Steamboat restorations
Two determined enthusiasts rebuild two amazing boats
Chris Cooper can trace his fascination with steam to his grandfather, who was a boiler inspector on the railways at Taumarunui.
Born and raised in Hamilton, Chris remembers school holidays spent around the marshalling yards and workshops of that historic central North Island town. One day he bribed the driver of a shunting loco with a bunch of grapes and so gained his first ride in the cab of a steam loco.
Chris went on to become interested in model steam locomotives. He joined Hamilton Model Engineers Inc. in the days when it had its facilities at Seddon Park and built his first model steam engine.
The steam adventure begins
Also a member of the club was John Hannah, chief engineer at the Waitoa Dairy Factory. John ran a steam launch named Greenbank and, as Chris explains, it started there.
“[John] would ask people to come and ‘fire’ (stoke) for him. He had the launch moored at the Paeroa Maritime Museum. We had some serious adventures going out through the Waihou River into the Firth of Thames and up to Clevedon on the way to Auckland steam meets. Often, we’d go overnight and camp out on the islands.
“One time I had the fire going beautifully and decided to toast a cheese sandwich on a steel shovel. But the fire was a bit too hot and the sandwich went ‘Whoof’! We’d often trawl a line behind to catch fish and poach them in the embers.”
Curate’s egg
John’s boat was an older-style double diagonally planked kauri vessel weighing about seven tonnes. It was powered by a Simpson-Strickland fourcylinder steam engine with a watertube boiler.
This gave Chris the idea to find and build his own steam-powered boat.
An engineer and tool and die maker by trade, he was at work one Saturday morning in 1990 when a workmate mentioned there was a 1911 pinnace that had been a steam-powered launch for sale at Beach Haven in Auckland.
“I went to have a look and was a bit crestfallen. It had a 21ft kauri hull but it had been left under a hedge for many years and one side was rotted out.”
Chris brought the forlorn remains home. The hull was empty. The pinnacle had once been based at Devonport Naval Base and used as a customs and excise boat and the admiral’s private launch. As the years progressed the old craft had lost its glory; it was gradually downgraded, its steam gear stripped, and finally it was abandoned.
Restoration begins
One of Chris’s early tasks was to find a supply of kauri so he could begin rebuilding the hull. That is where the generosity of other people came into play.
“That is where the generosity of other people came into play”
“I went down to Johnson’s Demolition in Hamilton. Old man Johnson had a barn full of salvaged kauri weather boards and beams. There was an old church staircase made of mahogany, which I wanted to use for the decking.
I was looking at this timber and thinking, $100 for that bit and $100 for that bit — it was all going to add up. But he just said, ‘So you’re looking for a piece for your boat — $100 the lot’. So I loaded up and drove home with the front of the car pointed skywards.”
There followed many years of cutting and machining planks with a bandsaw and thicknesser. Six months work on the ‘idiot’ board (a two-handed sander) and the hull was rebuilt and coated in seven layers of two-pot lacquer.
The engine was another story. The original machinery had disappeared, so Chris drew upon his engineering skills and chewed up most of his lunchtimes at work for most of a decade building another one from scratch.
“I built the crankshaft and the valve gear. I made the patterns and castings. Having seen John’s engine I went for a triple-expansion compound design, which is a more efficient way of using the heat. It also allows the steam to be condensed back into water so I can get 90 per cent of the water back.”
Steam engine regs
Steam boilers can be prone to explosions if not manufactured to rigorous standards. While boiler inspection was pretty commonplace 60 years ago, it isn’t today. What little call there is for it is handled by Maritime New Zealand.
“I had to come up with a design and have it calculated and registered with the department. They take it seriously.”
Chris’s engine uses a three-drum Yarrow boiler running at a pressure of 250psi.
“The boiler had to be vessel-welded by a registered welder and all the heat numbers and materials used had to be described. Luckily the marine inspector in Hamilton, Kevin Arnott, was very helpful.”
Chris’s pinnace had its first outing on Lake Kainui near Ngaruawahia around 2010 and drew the sort of crowd it usually does. So far he has fired it with coal but plans to convert it to fueloil so he can get better range and it doesn’t need constant hand stoking.
Fresh water only
Chris sticks to fresh water, such as lakes and rivers, as salt water is damaging to the prized and polished brass work. He and a fellow steampinnace builder, John Olsen, are planning a big trip down to Rotoiti in the Nelson Lakes National Park.
“I’m changing it from a working boat to a bit of a show pony,” he mentions. “I like taking it out to Karapiro so I can disappear way up the lake, and I enjoy going to the Wooden Boat Festival at Rotoiti, near Rotorua.
Wherever Chris goes, the steamboat is a crowd-puller. He enjoys hearing the tales from people whose fathers and grandfathers were involved with steam.
Earlier on in life Chris built a miniature steam shunting engine and as he approaches retirement age his next project could be a replica of a KA locomotive of 1950s vintage, which would be about 1.8m long when complete.
“Steam boilers can be prone to explosions if not manufactured to rigorous standards”
The steam bug
Chris’s fellow steam enthusiast, John Olsen, lives in Cambridge and also gained his introduction to steam through his father.
John’s dad, Bill, was the fireman on a Fell engine on the Rimutaka Incline when the family lived in Masterton. Bill was also a keen model engineer and John still has his father’s collection of Model Engineer magazines dating back to 1944.
“I’d sit on his knee and look at the pictures.”
When John decided to build his 30ft launch Dancer, his father recommended he use a diesel engine rather than steam.
“He’d say, ‘Real engineers would have more sense than to touch something like that,’” John explains.
Building a boat, and a steamboat at that, involves a veritable library of skills and trades — not only boatbuilding but also pattern-making, fitting and turning, and boiler making. Although his professional background was in electronics, that didn’t stop John.
“I had built small steam engines before I got into boats. My first was a model Stuart 10V, about ¹/₁₂ scale. The originals were used in factories to drive machinery.”
The next was a ‘Double 10’ twincylinder marine engine that could be used to power a model boat of up to about 2m in length.
John, wife Diana, and their sons lived in Wellington for 17 years and the family did a stint in Germany, where John worked for telecommunications giant Ericsson. While there, they cruised the canals.
Building Dancer
Back in Wellington, John decided to build a steam-powered launch.
“I started on the engine. The idea was I’d spend three years on the engine, three years on the hull, and three years on the boiler but the whole lot took 17 years.”
In the early ’00s, John started talking to other people about building
“Building a boat, and a steamboat at that, involves a veritable library of skills and trades”
the engine. He went for a two-cylinder high-pressure simple-expansion engine, rather than the triple-expansion type Chris used. The simple expansion has a 90-degree crank that gives easy starting and is good at manoeuvring.
The engineering castings could be obtained and John went on to make many of his own patterns from custom wood and epoxy — anything that could stand up to being knocked around in the foundry.
The Dancer build started in Wellington, and that’s where most of the engine work was done. Then, halfway through the project, the family moved to Auckland, where John began the job of building the hull in the confined space of their suburban home’s basement.
Modern design touches
The hull was designed by Peter Sewell — son of Ralph Sewell, who built the legendary brigantine Breeze, which is still a popular sight in Auckland waters.
“I got a table of offsets and patterns from which I could create formers on the hog, put the keel on top and the deadwood for the bow.”
The hull is planked in cedar with the keel and deadwood knees in Australian jarrah and the transom in attractive African rosewood. The hull was glassed inside and out. This keeps the timber dry, makes the hull lighter, improves strength, and reduces the chance of rot.
John explained that although the overall style of Dancer comes from the 1890–1914 period — old-style steam launches began to disappear around the beginning of WWI, when many were converted to petrol or diesel engines — it is really a modern sort of hull with the ribs and bulkheads going in afterwards.
The deck is a plywood sandwich with foam at its core covered in recycled kauri.
After six years work, the hull was in one piece by 2013 and work began on the water-tube boiler. Similar to the Yarrow boiler design but more compact, and built of certified boiler-grade steel line pipe, the boiler has 130 tubes and was welded together by a professional welder. All the tubes were expanded into place with special tools. The boiler and the engine between them weigh about 600kgs and the hull has 150kgs of lead ballast built into its keel.
Dancer’s engine can produce about 10bhp and run up to about 600rpm, giving the 30-foot launch a speed of 7–8 knots through a coarse-pitch screw. John fires the twin-cylinder with diesel but, with the environment in mind, he’s on the lookout for a good source of used cooking oil.
Dancer gets a shed
The entire shooting-box was transported from Auckland to Cambridge in three shipping containers four years ago. A special trailer was built to carry the vessel and towed by a 4WD Nissan Patrol on LPG — combined cost around $25,000, plus $41,000 for a new shed.
Dancer had its introduction to the water at Lake Hakanoa in Huntly and its first official run on Lake Karapiro as part of the Cambridge Armistice Day event in 2018. It has since run on the Mahurangi River near Warkworth and in the Bay of Islands.
The boat is fitted with a removable cabin and can sleep up to four people, with two stowed under the foredeck and space for another two under the aft. John went a little bit further than Chris — he’s put his background in electronics to use by installing a set of solar cells on the cabin roof. The electrical current thus generated allows him to run a little galley stove and a refrigerator — the sort of mod cons not normally found on oldstyle steam launches but ones that make the craft more usable on outings.
“This keeps the timber dry, makes the hull lighter, improves strength, and reduces the chance of rot”