Category Archives: Interior

Decks and such.

Since last we touched base there has been more odd job activity, as well as some big steps.

There’s been some ongoing varnishing, though at this point I’m basically waiting for the AwlSpar coats to dry enough that they can be overcoated with the AwlBrite.  AwlSpar I was willing to do in my apartment.  AwlBrite, notsomuch.  About half the contents of AwlBrite start with “hexa.”  For whatever reason (someone please explain to me if you know!) it seems like chemicals that start with hexa are really frigging bad for you.  Hexavalent Chromium?  Yeah, I saw Erin Brockovich.  The list goes on, but I won’t bore you.  Anyway, even though I’ve got things all masked off so that basically I don’t smell anything outside my kitchen – where I make food – I’m not going to bring that crap into my house.  This is a problem in that it needs to cure in temperatures well above what our current SF winter is providing, but I’ll figure something out.

One thing that you, dear reader, have not yet seen is the veneer I built for the face of the step up to the forward casting platform area.  I decided to add a bit of flare here and represent the day shape for a boat engaged in fishing in teak inlay in the middle of the step.  For those who haven’t sat through a USCG certified captain’s license exam, day shapes are visual signals hung on boats during the day to signify certain things.  At night you use lights.  Here’s the day shape for a vessel engaged in fishing:

 

Here’s the fascia for the step.  See it hiding in there?:

Okay, actually, nearly everything I just said is a flat out lie.  That is, in fact, the day shape for a commercial fishing vessel engaged in fishing, but the truth is that the two remaining pieces of veneer I had weren’t wide enough to cover the step with the seam dead center, so I pieced some scraps together to make that inlay and make the whole thing a few inches wider.  It only occurred to me later that it kinda looked like the day shape.  But I like the other explanation better.

When not at home huffing varnish, I’ve gotten some big stuff done.  On Tuesday I bagged the balsa to the inside of the motorwell to thicken the walls.

 

This was a rather time consuming process, principally because I decided to use up the scraps of balsa I had left over from doing the hullsides and this quickly turned into a game of balsa-tetris trying to get the entire surface covered.  I make a point of trying to be efficient in my use of material.  I might have gone too far this time, but it worked in the end.


Today, I had my dad back on the job so we did what was definitely a 2-person job:  shaping and bonding the forward decks.  Here they are, all “clamped” in place.  I was out of bronze and stainless screws and didn’t want to go to the store, so we scrounged around the shop and found everything we could that was heavy to compress the decks into the epoxy.  The casters of the dolly she’s sitting on were less than thrilled, but they’re holding in there.

 

I also spent some time trying to shape the drain openings to the motorwell.  I’m close, but there’s still some fine tuning to do.

 

And in a similar vein, I got out the holesaw and drilled the routing holes in the aft starboard frames so I can get the steering and electrical lines to the motor.  While I was at it I drilled smaller holes in every frame for whatever random routing ultimately needs to happen down the road, and then had a bit of a brainstorm about under-gunnel courtesy lights and realized that if I notched the tops of the frames, rather than just drilling holes, I could run an uninterrupted length of LED ribbon down each side.  This would be much faster to do, and would have fewer connections that could go bad.  Here’s what those look like:


It’s been an expensive few days.  I ordered a bunch of parts for the fuel system, all the steering components, and bought teak for the cockpit gunnels and inwales.  Wanna see how much teak you get for $1000?  This stuff is $35/BF.  Crazy.  But there really isn’t anything else that comes close.

 

Odd jobs

We’re at the point with this project where there are lots of little details to sort out.  You bust ass all day feeling like you’re doing stuff, but at the end of the day the boat still looks pretty much the same.  Sigh…

That said, there has been a bunch of stuff accomplished, some of which actually shows when photographed.

First off, I’ve cut the opening for the anchor locker door and applied InterProtect 2000E to the anchor locker, as well as the hidden portions of the hullsides far enough up that we didn’t bother to fill them with balsa.  While I was at it I did the tops of the frames since the teak covers won’t extend very far above the bottom of the inwales.

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Sorry about the curiously placed plastic crates in that photo. I got them down for a friend that wanted to use one and didn’t have it in me to climb back up and put them away at the end of the day.

 

I’ve also … finally … finished the work in the transom area.  Here you can see the results.  the hose furthest to port (left) is the outlet from the forward bilge hose.  Moving to starboard, we have the outlet from the aft bilge hose, the outlet from the bait tank, and finally the outlet from the sump pump.  To keep things from moving around too much I tied the port side hoses together with clamps.  This made a big difference.  On the starboard side, I actually added a block that I could attach a clamp to for the sump outlet.  I did this because the sump hose is 1″, but the throughhulls I found didn’t come in 1″, only 1 1/8″.  I had to adapt using barb fittings and a short length of 1 1/8″ hose, which means there’s a lot going on there.  I wanted it well supported.*

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If you look at the starboard side under the throughhull plumbing you’ll see some wiring and hoses that disappear into the corner. That’s the fuel line, the oil line, and the oil level sender cable. They route up through the fillet-chase on the outside of the motorwell. There’s also a piece of leechline tied off to the hose mount. That’s a pull cord in case I ever need to get anything else through that chase.

Having now finally finished everything I could think of in the transom area I boldly decided to do something that looked vaguely like progress and I bonded in the motorwell bottom. Here it is with a bunch of steel drops and some scraps of granite holding it down while the epoxy cures. Also to the right in this photo you can see the hoses and wires that are run up the chase:

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Further progress on the hullsides is somewhat impeded by the varnishing process for the frame covers. I’m still deciding if I want to prime before or after putting those on. In the meantime, the kitchen in my apartment is masked off to try to keep the fumes down while I varnish the covers here. It was just too cold in the shop.

While the varnish is going on – it’s going to take quite a while – I can now begin work on the gunwales and the inner part of the motorwell. I may also take a crack at mocking up the console to make sure I like what I’ve designed on paper.  Would be good to get that in progress sooner than later.

-Ben
 

*Note:  1 1/8″ barb fittings in bronze, brass or marelon are scarce as hen’s teeth.  Originally I used a plastic adapter that’s purpose built for going from 1″ to 1 1/8″, but I got nervous about using plastic since this would be a bear to change later.  (Doable, but annoying.)  I bought a 1-1/4″ threaded barb fitting in brass and turned the threaded end down to a barb I could get into the 1″ hose, and the 1 1/4″ end down to a 1 1/8″ barb and used that instead.  I feel better now.

Motorwell drains and deck framing

All of the metal on this boat is polished 316 stainless steel.  All of it.  No aluminum.  No bronze.  No brass.  Nada.  Zip.  Zero.  316 stainless steel.  This is fact 1 in this story.

Fact 2 is that the transom is painted already, and thus any transom penetration (of which there are many) needs some kind of trim around it to hide the rough edge of the cut hole.

With those two facts as background, consider that the motorwell needs to have a pair of drains so that water that collects in it has a place to go.  Then consider that I spent a LOT of time googling around and found not one example of a polished stainless motorwell drain fitting (or really anything that could be pressed into service in that capacity.)

Taken together, all this means it’s time to dust off the metalworking equipment.  I took some 1/8″ 316 flat bar and fashioned rough “washers” with 1″ holes drilled in the centers and rough circles cut out around the holes to form a 3/8″ wide washer surface.  I then cajoled my buddy Joel – a spectacular welder – to fuse these washers to a pair of 1″ OD 316 tubes.  These then went to the Hardinge to get machined to a reasonable shape.

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As machined they were pretty good – no chatter in that low hour sweetheart of a lathe – but they had more of a “brushed” appearance than a “polished” one.

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So I chucked them up again and scotchbrited them on the lathe to get the welding color off and generally smooth them out, and then mounted a sisal wheel in my grinder and compounded them until they were reasonably shiny.
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I’ve now permanently installed the plumbing thruhulls in the transom.  The motorwell drains will sit above and slightly inboard of them.  The holes are drilled, but I won’t install them permanently until the interior is painted.  On the inside, the holes will not be trimmed out, but will just be painted openings.  The tubes will be cut off so they go about half way into the transom and just held in place with 4200.  Here’s a shot of how the transom will look.  Less the motor, of course.  I’m pretty happy with it.
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We also installed the forward deck beams today.  Definitely makes the interior feel smaller!
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Tomorrow I’ll spend some more time on the interior fairing process and generally putter about with details.  There are a lot of details to attend to at this point.  Good times!

 

-Ben

Bandsaw beats finger

So, if you were contemplating a real world test to confirm your suspicion, I can spare you the trouble. Shoving one’s finger into a bandsaw yields a single result. And it isn’t damage to the bandsaw. Sigh…

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Beyond inflicting damage to my extremities, we’ve been plugging away at interior minutiae.

The balsa filled sections are glassed and faired. Or mostly faired. It’s proving more challenging than expected to get them “right” and I keep putting more compound on them and sanding it off to an unsatisfactory result. And then repeating. But it’s more or less done. In addition – and I’m just going to rattle off a litany of things we’ve done and then add a bunch of photos – we’ve drilled the motor mount holes in the transom, drilled the thruhull holes in the transom, glassed the interior transom, glassed, faired and installed the motorwell, installed the “fillets” to the lateral sides of the motorwell-transom junctions that serve as chases for fuel and oil hose, glassed the forward bulkhead, installed the deck beam system for the aft areas, and glassed the deck. We’ve also started work on the teak cladding for the frames.

Next up, we’ll finish the cladding and get started on varnishing them “off the boat”. While that’s happening, we’ll prime the interior so it’s ready to paint once the cladding goes in. After varnishing the teak we’ll install and fillet it in, and then mask off the varnished surfaces so the paint comes straight to the varnish.

We’ll also get going on the forward deck support structure and cut the anchor locker door in the forward bulkhead.  Oh, and we can now install the thruhulls in the transom and finalize the plumbing, after which we can install the motorwell bottom.  Still slogging away, but now that the interior hull is fair it should start to go a bit faster. We’ll see!

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