Cockpit, Pushpit, Galley hatch and some other bits.

Since my last update (which some of my regular readers may not have seen, due to Facebook being unhappy with something I wrote (not sure what), therefore refusing to alow me to share it on that platform – however if you want to read it first, please go ahead and click this: https://serchthrift.com/uncategorized/engine-box-steps-and-sole-bearers/), I have been to the Arctic twice – once on a voyage up to the Lofoten islands and the second time up to Svalbard and the voyage home to Inverness – and been offered and accepted a new job. Whilst I have enjoyed my season with Gordonstoun on Ocean Spirit of Moray, particularly the Arctic bits, unfortunately the boat is too small for my seatime to count towards revalidating my big-ship tickets, and this coupled with some discomfort with the job itself caused me to start looking again at the job market. I spotted a Master’s position advertised by Serco, a big company with fingers in many public-service pies, one of which is providing auxiliary support vessels for various roles supporting the Royal Navy (these vessels used to belong to the now-defunct RMAS (Royal Maritime Auxiliary Service), and operates tugs, passenger transfer boats and various other types of vessel mainly in the dockyard ports. They also have a small base at Kyle of Lochalsh, supporting the BUTEC ranges in the Inner Sound, and it is there that I shall be taking on the role of Master of a couple of their vessels. It should be an interesting role and will provide me with some experience in a couple of different types of vessel, which hopefully I can carry across to other jobs should I wish in future. I will be starting with them in mid-October, after the final term-time sail training voyage on Ocean Spirit.

In the meantime amongst all this excitement I have been quite busy on the boat, with two three-week leave periods to play with. During this warm sunny summer (!) I have prioritised epoxy work, so have made progress with completing the cockpit structures and the galley hatch (just forward of the doghouse). I have also completed some more welding work, making my one-piece pushpit out of the two rails I purchased some time ago, done some painting, made window frames for the doghouse, fitted some deck fittings in the cockpit, fitted the mainmast partner collar, done some technical work in the engine compartment and fitted the partition for the heads compartment and started the fit-out up there. So, in vaguely but not precisely chronological order, here we go:

The Cockpit

Hopefully Facebook won’t be unhappy with the “C” word when I try to share this post! I left the cockpit in a not-quite-completed state a year or so ago, mainly because I hadn’t quite decided how to tackle the seat backs, but also because winter arrived and made epoxying less practical due to the low temperatures. So, with some warmer weather I decided it was time to get as close as possible to finishing this so I could move back into the interior knowing that the exterior of the boat was reasonably complete structurally. The main job which needed completing was making some nice-looking seat backs. I wanted these to be teak (I don’t want too much varnishing or bare wood on deck, but some would be nice), and they would match the rope box lids which I made earlier in the year from some of my reclaimed lab worktop teak. However, because I need the coaming boxes to be watertight, I did not want to use a solid teak board and risk movement or opening up of gaps to let water in (I wanted to keep the teak natural, and not slathered in epoxy and therefore by necessity varnished over the top), so I opted to laminate some thinner teak strips onto a 9mm ply board. The first job therefore was to cut the two seat backs to shape, using my tried-and-tested method of templating using strips of hardboard to get the shape right. Fortunately I’d managed to build a fairly symmetrical pair of coaming boxes, so one template was sufficient for both sides, and I cut the ply shapes slightly oversize from a piece of board I’d already identified and kept to one side. These were epoxied all over with unthickened resin, and the back face (which would not be covered with teak) received a layer of glass cloth to reinforce it. Whilst all this goo was curing I spent the time milling up some more reclaimed teak planks to a thickness of about 15mm and width of about 60mm, taking care to joint (plane to a dead straight, 90° edge) the edges so they made a neat and tight longitudinal join. I cut them to length and then with a big mix of thickened resin, laminated them onto the ply boards. In order to ensure they stuck uniformly to the boards and to each other, many, many clamps were required (see photo)! Once the epoxy had cured, I could then trim the boards to shape and give them a run through the thicknesser to make the exposed faces nice and smooth. Next came the top and aft edges, which needed trimming with teak to hide and seal the end grain, again planed to shape and the whole lot sanded smooth. I then mixed up more thickened resin to glue the boards in place, held with a number of screws whose holes were then plugged and the plugs trimmed and sanded. Finally I ran a fillet of more epoxy filler around all the joints to ensure the whole assembly would be watertight (and filling in the gaps!). After more sanding the whole assembly looked rather attractive and pleasing!

The Pushpit

Some years ago I acquired two halves of a pushpit from a chap who was breaking a slightly bigger boat – I also acquired my centreboard winch from the same source. I had established that these would need some adjustment to fit the shape of my stern, but not too much, and decided the best way of doing this would be to join the two parts with a central arch to make a single rail assembly. This arch would form the anchoring point for the mainsheet blocks so needed to be substantial and well fastened.

The first task was to cut off the existing feet, which were not at the right angle for my rail, and slightly oversized. I also made a template of the aft part of the cockpit capping rail so that I would not have to constantly climb up and down the ladder to check things were fitting as I assembled it. I then moved into the fabrication shop in the boatshed and set up my template, the yard’s pipe bender and my welding machine…

Before committing to bending up the arch to the required dimensions from my one piece of expensive 28mm stainless tube, I had purchased a (similarly expensive) length of 28mm copper pipe from Screwfix to practise on. I made the first 90° bend and checked the radius so I knew exactly where to place the pipe in the bender in order to get the exact width right for the arch, so that its feet sat on the two bulwark knees. Having made a successful arch out of copper, I then gritted my teeth, set up the stainless tube in the bender and pulled the lever. It may be worth pointing out at this point that copper is considerably softer and therefore easier to bend than stainless, and I knew this, but even so I was slightly surprised when my first tentative pull rendered absolutely no movement from the tube. I pulled a bit harder, and a small bend was just starting to become evident. I scoured the workshops for something I could extend the handle of the pipe-bender with, and found something suitable, added it to the handle and pulled again. Much pulling, puffing, pushing, sweating, swearing, more pulling, more puffing, and worrying about breaking the adjacent window if everything suddenly broke or fell apart ensued. Eventually I coaxed the tube into a 90° bend, then had to reposition the tube in the bender, checking my measurements twice, and repeating the exercise (in both senses of the word) to get the second bend. Glad that was over, I could stow the pipe bender and move on to marking up the existing half-rails for cutting to mate with the arch. This required some preliminary cuts and then marrying up with the arch on my template, then later on the actual boat, to ensure a good fit. Once this was achieved, I put in a couple of tack welds to hold the parts together and repeated with the other side.

Next came the feet. I had already cut and drilled these, so with the railing on the boat, I marked these up with some pen marks for the correct angle, then took the whole lot back to the workshop and the template, checked again and tacked these into place.

I now needed to weld up the whole assembly fully. This proved quite tricky, as even at the lowest recommended power for the electrodes I was using, if I wasn’t very careful I blew holes in the ends of the tubes. I managed eventually to weld all the joints, with some unprofessional bodging where I made a hash of things, and just hope that no-one will look too carefully at the finished welds. Once ground and polished a bit, they look better, but please don’t bother criticising them – I know they look rubbish, but should be more than sufficiently strong.

Unfortunately, the final welding had distorted the central arch somewhat, opening out the feet a degree or so each side, so when offered up to the boat, the bloody thing no longer fitted. After scratching my head or a minute, I decided that before taking any more drastic action I would just try using a spanish windlass to pull the two central legs together. A bit of green string and a big screwdriver were found and set up, and wound gently until the legs were sufficiently closer together that the other feet sat roughly where they needed to be – enough to mark up their positions finally for the next step of putting in the fastenings. As the whole rail, and particularly the feet of the central arch, would be under load from the mainsheet, simply screwing the feet into the rail would not be sufficiently strong (and would also risk introducing moisture and thus rot into the wood), so I decided to drill oversized holes in the capping rail and bed upside-down bolts in epoxy to which the feet would be attached with nice shiny dome nuts. First I chiselled out a slight recess for the feet in the side rails, and then checked the positions of the holes before drilling out to just bigger than the head of a hex bolt. A blob of thickened epoxy went in the hole, and the the head of the bolt; ensuring it was central in the hole and upright was a challenge, and to do this I actually placed the pushpit over the bolts (having put parcel tape on the underside of the feet so they would not stick to any stray epoxy!). I then had to build up little plinths for the feet of the arch, to make up for the slight distortion of the structure, so essentially put a blob of filled resin under each foot, tightened it down a bit and filleted around the edges as it squeezed out. Amazingly, due to careful cleaning up before the resin cured, and to the judicious use of parcel tape, the whole thing lifted off again easily the next morning, and after a bit of final sanding of the plinths, I bedded all the feet in black poo and bolted the finished assembly down for the final time.

The Galley Hatch

I covered the making of the hatch coaming a couple of posts ago – this was actually almost exactly a year ago now, so I had to remember how I made the outer coaming and cover for the forehatch! It was almost and exact repeat of the same process, just slightly smaller. I had already milled up the teak for the assembly, so just had to cut the pieces to length, and then joined the two frames – the outer coaming and the hatch frame – from these pieces (remembering to put a slight curve in the fore and aft pieces of the coaming to take up the deck camber, of course). I cut the limber holes in the coaming frame, and the rebate for the plywood hatch lid in the lid frame. Once the lid was cut to size, I epoxied both sides, with a layer of cloth on the upper side, and then glued it into the frame. I filled any gaps with epoxy filler, and filleted all the joints inside, then cut the porthole aperture and glued in the inner trim ring before applying more resin inside and out (leaving the teak bare). Once all sanded and tidied up, I glued and filleted the outer coaming in place, and then I could fit the hinges. Presto – one hatch!

Other bits

Briefly, here are some of the other bits I have been tackling in between the bigger projects:

• Completing engine compartment insulation.
• Fitting of engine seawater strainer in engine compartment and plumbing of engine seawater intake (latter still to be completed).
• Fitting and plumbing of main bilge pump in engine compartment.
• Fitting stern fairleads (2 x open bronze ones in taffrail and 2 x panamas in quarter bulwarks).
• Fitting mainmast partner collar
• Finalising planned layout for heads compartment, and thus door position
• Templating, cutting and fitting of heads partition (fore-and-aft bulkhead in fwd cabin area). This had to be made in four parts due to the restricted access, and assembled in situ.
• Starting to fit out the heads – starting with cabin side linings and putting in a large expensive order for hose and plumbing fittings!
• Painting the maindeck with a further 3 coats of high-build primer (given it is a high-traffic area!).
• Painting the doghouse with 1 x topcoat.
• Making window frames for the doghouse ready for glazing.