Age of Sail ship (74) construction

[Elheru Aran]

Part of the deal with that is that working with green wood is far faster than with dry wood. It'll split, carve, and plane much more quickly. My guess is that the builders figured that as a decent portion of the hulls would be in water and not dry out. The upper structure of the ships would dry out, but it would take some time for the worst of the effects to show (cracking, warping, etc). So green wood was acceptable to them as a stopgap. Working in dry wood would have taken longer.

[LaCroix]

Right. My guess would be that they didn't expect most of the ships to last very long (due to battle damage), anyway, so they only needed to hold up during the war, but they were needed, NOW!

You will notice that right after the war, the build times for frigates quickly went back to the usual 1.5 to 3 years (with some exceptions when procurement was stalled), and their life time went back to ~50 years (or when the civil war put an end to them), showing that the "build rush methods" of the 1812 war were not continued.

[Elheru Aran]

Given that as far as I know the area of the Great Lakes was well forested at the time, they were probably simply commencing a program of massive logging and processing the wood directly into ship lumber.

Normally this is something that would've taken years if not decades-- cutting the wood into rough form and then stacking it to dry. The thicker the parts, the longer they would take to dry; wood two inches thick takes about six months to a year to dry fully, but four inches thick takes twice as long, and eight inches would take about four, if not six, times longer (depends on environment and species).

Not to mention that naturally shaped wood is far stronger than that which is carved or sawn to shape, so you're carefully selecting certain trees for their limb or trunk shapes, cutting those and setting them aside.

And that's without even mentioning that you have to select for species as well. Most softwoods aren't terribly suitable for an aquatic environment, so you have to go with hardwoods. This can be a good or bad thing; it depends on how common they are in certain areas.

I wonder, are there any numbers out there on how long they would have gone from cutting down the tree to actually rendering it into a ship in peacetime?

[Sea Skimmer]

quote="LaCroix"]
Alas, each and every one of their ships was laid up as soon as the war ended - to me, an indicator that noone trusted these things to stay afloat. Most were sold off or rotten to pieces ten years after the war, another indicator of poor quality, and quite possible the reason why they never continued with the two first rates they laid down just before the war ended.[/quote]

Of course many were sold off or rotten within ten years, the US and British banned warships from the lakes in 1818! The ships had to be disposed of, and many were not maintained from the moment the war ended. The US government completely refused to pay for a lake fleet in peacetime nor for that matter most of the regular ocean going fleet. Almost all US ships were demoblized at the end of the war of 1812, no matter where they were, as were almost all army units and forts. The same thing happened after the Revolution, and would again after the USCW.

The US did not begin to maintain an even remotely respectable military in peacetime until the birth of the steel navy in 1882. Prior to that after every way as quickly as possible everything was given up except a few cruisers for overseas duties. This then led to the burning of the demobilized fleet at Norfolk in 1861 to keep it out of rebel hands.

Do remember the US spent the whole Revolution bankrupt and was all but bankrupt in the War of 1812.

As for use of green wood, my understanding is the US largely used wood it had in stock dragged overland for its earlier lake fleets, I have no idea on the later ship of the line projects. The British were in a better position to bring in material, and did build some frames of HMS St. Lawrence in England. She and the American liners were designed as full ocean going warships, they had to be, the Great Lakes get crazy storms for their size because of how the arctic cold fronts blown down from Canada with nothing to stop them.

[LaCroix]

I did not know about that treaty. That explains why they were all sold off cheap during the 20's.

[Sea Skimmer]

Yeah, the treaty allowed just one 100 ton vessel with not over one gun of not over 18pdr on the lakes, and another on lake Champlain which had seen its own naval wars. The treaties of 1817 and 1818 also demarcated the border and line of control in the lakes accurately, the treaty at the end of the US revolution having been based on incorrect maps. In fact the maps were still a bit off, and at one point the US began building a fort a mile inside of Canada without anything objecting at first.

Extra amusingly with the birth of the US steel navy in 1882 it was proposed to build a very small armored gunboat, only 147 tons, that would be based on the Hudson river and able to pass through the Eire canal to seize control of lake Eire upon the outbreak of war. For some silly reason they never built it.

I'm still trying to figure out the green wood yes/no issue though for the lake fleets, Lake Champlain had some stuff built on it of up to frigate size within months too. However both sides had at least tiny shipyards preexisting on the lake. I have one very detailed book on the US sailing navy, but its lake war content is less then I had thought. Reading about the US obsession pre war of 1812 with tiny gunboats is depressing. Its like an early version of the FAC-M concept, except the worst vulnerability was that they could easily be captured... by British rowboats... because the sides were too low and they didn't have enough crew to repel it. This makes me think of Iranian speedboats trying to capture Soviet missile boats.

[Elheru Aran]

The main question as far as the green wood thing goes is how much of a stockpile of ship timber the Navy had built up, if any, between the Revolution and 1812. If they had a decent amount then the issue may simply be that the ships were hastily built in a shoddy manner. If not, then obviously they would have had to use green wood to offset the difference.

This is timber we are talking about, anywhere from one inch thick all the way on up to eight or twelve inches. For every inch of thickness, you are talking up to an extra year, if not more, for it to dry out. Even after, say, four years, an twelve-inch thick keel timber might not be dry in the middle, but most of it would be dry enough that it would be reasonably stable.

[LaCroix]

I know for a fact that the USS Niagara and Lawrence were constructed out of green timber at Cascade shipyard (see the document link I posted earlier), so it's safe to assume that the same would have happened at Sacket's.