief all that lead which was already in the pot that was left over from doug's last keel paw 10 years ago so we've started loading in smaller pieces of lead now small bits we've got lying around and bits from the spill and you can pretty much throw anything in the lead pot it doesn't matter if the lead has bits of steel embedded in it or one of those pieces had some some fire blanket in it but basically everything floats in lead so you can just skim all that stuff off the top when it's molten now the bigger pieces of lead though the old ballast skill which is going to make up the vast majority of this new keel is going to have to be chopped up into smaller pieces because right now they're in pretty long pieces and they won't physically fit into the top of the pot luckily i already found out that lead cuts pretty easily with a chainsaw [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] well we're getting closer and closer i've just been cutting up all the big sections of the old lead keel into smaller sections that we can more easily get inside the pot to melt them and i think in cutting all that up i probably made about 100 pounds of lead chip sawdust or more now we caught all that in a tarp so we're going to just put that in a bucket and put it back in the pot with everything else so now we pretty much have all of our lead pouring equipment and the lead itself ready to pour the keel we're only missing uh arguably the most important part of the whole equation which is the actual mold which we're going to pour the lead into so we're going to build the mold by first building a form or a positive plug or template of the keel that we want and then we're going to build a steel box around that and we're going to fill it with a sand and resin mix that's going to set and then we're going to lift it off the plug flip it over and then that will be our mold that we can pour the lead into so we're going to cover that process in the next video but for now thanks a lot for watching and a massive thank you to everyone who has donated or otherwise supported this project it does make a huge difference and it means that i'm able to make these videos and we're able to keep doing this work so i really really appreciate it and i'll see you next time cheers [Music] you

Channel: Sampson Boat Co

Views: 492,872

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Id: vbUyt4nJlNs

Length: 27min 14sec (1634 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 29 2022