Ive started to finish

The last few weeks have found me rushing around to get the boat weather tight, and starting to organize my thoughts on  how best to manage the build to the finish. Like most things on this project, a lot of work needs to be done in a certain order before progress becomes visible.

With winter sneaking up on us, I had to get the barn put back together. The  mornings are getting colder and with the heavy dew making its way in to the barn, some of my tools are showing signs of rust. It took me a weekend to frame the opening back in, find the correct insulation, and trim the door opening to be ready for the crew who were re installing the door. I have to be able to fabricate much of the wood work for the interior in the barn, so having it weather tight and able to be heated is a big deal to keep the boat build moving. As I write this post, the barn is now back together, and while its still a mess, it sure feels good to have all the space back.

The dry exhaust stack for the engine room is one of those deals that not much else can be started  until this part is finished. Getting this finished turned out to be a bit of a pain as some poor measuring on my part  had me doing a few  things over. I framed access panels  on both the port and starboard side of the stack. The port side panel is larger as to allow me to install the exhaust pipe through the panel. I also had to configure the panel opening to work around the microwave cabinet so I dont have to remove the cabinet to replace the exhaust pipe.

The  exhaust stack was the last big welding job I  have to do inside the boat, and it feels good to be able to take the big generator out of the back of my truck and leave it in the shop.

Now that the foam is all finished, I wanted to get the ceiling in the master cabin, and get that room pretty much wrapped up. The ceiling is 3 1/4" pine bead board painted an off white. To make things easy on myself, I primed and painted one coat of top coat paint on the boards to prevent bare wood from showing once things start moving around. The ceiling  job was pretty straight forward, and the only tricky part was building the removable access panel on either side of the center beam. The access panel is for throttle and engine controls, hydraulic lines for the anchor winch, hydraulic lines for the steering system, and some conduit. The center beam is about 3/8" lower than the ceiling, and instead of wrapping it in bead board, I decided to wrap it in Cherry. I needed a board over 10 long, and instead of joining two together to get the length, I found a long one on the bottom of my now air dried stack of lumber. The longest boards I have also  happen to be the widest boards. As you can see from this picture, this particular board is over 19" wide and dried pretty darn straight. After I finish milling the faux beam, Ill install it in a day or so, and the master cabin will have a finished ceiling in it.After the master cabin ceiling is finished, another day of work should have the guest cabin dressing room ceiling completed which will also mean all the ceilings below will be finished.

Another small detail I needed to get squared away was building a proper set of steps to get in to the boat. Ive been using a ladder, and given the amount of trips and quantity of material I have to get on the boat, the ladder was the old accident waiting to happen. I  also have a lot of people who like to stop by, and any thing I can do to prevent them or me from getting hurt helps everyone in the long run. I also want to do right by the boat yard, and keep my operation in such a way as to minimize any exposure.

The tooling I need to finish the job is also getting to the point where Im comfortable. I wish I would have built all the engine room cabinets before we move her, as it would be nice to be able to start organizing the floating shop. Once in a while I do find myself borrowing a tool off of my truck, but for the most part the boat is now tooled up.

Boat building and schedules dont seem to get along in Conallville, but I"m going to take another stab at it. My plan is to have the bulk of the wood work finished by sometime in January. Once the wood work is finished and coated with urethane, I can focus on getting the needed systems up and running for our May/June launch. Without going into a bunch of detail, the systems Im talking about are AC/DC electric, hydraulic, and engine controls.

Cheers

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Foredeck finish work

Now that I have finish paint on the fore deck, I had a few bits I could wrap up and get them off of ye ole list.

The first item to wrap up was the door on the pulpit. This is one of those items I have to give an old WTF was I thinking when I designed this. The door part is OK as this will make a nice place to store anchor lines, dock lines and even a shore power cord. The WTF thing comes for why I put all those bolt holes in the door. All I needed was one bolt that I could use a large wing type bolt to hold the door fast. Im thinking I was planning on storing air in this locker, and maybe I was afraid the air thieves were going to stop by and get some of the old O2 I was keeping safely behind door number one. ??? I also had someone ask about the notch in the side of the pulpit for my air hose connection and my wash down hose connection. Heres a better picture of the notch I created in the side of the pulpit. I need to find nice looking flush, black plastic caps I can silicone in to fill all those bolt holes. The pulpit is framed out of 1 1/2" stainless pipe, and stainless plate was used for sheathing. Everything on the pulpit is stainless steel, so when I dont have to worry about rust from chipping paint while we handle the anchoring gear. I notched the bottom of the frame so I could easily hose out under the pulpit and make it easy to maintain. I had originally set this up for a chain windlass and I was afraid that water could get down into the pulpit via the chain hawser. The handle for the door is 1" stainless bar that I bent, and also doubles the step to get up on the pulpit. The door is hinged with fixed pins that I fabricated on the lathe so the door opens 180 degrees. I might need to add some gasket material to the door in case it vibrates or rattles... well see about that. I wrapped the handrail around the pulpit to help keep anyone on board when the need arises to to climb out on the pulpit and deal with something.

The other item I was able to finish was installing the guest cabin hatch. Early in the build, I had planned on making my own hatch. After I had the wood work finished in the guest cabin, I decided to use a commercially made hatch. Instead of re doing the hatch coaming, I modified it a bit and bought a Lewmar Ocean Hatch. I like the hatch, and it seems to be well made and robust enough for what I intend to do. Theres really not much I dont like about the hatch. It dogs down tight and compresses the gasket, it has adjustable tension on the hinges to hold it open in any position one would want, its lockable, and it opens from the outside as long as it is not locked. Im glad I did not try to fabricate this hatch.

The third item I have completed are the vents for the guest cabin. These vents are what I would call a dorade style vent. Because of the Portuguese bridge, and the high bulwarks, it made no sense to have the vents on the deck. To get the vents up where the air is going to be moving, I welded six inch pipes to allow the vents to be higher. The dorade end of this contraption is some boxes I fabricated out of stainless, and that I can bolt to the pipe/bracket/pad I welded to the deck and Portuguese bridge. The basic layout of this box is that the air enters the vent, and goes travels down the six inch pipe into the cabin. I welded a bulkhead in the frame to stop water from getting down the six inch pipe. I also held the pipe proud high of the frame as another damn to discourage water from getting in the boat. If things get real ugly, the cowl vents can be quickly unscrewed from the box and water tight deck plates then screw in. On the bottom of the box, below the cowl vent intake, I drilled a one inch hole in the bottom of the bracket. This hole is to allow water to drain out. To stop wasps from nesting in the box, I glued a piece of screen over the hole using some clear silicone caulk. Another reason I held the pipe proud high of the bracket, was so that I could use some hose clamps to secure more screen over the pipes to keep the bugs out of the cabin. I want to make sure that I can keep air flowing in and out of the boat while we are away from it while keeping it secure and weather tight. It also goes without saying that the more passive ventilation there is on board, will make the boat a happy place to be. When were under way, the Lewmar hatch will be closed and the Dorade vents will be supplying air to the guest cabin. Im not a 100% happy with the way I came up with ventilating the boat in this particular area, and I wish the designer would have offered a design for this. I think its good that the cowls are up high where the air can actually get to them, but Im not 100% keen on how I did it. I think in terms of being hatefull to look at , the pipes are not too hatefull, but it could have been better. I was going to make the intakes integral with the Portuguese bridge, but this conflicted with the interior layout of the guest cabin. An integral intake would have also been difficult to fabricate, and would have been more difficult to paint. The Dorade boxes are held in place with four bolts, and are very easy to remove for future maintenance. The dorade boxes are also maid of stainless steel. All in all, I think the pipes work good, but Im just "OK" with how they look. One thing I can say is this design is extremely robust, and in a worse case scenario, I have another place to tie the boat off from. Im thinking after I launch, the pipes might be a good location to weld a bit too, and hang dock lines off of. I had a fan blowing on me while I was working on the installing the cowl vents. Once I was finished, I left the fan blowing, and went in to the cabin to see how much air was making it in. I was pleasantly surprised by how much flow was entering the cabin. It looks like the design will work. I think Im going to re paint the cowls, and make the inside the same green as the hull. I took a picture of the cowls looking at them from the wheel house so you could see a little more clear how I wanted them above the structures to get air flowing.

Im going to keep working aft, and knocking off these easy to complete finishing jobs. This work probably goes five times as quick while the boat is in the barn and all the comfort tools are handy. All this work needs to be done anyway to have her weather tight for THE TRIP TO THE LAUNCH SITE. Next item to finish is the Portuguese bridge wooden cap, hang the Portuguese bridge door, and install the waster fill ports, and the gray water pump out port.

Cheers

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Hull finish paint

Of course, in all things boat building, this job took about double the time I figure and posted about in my last blog post. The reason for the underestimated time was worthy of the extra time in my opinion.

When I had completed the body work on the hull, and sprayed the last coat of primer, I had thought I had the sanding to a good enough quality to paint. Thats kind of a loaded  response, as the primer was probably smooth enough to paint, I just wanted it a bit smoother. The problem I was fearing was that not having the primer perfectly flat would cause the top coat to have some blemish. Without more sanding, the top coat would still be shiny and pretty, but the blemish I was worried about would make it a problem to revive the finish years down the road with polishing and wax. The primer needed to be flatter. So given the lessons learned on the transom and wanting a more user friendly finish, I decided to re sand the hull.

Sanding the hull ( Im only talking about the port side today) to 320 grit was not to bad of a job. Its kind of hard to describe what Im talking about, but once you start to sand with 320, minute high spots in the primer start to appear. More sanding flattens the primer, and the high spots disappear. The primer starts to get a shine to it, and it is almost as if it is being burnished by the finer grit sand paper. 320 seems fine enough for a boat paint job, but Im sure body shops working on cars would take primer to at least 400 and more likely 600. There are for sure better ways to spend ones time than sanding primer so I approached in my not getting in a hurry way of doing things. Spending an hour  before leaving for work in the morning and a hour after work in the evening, helped me keep the patience  needed for this type of work.

Wanting to break up visual size of the hull, I decided to paint the rub rails another color. The lower rub rail extends around the back of the boat and becomes the swim platform. I dont know how many of you have painted the color red  in your house, but I can tell you that I now know that red industrial paint has the same problems as red house paint. You have to prime anything you intend to use red paint on. I had already painted the swim platform white, and the swim platform part of the rub rail green. I re sanded the swim platform rub rail, taped it off and began spraying red over the green. The green makes the red a few shades darker than the other ( primed) rub rail. The few spots on the swim platform rub rail  where I sanded through the green in to the white primer, the red does not cover the white. This part of the rub rail is going to  have to be sanded, primed, and re painted. Truthfully, it doesnt look that bad, but it is noticeable enough that I want to re do it.

Taping off the hull took also took quite a bit more time than I had figured. I probably have five or six hours invested in taping. Once I had an area taped, I wiped it down with a tack cloth to remove the dust. I started taping on Thursday night, and finished it Friday after work so I would be ready to spray Saturday morning.

When I blasted and painted the barrier coat on the hull bottom, I brought the barrier coat six inches above the water line. I brought the green two inches down past the barrier coat, so when the boat is in the water, about four inches of the bottom paint will be seen. The white barrier coat will be covered with red anti foul paint. 

The weather here has suddenly turned hot, and Saturdays forecast was for temperatures in the 90s. Figuring it would take four hours to spray the port side, I wanted to be spraying by 7:00 am and finished before the 90s found their way into the barn. As I began spraying, I immediately had an issue with the paint pot which took and hour to resolve. While I finally got the pot working correctly, it caused me to have a less than ideal finish on the area under the lower rub rail, between the water line and the rub rail. Ill have to do some paint repair in this area, but now that I know whats involved in doing that, Im not to worried about it.

Getting three coats of paint on her requires more of the elusive patience, and keeping track of where one is in regard to where one just sprayed. The first coat to hit the metal covers the primer, but not too heavy. The second coat goes on while the paint is starting to get tacky which allows the second coat to cover while not  sag. If the spray gun volume and fan width is tuned in right, the second coat is probably good enough to call the area finished. The third coat gets risky, because you now have some thickness developed and the paint wants to start sagging. The second coat needs to be well on its way to being tacky, or you could develop a sag on the third coat. You have to wait for the paint to tack up to accept more material, but you cant wait too long or it will to dry and you get dry spots where you start and stop the  spray pattern. Im using up to 10% by volume of reducer in the paint, so it tends to dry quicker. I have one spot below the bulwark at the wheel house, where I had a drying issue on the third coat and Ill have to polish it to blend it back together. This is where sanding the primer perfectly flat pays off as it makes polishing much easier.

I still have to finish paint the starboard side, so Im starting prep work on it this week. Given how busy Im getting with work, I doubt Ill have it completed by next weekend, so Im giving myself another week to call the paint work a wrap. Im big time happy to see so much shine when I walk in to the barn but Im more happy to have reached this milestone.

Cheers

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