Rick Thomson runs a boat repair shop in Lockhart called The Wooden Boat, but one of his recent ventures has brought him to Fredericksburg.

Prior to the National Museum of the Pacific War’s Pacific Combat Zone renovation project, they asked him to help with a particular item.

“Joe Cavanaugh called me and invited me to Fredericksburg so he could talk to me about a project,” Thomson said about the museum director.

The project was renovating a PT-309 (patrol torpedo boat) that would be on display at the combat zone complex.

During World War II, the boat was stationed in the Mediterranean Sea, where it sunk five enemy ships. Eventually, it became a fishing vessel in New York.

In the South Pacific, PT boats often were used against Japan in night missions. The Japanese called it “devil boat” or “the mosquito fleets.”

Once completed, the boat will be the only restored WWII PT boat on display in America.

When he arrived, Thomson looked at the boat to see what would be needed for renovations.

“At that point, I saw it would take a couple of years to do this project,” said Thomson, who now lives in Austin. “Once we established what needed to be done and the rough outline, it went into a holding pattern for the funding.”

Thompson saw his work was cut out for him, as someone had peeled off large sections of the original deck (which had been two-layer mahogany) and had replaced it with pine and plywood.

“Pine is not good for a boat like this,” he said. “They cut grooves to make it look like original planking. The Nimitz wanted us to pull out the plywood and replace it with period correct wood, and we did, using mahogany and bronze screws.”

Thomson, along with his crew of Woody Golden, James Dunlap and Tim Auld, has been working on this project now for about eight months. Because he has two other businesses, he has to shut them down when working in Fredericksburg. Spring is a busy time for the boating season.

“It’s been going relatively well,” he said. “We have about two-thirds of the deck restored from the wheelhouse to the transom (back of the boat). Initially we had to go in there and build a gantry crane since there’s a 40-millimeter cannon on the back of the boat. We came up with a rolling gantry crane so we could lift up the cannon and move it around.”

More copper needs to go in, and they’re still working on the forward part of the deck. He estimated the boat, by the time the project is completed, will have 9,000 to 10,000 copper rivets. The screws used in the boat are made of silica bronze.

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