Yours is the best site on these boats that can be found on the net. It seems odd to ask in California about a New England boat.
I rescued this boat from under a deck in New Jersey. She hasn't been sailed in over 20 years. The basic layout looks like the original CD 10, but it is 14'5" LOA and 51" beam. The teak is all rotted, but the glass is sound.
Any information on the rigging would be appreciated. I have several questions:
Where is the halyard tied off?
Is a downhaul used?
Where would the mainsheet block be mounted?
What did the aft end of the mainsheet tie to? (an athwartships cable, like a Sunfish?)
How is the heavy plate steel centerboard raised?
How old might she be?
My family and I will be restoring her and sailing mostly on Round Valley Reservoir in NJ. Any info would be appreciated.
Fair Winds,
Mark
chimel@nac.net
CD 14 hull # 191
Moderator: Jim Walsh
-
Jonathan Engdahl
Re: CD 14 hull # 191 (long)
I also have a Cape Dory 14. Yours is the first mention I've ever seen of another. I was beginning to think that it was an orphan. I think mine is older than yours, about #174 or something like that, but I'll have to check when I get home.
I'm guessing that mine was used on Lake Erie somewhere around Cleveland, OH. It was sold to someone who stripped all the hardware, and was going to do some restoration. He got tired of the job and sold it to someone else. That person left it sitting in a barn for a while, then I ran across it and bought it for $700. By this time half the hardware was lost, but I have the major pieces, including the sail.
If you want to get some idea what your boat will look like when restored, take a look at the Whitehall Spirit 14' at http://www.whitehall.com. The wineglass stern on the Cape Dory is a bit more moderate than that of the Whitehall, and the Cape Dory seems more sturdily built, but they are very similar.
I'm not really doing a "correct" restoration. This is my first sailboat, and I just wanted one that was relatively dry and stable. I also have a liking for traditional boats ("Swallows & Amazons"). I get some parts from a marine store, and some from the local hardware. Here's what I've done to it so far:
- I had to fabricate a bracket to mount the rudder on. The large brass Y shaped thingy that the rudder hangs on was there, but whatever mounted it onto the hull was gone, so I cobbled some brackets together from aluminum angle and stainless eyebolts. I hope it kicks up if I ever hit something, but I've never given it a real test. The rudder was workable, although it needs to be refinished.
- I found some brass oarlock sockets (what are they called? I’m not very salty yet) to replace the missing ones. There is a brass plate that sets on top of the gunwale, with a sleeve that lines the hole through the rail. I borrowed a pair of 7' oars from our rowboat. I had to move the clamp-on-the-oar part of the oarlocks up, because at first the handles hit each other in the middle. The other boat is rather wide. The first time we put it in the water we tried rowing with two pairs of oars, but the gunwales seemed weak so we had to back off. Later I dug a lot of rot out from around the oarlocks. On some of them I just filled with epoxy -- you can't see the mess when the oarlock is installed. For one of them I cut and shaped a piece of teak and replaced a section of the middle layer of the gunwale around one oarlock. I redrilled and screwed several places on the gunwales to strength the connection to the fiberglass hull, replaced plugs, filled a lot of gaps with epoxy, and slathered on the teak oil.
I love the way it rows. One stroke is worth three in our other boat. The part I don't like is that my hands hit my knees on the return -- the gunwales are too low. I have to hang my rear off the back side of the middle thwart to get clearance, and wind up sort of half on the thwart and half straddling the centerboard case. Ouch.
- The centerboard is a massive plate of quarter inch steel. It is held from falling by a shaft that runs through the front top corner of the board, and holds two pulley wheels and two hard rubber wheels. The wheels run along the top edge of the centerboard case, which is a smooth curved surface. The pulleys fit between the sides of the centerboard case, one on either side of the centerboard. There are two small pulley wheels at the very front of the case on another shaft. A rope is fastened somewhere (I can't remember where right now), visits each pulley in turn, then runs aft, through a hole in the back of the centerboard case, and gets fastened to a cleat within reach of the steersman. Pulling on the rope pulls the top of the centerboard forward. The hard rubber wheels roll forward along the curved top surface of the centerboard case. The front edge of the centerboard sort of rolls/slides over a curved surface down in the case. This action swings the bottom end of the board aft and up into the case. There is a wooden cap to the aft end of the centerboard case that runs under the cover of middle thwart (which is a sort of storage bin). When the centerboard is up I can flip the boat upside down and the board won't fall out. The pulleys used to raise and lower the centerboard were cracked and chipped. I tried repairing with epoxy, but it didn't work. I found a set of pulley wheels at the marine store. They were a bit too wide so I sanded them down a bit. Even so, you sometimes have to give the centerboard a shove when you lower it, but it works fairly well. The centerboard is very rusty and pitted, but structurally sound. I might get it sandblasted, or maybe I'll see what it would cost to have a new one fabricated. In either case, I have a can of red marine paint for steel that is supposed to protect it.
- I mounted the mast using forestay and shrouds of plastic coated steel cable from the hardware store. It took me two tries -- the first cable I tried wasn't strong enough. I am using some cheap galvanized turnbuckles for now. The forestay attaches to a piece of stainless strap I mounted to the back side of the bolts that fasten the mooring ring, just inside the stem. There appears to be a chunk of wood missing between the wooden gunwale rails in the very front, and I haven't tried to replace it. It doesn't seem to be needed, and its absence lets me get at the back of the mooring ring mounting. There were holes in the gunwales in the right places, so I put stainless eyebolts in to anchor the shouds. To the port eyebolt I fastened a small block. The halyard comes down alongside the shroud, through the block, and back a bit to a cleat on the inboard side of the gunwale. I should have gotten a longer halyard and mounted the cleat farther back, because now I have to run forward to drop the sail, just at the time when I really need to be at the tiller.
- I've tried a couple ways of dealing with the mainsheet. At first I tried this: there were holes drilled sideways through the teak gunwale just forward of the transom. Here I mounted two large stainless eyebolts with the eyes out and the threaded ends in (so the bolt ends don't bung up someone else's paint). I tied a piece of rope between these that made a sort of traveller that would raise to a peak about 12 inches above the center of the transom. The rope has a gizmo (a Harken part) that is two blocks with their ends fastened together on it, so the bottom block runs along the traveller rope, and the mainsheet runs through the top block. The mainsheet runs from the end of the boom, to the traveller, to a block near the end of the boom, forward along the boom to another block that is just above the aft end of the centerboard, then down to my hand.
With this setup I found myself getting tangled up in everything every time we came around. It might be the setup, or it might just be me, since I taught myself to sail *after* I got the boat back together and working. I also messed up every time I mounted the rudder -- you have to poke the tiller under the traveller *before* you mount it.
Later in the summer I tried a different setup. I took the traveller rope off, and tied the block down to a cleat on the aft end of the centerboard case (just aft of the middle thwart, right near where you deal with the rope that raises the centerboard). Now the mainsheet is fastened mid-boom just forward of the block that is mounted there. It runs down to the fixed block on the centerboard case, back up to the block mid-boom, aft along the boom to the block on the end, then down into my hand. This seems to work better for the steersman, but is inconvenient for the crew, since she can no longer comfortably sit on the middle thwart and laugh at me as we come about.
There are two eyes on the gaff, I'm not sure at the moment which one I use, but when the sail is raised, the gaff is vertical, and locks into jaws at the head of the mast. The jaws on the mast have to point aft. The gaff and mast overlap by about four feet. If you have the spars, you will likely see wear marks where the gaff jaws ring the mast, and where the jaws at the top of the mast hit the gaff. The halyard pulls the gaff right up into the jaws on the mast. If the knot that fastens the halyard to the gaff is too large or loose you'll have problems getting this to work right. Even so, with a strong wind, the halyard stretches, and eventually the gaff slips out of the jaws and lets the sail sag a bit. It really is a Marconi rig with a folding mast, rather than a gaff rig.
Oh yes -- lacing the sail is very important. The first time I did it I laced it too tight. I pulled down on the end of the boom once to see what flattening the sail would do, and the sail ripped a couple feet above the tack. We sewed in a patch of demin to hold things together for now. Looks great on a white sail (well, it used to be white, it's sort of grey now). What you have to do is start at the peak of the gaff, lace the sail fairly tightly to the gaff, make a knot at the eye which is near the gaff jaws, then lace *loosely* to the mast until you get to the boom, so that the leach (?) forms a straight line all the way down when the gaff is raised, even though there is a gap between the leach and the mast all the way from the lower end of the gaff to the tack. This loose lacing makes a mess when the sail is lowered. Make a knot to another eye near the jaws on the boom, then lace tightly to the boom. The sail doesn't quite reach to the end of the boom, so I have a creative mess out there that goes through the last grommet, around the boom, back through the grommet, out to the eye, back to the gromet, ... It serves the purpose of an out-haul, and also keeps the sail tight to the boom. The entire lacing is once piece of rope.
I don't use a downhaul (yet). There is a patched hole in the fiberglass near where you might have expected a downhaud to be mounted.
I then proceeded to teach myself to sail, by trial and not too many errors. The lake is small and surrounded by woods, so the wind is always coming from a different direction. I haven't capsized it yet. It's not supposed to. My opinion is that in this boat that would be like bashing a fender on a car. If I want to get wet, we now have another boat for that (MFG Sidewinder, another orphan).
I have some trouble sometimes tacking, When I put the tiller down the boat refuses to come around. It stalls, I fall back to the previous tack to get some speed, try again, etc. Some times, when the lily pads were coming up fast, I've had to come around the other way and jibe, because I couldn't make it head into the wind and across. I don't know if it's something I'm doing wrong, or if I've got the boat put together wrong.
I have drawings I made of some of the parts that I can copy and send to you. If you want, maybe I could take pictures of how things are put together. I tried writing to Spartan Marine a couple years ago. They didn't help much. There aren't any spare parts, and no drawings. They sent me a catalog that shows the little 10 footer. Let me know if you come up with any documentation. I also got hold of a phototcopy, from some marine museum in New England, of a 14 foot catboat that Cape Dory made. It was much wider than the CD 14, and has a gaff rig.
I've been thinking, since I need a new sail, maybe I could make new spars out of steel pipe, and copy a gaff rigged sail from the BeetleCat or something. I wonder how that would work? Would that upset the balance of the boat? The sail would be significantly larger, and the center of effort would probably move down and aft.
I’m going off on vacation tomorrow, so I’ll check back in a week.
--
Jonathan Engdahl | Rockwell Automation
Senior Project Engineer | 1 Allen-Bradley Drive
Advanced Technology | Mayfield Heights, OH, 44124, USA
Mayfield Heights Labs | engdahl@cle.ab.com 216-646-4365
BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WONT DROWN
engdahl@cle.ab.com
I'm guessing that mine was used on Lake Erie somewhere around Cleveland, OH. It was sold to someone who stripped all the hardware, and was going to do some restoration. He got tired of the job and sold it to someone else. That person left it sitting in a barn for a while, then I ran across it and bought it for $700. By this time half the hardware was lost, but I have the major pieces, including the sail.
If you want to get some idea what your boat will look like when restored, take a look at the Whitehall Spirit 14' at http://www.whitehall.com. The wineglass stern on the Cape Dory is a bit more moderate than that of the Whitehall, and the Cape Dory seems more sturdily built, but they are very similar.
I'm not really doing a "correct" restoration. This is my first sailboat, and I just wanted one that was relatively dry and stable. I also have a liking for traditional boats ("Swallows & Amazons"). I get some parts from a marine store, and some from the local hardware. Here's what I've done to it so far:
- I had to fabricate a bracket to mount the rudder on. The large brass Y shaped thingy that the rudder hangs on was there, but whatever mounted it onto the hull was gone, so I cobbled some brackets together from aluminum angle and stainless eyebolts. I hope it kicks up if I ever hit something, but I've never given it a real test. The rudder was workable, although it needs to be refinished.
- I found some brass oarlock sockets (what are they called? I’m not very salty yet) to replace the missing ones. There is a brass plate that sets on top of the gunwale, with a sleeve that lines the hole through the rail. I borrowed a pair of 7' oars from our rowboat. I had to move the clamp-on-the-oar part of the oarlocks up, because at first the handles hit each other in the middle. The other boat is rather wide. The first time we put it in the water we tried rowing with two pairs of oars, but the gunwales seemed weak so we had to back off. Later I dug a lot of rot out from around the oarlocks. On some of them I just filled with epoxy -- you can't see the mess when the oarlock is installed. For one of them I cut and shaped a piece of teak and replaced a section of the middle layer of the gunwale around one oarlock. I redrilled and screwed several places on the gunwales to strength the connection to the fiberglass hull, replaced plugs, filled a lot of gaps with epoxy, and slathered on the teak oil.
I love the way it rows. One stroke is worth three in our other boat. The part I don't like is that my hands hit my knees on the return -- the gunwales are too low. I have to hang my rear off the back side of the middle thwart to get clearance, and wind up sort of half on the thwart and half straddling the centerboard case. Ouch.
- The centerboard is a massive plate of quarter inch steel. It is held from falling by a shaft that runs through the front top corner of the board, and holds two pulley wheels and two hard rubber wheels. The wheels run along the top edge of the centerboard case, which is a smooth curved surface. The pulleys fit between the sides of the centerboard case, one on either side of the centerboard. There are two small pulley wheels at the very front of the case on another shaft. A rope is fastened somewhere (I can't remember where right now), visits each pulley in turn, then runs aft, through a hole in the back of the centerboard case, and gets fastened to a cleat within reach of the steersman. Pulling on the rope pulls the top of the centerboard forward. The hard rubber wheels roll forward along the curved top surface of the centerboard case. The front edge of the centerboard sort of rolls/slides over a curved surface down in the case. This action swings the bottom end of the board aft and up into the case. There is a wooden cap to the aft end of the centerboard case that runs under the cover of middle thwart (which is a sort of storage bin). When the centerboard is up I can flip the boat upside down and the board won't fall out. The pulleys used to raise and lower the centerboard were cracked and chipped. I tried repairing with epoxy, but it didn't work. I found a set of pulley wheels at the marine store. They were a bit too wide so I sanded them down a bit. Even so, you sometimes have to give the centerboard a shove when you lower it, but it works fairly well. The centerboard is very rusty and pitted, but structurally sound. I might get it sandblasted, or maybe I'll see what it would cost to have a new one fabricated. In either case, I have a can of red marine paint for steel that is supposed to protect it.
- I mounted the mast using forestay and shrouds of plastic coated steel cable from the hardware store. It took me two tries -- the first cable I tried wasn't strong enough. I am using some cheap galvanized turnbuckles for now. The forestay attaches to a piece of stainless strap I mounted to the back side of the bolts that fasten the mooring ring, just inside the stem. There appears to be a chunk of wood missing between the wooden gunwale rails in the very front, and I haven't tried to replace it. It doesn't seem to be needed, and its absence lets me get at the back of the mooring ring mounting. There were holes in the gunwales in the right places, so I put stainless eyebolts in to anchor the shouds. To the port eyebolt I fastened a small block. The halyard comes down alongside the shroud, through the block, and back a bit to a cleat on the inboard side of the gunwale. I should have gotten a longer halyard and mounted the cleat farther back, because now I have to run forward to drop the sail, just at the time when I really need to be at the tiller.
- I've tried a couple ways of dealing with the mainsheet. At first I tried this: there were holes drilled sideways through the teak gunwale just forward of the transom. Here I mounted two large stainless eyebolts with the eyes out and the threaded ends in (so the bolt ends don't bung up someone else's paint). I tied a piece of rope between these that made a sort of traveller that would raise to a peak about 12 inches above the center of the transom. The rope has a gizmo (a Harken part) that is two blocks with their ends fastened together on it, so the bottom block runs along the traveller rope, and the mainsheet runs through the top block. The mainsheet runs from the end of the boom, to the traveller, to a block near the end of the boom, forward along the boom to another block that is just above the aft end of the centerboard, then down to my hand.
With this setup I found myself getting tangled up in everything every time we came around. It might be the setup, or it might just be me, since I taught myself to sail *after* I got the boat back together and working. I also messed up every time I mounted the rudder -- you have to poke the tiller under the traveller *before* you mount it.
Later in the summer I tried a different setup. I took the traveller rope off, and tied the block down to a cleat on the aft end of the centerboard case (just aft of the middle thwart, right near where you deal with the rope that raises the centerboard). Now the mainsheet is fastened mid-boom just forward of the block that is mounted there. It runs down to the fixed block on the centerboard case, back up to the block mid-boom, aft along the boom to the block on the end, then down into my hand. This seems to work better for the steersman, but is inconvenient for the crew, since she can no longer comfortably sit on the middle thwart and laugh at me as we come about.
There are two eyes on the gaff, I'm not sure at the moment which one I use, but when the sail is raised, the gaff is vertical, and locks into jaws at the head of the mast. The jaws on the mast have to point aft. The gaff and mast overlap by about four feet. If you have the spars, you will likely see wear marks where the gaff jaws ring the mast, and where the jaws at the top of the mast hit the gaff. The halyard pulls the gaff right up into the jaws on the mast. If the knot that fastens the halyard to the gaff is too large or loose you'll have problems getting this to work right. Even so, with a strong wind, the halyard stretches, and eventually the gaff slips out of the jaws and lets the sail sag a bit. It really is a Marconi rig with a folding mast, rather than a gaff rig.
Oh yes -- lacing the sail is very important. The first time I did it I laced it too tight. I pulled down on the end of the boom once to see what flattening the sail would do, and the sail ripped a couple feet above the tack. We sewed in a patch of demin to hold things together for now. Looks great on a white sail (well, it used to be white, it's sort of grey now). What you have to do is start at the peak of the gaff, lace the sail fairly tightly to the gaff, make a knot at the eye which is near the gaff jaws, then lace *loosely* to the mast until you get to the boom, so that the leach (?) forms a straight line all the way down when the gaff is raised, even though there is a gap between the leach and the mast all the way from the lower end of the gaff to the tack. This loose lacing makes a mess when the sail is lowered. Make a knot to another eye near the jaws on the boom, then lace tightly to the boom. The sail doesn't quite reach to the end of the boom, so I have a creative mess out there that goes through the last grommet, around the boom, back through the grommet, out to the eye, back to the gromet, ... It serves the purpose of an out-haul, and also keeps the sail tight to the boom. The entire lacing is once piece of rope.
I don't use a downhaul (yet). There is a patched hole in the fiberglass near where you might have expected a downhaud to be mounted.
I then proceeded to teach myself to sail, by trial and not too many errors. The lake is small and surrounded by woods, so the wind is always coming from a different direction. I haven't capsized it yet. It's not supposed to. My opinion is that in this boat that would be like bashing a fender on a car. If I want to get wet, we now have another boat for that (MFG Sidewinder, another orphan).
I have some trouble sometimes tacking, When I put the tiller down the boat refuses to come around. It stalls, I fall back to the previous tack to get some speed, try again, etc. Some times, when the lily pads were coming up fast, I've had to come around the other way and jibe, because I couldn't make it head into the wind and across. I don't know if it's something I'm doing wrong, or if I've got the boat put together wrong.
I have drawings I made of some of the parts that I can copy and send to you. If you want, maybe I could take pictures of how things are put together. I tried writing to Spartan Marine a couple years ago. They didn't help much. There aren't any spare parts, and no drawings. They sent me a catalog that shows the little 10 footer. Let me know if you come up with any documentation. I also got hold of a phototcopy, from some marine museum in New England, of a 14 foot catboat that Cape Dory made. It was much wider than the CD 14, and has a gaff rig.
I've been thinking, since I need a new sail, maybe I could make new spars out of steel pipe, and copy a gaff rigged sail from the BeetleCat or something. I wonder how that would work? Would that upset the balance of the boat? The sail would be significantly larger, and the center of effort would probably move down and aft.
I’m going off on vacation tomorrow, so I’ll check back in a week.
--
Jonathan Engdahl | Rockwell Automation
Senior Project Engineer | 1 Allen-Bradley Drive
Advanced Technology | Mayfield Heights, OH, 44124, USA
Mayfield Heights Labs | engdahl@cle.ab.com 216-646-4365
BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WONT DROWN
engdahl@cle.ab.com