Beam chocks

Goodness, it has been a long and eventful time since I posted.

You can see the lashing strake in this photo. (We can't see it in real life any more, except in a tidy pile in the boat shop, since Trevor has removed it in preparation for painting.)

With cabin top nearing completion, things are looking distinctly more boat-like.

Beam chocks. Note lovely purpleheart hatch combing, too.

The beam chocks are vertical-grained Douglas fir, which we acquired at Coastal Pacific Forest Products.

On top of the chocks there are additional pieces.  I lack the vocabulary to name them, but I can tell you they are the pieces through which the alignment pins pass. Or alignment bolts. My vocabulary seems to be not quite up to this part of the project.

Whatever they are called, the picture below shows them in one beam trough. They are made of ipe, an alarmingly-tropical (since not FSC-certified) hardwood from South America, via Westwind Hardwood.  We likely would have used purpleheart for this, but it wasn't available in the appropriate (4x4) dimensions. Ipe is very hard, and this piece needs to be very strong and resistant to wear.

There are even more pieces to the beam installation puzzle, and I don't know what any of them are called! First, there are mahogany pieces that go one on either side of the hull, to lift the beam off the bottom of the beam trough. You can see one in profile in the picture below; you can see its position better in the picture above. And then there are pads that help resist the compression from the lashings. They're two layers of plywood, and you can see one mounted on the side of the hull in the picture below.

No doubt there are official nautical terms for all these bits and pieces. I welcome instruction!