Fitting Out (Year 8):

Date	Discussion
April 2017	I usually start a new chapter of this tome around April 1st each year. I've tried not reading anything significant into the choice of dates, but it's hard sometimes to ignore the irony. In fact, it first started because the hull was turned "right side up" on 5th March 2010 and that signalled the start of the "fitting-out" process. Hence the start of the fitting out description chapters around each April 1st. Nothing foolish about that! Now, building a boat, that's another subject...
25 Apr 2017	The "cliff-hanger" at the end of the last thrilling episode was the fitting of the stern tube. A couple of the remaining supports have been glassed in and it is now all quite stable. The shaft still lines up properly with back of the gearbox and I can turn it easily by hand, which given that it's running through four bearings, proves that they must be more or less, in line. The stern tube goes through the area under the bed, which is to become the aft ballast or trim tank. Now the tube is in, the tank can be progressed. It needs lots more glass and epoxy yet to seal it and a lid with an inspection hatch or two as well. The rudder pintle will sit on a length of stainless steel that goes back forward from the rudder to attach under the bottom of the tank area, but that hasn't been made yet because the dimensions were not able to be finalised. That can now be done, which will make a bit more work for C.E.&A. engineering and my friend Phillip Mathews. Working in the bedroom now, just for a change, the top and bottom rails for the wardrobe doors are now fitted. The bottom one is simply a length of timber with a slot "routed" underneath so that it sits securely on the frame underneath. The top rail however has a number of complications. The first is that it has to be straight to match the tops of the doors, but of course the roof above it is curved. So, it has a filler panel on top to attach it to the roof and fill in the curved gap. The top rail also has a slot routed in its lower side to hold a length of aluminium "U" channel in which the locating pins for the tops of the doors run. The search for a workable range hood design is still continuing! I bought a couple of new fans, but when they arrived I realised that they were too small - very careless... I ordered another of the proper size and that has now arrived, but I'm still not sure that it's a good solution. More tea I think... The remaining exhaust fan for engine bay has been installed together with its 75mm PVC piping. It now draws air from the very bottom of the area underneath the engine. Let's see if we can't keep those pesky petrol fumes out. I originally purchased three TMC bilge blowers and when I installed this one and tried it out, it was extremely noisy. I've had the unit for quite some time and probably don't have the receipt anymore, so there was little choice but to take it apart and "have a look". There wasn't anything obviously wrong, but some additional oil seemed to work wonders, which is distressing at one level, because it's supposed to be a "sealed" motor. Hmm. There is now only some 75mm pipework left to complete the bilge blower installation in the main petrol tank locker, and then that's finished. There is still the small matter of building the electronics needed to control them all, but hey - put it on the list. The next job in the bedroom is to install a proper floor. I can move around quite easily without it, so it hasn't been a problem thus far. However, there are some under-floor things to finish off first like the plumbing and the exhaust system. To that end, I re-fitted the copper part of the exhaust system to the engine and then could position the rubber exhaust hose and muffler. The muffler will be at the forward end of the system adjacent to the engine, to avoid heating the floor somewhere else less convenient and to keep it below the water line to ensure that it stays full of water. This should keep it cool and make sure that it works as well as it can. The goose-neck riser in the copper part of the system is above the water line, so it shouldn't be possible for cooling water to backflow into the engine. Holes for the 50mm rubber exhaust hose were then drilled in the underfloor frames and the two very last hull frames could then be installed under the sundeck steps and glassed in place. The hose can now make its way all the way back to the transom. There will be a join in the hose under the steps for convenience and to use up all the available hose. At $50 per metre, it's not to be wasted!!! I described the raw water reservoir in some detail earlier. The raw water inlet goes through a fairly coarse "leaf basket" filter, but that's not enough to protect the domestic pressure pump. A finer, 50micron, filter is necessary as well and it seemed prudent to put one on the drinking water pump as well, so two appropriate filter units have been purchased. They have removable and washable stainless steel elements and also some very ordinary looking connectors as though they were intended for garden hoses. Still, they are called "Jabsco Connectors", so perhaps they will be OK. I acquired a set of AGM batteries for the boat what is now several years ago and they were second-hand then! They have been on "float charge" via a fairly up-market four-stage solar controller and solar panels since then, but I started to worry that they may now be past their "Use-By" dates. So, I decided to test them. To create a meaningful load, I unboxed my very expensive 3Kw pure sinewave inverter and connected it to a 1.5Kw electric heater. The whole system lasted about 20 minutes before it shut down on an under-voltage alarm. At least that works although the result was a bit disappointing really. However, after thinking about it for a while, it is actually not unreasonable. A sudden and consistent discharge rate of over 150 Amps is a big ask! So, I dropped the load to about 400W by using the system to heat my kitchen Crock Pot, which made a very convenient test load. The battery voltages all stayed within range and nothing got hot - well, except for the Crock Pot of course... In this test, the batteries supplied more than 30Amps for a full eight hours, which is excellent. That's almost 250Ahrs, and although there should be 500Ahrs available in theory, but that depends on the discharge rate of course. Anyway, the result is absolutely fine and a bit of a relief really, I didn't fancy having to shell out for new batteries just yet!
18 May 2017	The end of April every second year sees the SA Wooden Boat Festival held in Goolwa. It is a very well attended and popular event. The heritage paddle steamer Marion usually attends, which as Skipper, kept me away from boat building duties for almost two weeks - lucky me! Enough enjoying myself - back to more mundane things. The new frames installed under the sun-deck stairs have had 90mm holes cut through them to allow for the exhaust hose. The holes were coated internally with epoxy to seal them and then had to be very well sanded to avoid chaffing the rubber. Once the route for the exhaust hose was known, the floors that will go over the exhaust pipe could be planned. This involves a 50mm wide strip of plywood glued to the hull to form a ledge for the floor panels and also to avoid creating a "hard spot" at the ends of the new frames. Ledges around the other three sides have been made up from 50x50 square lengths of plywood laminated up from scrap. The floor will ultimately be the bottom of a cupboard under the sun-deck stairs that will be accessible from the corridor between the saloon and the bedroom. The access door shape is still to be decided. Heat from the exhaust should not be a problem since it is a "wet" system and the temperature didn't rise above 55 degrees during testing. Another piece of plumbing yet to be finalised in the engine bay is the carburettor air intake. I decided long ago that the engine should draw air in from outside the hull rather than breathe its own fumes internally. There are two reasons for this; the first is noise and the second is safety. An engine sucking in air is quite a noisy process and whilst the air cleaner suppresses that to some extent, piping air in from outside is better. Engines can "back-fire", which can produce a flame out of the air-intake. It is much better to have this piped outside where it cannot start a fire in the engine bay. There is a spark arrester in the air-cleaner as well of course, but belts and braces together are safer! The air cleaner, which was taken from a Holden Torana because of its low height, has been significantly modified to allow the attachment of a 75mm fire resistant plastic hose. The hose in turn is joined to a plywood trunking built into the side of the hull that allows access to outside air through a plastic grill. The subject of fire prevention is always a "hot" topic (pun intended), on a petrol powered wooden boat! So, I was intrigued by an item on the TV recently introducing a new type of fire extinguisher. It is a ball, a bit smaller than a football, that has a heat sensitive outer case. If the ambient temperature rises above a certain point the whole thing literally explodes releasing a significant quantity of fire retardant powder together with masses of carbon dioxide to displace the oxygen and starve the fire. The combination of the three elements, i.e. explosion, powder and gas is remarkably effective. At present they are ridiculously expensive, but before the boat is launched, buying a couple might be a very wise move. Having finally remembered to take mechanical tools such as spanners and sockets to the boat shed, it was time to finalise the engine alignment with the propeller shaft. The provisional alignment was done using light beams and mirrors (no smoke with the mirrors - promise), and it has turned out to be surprisingly accurate. The front of the engine had to be moved 3mm to port and the front engine mounts raised slightly. The alignment was then checked with a set of feeler gauges and was found to be just about perfect. All the bolts were then tightened and the system pronounced "Ready to go". The centre steady bearing has been packed with grease, but the stuffing box is still waiting for the appropriate stuffing to be installed and then it too, can be grease packed. The shaft is bolted up lightly, but the Woodruff keys for the keyways have temporarily "gone missing". They have no doubt been put somewhere to keep them safe, but they'll turn up! The shaft alignment will need to be re-checked once the boat has been in the water for six months or so. This is to account for any flexing and settling of the hull structure, which may make a difference to the alignment. With spanners still in hand it was also a good opportunity to re-install the components that had been removed to facilitate the engine installation. Such things as the exhaust front pipe and the water jacket cover plate. The carburettor, which has been professionally re-furbished with new jets, needle and seat and gaskets etc. was also re-installed. One of the next jobs in the bedroom is to line the walls. However, the side decks must be installed before doing that, whilst their undersides are still accessible for gluing and painting. The side decks are straight on their inboard side for the length of the bedroom and bathroom and can be installed as a single 4800mm piece of plywood. Naturally, since sheets of plywood are only 2400 long, separate pieces have to be scarfed together to make up the length. Since I was scarfing bits and pieces, it was a good opportunity to use up some of the plywood off-cuts around the place. The pieces cut out from the coach house sides for the windows were very useful when trimmed to about 200mm wide and all joined together. The port side deck is made and installed and looks very handsome. The starboard side is made and ready for installation. Now the propeller shaft is installed, it is easier to see what space remains in the back of the gearbox area. This space has to accommodate various pumps, filters and taps and it remains to be seen what can fit where. One item that has to be there is the filter box for the shower and hand basin grey water. It has a coarse filter that has to be cleaned periodically and having it together with the other filters makes some sense. It needs to be raised from the bottom of the boat both for convenience and to make sure that it will reach all the plumbing connections. So, a set of small frame pieces, which will also provide additional support to the boat's bottom have been made up and are being glassed ready for installation. Grey water will leave the boat through the transom via a fitting that looks like an exhaust pipe, actually it is a match for the real exhaust pipe which is on the other side of the boat. It will look like twin exhausts from the back, but nothing is what it seems - necessarily... The raw water reservoir has been completed for some time, but it has been bothering me that the flange that holds all the plumbing connections is somewhat flimsy for its new, rather unorthodox role. After all, it is only a simple threaded 150mm PVC end cap and I had to remove what small reinforcing mouldings there were on its underside, to ensure that the connections could sit properly on a flat surface and not leak. A solution suggested itself in the form of a circle of 12mm plywood glued completely over the outside of the cap and have the plumbing fittings go through both layers. Whilst epoxy doesn't really stick to PVC, the nuts on the fittings will hold it all together and I can wrap some glass tape around the outside to both seal it and provide some additional strength. A much better arrangement I think! Another job that has been "lurking" around waiting for some inspirational solution is in the bathroom or more particularly in the shower. It turns out that the acrylic sheets used to line the walls expand significantly with temperature. This means that on hot days and presumably therefore in the presence of hot shower water as well, the acrylic panels "bow" and lift away from the walls here and there because they fit together too tightly. The solution is to provide an expansion gap in the corners of the shower and wherever two acrylic sheets meet. The problem is of course that they are all installed already and cutting a groove as an expansion gap deep in the inaccessible corners is a problem. Having discounted various possibilities, a desperate solution came to mind. Use a 9" angle grinder with a metal cutting blade - sounds "butcherous" in the extreme, doesn't it? Well, it did to me! How could you possibly control such a cumbersome tool in such close confines where the slightest error will be glaringly obvious for evermore! Scary! Actually, the angle grinder does have a speed control, which helped a bit, but taking my courage in both hands, well the angle grinder anyway, I attacked my very expensive and fragile acrylic sheeting with great trepidation. What a great idea it turned out to be! I cut a neat 3mm gap in all the corners where the acrylic sheets meet, which I will fill with silicone in due course like any other bathroom. Actually, the corners of the sheets guided the tool really well and not once did it go off line or make any horrible marks on my lovely bright royal blue acrylic sheeting! Love it when a plan works - it makes up to some extent for all the other times when... Well, you know.
3 Jun 2017	I'm a member of the local Wooden Boat Association and we occasionally arrange "shed visits" to see what our members are up to - mostly when they should be doing other things. The Club visited Rhapsody "en masse" in 2010 and again in 2014. This October they are planning to come again and since it has been three years since their last visit they will see that the galley and saloon now have roofs and that the windscreen is in as well as the engine, not to mention a finished bathroom! The reason for mentioning the club visit is that it will bring lots of extra people to the boat, which in turn reminded me that I still need to fix the saloon floor. The floor consists of plywood "tiles" about 500mm square resting on two plywood girders. These are easily removable to expose the large storage area beneath. However, although each plywood tile has a reinforcing frame on its underside, they are still only really supported down their two outer edges, where they are relying on the glue on the single veneer of plywood to take the weight. Not a good design as it turns out, especially for the tiles made of lower quality BS1066 timber. Consequently, several of the tiles have de-laminated and will break altogether in due course - hardly desirable, particularly with the assembled mass of the Wooden Boat Association in attendance. So, a little re-thinking and repair is required. Instead of just supporting each tile down two of its edges, it would be better to support all four sides. This has involved making new sections of floor girder that slot into place between the existing ones to share the load. They are not fixed because they need to be removed to access the black tank hatches (yuk)! When I made the original floor girders, it turns out that I made one too many and given that they were each 2400mm long, that represented quite a lot of wasted effort and material. Now of course, good fortune has smiled, because I have been able to use up the spare beam for the reinforcing job. In fact, I will have to make another because I now don't have quite enough and there is still a small area around the helm position that doesn't yet have a floor. So, a good result. I mentioned a while back that I thought that the front face of the raw water manifold was a bit flimsy and so, I would reinforce it with a piece of 12mm plywood. This started out as a trivial exercise in the grand scheme of things, but has become bigger the Ben Hur! Cutting a 150mm circle of plywood was no problem. The drilling of six holes for all the fittings and having them exactly line up with the original PVC end cap was only time consuming and tedious. Then of course, it had to be glassed on both sides to keep the water out and then finished with Peel Ply to create a smooth surface so that the fittings could all seal properly. The real time wasting only really started when I thought I would wrap some fibre glass around the edge to finish the whole thing off neatly. I did that and it looked awful! So, I thought perhaps I could put it in the lathe and turn the outside edge down to a nice shape. However, before you put anything in a lathe, you have to make an appropriate mandrel to mount it on - more messing around! Once it was finally in the lathe and I could start to dress the edge properly, I quickly realised that there wasn't enough material there to do the job. So, back to the shed to put more fibre glass around the edge and have another go! Grrr.... The engine draws air from outside through a hull fitting and then into a 75mm fire and fuel resistant hose. The inlet side of the air cleaner is much the same area as the hose, which is good. However, it is square and the hose is round, which is not good. Mating of the two involved a significant amount of time, significant use of a heat gun, a significant number of pop rivets and a significant sprinkling of bad language. Still, is now installed - good! Now the propeller shaft is in place it is time to start planning the other bits and pieces that have to be accommodated under the floor in the area behind the gearbox. One such item is the grey water filter for the shower and hand basin. It is really just a plastic box containing an automatic bilge pump and a removable mesh filter that takes water from the shower and the hand basin and passes it through the filter before pumping it over the side. I have fitted a float switch to the box to provide an alarm if the filter becomes blocked. Naturally, the filter has to be cleaned occasionally and therefore has to be readily accessible. The most convenient spot is under the removable floor panel outside the bathroom door, although the filter box needs to be raised from the very bottom of the hull to properly align with the plumbing connections. It also makes it easier to reach for cleaning. So, an appropriate mounting frame was made to fit the filter box and its plumbing in amongst the exposed and rotating propeller shaft - Hmm, don't clean the filter whilst the engine is running perhaps! As part of finishing the bathroom, part of the side deck above the hand basin had to be installed. Since I am now working around the bedroom, it would be convenient if they were installed there too. So, side decks all around? Why not? The side decks are generally about 200mm wide and straight on the coach house edge and curved on the hull side. They are made of 12mm plywood and follow the shape of the hull as it rises from the stern to the bow. Since they run the full length of the boat of course, they need to be made up of joined pieces. Scarf joints are best because they won't crack, but in various places, adequate support is available to risk butt joins. The two side decks had been scarfed up for the rear half of the hull and it turned out to be a good way of using up scrap timber. Particularly the large pieces of the coach house that were left over from the window cut-outs. In some cases, of course, the scraps were themselves made up of scarfed pieces so that the starboard side deck has end up with five joints. It doesn't matter and it's really good to be able to use up all that plywood - it is $200 a sheet after all! Installing the side decks turned into a difficult exercise because the panels are over four metres long and since they're only 200mm wide they are a bit floppy - fragile even and really awkward when they're covered in wet glue! Some days, you just need a bit of a hand! My friend Scotty had dropped by to say "hello" and very kindly offered to come back later in the day when I was ready and give me a hand. So, both side decks were installed and it was so much easier with two people! Thanks Scotty!!!
6 Jul 2017	The process of reinforcing the saloon floor mentioned above is now finished. I originally only installed floor girders athwartships to support the 500mm square floor panels. They were each braced underneath of course, but I had to concede that they were inadequate after three panels actually broke. I had an original girder left over, (which had made me cross at the time), so I decided to make small cross girders (running fore and aft) to support the edges of each panel. The "spare" girder wasn't quite enough (naturally) and so had to make another one. In fact, I made another two because I haven't yet made the floor around the helm position and it seemed prudent. One issue with installing the small fore and aft girders to support the edges of the floor panels is that they have to be removable to be able to access the black tank hatches below. I eventually realised that the cross girders could simply be notched into the existing ones and that the framing on each floor panel would hold them in place, without having to glue them in. It turns out to be a neat solution, but again, it's another week's work with nothing apparent to show from the outside. Never mind having to repair the three delaminating floor panels as well - more painting - yada - yada... Very frustrating! The other major achievement for this post is that the side decks are all finished. I decided to go with butt blocks to join each piece rather than scarf joints because it's so much easier and since the area of each join is quite small, they are not under any great strain. I may live to regret that decision (Aside - That's a daft expression - if I'm dead, I wouldn't be regretting it much really - although, you never know...)! Anyway, with all the necessary butt blocks installed and sanded to the right profile, the remaining side deck panels were cut and installed. Each one was made to slightly overhang the sides of the hull, which has now been sanded off and it all looks terrific. The plan is to round off the outer edge of the side deck so that fibre glass cloth can then be installed to cover the edge of the hull, across the side deck and up to the window edges on the coach house. This approach should not only provide a complete waterproof seal for the coach house, but also make a solid backing for the rubbing strakes which have to be installed on the outside edges of the hull. The rubbing strakes are sacrificial and in the case of a mooring "accident", have to be replaceable. They cannot therefore, be permanently glued into place, so the hull has to be sealed underneath where the rubbing strakes will be fitted. Now the side decks are in place, only the fore and aft decks remain to finish that part of the job. Making these two deck areas would be very straightforward, to the point of trivial, except... There's always "but" with these things isn't there? Actually, there are two "buts" in this case. The first is that neither deck is flat. They both have the same curve as the saloon and galley roofs, so the roof mould gets resurrected for some slight modifications to be pressed into service to make the deck panels. Both fore and aft decks will be made from three layers of 4mm ply as for the roofs and with the experience gained thus far, don't represent a huge problem - only time! The first two layers of the fore deck were glued up yesterday and the third will go on next week when because of the cold weather, the glue might actually be dry. It is winter - I know... The second "but" mentioned above is because the fore and aft decks both have hatches in them - multiple hatches actually! The foredeck has a hatch to access the gas bottle locker and another to stow mooring lines and the anchor. The aft deck has two hatches for the removable petrol tanks and another two for the aft mooring lines. None of these hatches has to be waterproof because the lockers underneath have all been made with appropriate drains (foresight - yeah), but they do have to be strong enough to walk on and flush enough to not present a trip hazard. Moose has a "plan" for moulding fibreglass hatch frames and when I find out more about it, so will you... I am so bored with the never-ending story of the raw water manifold that I hesitate to even mention it again. However, it has been the subject of yet more work and if you, dear reader, are wondering (like me) where the last nine years has gone, this is the sort of thing that happens. I won't recap the full story, it's all there in the preceding sections, but suffice to say that I needed to put some additional fibre glass "meat" on the edges of the front plate for reinforcement and appearances sake. That done, it was time to make a suitable mandrel and put it into the lathe for a last "tidy up". The final result is actually quite good and will do the job nicely. You might have realised that one of the reasons that I was keen on adequate strength here is that if it were to fail - the boat would sink in a trice - not good... The shower and hand basin waste water has to be filtered before being returned to the river. Any filter has to be accessible for cleaning of course, and needs to be placed somewhere to make that as easy as possible. (or it won't get done)! The shower waste grate is below the waterline, so after filtering, the water has to be pumped out of the boat. I have bought a combination shower pump/filter box designed for that purpose that complies with the EPA's requirements and had long ago decided that it should go under the access panel outside the bathroom door, (along with various other filters). However, to bring it to the correct height, just under the floor panel, a mounting frame was required. Also, in the area directly behind the gearbox there is a large area of the hull bottom that is not supported a well as it might be. So, to combine the two things, a frame was made to fit across the hull for reinforcement and also mount the waste water filter box. Now that the propeller shaft is in place, the frame could be tailored to fit around it (good idea). Speaking of the propeller shaft, another essential job in that area is stuffing the stuffing box - alright, packing the stern gland, if you prefer. That was a job I had never done before and happily whiled away a couple of hours on my stomach with a mirror and a torch, whilst I could have been doing something more interesting like watching paint dry. However, the grease nipple puzzled me. The stern gland casting is provided with a grease nipple. It is placed aft of the gland packing material so it's not to lubricate that. The normally water lubricated Tufnol bearing is a few millimetres aft of the nipple and so it's not anything to do with that either. The part of the casting immediately under the grease nipple is bigger than the propeller shaft by several millimetres and therefore does not require any lubrication. Another suggestion was that it was there to allow for bleeding air out of the stern tube to ensure outside water can reach the water lubricated bearings. So, it was a puzzle. Well, in the absence of any better ideas, what should one do with a likely looking grease nipple except, well, fill it full of grease. The smart thing to do and of course and I didn't think of it until afterwards, would have been to simply ring my friend Phil at CAE Engineering who supplied the thing and ask him what it's for. "Oh, it's not for anything - just ignore it" says Phil. Hmm - it's already full of grease - ah well, apparently it doesn't matter. The same stern gland casting is used in a number of different configurations, some of which have a bearing there - but not this time... Another matter that has been bothering me for some time is whether to reinforce the bedroom ceiling by making the bed into a "four poster", for example. The bedroom roof is of course, also the floor of the sundeck and who knows how many people might get up there on a pleasant evening? The roof beams in the bedroom have the same, deliberately narrower, spacings as do those in the galley and are specifically designed to walked upon. The beams in the saloon are spaced more widely recognising that they should only need to carry equipment, such as solar panels and lights. However, the galley and bedroom roofs do differ significantly in terms of their span, since the bedroom is approaching three metres wide for most of its area, it is almost double that of the galley. It is comforting perhaps, that the bedroom roof could be reinforced at a later date, if that were found to be necessary. Another related concern about the sundeck is that it is at a significant height above the waterline and a large number of people at that level may profoundly affect the Centre of Gravity and indeed, the ultimate stability of the vessel. Practical tests during the initial sea trials, (or should that be "river trials"), will establish the actual CofG and Metacentric Height for the boat and ultimately, its stability, but it may be that there will need to be strict weight (i.e. numbers of people) limits applied to the usage of the sundeck to ensure that the boat remains stable, or at the very least upright...
27 Jul 2017	As mentioned above, the side decks are now completed. They are filled and sanded and ready for filleting and glassing to the coach house. The fore deck is laminated up and is installed. I decided that the aft deck has enough supporting structure underneath that it didn't need to be laminated and could just be cut from 12mm plywood. The deck is about 200mm wide and as luck would have it, is 2395mm long, which very convenient given that sheets of plywood are 2400! So, the aft deck is made and installed and now one can walk right around the boat! Nice (watch your head)! The various hatches will be made in fibreglass and installed in the timber decks. The edges of the side decks have all been rounded over with a router to aid with the glassing and they look terrific. Fibre glass cloth will now be glued all around the boat from the lower edge of the windows, down over the side decks and on to the top edge of the hull under where the rub rails will ultimately be installed. Once the rub rails are in place, the gap where the edge of the hull was rounded for the fibre glass will simply be filled back up to bring it back level with the side decks. The result will make the side decks wider and therefore easier and safer etc. The foredeck was made on the same curved mould that was used to make the brow for the saloon roof. Whilst the mould was still on the bench, it seemed like a good time to make the lift-up hatch for the saloon, which of course has the same profile. The saloon hatch, which is the main entry point for the boat of course, is now made with the usual three layers of 4mm ply and is awaiting the completion of the hatch coamings so that it can be fitted. There will be a sliding door in the coach house wall as well of course, which when combined with the lifting entry hatch, should make for very comfortable full height entry and exit from the vessel. When hatch and door are both closed, the outer edge of the hatch has to seal on the top edge of the sliding door and quite how that will work is still the subject of several more cups of tea! The "cupboard under the stairs" (sounds like Harry Potter's bedroom), which will be quite a large storage area, now has the start of a floor. There was some mismatch of levels that needed a bit of tidying up and that's been done. Once the floor is in, the access door from the passage outside the bathroom door can be cut. Once that's done, the stairway to heaven, well the sun-deck anyway, can be finished off. The other access panel in the passage is the one that hides the shower plumbing, which is also where the gas, water and electrical connections go to the upper deck. The hatch was originally simply cut out of the wall, but the intention has always been to make a "cutesy" little frame around the edges to hide the joins. That has now been finished using some scrap meranti, which will contrast nicely with the pine wall, once it is all clear finished. I have fitted a flow meter to the engine cooling system just after the main water pump, to measure the volume of water flowing through the system at any given moment. If there is a blockage in the filters or water inlet, it should be immediately obvious before any damage is done. The flow meter is a length of tube with a small turbine fitted inside and a Hall Effect sensor on the outside to count the revolutions of the turbine. I'm pleased with the potential usefulness of the device, but have always been a bit concerned that the body of the unit is plastic. Whilst that may be OK for a garden irrigation system, in my case if it were to fracture, it could sink the boat. So, I was delighted to find, again whilst looking for something else, an almost identical unit in bronze and of course, couldn't get to my PayPal account quickly enough! Incidentally, I had always expected to have to build the dashboard display end of the flow meter system myself. I had designed up a suitable circuit to drive a VU meter style display, but not bothered to build it as yet. So, I was pleased to notice on another site, an electronic digital rev. counter for the princely sum of $7 - I couldn't build it for that! So again, another Internet purchase was made. Whilst the display wasn't really designed for use with my flow sensor and the connections and circuit diagram were all in Chinese, I finally got it to work. Once connected to the kitchen tap, it clearly measures water flow quite happily although what the "units" might be is anyone's guess. I don't actually care what the units are, because I only really care if the flow rate drops suddenly or worse still, stops altogether! So, it's a good solution - if you'll pardon the pun.. Another problem that has been repeatedly ignored for many moons and oddly hasn't gone away, is the matter of actually getting off the boat and down on to a river bank. The front deck is almost 1500mm above the waterline and so getting down from the deck to what may be a beach and therefore very close to the waterline, represents a challenge. This is particularly true as we age and become less agile. A boarding plank or ramp, long enough to reach down 1500mm without being too steep to use, would be too heavy to manoeuvre. A ladder might be OK for teenagers, but otherwise is simply too hard to use! I did have a conversation a couple of years back with a local business that makes folding attic access ladders, which seemed like a potential solution. He was keen to make something up to try, but it still didn't appeal. Whilst trawling the Internet looking for something else, I happened across something called a "bow to beach" ladder. My interested was immediately piqued! It turns out to be a concertina or accordion style folding ladder, which looks terrific. It fits on two clips on the foredeck and once thrown over the side, expands to easily reach the beach (or river bank in my case), and can be set away from the boat far enough to make the climb angle manageable. It folds up into a 500mm odd cube and weighs 9Kg. To test the theory, I made up one side frame from MDF and lots of nuts and bolts, just to see if it would work in practice and it looks pretty good. Made in the US, the concertina ladder is not cheap, but is the only solution that seems workable - and what's another $700 in the grand scheme of boat building. (Certainly not significant in percentage terms)! I ordered one yesterday. I have found during this project that cheap tools usually aren't cheap in the end. They are either hard to use or don't do a particularly good job, (well, not in my amateur hands anyway). However, there are exceptions. My belt sander failed last week with the usual bearing failure that gets hot and then melts the housing. It was cheap, but I've had it two or three years and it has done much more work than the manufacturers ever envisaged. So, I have no complaint - or recourse for that matter! Given that my belt sander cost $75 versus a "professional" quality unit at $450, I think it's pretty good value even if I now have to buy another one - my FOURTH! Still, $75 times four is still only $300, so I'm in front. Added to which, in the cheap tool store yesterday, the $75 sanders were on "special" for $45. You have to win one once in a while...
28 Aug 2017	OK - last day of Winter today - Yeah! And, a really nice day too. 20 degrees, bright blue sky, sunny and quite still. A great "epoxy" day. As a short addendum to the subject of the previous post, my new belt sander is working very well, as you would expect. However, over lunch one day I had another look at the old unit that was still in pieces on the bench, and noticed that in fact, although the main bearing had totally destroyed itself, it hadn't actually become hot enough to deform the plastic housing, which is very unusual. That raised the question of course, perhaps it could be repaired? I took the remains of the old bearing to CBC and they wanted $25 for a new one. No! I'm not spending that much on a repair that was "iffy" at best! I thought that was rather a lot for a bearing anyway, so I checked eBay (as you do) and was able to buy one from Melbourne for $4.05 including postage - much better. It is now installed and hey presto, the old belt sander is new again! The top edges of the coach house walls, above the bedroom windows, become the sundeck sides. They have been sitting at a jaunty slope for quite some time. However, that was sheer luck. In order to be able to cut each coach house side from just two sheets of plywood scarfed together, the patterns had to be turned at an angle. So, the angle on the top edges of the final wall panels was the accidental result. Whilst I did quite like them it was now time to finalise their proper shape before putting the bathroom/bedroom roof on. The original plan was to have fixed seating on the sides of the sundeck, which would have required the sides to be high enough to accommodate them. A hull with such a shallow draft necessarily sits fairly high above the water line anyway and I have always been concerned because I don't want it to end up looking like a block of flats! So, I have abandoned the fixed seating idea in favour of a lower profile. One of the reasons for the fixed seating idea was to physically keep people away from the edges of the sundeck. There is some concern about the stability of the boat if too much weight is placed at its outer edges at such a height. Ultimately, we may have to impose a "number of people" limit on the sundeck for that reason. Another consideration is the aesthetics of the proposed Fly Bridge or second helm position on the forward end of the sundeck. The flybridge will have to be built once the boat is moved out of the shed, because the shed isn't tall enough. So, many scale drawings later, we have a final shape for both the sundeck walls and the flybridge. These were transferred to the sundeck sides with a fairing batten and the shapes cut out. I'm very pleased with the final design, which is just as well I suppose. There are going to be various hatches in both the fore and aft decks. Moose has suggested that we cast the hatch frames and indeed the hatches themselves, in fibreglass. To that end the fore and aft decks need to be finished to get their final shapes defined so that moulds can be taken off to make the hatches. Both decks are now filleted and glassed and look terrific. The side decks now have to be finished around the remainder of the hull. It's not a difficult job, but there are 10 metres or so on both sides! The area under the sundeck stairs is to be a cupboard, but it seems to have become known as the "Harry Potter Suite" for reasons that will be immediately obvious to anyone who has seen the films. The "HP" Suite has to have a level floor, so battens have been fitted around the sides of all four sections of the hull underneath and plywood floorboards made. The warm exhaust system goes under the floor so it won't be the place to keep the wine! The "HP" suite has to have a door too, of course. So, an access panel has been cut in the wall opposite the bathroom. It will simply lift out to give access to the cupboard space and a frame of contrasting Meranti timber has been made to hide the saw cuts around its edges. The same approach has been used to hide the saw cuts around the edges of the bathroom plumbing trunk, which is also in the passage. Now that the "HP" suite is complete, the sundeck stairs can be finished and that gives easy access to the sundeck itself to facilitate putting the floor in. Sounds easy if you say it quickly, but that floor is the last piece of major construction needed to finish the outside of the vessel. In fact, the "F" word comes to mind more and more, which is scary...
22 Sep 2017	The "Harry Potter Suite" mentioned above now does have its door - is it a "Portkey" perhaps? Anyway, it is finished and has two ring-pull catches fitted and looks terrific. The bottom half of the door will have wall liner (carpet) glued to it to match the remainder of the passage and the rest of the boat for that matter. The top half is clear finished timber with a mitred Meranti frame hiding the edges - it looks great. The floor panels for the HP suite are made and painted and ready to go in. The support rails are in and the whole underfloor area has had its first coat of paint. That has highlighted a small issue with "limber" holes. Limber holes provide drainage for any water that finds its way under the floor either from condensation, rain or anything else, through the various bulkheads to eventually find a bilge pump to be pumped out. However, as the hull design has "evolved" over time, a couple of the "limber" holes now don't actually lead anywhere - another little job for another day... The completion of the HP suite was a prerequisite for the convenient building of the sundeck stairs. The top two steps were built a long time ago because they make up the top of the heat resistant locker that holds the gas hot water service. The remaining five treads and risers had been left until "later" to leave better access to finish the under-stair area and install the exhaust pipe. The five treads and risers have now been cut out and fibre glassed on their outside faces, since they will be exposed to the weather in the final design. Building the stairs has been a tedious job because access is very limited and keeping everything dimensionally accurate and level has meant installing a few components at a time whilst there is room for the necessary G-cramps, then waiting for the glue to cure to be able to install the next few bits. Each stair tread also has two triangular supports glued underneath, to provide additional strength and will have reinforcing fillets and glass tape applied later, just to finish the job. Given that the stairs will ultimately be open to the rain, some arrangements for drainage are required. The very bottom stair tread therefore, is not a plain piece of timber, but a grid or grate with a gutter underneath leading out to a hull fitting. The grate has to be removable of course, to be able to clean out leaves and other debris. So, the final staircase is now complete except for that very first step. The design of the grate is still the subject of another cup of tea or two... Now the sundeck stairs are finished and the top edges of the coach house have been cut to their final shape, the actual sun deck / bedroom roof can be constructed. Although, whilst there are still a significant number of jobs remaining in the bedroom, it seems prudent to enjoy the extra light and ventilation without the roof for the time being. The coach house walls are made from several flat sheets of plywood to facilitate the sliding windows. However, in order to follow the shape of the hull (more or less), those sheets have had to be joined. Those joins have to be strong enough to resist cracking with any flexing of hull and to that end, they have been placed against various inside frames and have been heavily glassed in rebated trenches on the outside. These joins have finally had to be faired ready for painting. A very awkward, dusty and time-consuming job, but looks terrific now it's done. The joint between the coach house walls and the side-decks right around the boat, can now also be finished off. Once that is done, the outside of Rhapsody is essentially ready for final fairing and painting. There's that "F" word looming again... A couple of other small things for the outside of the boat. The navigation light wiring is now installed. Again, nothing is easy or straightforward! The wiring had to be hidden of course, so appropriate trenches were routed into the coach house walls and 5mm aluminium tube buried in epoxy to act as conduits for the wires. Now, each is covered in epoxy and faired ready for painting. Deck lights on a river boat are not strictly necessary perhaps, but why not? To both illuminate the side decks at night for safety and to generally "show-off" a bit, eight blue LED downlights have been installed around the boat. I better be careful, I'm almost enjoying this...
1 Nov 2017	Another Halloween Festival is passed, but another, much more significant, anniversary also sneaked past in October. The "Build Date" of any boat is generally considered to be the day the first piece of the keel is laid and in this case, that was 31st October 2008. Nine years ago! It's hard to believe and if the question is "Did you expect it to take this long", the answer is "Absolutely not". The next question might be "Had you known it would take this long, would you have started it at all"? and the answer is - "I'm not sure"... An even more difficult question is "Would you have started the project had you known that the cost would be at least three times the original budget" and the answer is - "Probably not". However, from a commercial perspective, the boat is still a good investment, provided you accept that my hourly rate is around 1 cent per hour - or less... October saw me skippering the PS Marion paddle steamer for a week, which was great fun, but doesn't allow for a lot of boat building. The other significant event was a planned "Shed Visit" by members of the Wooden Boat Association of SA of whom I am one. The impact of the impending shed visit was to have to vacuum the shed and the boat, cut the grass and generally hide the slovenly way in which I generally work. That process seemed to occupy many, many days during which I was surrounded by a haze of sawdust and pollen. Not good for a mild asthmatic... I had promised myself that the sundeck stairs would be finished for the Club Visit, and so they were - more or less. Not only are the stairs finished, in so far as they are actually built and one can walk up them some way before colliding with the tin roof of the shed, but they are glassed and painted with wood preservative underneath as well. Working under the stairs in the Harry Potter Suite is remarkably uncomfortable. Headroom is limited and irregular in shape making head-banging a certainty rather than a risk and fibre glassing overhead is only marginally better than welding in the same position. At least the drips of epoxy will come out of one's hair eventually, unlike the damage done by hot welding rod, which simply burns holes. There is still the matter of painting the area under the stairs of course, but that is still a joy to come at present. The floors in the cupboard are all finished and painted, so that's something. The cupboard also now has a door, which is also finished. It is held in place with a couple of handsome lift catches and looks terrific. Whilst cutting the hole for the door, the jigsaw jumped out of the slot and damaged my pretty veneer, which is a real shame. Plunge cutting with a jigsaw is still a job I approach with some trepidation, with good reason as it turns out. Hopefully, the application of some colour coordinated putty will at least make the mistake a little less obvious... It occurred to me as well, that the weight of the stairs and anyone walking up or down them was being directly taken on the edge of a 12mm plywood wall that, because of the Harry Potter hatch, now had a large part of itself removed. It seemed prudent then to provide some reinforcement for the whole area, so a frame was made and fitted around the hatch to provide some addition stiffening. Another item that I decided would be good to have in place for the "shed day" was the saloon LED lighting. The ceiling has been finished for a long time and the wiring harnesses were installed and ready as well. Two things that required new skills were using the "jelly joiners" and having to solder thin wires on the ends of each LED light string. The jelly joiners are used by British Telecom and are cheap and readily available on eBay. You insert two unstripped wires, up to 0.9mm diameter each, into the clear body and crunch it flat with a pair of pliers. The inside of the plastic body is filled with a waterproof jelly that quickly surrounds and protects the join once it is crunched. They are very quick and easy to use and seem quite reliable. Soldering wires on to the LED light strips on the other hand is neither easy, quick nor straightforward. Getting the waterproof coating off the LED strip is the first challenge. It's tenacious stuff. I used a very sharp craft knife like a scalpel and being very aware of the potential for removing the top of a finger, it was a careful and slow process. The Mylar printed circuit board underneath the waterproof coating is very flexible and fragile and getting the copper surface clean enough to attempt soldering needed more careful work with the scalpel. I tried a small soldering iron to start with and then realised that a bigger one was actually better because it put a lot of heat in the right spot for a shorter time. After the first ten or so joins, I was actually improving. So, it can be done. The saloon lighting is now installed in all its glory and it really does look very good. The LED strips reflect off the white ceiling to provide indirect illumination in every corner of the area and the warm-daylight light colour, is very easy on the eye. With my new-found jelly joiner skills, I also took the opportunity to re-install all the galley lighting, which was turning out to be most unreliable with the old-style LED strip clips. One thing I considered the WBASA members would like to have a good look at was the engine. So, to finish things off a bit more, I installed the muffler, bilge blower and air intake hoses. These all involve the use of 75mm stainless clamps that are screwed onto mounting blocks glued into strategic positions around the engine room. Each block has to be cut and fitted and then glued in the right spot where the paint has to be scraped away so that the glue sticks. Once dry, each area has to be filleted and repainted. (And you wonder why this boat takes so long to build)? Now all the hoses are in place and it would only need some petrol and volts and we could be off! Just to finish on a "you wouldn't believe it" note, I must tell you about the door lock. The saloon will have a sliding door. I imported the rail and all its fitting from America a while back and will need to make the door fairly soon. As the main door to the boat of course, it has to have a lock. So, whilst in the local Big Green Hardware Shop the other day I started looking at sliding door locks. Immediately it became clear that apparently none of the manufacturers expect a door to be less than 40mm thick and that it is also quite OK for it to have bits and pieces sticking out much further than that! I had expected my door to be only 25mm thick and to be able to slide completely out of the way when fully open. In the end, I couldn't meet all of my requirements, but got fairly close, which is good. However, and I know how hard you will find it to believe this, the lock I needed was the most expensive on the shelf! Ah, but that seems to be the way with boat building, doesn't it?
18 Nov 2017	Christmas Pageant day in Adelaide today - pity about the weather, which is cool and wet so far. Hard to believe yet another Christmas is only 37 days away - Grrr... Rhapsody is constructed on athwartships frames like most boats. Longitudinal stability for the lower part of the hull is provided by the shape of the keel and chines and for the upper parts, by the side decks and sheer clamps. The clinker-built sides of the hull in between, are made of 12mm marine ply and are otherwise not supported between the frames. Clinker construction inherently provides longitudinal stiffening at every point where the planks overlap each other, which is why it was chosen, but it has always been planned to provide further strength by adding horizontal frames that double as shelves for "stuff" inside the boat. This approach not only creates a very strong "egg-crate" reinforcement for the sides of the hull, but some very useful storage spaces as well. The first place ready to receive its "structural" shelving, as it turns out, is the HP Suite, under the stairs. Now boats tend to move around a bit whilst "sailing the high seas" or even "low rivers" in my case, so any "stuff" on shelves tends to fall off. To reduce that effect, shelves (and tables, or any other flat surfaces for that matter), on boats usually have lips on their edges more properly called "fiddles". So, two shelves were made for the HP Suite, with 35mm fiddles and duly glued into place. An interesting by product of adding the fiddles is that the shelf structure now becomes much like an "I" beam, albeit with one cheek of its cross piece missing. Still, a very strong shape and ideal to reinforce the sides of the hull against collision intrusion. The same style of shelving will be added throughout the saloon and bedroom in due course and for all the same reasons. The Galley and the bathroom already have cabinets and benchtops to provide the same longitudinal stiffening. The infamous side decks are now all filleted and glassed, and aside from final fairing, are finished. Again, not only providing a walkway all around the boat, but significant longitudinal stiffening for the top edges of the hull as well. The filleting strengthens the join between coach house sides and the top of the hull and also ensures a watertight seal to keep the rain out. The outer edges of the side-decks were rounded over to allow fibre glass cloth to be extended partly down the top plank. This area will be underneath a sacrificial and therefore replaceable, "Rubbing Rail" that will be fitted after final painting. Rubbing rails are usually un-painted and are simply there to protect the hull from scrapes during mooring etc. One of the oddities of Springtime in Adelaide, is the "yo-yo" nature of the daily temperature. Whilst glassing the side-decks in 16 degrees one day the following two days were 36! The "pot-life" of epoxy in these circumstances is constantly changing and the higher the temperature, the quicker you have to work, (or in smaller bites). Never mind personal comfort - but this is a hobby, right? I'm doing it for fun, enjoyment - some days I wonder... Perhaps just buying a hair shirt would been easier - a bloody sight cheaper at least. One of the by-products of the "big clean-up" for the WBASA shed visit mentioned above, was finding unexpected things in amongst all the sawdust and wood shavings. That is apart from a couple of bush mice nests and the like. Amongst the bedroom litter, I found a piece of aluminium bar, carefully drilled with a couple of holes, which was not familiar to me at all. I'd obviously made it for a purpose, but with a build that's now into its ninth year, I'm starting to forget the solutions I had found to particular problems. Indeed, in this case, I couldn't even remember the problem either. Perhaps it's dementia - now, what was I saying? Ah, yes! It was actually four days later, lying in bed half asleep, that I suddenly remembered that the piece of aluminium was actually part of the mountings I had made for the electric steering servo motor. Next day, anxious to check out the idea, the problem took a new slant - Now I don't know what I did with the piece of aluminium. I've put it safely somewhere I'm sure, but where? It was only last week! Life's really frustrating sometimes... On the subject of things lost, there is another, very effective, method of finding such things I have discovered. Start re-making them! Usually, once you acknowledge that something is lost and you start to make a new one, the lost item will turn up. It may not be until the replacement is finished of course, by which time you have two. But, as Ned Kelly said on the gallows "Such is Life". The back wall of the bedroom is stained and clear finished pine, whilst the side walls are painted white. I had intended to put supporting posts in the very back corners to provide strength for the joint and also for aesthetics. Furthermore, the posts would be laminated from the two contrasting timbers as has become a bit of a "theme" throughout the boat. I made the posts some time back, along with a pair for the saloon, which have been installed and look terrific. Now I'm ready to fit the pair into the back of the bedroom, but what did I do with them? I didn't see them during the clean-up and I have searched "high and low" since, all without success. I pondered for several days where I may have put these posts for safekeeping. All to no avail! I finally had to concede that they were lost and had to turn to my "final solution" - that is, start making some more! I had the Thicknesser out for something else, and thought I would just make up the necessary lathes ready to laminate a new set of posts just in case - surely then, after a couple of days, the old ones would turn up? No, no sign of them! Next day, I set up the moulds on the bench and got ready to mix up some glue - surely they would turn up now? Nope! OK, I give in - mix the glue and make the rotten things. They are now finished, fully sanded with edges rounded and ready to go in and looking very handsome. The old ones still haven't turned up, and I'm beginning to wonder now if they are actually the ones I used for the back wall of the saloon. They were largely put in for decorative purposes and were a last-minute decision - so yeah, that must be it, probably...
8 Dec 2017	Post script to the previous post: - It's some weeks later and they still haven't turned up! The new ones are made and fully installed on the back wall of the bedroom and are ready for clear finishing, so it's just one of the mysteries of boat building. The new and very pretty laminated roof support pillars in the bedroom are also finished and installed together with new matching quarter knees as well. You may recall that the roof supports in the bedroom were put in eons ago and were simply made of three layers of plywood glued together, which, whilst perfectly functional, didn't follow the later "style" of pillars used in the saloon. The dilemma of course, was whether to go back to the previously made components, rip them out and re-make them just to satisfy the aesthetics. Having decided that the inconsistency of style would continue to irritate me long into the future, I decided that I would do the work and make the changes. And, very handsome they look now too! Attacking perfectly functional parts of a new boat with a Sabre Saw just to make it look prettier takes a degree of determination, but now it's done, it was well worth it. Although, I have to concede that the new laminated pillars will probably be hidden behind the curtains in the end and never be seen again - but, I'll know they're there! One of the possible benefits of taking so long to build Rhapsody is that technology moves on and old problems suddenly seem to have new solutions. For example, I searched for some time in the early days, for low profile headlights suitable to mount on the roof. In the intervening years, LED Light Bars have come on to the market, which are ideal for my purposes. (Yes - I now have a pair in the shed, ready)! The electronic controller for the stepper motor that drives the rudder and will ultimately provide the steering has a problem with noise. The older style electronics operates at an audible frequency and every time the rudder moves, the electronics makes a very loud and unpleasant noise. Given that I am about to fit the stepper motor etc., on a whim, I thought that it might be worth a look on the Internet to see if anything new had turned up. Sure enough, a company in Sydney is making a bi-directional stepper motor controller that operates above the audio range and voilÃ - silence! I had been thinking more about the 75mm ship's wheel that I was intending to use for steering the boat and decided that it would be quite uncomfortable to use. It's very pretty and "twee", but hardy practical for use over a period of several hours. I decided that a more traditional "joystick" type control would be better and would be and ideal partner to the new electronic controller. Move the joystick at little and the rudder movement is tiny; push it hard over and the rudder responds very quickly. It should be good however, not wanting to waste the brass inset ship's wheel that took so long to find, I've made a new brass centre for the wheel to accommodate the joystick. Once it's set into the dashboard it will be not only good to look at, its function will be obvious, and the joystick will be comfortable to use as well - I think... Quite some time back, I decided not to install the very expensive range hood that I had bought with the stove, because it made the galley too claustrophobic. Trolling the Internet one evening, as you do, I found an extractor fan designed for external mounting on a roof. The idea of having the bulk of the extractor unit outside the galley was appealing and although the unit will be visible from the helm position, it not so intrusive and it's a reasonable compromise. The particularly unit was new, but surplus to requirement and the asking price was $50. I was delighted when I discovered that the retail price of this Italian made unit is over $450! The extractor fan runs on 240v and continuing on from the comments above about the advancement of technology, there are now a range of very small and super-efficient inverters available, that are ideal to power this kind of device from 12 volts. The other device on the boat that will benefit from this technology is the heated towel rail in the bathroom. Neither device draws more than 100w and it is much more efficient to have separate mini-inverters, than to fire up the main 3Kw pure sine wave unit that will also be on board, just to run them. So, I ordered two 150w inverters from AliExpress (the Chinese version of eBay) and they are only the size of a packet of cigarettes (remember them?) and work very well indeed. However, I had ordered the units to suit Australian standard mains plugs of course, but the items that arrived had an old-style US two pin socket. I immediately lodged a complaint with photos of what I had ordered versus what had been delivered, and AliExpress, to their credit, immediately gave me a full refund with no requirement to return the units. Now of course, I have a moral dilemma! I have since ordered two US plugs for just $5 and by simply changing the Australian plugs to US plugs on the devices, I have two perfectly good inverters, which have cost nothing. Oh dear! What should I do... Another "milestone" that has slid by since the last post is my birthday. And speaking of "last posts", this one has a nought on it. It also has a certain Biblical significance if you're that way inclined. It's the birthday where people pat you on the back and say "Gee, you're doing well - for you age" and I get even cheaper haircuts, so perhaps it's not all bad. However, if I've really reached my "allotted span" - I had better hurry up and finish this damn boat...
30 Dec 2017	This will be the final post for 2017. It's New Years' Day on Monday and I'm having the weekend off. I've started a couple of jobs at home too, so it's busy, busy... I've also had "Man Flu". A friend came by to help out with a job or two, and shared a bit of a cough with me. I didn't leave the house for three weeks - it's been a "doosy"! However, there is a little bit of progress to report. Particularly the drain at the bottom of the HWS locker. It's designed to vent any gas that may escape from the Hot Water Service to the outside air. (LPG being heavier than air). It was made quite some time back, but needed an angled bottom plate to finish it off and seal it. This is now done - finally. The outside cover of the HWS locker looks like a window, but it is not glass, it's a steel grill. This was done to match the look of the bathroom window on the other side of the boat, whilst being able to vent heat, fumes and anything else to the outside. Of course, whilst heat may be able to get out, so rain can get in. So, a drain arrangement is required on the inside of the steel grill and it looks as though the recently finished gas vent mentioned above is a possible solution. Rain being heavier than air as well - funny that. More on that later. Inboard of the steel grill is the flat timber side of the sun deck staircase. Given that it is open to the air, it has occurred to me that it's a good place for a couple of items that may get hot once in service. Particularly the 3Kw 240v inverter comes to mind together with the two solar panel controllers that will be installed eventually. (Maybe only one in the end, we'll see). I have been planning the wiring layout around the boat and it turns out that the main House battery cables will be passing right below where the inverter and solar controller could be installed. So, it is all really rather convenient. Those battery cables have to be able to carry enough current to start the engine in an emergency and to power the inverter to provide 3Kw, so they must be capable of continuously carrying about 240A without getting too hot. Twelve metres of red and black tinned copper cable arrived the other day (via eBay, of course) and is size 2B&S, which is rated at 255 Amps. Not cheap stuff however!!! On the subject of batteries, the engine has its own separate unit of course. Whilst a switch will be installed to enable the House batteries to be used to start the engine in an emergency, the systems are otherwise completely separate. A dual charging system that charges the Engine battery first and then the House battery from either the alternator on the engine or from solar panels or maybe even a wind turbine, will be provided once I design one. The Engine battery needs to be close to the engine in order to keep the starter motor leads as short as possible. So, a shelf has been installed in the forward end of the engine bay and a commercial battery box from Repco installed to keep it secure, clean and dry. The battery box has to be vented to the outside air to get rid of any hydrogen produced during the charging process and it turns out that there is a vent immediately above the Engine battery location, which is very convenient. Some time back, I was bemoaning to you dear reader, the loss of two laminated posts that when I was ready to install them simply couldn't be found. I was suggesting that a sure-fire way to make them re-appear was to start making another set. It didn't work! The new set are made and installed and the missing set are still just that - missing! As luck would have it, I was faced with the opposite situation just recently, whilst preparing to make the shelf for the Engine battery box. I was looking for a suitable piece of material when I found a piece of plywood lying under the boat that was almost exactly the right size, which was already glassed on both sides and even painted. The problem was - I have absolutely no idea where it was supposed to go or what I had made it for! Being a bit superstitious, I decided that the minute I cut the recently discovered panel, I would probably remember what it was for. So, trying to avoid such an outcome, I just marked out the proposed cuts and left it on the bench for a week. Surely that would be sufficient time for my aging memory to tell me what it was for. Nope! Couldn't wait any longer. I cut the panel and glued it in and it looks very handsome - so much for superstition! I actually have sneaking suspicion it was one of the sun deck stair treads that never got fitted and when a burst of energy was targeted at those stairs to finish them, it was simply re-made with all the others by mistake. So, it's great that it wasn't wasted and has ended up as part of the boat anyway. All good.
27 Jan 2018	OK, all the frivolity of Christmas and the New Year is over, so - back to work! Well, just gently back to work anyway. It's been really hot lately (well, it is mid-summer) and inside a tin shed, when the ambient temperature outside is 43 degrees and it's nudging 50 inside, is no place to be unless you are being very well paid. If it's just a hobby, then home in the air-conditioning seems like a much better idea. I've also noticed that as the boat becomes more and more "finished", I'm spending more time working higher up in the shed! Maybe on the roof of the boat, looking at the main hatch for example, which I'll tell you about in a moment. The effect of this "progress" is of course, that I'm often working nearer and nearer to the underside of a tin roof that is in full summer sun, which is definitely no place to be - unless you really have to - and I don't! However, time at home isn't necessarily wasted from a boat building point of view, because there are a number of bits of electronics that are going to be required in the not too distant future. For example, one of the issues with the proposed electric steering is managing the twin helm positions. Obviously, only one can be active at any one time and that raises the question of how do you change active helms? My original plan was to simply have a "big red button" beside each helm position with which you could take control and "big red light" to confirm that "you have the con" as James T. might say! (Come on all you Star Trek fans - get with it!) Whilst that solution would work perfectly well, it's all a bit clunky. A better solution suggested itself whilst enjoying the air-conditioning the other day. The joystick now used to control the rudder is obviously able to move left and right for Port and Starboard, but it also has forward and backward movements as well, that I'm not going to use. (No, I'm not going to use it to control the gearbox!) However, a function that is provided that does nothing is wasteful, untidy and suggests a lack of planning. So why not use a quick flick of the joystick forward or backward to take control of that helm instead of the aforementioned "big red button"? Electronically, that is not quite as simple as it sounds, but I have lashed up a circuit on the bench, which seems to work, which is nice... Also, having a "big red light" to show that the helm you're trying to use is actually active is not a particularly sophisticated proposal either. As mentioned elsewhere, the current rudder position is indicated continuously by a series of red and green LEDs on the dashboard, surrounding the ship's wheel. So, simply having the rudder position indicator lights only illuminated when you have control of the adjacent helm, seems like a practical and rather more subtle solution. And, not so difficult from an electronics perspective. I mentioned the main hatch in a paragraph above. This has been the subject of some recent activity too. When the roof was glued on a while back, the hole around the hatch was not trimmed and was just left "in the rough". It's a job I had been putting off because it's fiddly, has to be really accurate and is too near the very hot roof of the shed. However, needs must, so the edges have now been trimmed with the circular saw, with the depth of cut very carefully set to exactly 12mm. This is the start of a ledge all around the edge of the hatch for a combing piece. The combing is needed to keep the rain and to a lesser extent wind, from getting in through the hatch when it's closed. The ledge had then to be tidied up with a router to mill an accurate slot to take the combing. Like so many jobs, it only takes a sentence to describe, but several hours to do. Given that the hatch is the main point of entry and exit for the people onboard, it seemed prudent to make the combing from a piece of hardwood. As luck would have it, I had some of the Redgum used for the stem post left and that seemed to be perfect. It also gives me some satisfaction knowing that that particular piece of timber came from the paddle steamer Marion, which was built in 1897 and of which I have been skipper for many happy years. The Redgum combing is now made and installed and looks very handsome. I actually had to make one side twice because the roof does have a slight curve in it. When cramping down one strip of Redgum to the curve, it actually broke! How dare it? It's only 120 years old... The inside of a boat hull is rarely straight, level or flat, which makes walking around on it tricky. So, a false floor, which on a boat is called a "sole", is usually required to make us mere humans more comfortable and safe. Rhapsody's bedroom floor is no exception and it has to have a sole, which is raised 80mm, or so, above the inside of the sloping hull. This is convenient in one sense since it leaves room for pipes and wires under the floor and out of sight, but it is also very tedious and time consuming to make. There are various frames and other obstacles under the floor that mean that the sole has to be made as five separate panels down each side of the bed, each of which has to be removeable. Whilst each panel is quite small, they still have to be supported at all of their edges. This means that the five panels on each side of the bed, with four support ledges each, add up to, let me see, umm - forty little strips of timber. Each has to be cut to size and many of them have to be glued to the actual hull, which, of course, is not vertical and tapers towards the stern. A rotten job that has taken several days. The frames under the floor also provide stiffening for the hull between the box keel and the chine. To allow for plumbing and electrical connections and more particularly the 65mm exhaust pipe, holes have had to be cut in those frames, which has significantly weakened them. To provide additional strength, I decided to combine the athwartships sole panel ledges with a fixed piece of flooring 50mm wide, which has the effect of making a "girder" shape to reinforce the frames. These were made up as a single three metre length on the bench, which was then cut to size in eight pieces and glued into place. The result is a great improvement in the stiffness of that part of the hull. One disadvantage of this approach was that the holes that I had cut previously for the exhaust pipe were now too small and making them bigger in such cramped conditions, where you can only see the actual job with a mirror, is not nice! Like all these things however, after several cups of tea, I hit upon a way of enlarging the holes using a hole saw, a template and a right-angled drive and now they're done and looking good. After a lick of paint, the exhaust pipe can then be installed - oops - I haven't installed the outlet castings into the transom yet. Ah well, yet another job for another day. The passage from the bedroom to the saloon, past the bathroom, will be quite dark once the roof is in place, since it has no windows. There will be some courtesy lights for night time, but I thought it would be much more pleasant with some natural light for daytime. How about a window in the passage wall on the starboard side, where it is actually the side of the sun-deck stairs as well, and is open to the sky? OK, what sort of window would be suitable? Well, it's a boat, so perhaps it should be a round fixed porthole? The glass would have to be frosted for the privacy of people going up the stairs, but really quite straightforward, right? Well, cutting a round hole in a plywood panel, now I have the right attachment for the router, is no problem, but if you're going to glaze it as well, you need a round window frame to hold the glass in. I couldn't help thinking that this was all a bit frivolous and not really germane to the business of building a boat, but once an idea takes hold, you're stuck with it. Eight small bits of Meranti later, each cut at 67.5 degrees on both ends to make a perfect octagon, no problem, right? Well, not quite. It turns out that Meranti is too soft and the particular piece was too thin, which made it very fragile. In fact, the MKI fell apart whilst trying to finish it with the router. And, after taking a very deep breath, I decided to start a MKII. I wanted to use a different timber and settled on some Australian Oak that was in the "come-in-handy" pile. In fact, it originally came from the kitchen of my ex-marital home, which has just recently been demolished - so, just call me sentimental! The MKII porthole frame is finally finished and it may be frivolous, but now it's trimmed, sanded and stained, it really does look terrific!
23 Feb 2018	Those 40-odd floor panel support ledges mentioned above, are now finished and glued in, which is a relief! Making the twelve floor panels themselves that surround the bed, was also quite straightforward and they are now fitted in place and provide a nice flat floor for walking around the bedroom. While I was finishing the bedroom, I decided to go on and make support ledges and panels for the passage area outside the bathroom, as well. It was another job I had been putting off because there were some complexities involved, such as a flight of stairs and an existing removable hatch over the back of the gearbox, which were not only out of square, but not level either - all of which had to be fixed. The ledge pieces either side also had to butt up to the drainage grate in the bathroom accurately enough so that it could be sealed with Sikaflex, in due course. These panels too, are now finished and one can walk right through the boat on level floors, which is nice! I have noticed in a couple of areas, where removable plywood panels have been used, that without additional bracing underneath, they tend to warp over time. The cheaper BS1066 plywood from the Philippines is the worst of course, but even our gold-plated Hoop Pine from Queensland tends to do it too. So, what to do? Roger Simpson, in his fine book about fitting out a boat, has a bit to say about plywood that warps. His particular advice is to not make some furniture and more particularly drawers for example, from plywood, because they will warp and jam. OK, so what's the alternative - what about MDF - it works for Ikea? Each sheet is pressed from sawdust and epoxy glue and is apparently dimensionally stable and doesn't warp. Shock, horror - MDF? The conventional wisdom is of course, that you should never, ever use MDF on a boat because it absorbs water like a sponge and simply dissolves if it gets wet. However, it seems to me that if my floors are getting that wet then I probably have a much bigger problem amongst which dissolving floor panels would be the least of my worries!! So, we now have all the bedroom floor panels bar two, made from MDF and we'll see what happens. By way of an experiment, I put an unfinished piece of scrap MDF and a similar piece of plywood in a bucket of water to see what happens - I'll let you know... All the MDF panels will be coated with two-pack epoxy preservative of course, just like their plywood counterparts and then painted with two-pack polyurethane interior finish. That should make them quite waterproof and the underlying material irrelevant. As always - we'll see. One of the big tasks that remain is to make the access stairs into the saloon from the deck. The distance from the side deck where you enter the boat, down to the saloon floor is about 800mm and I'm too old for ladders and the like, so I decided I needed a staircase. However, a staircase necessarily occupies a large floor area and given that it is only used for a very short time each trip, that's wasteful of a very scarce resource - space. Also, the stairs are very close to the proposed helm position, which prompted the question "was it possible to combine the two functions"? Since they are not usually required at the same time, this notion was worthy of some consideration. After many cups of tea and a small epiphany, a design for a flight of steps that folds up to become a helmsman seat was produced. (That's a non-gender specific "helmsman" of course)! It seemed like an oddball sort of plan, so a template was cut from MDF to try it out. And, it seems to work quite well. The steps have to be 600mm wide because that's the size of the opening in the saloon wall, but it means that the helmsman's seat is therefore 600mm deep, which is overkill really. However, making sure that there is adequate leg and foot room are the more important considerations at present. To start the process, the right-side panel of the TV locker was cut-out and installed, which also determines the final size and rake of the dashboard, as planned many moons ago. The steps have to be secured to the inside of the hull of course, but they also have to be removable as a unit to gain access to the floor and black tank below. So, after resurrecting an old friend, namely the mighty Joggle-Stick, two frames were made to fit into the hull under the main access door. They will be filleted and glassed in as additional frames to provide more strength for the hull at that point. The frames have tabs pointing inboard, to which the step assembly can then be attached with bolts and wing-nuts, for easy removal. The fore and aft panels that make up the steps were cut-out and dry-fitted. There are some concerns about how comfortable (or not) the helmsman's seat will be, but we need to build a bit more of it yet. The step assembly is hollow of course, and it seemed like a good place for a useful storage area. So, the aft-most panel now has a big cut-out in it to allow for the storage of life-jackets. If you're going up the steps to the deck, the life-jackets are right there to be grabbed on your way - no excuses! Since the steps will be carpeted like the remainder of the boat and they also fold up on themselves, the thickness of the actual carpet has to be known and accommodated in the design, so that they will fold-up properly. That forced me into making a final selection of carpets rather sooner than I had imagined, although aside from having to keep them clean, the floors are all finished and could be carpeted now. Scary! I have selected a waterproof polypropylene marine carpet from Bunnings in a deep blue. They have three "weights" of waterproof carpet and this is the middle one. The "light" is too thin, and the "heavy" version has deep ribs in it which I know from experience, are really hard on bare feet, which is how I spend a lot of time. I have always intended that the interior side walls of the boat (more properly called ceilings in a boat for reasons that are not at all clear) would also be carpeted and the "light" weight version of the same carpet is ideal in that role. I selected a pale grey to keep the inside of the boat as light and airy as possible. The boat's steering is electric. The rudder is moved by a 2,100rpm, 1/10th horsepower electric motor, through a 200:1 reduction gearing system, applying 20hp of effort to the rudder. The motor is a "pancake" style brushed DC unit with a 25:1 gearbox built-in, that I bought at a market for $5. I have always been aware that if it ever needed to be replaced, it would present a problem. I searched eBay and found that they are very rare and when they do turn up, they are anything up to $1,000 each, which is way too much. I left a standing search with eBay to notify me of any new potential sources and after seven years, one turned up the other day. The seller was really apologetic because he only had the motor and not the gearbox, which suits me just fine because the gearbox is much less likely to fail than the motor. Also, since he only had the motor, although it was brand new, he was only asking $50 - once again, Lady Luck was smiling on "Rhapsody in Glue" and I couldn't get my money out fast enough. A friend told me recently that "it was better to be born lucky than handsome" - I have a suspicion that he was being rude...
30 Mar 2018	OK - today is Good Friday. Having been out for a good fish lunch, it seems a good time to add to this massive missive, having been remiss of late and missing an entry or two... There, tautology and alliteration in the same sentence! One of the big jobs for the last couple of weeks has been making stairs to be able to get in and out of the boat. The side deck is 800mm above the saloon floor and I'm too old for ladders and the like. So, a flight of stairs is required. To rise 800mm at a comfortable angle, there needs to be six risers. Given that each tread needs to be something like the length of your shoe, or about 220mm in this case, the staircase therefore extends 1320mm from the side of the vessel. Additional headroom needs to be provided from above the very first step of course, which is why the hinged entry hatch has been made so long. All planned in advance of course! Now a staircase that extends almost to the middle of the saloon floor takes up a lot of room. Also, given that the stairs are adjacent to the helm position, space needs to be allowed for that too. A solution is to make the stairs fold up when not in use and become the helm seat. You'll probably need to look at the photos to see how this works, but essentially the staircase is hinged in the middle of the third tread and the whole issue folds up on itself. A big cushion that was facing the floor is now on top and become the helm seat. There is some concern about comfort given that there is presently no back rest, but will might come back to that, if you'll pardon the pun. Another consideration is that in order to be able to reach all the access covers for the black tank under the floor, the whole stair assembly has to be easily removable. To that end, two frames were made up and permanently installed into the hull under the entry door. The staircase then slots into them and is secured with bolts and wing-nuts. To finish the stairs, they need to be carpeted to match the interior dÃ©cor scheme of the boat. However, to make a staircase that folds up, you need to know the thickness of that carpet, which considering it hadn't been chosen yet, was a problem. So, onto the Internet and a visit to Bunnings to look at carpets ensued. I had always thought that the floor would be covered in dark blue marine waterproof carpet, whilst the walls of the saloon and elsewhere would be lined in a much lighter weight material, which has the same texture, but is coloured pale grey. The carpets are 4mm and 3mm thick respectively and the staircase has been built to accommodate them. They were sourced from Bunnings in the end as the cheapest. I do want to test their reaction to fire at some point too, although I'm not sure I'm going to like what I find. The actual stairs are made of 12mm ply but have significant reinforcing gussets glassed inside them to ensure that they are strong enough for enthusiastic visitors to jump on, in their joy at visiting the boat. Making them has taken some time, but they are now complete and ready for finishing. The inside of particularly the lower half of the stairs is hollow and quite large. Certainly, big enough to be utilised for storage and what do you need to be stored close to the main entry and exit point of a vessel, but life jackets! So, a large hole has been cut in the aft face of the staircase with that in mind. If you're going outside - take a life jacket!!! A panel which forms the right-hand side of the TV cabinet and the left side of the dashboard, has been made and installed. On reflection, it may be that this was a little premature in that until the helm seat is finished it's hard to adjust everything to be comfortable for long term cruising. We'll come back to that! On a different and completely trivial subject, I mentioned earlier that I had decided to put a stained-glass window in the passage outside the bathroom door, to let in some natural light. I made a round window frame from eight bits of Meranti, which took an inordinately long time, only to have it come to a sticky end when the router being used to clean it up, slipped and destroyed it. A MkII was made using slightly thicker Australian Oak and was of course, much stronger. However, despite being completely sanded, stained and ready for a clear finish, I discovered to my annoyance that it broke, spontaneously, during a spell of very hot spell weather. Not to be beaten, I have now fibre glassed the back of it with a light cloth and whist I don't think it will break again - I now have to refinish the rotten thing from scratch - again! Incidentally, I have also started the stained-glass window as well in the workshop at home, and it looks terrific.... Speaking of painting - my least favourite job as you know, I have now clear finished the cabin side and back support pillars in the bedroom. They all look good, although there is still some making good to be done where the old posts were pulled out in order to be able to install the new laminated style ones. All that work just to make it look better! Still, as someone pointed out "if you don't do it now while you can, it will continue to give you the 'irrits' for ever". At least, that's close to what he said and he's right of course. The next, maybe even the last, major piece of furniture to be made is the couch, dinette, banquette - call it what you like. (I have a less polite name for it at present). The design requirements are for it to fit in the Starboard aft corner of the lounge and be a comfortable place in which to relax. However, like everything in a small space, it has another requirement as well. It also has to be comfortable when used for dining around a regular height table. The one requirement it doesn't have however, is for it to convert into a bed - if people want to come and stay, bring a swag! A significant research effort has gone into finding out what "comfortable" means and how it can be achieved, but of course, there are two types of "comfortable". One when it's being used for dining and another when it's being used for relaxing. Oh dear, I thought - another compromise that is not going to be that good at either one thing or the other. But maybe not! It turns out that the angle between the seat (squab) and the chair back is almost always the same for both types of seating requirements and that's about 100 degrees. So, if I made a chair with the seat and back fixed at the correct angle, then the only thing left that can change is the angle at which it is raked backward for relaxing or more upright for dining. In fact, if we made a chair with a solid seat/back combination, hinged at the front, would it provide comfortable service in both modes? The only way to resolve this question was to make one and try it. So, a half sheet of old chipboard later, with some glue, screws and a hinge, I had a very rough, non-upholstered chair ready for testing. And, test it I did. Some days with the seat set "level" in the dining chair position, I would use it to sit and have lunch at my bench. Other days, with the seat raked backward, I used it to sit back and read a book after lunch for a while. The result of all this energetic testing was that yes, it was possible, so I'm looking at a potential solution for my couch issues. However, with a background in electronic engineering - I couldn't stop there. I wondered if the change between the "dining" position and the "relaxing" position could be achieved with an electric motor? So, off to the Internet yet again, this time to order a 12v linear motor with a 200mm travel to test my theory. A week later, the linear motor was fitted and yes, it works very well! Have I over-complicated what should have been a simple thing, I hear you ask - yes, probably. Can my good friend John, the upholsterer, actually deal with such a gadget? I don't know, I'll have to ask him. Jobs for after Easter. Never being one to quit while I'm ahead, I suddenly realised that the saloon table would also have to be height adjustable from coffee table to dining table. So, on a paper and pad I started drawing up a complex scissor lift kind of table leg arrangement. Then, over a glass of red a bit later on it occurred to me that it might be possible to get a ready-made pedestal table centre that adjusts in height - maybe, you can even get an electric one. Back to the trusty Internet - of course you can - easy!!!