The Steamboating Forum

What would be the "correct" camber/rake of the funnel?

John,
Rake = the angle that the stack or mast makes with the vertical. Rakish = smart or fast in appearance.

Camber = the athwartships crown in a deck or cabin top.

Defenitions Are Us
Dave

Angle that the stack should lean back

10deg. off vertical in profile on level waterline

Greg

In algebra, the angle of the dangle (x) is necessary to find y (the heat of the meat) provided that the maxis of the axis (graphing in y=mx+b) and the gravity of the cavity (solving inequalities) remain constant.

From a STEAMBOATING article by Kelly Anderson back in 1993:

Rake: for a steam launch, 5 to 10 degrees, 5 degrees is about the aesthetic minimum, while 10 degrees, makes the boat look like it is going 10 knots at the dock. Reciproca has 8 degrees of stack rake. Kelly also recommended stack height, from waterline, be equal to 1/3 of boat length.

The Brits are fond of more rake, I think, than the US folks... You want a bit of rake, since boats look funny if the stack leans forward. Have someone hold the funnel while you eyeball what you like...

- Bart

Personally I think the stack should parallel any other vertical lines. If there are stanchions for a canopy and they are 5° then the stack looks right at 5°.

-Ron

Rake is very much a personal choice, but generally more is better than not enough. I can't say that i've measured Zeltic's rake, but that on MV Swan was 7 degrees if I remember correctly. Unlike Ron, I don't believe it needs to be parallel to any other line, Zeltic has far more rake on her funnel than the mast, which has more rake than the front of the cabin and canopy stanchions. Swan's masts an funnel were all parallel, but again more than the handrail stanchions.

The worst thing you can do is do what the Maritime Museum have done in Auckland to Puke, they have set the funnel up with no rake at all, which gives the impression that the funnel is actually leaning forward when the boat is sitting level. It never had the large amounts of rake that Settler, Zeltic and Swan had, but it used to have enough to make her look right.

Daniel

Looking at late 19th century steamships, the great majority had stack rakes of 5 to 9 degrees, and in every example I could find (from about 50 ships) in this era, the masts were always with exactly the same rake. Below are a couple of examples.

The first picture shows relatively extreme rake, at 12 degrees. The second picture shows how the artist added rake to make the ship look like it had even more extreme rake. The artist rendering shows 21 degrees, the ship profile drawing shows only 6 degrees.