More with the Dorades and Mast Preps

Having now returned to Kyle after what was a very active leave period, I can give you a quick update on what progress I made during the week I was actually at home!

First though, just a brief summary of my activities in the first two weeks of my leave, as this is not just a blog about me creating dust in the shed in Kilmelford! As you may recall from my previous post, I was going to be disappearing to the deep south for a week trying out sailing on the Sea Cadets’ flagship, TS Royalist. I did not officially finish until midnight on the Sunday, so I had booked two volunteering days from work to cover my charitable activities. Straight after finishing work at midday on the Friday I hit the road and started my 24-hour race down south to Weymouth to join the ship, having opted for the Caledonian Sleeper as a way of travelling and getting something approaching a good night’s sleep at the same time. It was slightly disappointing on this count, being roasting hot in my cabin, and the bunks being rather small, but it was better than nothing! I would not recommend the room service breakfasts, which come in kit form and suffer from severe overcooking.

Anyway, I digress. A further train journey in the morning from Euston got me to Weymouth by lunchtime and in good time to settle in before the cadets joined mid-afternoon. It was nice when I arrived to be greeted by Lesley, my old Chief Mate on Nellie, who was sailing on Royalist as Sailing Master; I also met the rest of the crew, some of whom I knew already and some who were new acquaintances. As I was in a training berth I was sharing a cabin with a young trainee bosun, who proved to be a perfect cabin mate – no snoring and very tidy!

I was very impressed by the “new” Royalist (now ten years old) – she was looking very tidy after major refit work over the winter, and amazingly packed in a lot of accommodation for a vessel just under 24m on the waterline. The only area which really suffers from lack of space is the engine room, which is not somewhere I would wish (or ever intend!) to spend too much time. Unfortunately over the week we had very little sailing – the weather was beautiful but windless, and the most we managed was a couple of hours’ drift in the middle of Lyme Bay. Fortunately the group of cadets on board seemed not to worry too much about the sailing, or lack thereof, being more concerned with showers and shore leave! From my point of view however, the week served its purpose and got me signed off to sail as relief Commanding Officer, so hopefully next year I’ll get a week or two to keep up some sailing and square rig time.

At the end of the week I then had to race back to the north in time to join VIC32 for a week’s skippering from Tarbert to Crinan. I managed a whole night in my own bed in between, and got the essential laundry done before heading down to Tarbert on the Sunday afternoon. By this time the weeks of fine weather had finally broken, and it was wet and windy as I joined, so it was nice to step down into the saloon which was already nice and warm from the woodburner in the corner. I spent the rest of the afternoon doing my planning for the week and meeting the joining passengers; we spent the Sunday night alongside in Tarbert before setting off the following morning. The first day was a long steam all the way round to Rothesay, requiring us to round our “Cape Horn” for the week – Garroch Head, the southernmost point of the Isle of Bute. Unfortunately the weather wasn’t the best, and for a couple of hours we had quite an uncomfortable time, but once round Garroch Head with the wind and sea behind us again, things calmed down. The rest of the week proved to be far more comfortable – taking in the Kyles of Bute and Tighnabruaich before heading up to Ardrishaig for our return to Crinan through the canal. Unfortunately we only managed to get half-way through before low water levels prevented our continuing. This was slightly inconvenient as during the week we had relocated all our cars in stages to Crinan, so on the final evening I volunteered to walk from Cairnbaan down to Crinan to pick up my car and thereafter shuttle everybody else to theirs.

After what was a fun and fairly relaxed week on VIC32, the final week of my leave was devoted to Serchthrift. Most of this week I spent continuing the manufacture and preparation for fitting the Dorade boxes for my cabin ventilation. In my last post I dealt with the cutting of all the pieces for 4 identical boxes, and their assembly, trimming and the cutting of the holes for the vent cowls. On the face of it, this might seem to pretty much complete the job; however, as I am discovering with many other fitting out projects, it is the detail which becomes fiddly and time-consuming, and these vents would continue to be the focus of my attention for the whole week.

Firstly, I would need to determine the final location of the four boxes, preferably keeping the deck layout symmetrical. I knew I wanted vent in the heads, forecabin, aft cabin and galley (although this will actually be ducted to feed air into the engine bilge), so I needed to work out exactly where the holes for the mushroom vents (which sit inside the boxes and enable the deck vents to be shut down) should be cut so they did not interfere with deck beams or any other structural members, and allowed the location of related items (e.g. the forward dorades will also be the mounting location for the sidelights, so convenient cable runs and location of deck plugs needed to be considered; also the vent gooseneck for the black water tank will be mounted adjacent to the port fwd dorade, providing some protection for the former from flying ropes – again, convenience of hose runs needed to be considered).

The locations decided and marked, I drilled pilot holes for each of the vent openings first, in order to double check their location, and after a couple of adjustments could deploy the hole saw to cut the openings. Once these were established, I then needed to establish a means of fixing the boxes securely to the deck. I did not want these to be permanent so the boxes can be removed in future if necessary to allow access to the mushroom vents, so I chose to use some 18mm square section teak to locate the boxes and provide four blocks to screw into through the box sides and ends. Of course these needed to be bevelled in order to fit the camber of the deck, which made the job more fiddly. However, once these were located and dry fitted, and I had checked that the boxes fit snugly over them, I could epoxy glue and screw them to the deck. There followed much epoxying to ensure everything would be waterproof – wherever end grain of ply was exposed needed to be well sealed with resin, so the holes in the deck were coated, as were the mounting blocks. I had also cut holes for the aforementioned black water tank vent and the black water deck pump-out cap. The former required a wedge-shaped mounting ring, which I made out of scrap teak, to ensure the gooseneck itself was vertical, and not perpendicular to the deck, which was glued to the deck, and the holes sealed with resin. Finally all the holes for fixings and the sidelight cables were drilled oversize, filled, and redrilled to the correct size. This drill-fill-drill technique is vital to ensure that all holes drilled through the plywood deck are epoxy sealed, again to prevent water getting into the end grain of the ply, and I’m sure I will mention it many times in the future as the fit-out on deck progresses.

The boxes themselves also received the drill-fill-drill treatment for all fixing holes and sidelight cable holes, as well as getting a fillet of thickened epoxy around all internal joints to ensure the boxes were nice and strong, and any external imperfections in the ply or the joints filled and faired. I also had to cut drain scuppers in the bottom edges of the “wet” half of the boxes. The boxes then received a full coat of epoxy resin and then a layer of glass cloth. Once cured, a good sanding was followed by a further 2 coats of resin and another good sanding. The next stage will be to paint the boxes with epoxy primer inside and out, before receiving a cream topcoat to match the rest of the upperworks. Finally they can be fitted with cowls and sidelights before themselves being fitted to the deck blocks. Hopefully some of the photos that follow can help explain the whole process.

There was one dorade box left to attack, which, being of a different design to the others, I had left to build separately. This is the one fitted to the vent on the foredeck, just forward of the break of the coachroof, and which I have ducted down below to ensure air goes through the forepeak (fwd of bulkhead 1) and aft through the cable lockers. The reason this had to be of a different design is because there were already steel tabs mounted to the deck to which the box will be screwed, which are at an angle to the vertical. In order to ensure my box would fit these tabs, I first built a mock-up box from cardboard, making sure I got the angles just right, and then cut the side and end pieces from 12mm ply as with the other boxes. I drilled these for dowels as before and joined the four pieces together, again making sure the joints dried true. Once the glue had cured I could then check the box fitted the steel mounting lugs. There I had to leave it, until the next exciting instalment, where I will cut and glue a top before going through the same epoxying process as the other four boxes received.

The final mini-project for the week was to build a mast bench in preparation for sawing the staves and constructing the foremast in my next leave. The mast is just shy of 9m in length from truck to foot, so I needed a table of that sort of length, initially to act as an outfeed table and very long workbench for scarphing and sawing the 8 staves. Having bought and taken delivery of a new table saw – the one I have been using up until now has been adequate but unfortunately does not tilt to 45 degrees, which is vital for my chosen method of building the mast – the bench also needed to be set up level with the saw table. I dug out a fresh sheet of 18mm ply (at the bottom of my pile of ply, of course), and sawed this lengthways into three boards of equal width. Conveniently, the boatyard has a number of saw horses which are just about the right height, so these boards were laid across equally-spaced horses, and I used a fourth piece of ply to extend the table slightly further. The boards were joined with screws and butt-straps, making a table about 8m long (it will not matter if the staves overhang the ends slightly during manufacture), using shims to adjust the height at each horse as required.

Once the horses were screwed to the boards (having been equally-spaced and squared), I chose four to which I would attach simple U-shaped ply crutches to hold the staves together during assembly. these were cut to appropriate dimensions according to the taper of the mast, and aligned using a taut, horizontal string. It remains to attach a temporary fence to one side of the table, to be aligned with the saw fence when machining the staves, which I can also use as a jig when glueing up the scarph joints to ensure the staves are straight and true. Scarphs will be cut initially by circular saw, then trimmed using my big router and a scarph jig which I have knocked up out of 18mm ply.

I will leave a full description of how the mast is constructed until a future post – it will require a whole post to do so. I look forward to writing this once the bulk of the job is done in early August.