Archive for the ‘Interior’ Category

A boat, not a building site

Friday, June 20th, 2008

Finally finished. All of the tools have been removed, all of the work has been finished, all of the cushions installed.

Here we can see the control panel:

From left: Adverc battery monitor with Ipod and Screaming Meanie alarm clock below, then the Navylec control switches.

Three 12 volt “cigar lighter” sockets with cabin heater and AIS controller beneath and SeaMe active enhanced radar repeater below, then a Standard Horizon DSC VHF above a Pioneer stereo (there will be music) and fore and aft automatic bilge pump switches.

You can see an Icom hand held VHF radio in its charger and the laptop with SeaPro navigation and chartplotter software. Of course, there is a large collection of paper charts

interior 1

The aft cushions are in place and all of the tools and materials have been removed.

interior2


A Breakthrough!

Friday, April 4th, 2008

Evenings have been pretty busy this week! The old keel plates were warped and fatigued, so I had some new stronger ones made. After waiting a while for a shipment of 316 A4 stainless steel to arrive in the country, my new plates were finally fabricated this week.

To ensure as much bearing surface as possible, a bed of fibreglass was laid under each plate. Then the plates were coated in vaseline to stop them sticking to the resin, and gently squeezed to ensure contact across the whole plate.

Shifter

It took two of us a lot of effort and a seriously big socket spanner (thanks Paul) to tighten each bolt up fuly. These bolts and plates hold the keel on to the boat. It’s really really important that these nuts never move again!

Plates in Place

Eventually all the plates were in, and the long job of strengthening the keel support was finally over.

Floor with Plates

Just one thing left to do. Make the whole thing waterproof! About 2.5kgs of flowcoat with bright white pigment was applied over any bare fibreglass. The result is a shiny waterproof surface that will resist anything that gets thrown at it and will easily clean and sponge dry.

Flowcoat

The change is amazing. After weeks of dust, grime, and effort, the result is almost better than I could have hoped for. It’s almost a pity to cover it up with the actual floor! But the boat moves to its new home in Dun Laoighre tomorrow, where that floor will be fitted soon enough. I just can’t wait to bea in open water on the boat again for the first time since bringing it down from Scotland.


This boat is blessed!

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

Amazing luck. In the picture below, the teak/holly floorboard has a circular cutout for the saloon table support. The table has an aluminium socket on its underside which accepts an aluminium tube which in turn fits into a similar socket on the floorboard. Voila, a table. But, Dinah’s table is long missing, leaving a useless hole, a trip hazard, in the floorboard.

At the right is one of the ballast tank baffles with a circular cut out. The cut out was traced from the lid of a storage jar from the kitchen. It wasn’t measured from a compass, it was simply traced from the handy lid. No idea or interest in its size, just a useful circle.

blessed 1

Amazingly, the waste from the ballast tank circle is a PERFECT FIT for the floorboard!

blessed 2

To glue the waste disc in place, first tape a piece of acetate to the underside of the floorboard (epoxy will not stick to acetate).

blessed 3

The floorboard has a bit of a bow, so the toolbox serves to flatten it. The waste plywood disc, 12mm thick, has been glued in place with thickened epoxy, applied with a squeegee (old credit card) and another two pieces of acetate laid on top.

blessed 4

A pile of heavy books will serve as a poor man’s vacuum bag to compress the floorboard and the plywood disc..leave for 12 hours then solid!  LUCK!

blessed 5


Floor fitting

Monday, March 31st, 2008

Not sure what to call this yoke, it rests on the stringers and forms a base for the cabin sole floor boards. Anyway, it had to come off so that the keel pan could be strengthened, as seen below. It was moulded as a single unit and we had to cut it into three pieces to get it out of the boat and home for cleaning and repairs (a few edges were “stressed” in the removal). Here the main piece has been reinforced with a length of unidirectional glass cloth and epoxy along the main channel (at top).

floor 1

The three pieces have been cleaned, bleached and various holes and nicks filled with white gelcoat filler.

floor 2

Next: install with Sikaflex 291 and then lay the floorboards with velcro strips instead of screws.