Cockpit Underside

Here the underside spaces of the cockpit floor are complete. Treatment? One sealer coat of epoxy to all surfaces, filleted all corners and layed 75mm cloth tape to same. Then another two coats of epoxy. Sanded and painted with enamel paint. It might seem like overkill, but this area is inaccesable later so don't take shortcuts here. Oh yeah! it's hard to see in the pic but all bulkheads have limbers (drain holes) to let water flow to the under cockpit bung in the transom.

Transom

My workspace, sorry about the mess in the shed :)

As you can see from this shot, my working space is pretty tight. Moving large materials involves some pretty fancy foot work along with mutterings and curses when I trip over something. It could be worse, I could be outside trying to battle the elements.
During winter the nights got down to 2-3 degrees C so I had heaters going to keep the shed warm. Otherwise working with epoxy would be out of the question.

Onto the boat now

An apology, I was that engrossed in the building part that I forgot to take photos and document each step as it happened. Hence the big jump forward. I will try to remember to photograph more often in future. MP

Bulkheads and rails


This bulkhead forms the front of the cabin, the large opening in the top half is for access to the galley flat, the smaller opening at the bottom is to access storage areas fwd.
I decided to fit the bunk rails before fitting this bulkhead so that they could be done full length. The rails run from this bulkhead right through under the quarter berths to the bulkhead at the aft end of the center case. This was a stroke of genius on my part! :) It saved me lot's of hassels and a better finished job was the result.

Way back at the start

The Rudder Assembly


When I first started the boat, I had the plans but not all the material required to build the boat itself.
I did have a lot of smaller bits of wood lying about in the shed so I decided to start with some of the smaller fiddly bits first. This gave me something me to do while I collected the other materials required and would give me inspiration later to get the boat together and see how the smaller bits would look when mounted in place. :)
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Rudder Head

The blocks are Ronstan 30mm, I have since changed this setup.

Since this shot was taken I have changed the layout of the lifting sheet, the sheet now goes through a fairlead on the rudder head then onto the tiller into a cam cleat. That should save a lot of leaning over the transom when you should be looking ahead :) The blade is made of laminated Oregon with a piece of Murbou  on the leading edge, this all covered with a light weight cloth, epoxy and several coats of UV stabilized Marine varnish.

The Tiller

Tiller is a nice bit of straight grained Tassie Oak, the extension is an alluminium extendable duster handle that locks at any length with a twist of the wrist and the hand made turned handle on the extension was given to me  by a friend who likes to dabble at torturing things on his wood lathe, thanks Bob! it found a home eventually   

Water IN the boat on purpose?

Is he mad!
Not yet anyway. :)
It's called "Water Ballast"

Firstly, this idea has been given the "go ahead" by John Welsford but with a few caveats.

1. That the tanks must be completely FULL or EMPTY, water sloshing around in them is not ideal and could cause stability problems. Or extensive baffling is required to minimise water movement.
2. The boat could be a little less lively and possibly a bit slower to helm response.

Now for my reasons to modify.

1. I wanted to make the boat as light as possible on the trailer for one man to launch and retrieve.  I have made the centre board out of wood with a steel weight, it is about 40 kg lighter than the specified steel plate. The extra 50 kg under the bunks will not be used, instead there will a closed cell battery each side at this position, the batteries combined are 30 kg lighter than the fixed ballast. Most of the time the boat will carry only myself in an area where a short nasty steep chop can appear very quickly with a wind shift.
2. So for the above reasons there is close to 70 kg less fixed weight plus a crew member we have around 150 kg to replace. The intended tank locations will give close to 115 kg per tank or 230 kg in total, the additional surplus weight will pull the boat a little lower in the water and thus cause more stability and stiffness as John states above.
3. The local bay where I will do most of my sailing is very large, on long reaches with a steady wind the windward only tank can be full and the lee tank empty, this will have a similar trim result as would a crew man on the same side.
4. The boat is also a good design to just shoot out for a spot of fishing without the rig, or do a bit of river exploring, with the tanks empty I will have a lighter higher floating hull which will provide good performance motoring.

How are the tanks filled and emptied?
So far I have fitted two 38 mm PVC 1/4 turn gate valves, one for each tank. They are located in the cabin on the floor just in front of the aft cabin bulkhead. I used a 90 degree bend through the hull bottom into the gate valve and a straight fitting from the valve into the side of tank which is the front of the cabin bunks. Very simple and compact, with the boat sitting on water all that is needed is to open both valves and flood fill the tanks.

Each tank has a breather line going up to the hull side just under the sheer line.  This means that the tanks can be flood filled and gravity emptied when beached or on the trailer.
To control water levels when on the water I will be fitting a large volume 100 litre/min hand operated bilge pump in the cockpit near the helm. By using a series of 38 mm hoses and gate valves I can fill/empty both tanks or only one tank. The only draw back to this idea is that the valves need to be easy to get at, so will be visible in the cockpit. I have modified the handles to the valves so that the valve bodies can be mounted inside the cockpit seats and only have the handles visible.

There are so many ways to deal with pumping water, and if you want the flexibility to be able fill or empty on the run then it needs careful planning, I did toy with the idea of using small electric pumps in each tank but then wondered what would happen if the batteries are flat? So I ended up staying with manual pumping, that way the batteries are saved for the radio and nav lights only.

The Boat

Hi there, welcome to my humble little blog.

I will be adding in short order all my existing data from my old web page that my ISP kindly decided I didn't need anymore (thanks BigPond!). Once I am up to date with that lot I will update the blog as things happen on the boat.