Building Another Battleship

Here in San Diego, I have built two wooden workbenches in my garage. They are identical in size, each with a 8' x 2.5' top. They were designed on the fly and there are small differences in their construction, but by and large, they are identical. I named them after battleships, specifically battleships named for states in Dixie. The first is BB-60, the USS Alabama and the second is BB-41, the USS Mississippi.

I recently spent a week at our river house in Alabama. This time, I didn't have much maintenance to do on the place so I finally had a chance to outfit the storage room below the house. As we're right on the river and this is the Gulf Coast, the house is designed to withstand substantial flooding. The living quarters are a good 17' off the river's normal levels, but there's a large storage room below the house at ground level. According to flood records, it's possible that the storage room will flood to about 6' deep sometime in the next 20 years.

One of the things I want to do in the river house is work on various goofy projects. The storage room had a lovely drafting table made from solid wood, but the thing was naturally sloped and a bit small for my purposes. It became a junk table. Further, I've now got a decent fleet of DeWalt cordless power tools, but I couldn't find them easily nor find their related drill bits, drivers and blades. The place was a mess, albeit with all the expensive stuff stored in plastic bins on shelves well above anything less than Noah-esque flood levels.

On this trip, I built BB-55, the USS North Carolina. I had a wonderful time doing it. The guys at Home Depot were wonderful and cut all of my lumber to size without charging me, chatting pleasantly with me the whole time. I ended up with what amounted to an Ikea workbench of my own design that I had to assemble. I took it home and put it together over two days.

BB-55

Like its sister ships, it's got two layers of 3/4" plywood for a top and is lag bolted onto the studs. One advantage to the river house storage room is that there's no drywall occluding the studs. That meant I was able to score a bullseye effortlessly every time with the bolts and screws going into the wall.

I stopped at two coats of Spar urethane, leaving a small amount of rough grain sticking up after the last sand-coat cycle. Upon returning to San Diego, I felt my other workbenches and found no such roughness. Next time I go back, I'll give her another round of sanding and coating to make the top smooth.

Now comes another fun part - organizing my tools, accessories and hardware for easy location. Because this isn't a garage shared with the wife, I have complete freedom to set up this workshop exactly how I want.

Why The USS North Carolina?

It seemed strange to have the USS Alabama in San Diego and the USS Whatever in Alabama, but the ways of the CNO are an eternal mystery to all. Actually, I built the Alabama more than a decade before I had settled on buying property in the heart of Dixie and there was no way I could swap the names of the two ships.

I looked into the USS Louisiana, but the most recent battleship with that name was BB-19 which never saw action and was obsolete within a few years of completion thanks to the substantial advances in British naval engineering that were manifested in the HMS Dreadnought. BB-19 did sail around the world with the Great White Fleet, but that was just about all it did before being scrapped.

With that name off the table, I turned to my fiction and discovered that North Carolina plays a small part. 

"We got kinfolk in Norf Caroliner and kinfolk in Indyanner," said Bubba to Meemaw and Darlene. "We'll flip a coin to see where we'll go." His wife nodded, but as he tossed a quarter in the air in the cab, Meemaw, with catlike quickness, swatted the coin out of the air and out the open window where it bounced on the pavement and was quickly lost behind them.

"We are not going to North Carolina. Billy Bob and Carol may be kinfolk, but I will not stay with them. They are barbarians."

"What in tarnation is wrong with Billy Bob and Carol?" asked Bubba in disbelief.

"That woman gets her roux from a jar," pronounced Meemaw with undisguised disgust as she took another drag on her cigarette.

Despite the fact that Carol gets her roux from a jar, the presence of kinfolk in North Carolina was good enough for me. Also, BB-55 is one of the more storied battleships in US Navy history. And so the North Carolina is homeported in Mobile while the USS Alabama is homeported in San Diego.

Who am I to question the CNO?

Fiction Update

Since I'm now writing for myself, I've decided that I'm really writing a single world. The stories with Bobby Lee and Basil are in the same Universe and the exact same time as the ones with the Hardy Boys knockoff lads. The Southern extended family will be scattered throughout Dixie and in some locations include women who get their roux from jars.