Motorwell drains and deck framing

December 6, 2013 7:10 pm ⋅

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

Posted in: Framing, Interior, Plumbing

Bandsaw beats finger

December 5, 2013 10:10 pm ⋅

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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Posted in: Fairing, Framing, Interior, Trim

Yes, yes. We’re still at it…

November 20, 2013 10:19 pm ⋅

In candor, I didn’t think many people bothered reading these updates. Seems I was wrong. Go a month without posting anything and people come out of the woodwork wondering if you’re still alive.

I assure you, we are.

And we’ve been busy.

In our last installment, you saw the beginnings of the scupper/sump system. Once the plywood “box” was built, it was bonded and glassed to the port aft corner of the bilge, and holes were bored to enable the routing of two pieces of fiberglass pipe from the collector cups to the sump. At present, there’s no lid on the box, but ultimately one will be fitted, and it will include a vent so that the system doesn’t air lock.

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Next, we went to work on the access hatch that permits servicing the sump, and that mounts the float switch. It also has cable glands to permit the wiring to the switch to exit the box. You’ll recall that I started with a SeaBuilt 6″ access plate. I took this to the Bridgeport and, using the DRO to get it all lined up nicely, drilled six holes. Two permit mounting the switch, and the other four are for the cable glands. The glands require a 1/4″ NPT threaded hole, so I first drilled pilot holes, and then finished with the appropriate size drill for a 1/4″ NPT tap.

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Then I tapped the holes using a manual tapping tool, but on the Bridgeport to provide a secure clamping surface.

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The glands are IP68 rated so they’ll be fine if the box fills up for an extended period of time.

Once this was done, it was time to start preparing to lay down the boat’s deck. Before that happens, we needed to:

  • Run a rigging chase from the console area to the machinery space.
  • Foam the floatation areas
  • Prep and paint the “man accessible” areas of the bilge
  • Install the pumps and plumbing
  • Prepare the deck panels by installing the gutters and painting the undersides

We kinda blew through this without stopping to take many pictures, but here’s a good shot showing the aft areas ready for the deck to be installed. If you look closely, you can see that access plate we machined installed in the (still topless) sump. There’s a bilge pump aft, a washdown pump on the starboard side, a bait pump in front of that, and on the port side there’s an oil reservoir for the motor forward, with a macerator pump connected to the sump aft of it. Beneath the macerator is a 1kW throughhull transducer for the sonar.
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Up front, I installed a drain in the bottom of the anchor locker to allow any moisture that accumulates there to run back through the floatation area to the bilge.
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Next up, for each of the hatches we had to lay up the gutter. Each gutter consists of three pieces. Here’s the forward compartment’s gutter, clamped up and curing
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Once they were cured, we bonded them to the underside of the deck panels and, because I’m ridiculous, I then painted the “visible” parts white to match the sides and bottoms of the lockers.
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Then we put in the deck panels. At least we did the lower ones. The forward ones will go in tomorrow. Unfortunately I didn’t take a picture of this process, but it wasn’t very complicated. I did decide to drive a bunch of bronze screws in to augment the epoxy bond. These are the first fasteners intentionally left in the boat.

Once the deck was in, we turned our attention to filling the voids between the side stringers. By design, these are left as they are and just sanded and painted. We can do better.

I bought some 3/4″, scored, scrim-backed end-grain balsa panels and we’re bonding them into the gaps. This will then be covered with glass. This is purely an aesthetic endeavor, but it will have the effect of turning the hullsides into a 1.25″ thick cored structure, which will be absurdly rigid and strong. To get the balsa panels properly bonded to the hull we’ve opted to vacuum bag them in place. There’s no way to clamp them without doing this.

Here you can see, on the left, a section that’s got the balsa installed. On the right is a section being bagged.

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Once we got comfortable doing this, we started doing multiple panels simultaneously.
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We had to order more of the Stretchlon bagging material from Fiberglass Supply, so we’re currently stuck at the halfway mark on putting in the balsa. Today we filled some of the voids between the frames and the balsa we’ve already put in, and then got to work on the motorwell. Timm’s design calls for the motorwell having either a square corner, or a 5″, 45-degree miter. Both options leave “sharp corners.” We can do better. I CNC’d some quarter-circles with a 5″ radius and cut a bunch of strips of plywood with 3.5-degree angles on each side. Twelve strips of appropriate width can be bonded together to create a 90 degree arc. Here’s the first corner being laid up.
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Here it is bonded to the face panel for the motorwell. Note that the “top” part will be trimmed once it’s all assembled.
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I’m not sure I’m wild about the idea of the top edge of this thing being only 3/4″ thick. I think it’ll look “flimsy” relative to the thickness of the transom. Once I see how it comes together, I’ll probably take 1″ balsa and bond it to the outside before glassing everything. That’ll make it 1.75″ thick, which is more meaty.

Oh. One other detail. We need a rigging chase to get the fuel and oil lines from the aft part of the bilge up to the underside of the starboard gunnel where they’ll join the steering and electrical connections and be routed to the motor from the side of the motorwell. To do this, I’m creating a hollow “fillet” between the motorwell and the transom. I laid up two layers of 1808 tape over a piece of 6″ diameter PVC pipe, covered it with plastic and wrapped it in masking tape to compress it. Once it’s cured, I’ll cut 1/4 sections of it to create big fillets for each side.
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Okay. You’re more or less up to date at this point. I’ll try to be more diligent about updating things. It’s been a grab-bag of little projects so nothing seems worth writing about, but as I type this up it’s clear a lot has happened since I last checked in.

-Ben

Posted in: Electrical, Fiberglass, Plumbing

Hull details

October 25, 2013 5:53 pm ⋅

We’re working inside the hull, now.  Some of it is straightforward and laborious.  Some requires lots of mulling and tinkering, but very little actual effort.  It’s a nice balance.  But it’s taking too long.

The first thing we had to do was sand the rough bits of epoxy and such off the inside.  Not too bad.  Then we had to fillet the stringers and frames to the hull.  This needs to be done for all the frames and stringers – above and below the deck – but we decided to start by just doing the below decks areas under the theory that it’ll be easier to fillet the upper parts once the deck is in and we’re not tripping on framing trying to move around.

This took a day and a half or so to do, and it takes a startling amount of epoxy and filler.  Some of the fillets are best made quite large to distribute the load, and the majority of them need to be done carefully so they’re smooth when you come back to tape over them with glass.  Invariably, they’re not perfectly smooth, however, and so there was a day of sanding and “tuning” that had to be done after the fillets went in before we could do the taping.

The tape had to completely line all of the seams of the compartments framed by the stringers and hull, which required just under 100 yards of tape and over 4 gallons of resin.  Timm specified 1808 tape which is (a) hard to find, and (b) sucks up a huge amount of resin.  I think it’s probably overkill, but I’d rather overbuild than underbuild when it comes to things that affect structural integrity of the hull.  1708 tape can be had anywhere, but 1808 I had to order from an eBay seller.  Timm was pretty adamant that I should use the 0-90 1808 over the 45-45 1708…

I wasn’t very good about taking photos as I went along, but here are some good shots.

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In this one, you can see the filleting around the chine logs and keel, and you can see the tape in that foremost compartment.  The tape in the main compartment is covered with fairing compound.  I decided to fair smooth all the man-accessible compartments since invariably I’ll be crawling around in them someday and I don’t want to get fiberglass splinters.

Here you can more fully see the taping of the frames and stringers.

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As this was all going on, I was contemplating the question of scupper drains for the deck.  Timm’s design is for a self bailing hull with scupper slots cut in the transom at deck level.  The problem is that this is very close to the waterline.  After some reading on the web which suggested that scuppers are one of the leading causes of small boat sinking, and also some discussion with Timm, I decided to abandon the self bailing feature and configure things so water that comes aboard gets pumped out.

This doesn’t mean I want it to end up in the bilge.  I’m going to work pretty hard to keep the bilge of this boat dry by putting hatch seals in the deck and such, so I decided to create a sump under the motorwell just forward of the transom, and set two scupper drains in the aft corners of the deck that drain to the sump.  The sump will have a float switch inside it – accessible via an inspection port so it can be replaced when it fails – and will be connected to a macerator pump that will purge the sump when it fills.  This is all very complicated to implement, but it’s actually a pretty simple system and should work well.

To make the drains for the corners of the deck, I cast glass over a pair of quart mixing cups to create 4″ diameter fiberglass cups.

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These will sit about here:
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Because these compartments will be filled with foam, the plumbing connecting the cups to the sump will not be serviceable. It needs to last forever. I ordered some 1″ ID pultruded fiberglass pipe from McMaster-Carr so I can create a completely fiberglassed system with no joints.

Just before we ran the cut files for the deck, I added 4″ cutouts for these cups. The interesting trick will be to get the cups and pipe all epoxied together in just the right position so the cups line up just under the holes in the deck. That’s a “to be done” project.

Here’s the sump box in progress. You can see the lower hole which will get a bulkhead hose fitting to connect to the pump. The upper hole with the bolt circle around it is for the SeaBuilt 6″ stainless steel inspection port. The switch will be mounted to the back side of the port cover, and the wires will route through the cover using IP68 rated cable glands. That way, when the cover is removed all the wiring and the switch comes with it so it’s easy to service.

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You can see looking at this that I’ve made it as complicated as I possibly can ;-)  The interior framing is intended to minimize the amount of water that can collect below the level of the pump’s pickup, so there will be as little standing water left as possible when the switch shuts off.  If it’s not clear, this gets mounted in the corner formed by the inboard port stringer and the transom, which provide the other two “walls” of the sump.  Once it’s all together and I confirm it’s watertight, I’ll glass a lid onto it.

I ordered a bunch of Molex MX150 connectors. These are rated to 20A and are IP68 rated. This will make it easy to connect and disconnect pumps and other parts without tools, and the connections will be watertight.  The crimper pliers appear to be unique to the MX150 pins, so I had to order those too.  $120.  Awesome.

The mechanical space – the aft most storage area just in front of the motorwell – will have all the pumps, throughhulls and other mechanical bits. This includes:

  • Macerator pump for deck sump
  • 1500GPH Bilge pump
  • Livewell pump
  • Washdown pump
  • Fuel filter
  • Oil reservoir
  • Sonar transducer

The livewell pump and washdown pump share a single 3/4″ throughull with a seacock.  The only other hull penetration below the waterline is the transducer.  I’m opting not to install a drain plug.  The pumps should be sufficient, and we don’t get freezing weather around here so it’s not critical that the hull be completely, totally devoid of water.

This is a lot of stuff to screw to the wall of the mechanical space and my experience in the past has been that because these items fail from time to time and need to be replaced, the screws tend to loosen and the wood behind them gets damp. I decided to order some brass E-Z Lok threaded inserts.  I’ll drill holes in the appropriate locations, screw them in once to create the threads, then take them out and soak the holes with epoxy which will cure before I put them back in with a dab of 4200 sealant.  That’ll make them more removable later.  Once these are in place the pumps and other machinery will thread into them with machine screws instead of wood screws.  The machine screws can go in and out as often as needed without damaging the wood. I was a little hesitant about using the brass inserts since I’ll probably use stainless screws and, especially in salt water environments, you need to worry about galvanic corrosion. Brass and stainless are pretty compatible though, and I can always use brass machine screws if I want to be really safe.

Other developments include the installation of the first half of the frame/stringer doublers which create a greater bonding surface for the deck.  You can see those, as well as the to-be-sealed and installed tank supports in this photo:
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For most of these doublers I’m using scrap 3/4″ plywood, but the areas around the fuel tank are supposed to be solid wood because the access hatch over the tank is held down with screws not epoxy, and screws don’t hold well in the edge grain of plywood. Unfortunately there was a foul-up with the cut files and so a void that was supposed to make room for a special piece of solid wood for this purpose was omitted. I have to decide how to handle that situation, still.

I’m also continuing to work on the CNC-cut storage units for the leaning post.  Here’s the first of them.  It’s nearly done, but there’s still work to do. There’s always work to do…

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Okay, so from here we need to get the plumbing glassed in for the deck drains, glass in and seal the sump, do the final epoxy sealing of the insides of the hull.  Install the last of the doublers, and foam the floatation compartments.  Then I’ll paint the storage/mechanical spaces with white-tinted epoxy, install the machinery, and move onto the decking.  Yee haw…

 

-Ben

Posted in: Electrical, Framing, Plumbing

Painted and rolled. Yee haw.

October 13, 2013 6:10 pm ⋅

The guys I hired to paint the boat did a great job prepping it, but the painting didn’t go as well as we wanted.  We ended up with a few too many sags, some weird swirl marks that I think had something to do with the wipedown solvent they used, and a fair bit of dirt and bugs in the paint.  Sooooo… We did it twice.  The second time went MUCH better, and while there are still a couple of minor sags and a few fish eyes, it’s damned good.

Here you can see by the reflection that the hull came out really fair. It was worth all the sanding. There are, of course, places where it’s not perfect, but I’m very happy.

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Here are a few more shots:
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You may be saying to yourself: “Wait a second. That boat is right side up now. It was upside down in the last photos.”

And if you’re saying that, you’re right. After the first paint exercise, we decided to turn it over before shooting the do-over coat. The bottom (below waterline) parts were actually fine, and don’t much matter aesthetically. And that big bow flare just catches dirt as it settles. So we wanted to do the do-over right side up.

Flipping it was an interesting exercise.  I rigged three chain hoists from the ceiling / crane beams, and used the crane for the fourth lift point.  Then I hung two lift straps – one forward and one aft – between each pair of hoists, and positioned the hoists so those on the port side were at full retract and the starboard were at full extend.  Then I just ratcheted in the long ones and let out the short ones, and as the straps moved they rolled the boat with it.  Photos:

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Today we cleaned up the paint area, and moved the boat back inside.  She’s ready and waiting for interior fitout.  Exciting stuff.

-Ben

Posted in: Paint, Turning

I’m still sanding……

October 2, 2013 7:40 pm ⋅

Since I own a larger boat – a vessel I prefer to refer to as a “boat,” not a “yacht” – I’m often asked what the difference is between a boat and a yacht.  I didn’t have a good answer until recently.  But now I can definitively and without irony declare:  Sanding.

Getting a defect-free, yacht-quality finish requires hours and hours of sanding, none of which is really necessary for a “boat” to do its job on the water.  It’s purely an aesthetic conceit.  But after putting so much work into building the boat, I want it to look GOOD!  And so…   Sanding.

When I got back from Tuscany I set to work sanding the coat of primer I applied prior to my departure.  Sadly, what this revealed was that there was still enough variation in the surface that I’d go completely through the primer in some places before I got rid of all the orange peel in others.  The variation was enough that I didn’t think we’d fill it with just a couple of coats of the 545, so I bought some AwlGrip High Build and had my friend Chris shoot two heavy coats of it across the entire hull.

I then blocked this off using the stroke sander where possible, and manual sanding blocks in the really curvy parts, and was able to get to a fair surface with only a few places where I went all the way to the hull.  Good enough!

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The transom and rear quarter areas were the least fair, but not bad at all.

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Along the way, I decided to bring in some sanding help.  This is pretty rough work and it was killing my back.  My dad was away – and frankly I wouldn’t want to subject him to this anyway – so I hired a gentleman from the local boatyard to help.  He’s done some work for me on my big boat in the past and is very talented.

As we were sanding, it became clear that he thought his buddy from the yard – the painter from the yard … who shoots AwlGrip all day, every day – would probably be interested in a side job shooting the boat.  Chris had been a bit nervous about shooting the AwlGrip since he’d never worked with it before and didn’t want to screw up on something that had this much prep into it.  We agreed that they’d both come by the following afternoon to take a look at it.  In the meantime, I finished blocking out the High Build, and by the time the guys showed up she was ready for finish primer.

After a little dancing around the issue, we agreed that they’d shoot the primer that afternoon (Monday), come back in the afternoons this week to sand it off and prep for topcoat, and then shoot the topcoat on Saturday.  This will be the first work I’ve “hired out” on this job, and I was a little hesitant about it, but honestly painting is one of those things that demands a lot of expertise – which comes with practice – and I wanted it right.  Unfortunately, it’s not cheap, but I’m off to a wedding this morning, and when I get back to Alameda on Monday my boat will have a professional, high gloss finish.  I’m thinking it’s worth it.

Here they are shooting the primer.
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I’m really happy with how fair she looks with a glossy coat of wet primer on her.  There are a few spots that have minor waves to them, but they’re the kind of thing that the builder notices because he’s run his hands over the boat 1000 times, but nobody else is likely to see.  It’s mostly in the rear quarters where the glass tape didn’t get completely faired in, and a little just under the sheer guard where it’s tough to sand smoothly.  For a first effort at building a boat, I’m ecstatic.

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Anyway, while the painting is happening I’ve been working on some CNC-cut Starboard cabinetry for the leaning post.

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Oh, we also took a day off to run out in the big boat and watch the America’s Cup final.  Pretty amazing sailing.  Those boats are FAST!

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That’s it for now.  Come Monday, I should be able to share photos of a glossy, painted hull ready to be turned over and wheeled back into the shop for the inside to be finished out.  I can’t wait!
-Ben

Posted in: Paint