INVADER
a vibrant racing career. Most importantly, Invader II
was a Fife with excellent racing characteristics; one
worthy of recreating.
Building a modern wooden boat to historical
standards is challenging enough. Meeting the 8-Metre
racing class specifications requires even further demands.
Building as close to the original plank-on-frame
construction plans in the Fife method, yet creating a boat
fully compliant to the rule, meant extreme devotion to
historical plans and drawings, construction details and
materials, distribution of weight throughout the vessel,
and of rig dimensions. Duncan Walker at Fairlie Yachts
in Hamble assembled her construction plans and
drawings. Using the Invader II plans, naval architect
Theo Rye prepared a table of offsets. The Wooden
Boatworks team lofted the lines, which were then used to
auto-cad full-sized construction drawings for cutting
materials on the shop floor.
In this case, the shop floor is in a cavernous potato
barn in eastern Long Island, an agricultural area known
more for growing wine grapes than for building beautiful
yachts. Wooden Boatworks has two facilities. One is on
the water in Greenport, with several sheds and shops
plus two marine railways for classic yacht maintenance
and repairs. The other is the expansive barn complex for
new builds. The barn also houses Wooden Boatworks’
extensive collection of vintage Merriman Brothers,
Wilcox Crittenden and Perko marine hardware – much
of it never-used old stock – and over 60,000 board feet
of seasoned, sustainably-harvested lumber suitable for
yacht building and repair. Still, assembling materials for
an accurate historical reconstruction is challenging. In
today’s world, construction timber comparable to a
1930s era Fife simply does not exist. Although materials
for the new Invader were collected for years, Costanzoand Wahl had to reach out to the best sources in
America. New England Naval Timbers in Cornwall
Connecticut located an extraordinary 46-foot white oak
at the Thomas Cole Museum in Catskill New York. The
30-inch diameter tree was milled for the 25ft by 2ft keel
stock. The original Invader II had 88 pairs of grown
timber frames. A modern boat builder could save
materials for a lifetime and still not have enough grown
frames to build a 48-footer, so Wooden Boatworks’
construction team substituted the best modern equivalent- laminated cherry – for the grown timber primary
frames. Then, as in the Fife method, they steam-bent two
white oak frames between each laminated cherry frame.
Another divergence from the original design is the floor
plates. William Fife used galvanized floor plates, whereas
Wooden Boatworks chose silicon bronze plates and strap
floors, which were fabricated by Kristian Iglesias of Kai
Design in Greenport. The lead keel itself was moulded by
Mars Metals of Burlington, Ontario and trucked to Long
Island. Invader is planked with Alaskan yellow cedar
and she is copper riveted.
Invader’s decks are Alaskan yellow cedar, for a
subtle golden blond tone that pairs beautifully with her
varnished dovetailed cherry cabin, covering boards, and
toe rails. Setting off her decks and cherry rails is a
tasteful marriage of traditional bronze and stainless
steel deck hardware. Wooden Boatworks’ large vintage
hardware collection, plus customized details, made
Invader’s authenticity possible. Carrying the
combination stainless and bronze theme elsewhere
throughout the deck, stainless rails – instead of wood as
Fife would have done – were positioned on the fore
and after decks with bronze eyes.
The tiller is a work of art and can be described as
no less than deck jewellery. Fife’s original tillers were
Dacron cross-cut
sails by North