Friday, July 3, 2015

Gak!

Isn't it alarming and disheartening when blogs just go dormant? 

"They've stopped," I imagine readers thinking gloomily. "They're just going to sit there with a half-finished boat project for the next decade."

But no! It is not so! There has been a good amount of progress since April, when I last posted. The galley is not only installed, it has the perfect shelf to hold our four travel mugs. And there has been a lot of painting, all of it white so far. And the appropriate chimney-cap has been discovered and purchased for the Dickinson Marine wood heater. (For the first one at least; we are imagining that we'll have one per hull.)

There are pictures, too, but, being an up-to-date individual, I haven't freed them from my phone. 

This weekend. Promise.

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Bulwark

noun bul·wark \ˈbl-(ˌ)wərk, -ˌwrk; ˈbəl-(ˌ)wərk; sense 3 also ˈbə-ˌläk\

Or is it bulwarks? One rarely hears of a single, lonely bulwark, yet it does appear to exist as a singular noun.

Plural or singular, it (or they) are now attached to the hull. The port hull. The bulwark (or bulwarks) run full-length on the outboard side, and cover only a small section forward and aft on the inboard side.

 
 
Here it is dry-fit, with none of the notching for the beams cut.

And here it is glued and clamped. It's a relatively large glue job. We're into the reasonable weather again, so we don't have to worry much about temperature.

     
Forward inboard section
 The most amazing thing about all of this is realizing that it's the last time we'll be doing it. The project felt endless at the beginning -- all very exciting, because we were seeing things for the first time -- but really endless, since we knew there was another hull to go. Now it's getting much more real. It's becoming easier to believe that at a point in the reasonably near future, we will stop having a boat project and start having a boat.

Mind you, there are many, many layers of paint to apply first. And there's a deck to build. And the rigging. And the masts to finish. And the sails. And and.

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Boatbuilding. It's like the tides.

Yesterday, the galley was complete. We sat at the table (about which more later), ate pancakes, drank coffee, and ignored the dishes in the sink.

Today the table is but a memory.

Well, okay, that's a bit melodramatic. But everything's removed now, so that it can all be glued in. At which point it will be back. Coffee will return. Who knows, there might even be pancakes.

Here's an aerial view of one of the benches, and a view with bench and wet locker.


Galley dry fit

No pictures survive of yesterday's pancake breakfast. 

The pancakes were coconut, the maple syrup was genuine, and the whole thing was cooked in Tiger's galley. Sunday lunch was black bean noodles with peanut sauce on a base of salad -- likewise cooked and eaten in the galley.

Yee haw! We have been talking about this for such a long time!

For the dry fit, Trevor screwed a lot of components into position, and clamped some others. Here are some views.

Here's the sink, immediately aft of the companionway. The counter, in this picture hosting quite a few tools, will be the location for our in-use water jug. There's room for a work surface too. Thermoses are behind the rail above the sink.
Here's the opposite side, with the stove installed. It's a Primus-style stove. You heat the burner first by burning alcohol, then light the kerosene. The red hose you see in the bottom left is the bicycle pump; you have to pressurize it manually. Behind the stove there are two small compartments. We are likely going to put wide mesh across them and use one of them to store our ladle, slotted spoon and cutlery, while the other holds pot lids. Dish storage is above.
Here's the plate storage, more like it will really be.




Whenever Trevor finds a small spot
with nothing immediately planned for it,
he seems to label it "books."
"Why?" asks no one, ever, who
has seen our house.
"Hot beverage to helm attendee."
It's a port light to the cockpit.


Sunday, March 15, 2015

Mysterious!


Mysterious, right?

Kind of like what happened to the time between last October (my last blog post) and now (March).

I think it looks a bit like a table prepared for some sort of odd ritual involving scissors.

But no. It's a hatch cover, newly glassed, sitting on the work bench under the empty clamp rack.

We're back, people. Galley photos coming on Wednesday.