Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 70, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 April 1918 — Maritime Miscellany. [ARTICLE]

Maritime Miscellany.

One of the minor and yet exceeding ly important articles entering into the construction of a wooden ship is the “knee.” A ship knee is a right-angled wooden brace used to give strength to the framing and is fashioned from the natural crook of a tree formed by a heavy, shallow, horizontal root and a section of the trunk. Knees when finished are sometimes as much as six or seven feet high and many of them are four feet high. The tremendous impetus to wooden shipbuilding brought about by the war has resulted in the establishment of a sawmill at Portland, Ore., designed exclusively for the finishing of ship knees. The timber preferred is second-growth Douglas fir, found growing in shallow soil, so that the roots turn off at right angles to the trunk and thus give the proper shape. A tract of timber that will produce five to seven knees per acre is considered a good location for a camp. The standardized wooden ship requires some two hundred knees of all sizes, while of wooden ship, also under construction, requires more than one hundred and sixty knees. In addition to the production of knees by the special sawmill at Portland, various operators are also getting out knees by the old-fashioned method of hand hewing in the woods. —National Lumber Manufacturers’ Association.