MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ONE AND ALL!

Enjoy your holidays and see you in the new year, I won't be posting much in the first few months of 2015 as i'm back to paid work next week but feel free to check out the blog and leave comments.

Roger  

A step forward

This last week and today has been spent making a new companionway, again as its a jigsaw puzzle where the position of all the pieces are known to someone else certainly not me i realised a few weeks back the companionway is a pivotal piece of joinery which will determine where the galley starts and also where the battery compartments display panel will go hence i got the lid scribed and fitted then stopped to build the companionway. 

I wanted the door to stay attached as it being of such a wieldy size i dont like the idea of it sitting around loose while you work on the engine so a trip to the local builders merchants got me two polished 304 stainless butt hinges, the gas struts will have to wait until finances improve or i go out back out to work full time.

Speaking of which having killed a couple of sheets of ply needlessly  well not needlessly but trying out different ideas with the tanks i now have concluded its easier on my pocket to prototype in MDF and then nip, tweak and fettle till i'm happy with the overall theme then transfer everything to marine ply, also went wild and bought new blades for the table saw and circular saw as it was getting silly with the quality of the cuts i was producing. Got so bad thought of asking the neighbour but one if i could borrow a rifle to cut the boards with.

Stopped midweek for a day after receiving an email the previous weekend asking for some help on a Westerly with the pox which i duely did, the guy should now be well on the way to getting his boat back to health.

Then it was back into all things companionway based, now i constantly scour the net for ideas and had some pretty wild ones for these steps but you know what, at the end of the day you can't beat simplicity and also time so the brief was simple: dimension the old steps and reproduce it to suit the new.

And having the bonus of all the materials i required in the form of some old unused window sill boards i got to work today running them through the planer having finished building the cabinet surround and panel by the end of last week.

All that left to finish is to veneer the front of the cabinet and make and fit the cheek pieces which i'll do tomorrow.

A little bit to show.

Haven't achieved a great deal this week, but got a bit further along and ticked a few more things off my mega list; these included building and mounting the lid for the battery box, making up plywood panels to section off the different lockers under the cockpit* and making the box that the galley module will sit on.

*This was a pain in the arse as the space i'm working in is 2/3rds the size of me, i swear when i sectioned the cockpit when i made all those lockers it was a darn site easier than i find it now as more than a couple of days in there and my knees swell up - weird!

Still thats done, just needs a couple of coats of white but seeing as its so cold in the shed and i don't want large heating bills i may wait to paint these bits, the big job i started on Thursday after finishing the battery box for now was the galley box.

To be more precise the foundation the galley will sit on, i had to make it so it so access was maintained to the keel bolts although considering the spreader plates are bonded to the stub floor theres not a lot you can do other than tightening the nuts, if any 'big maintanence needs doing it'll mean an air saw and lots of swearing but i try not to think of these things now.

Didn't get it totally finished today but will have it bonded to the hull and wrapped to tomorrow. Again i've realised there's an order to the chaos in so far as i can't build out the galley until the companionway is built seeing as that will abutt the galley and the battery /electrical are on the other so will get that in then sort the floor out whilst trying to keep the ply waterproof.

Its not worm proof thats for sure as i routed out the 2mm strip to take the glass tabbing to find loads of 1mm lines in the lamination below all in random directions.

Until the next time.