The Arctic Tern Project

Volume 7                           Issue No. 2                       February 2010

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That Was Fast

February blew by as usual.  Although we didn’t have much of a winter (I didn’t even unpack my winter coat) spring is definitely on its way.  This month I installed the bronze chocks I cast and finalized the interior.

Boat Jewellery

Ok, since I sold the two pair of chocks I made at the bronze casting demonstration last month I had to fire up the furnace again and cast another set.  These guys turned out really nice.  Here they are in their rough form.

 

Then I use a file, wet sandpaper, and metal polish to get them all shiny.  Believe me, if I had a machine that could do it I’d use it.  It takes about an hour to polish each one by hand.  I’m showing six here although I’ll only use four because I made a couple of extras.

 

The next thing I had to do was cut into my beautiful toerail in order to mount them.  I made up a jig so I could use the router for this task.

 

First I route out the deep center portion (checking against the overall depth of the chock).

 

 

 

Then I shift the jig right and left and do the shallow portions.

 

 

Then I swap in the 1/8” round-over bit to round the shoulder.

 

 

And…in she goes.

 

 

Ok, that’s one down.  A little nerve-wracking but it seemed to go off without a hitch.  The chock fit pretty nice but I had to do a little clean-up on the bottom to get it to lie better.

 

Next I move on to the ones at the bow.  These ones make me a bit more nervous because there’s quite a lot of bend to the toerail at this point and I’m not sure what’ll happen when I cut a big chunk out of it.  I’m also not sure how the straight chock will look when mounted in the curved rail.  Anyway the first step is trying to remember where I had planned on mounting them.  I know I’d extracted screws from the toerail to allow for the cut-out but couldn’t remember exactly where.  So, I went hunting through previous journal pictures and found one I could use to help me locate the chock position.

 

The front chocks went off without out a hitch; the rail didn’t do anything weird when I cut into it and you can’t even tell that the chocks are straight while the rail is curved.  Whew!

 

 

The next thing I do is drill all the fastener holes in the chocks and mount them using screws.  Each chock will have three #10 fasteners.

 

Then, because the fit of the chocks is a little sloppy in places and I want the screws to be totally surrounded by epoxy, I over-drill the screw holes and I tape the chocks and bed them in thickened epoxy.

 

To make the screws come out easy I coat them in car wax by screwing them into a wax filled hole in this board.  Much faster than trying to wipe the wax on each screw and it really gets into the threads this way.

 

After the epoxy cures I take out the screws and pop out the chocks.  Multiple layers of tape make an allowance for bedding compound when the chocks are finally mounted.

 

I clean up the epoxy in cutout and there you go.  I’m really happy with the results.

 

Bowsprit Bonanza

Next, I revisit my old nemesis: the whole bowsprit/anchor handling issue.  Jeez.  I would dearly love to have some sort of retractable bowsprit for deploying an asymmetrical spinnaker.  I’d also like to have an easily deployed and retrieved anchor so I’m not dragging a big hook and a bunch of chain around the foredeck (ok, so the anchor is only 14 lbs. and there’s only 10 feet of ¼” chain, but I’m sure I could still do a fair bit of damage with it!).  I mock-up a stubby ‘sprit / anchor mount to see what’s possible.

 

 

I like it but there’s still a bunch of details to work out.  I make up a wood replica of the anchor shank and see how that would fit into the scheme.

 

 

There’s some potential there.  We’ll see.  The whole thing (except the retractable ‘sprit) would be made out of stainless and then painted.

Back Inside

By this time I was getting desperate to cut some wood.  I thought I’d laminate a 5/8” layer of mahogany on all my deck beams because 1) I’d left a sharp edge on the yellow cedar and I hit my head on it one day and 2) if I want to attach a lee-cloth (and strip of cloth that prevents you from falling out of your bunk) to them I wasn’t confident the yellow cedar would hold the fasteners.  I made up all the pieces and dry fit them.

 

 

I still wasn’t sure I wanted to do this.  It seemed a bit like “gilding the lily” and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get the finish looking nice.  Plus it was going to be a bunch of extra work.  I didn’t drill any holes but I gave them a couple coats of epoxy (off the boat) and set them aside.  My current thinking is that I won’t install them.

 

My primary focus here is to finish off the interior and get this boat done.  It seemed as though there were myriad of small details left and I was kind of going around in circles so I decided to just start at the pointy end and work back.  So, at the very point end, under the breast hook, I wanted to make a backing block for the forestay fitting.  I already had made a bronze backing block but I wanted a wood block underneath because the stem area under there is a mess of ‘glass and the bronze plate wouldn’t sit flat.  Also, I had to grind off a pad-eye under there in order to fit the bronze plate and this left some exposed wood that I wanted to cover.  This spot is a nightmare because I have to do all my work at arms length through an eight inch hole in the anchor locker bulkhead.

 

I made the rough shape of the block and then taped it to a stick in order to offer it up for fitting.

 

 

After much fiddly shaping I eventually got a good fit.

 

Then I roughed up the area with a sanding flap on an extension in preparation for gluing the block in with epoxy.  Here you can see the hole I’m working through.

 

Now I still needed a pad-eye to attach the bitter end of the anchor rode.  I was waffling between a very small pad-eye to just prevent the rode from slipping over the side and a large, strongly mounted pad-eye that could actually hold the boat against the anchor.  There are two schools of thought on this but I opted for the robust pad-eye.  I decided to mount it through the mahogany beam just aft of the anchor locker.  The second photo below shows the brass backing plate.

 

 

Here’s a shot of the pad-eye inside the anchor locker.

 

Ok, I abandon my pointy-end to blunt-end work schedule and the next thing I do is make up some plywood mounting frames for some stainless vent grilles I’d bought for venting the under-berth lockers.  I made up a router template that I screw to the plywood.

 

Then I drill out the excess.

 

And run it past the router.

 

 

And do a ¼” round-over on one face.

 

This is what they look like.

 

 

I actually really like what they do for the interior of the boat (aside from the practical aspect of venting the under-berth storage).  They nicely break up the long expanse of plywood on the berth fronts which was something that’s been bugging me for some time.

 

The next I think I do is revisit (again) the area under the bridge deck where I’ve got the little door to the battery storage.  I’m still not happy with the aesthetics here.  I rework things so the door and framing is set in from the berth front trim by about 1/8” rather than being flush.  This allows me to put a 1/8” radius round-over along the entire bottom edge of the berth front trim and it means things don’t have to line-up perfectly thickness-wise.  I also put a bit of Honduras mahogany along the bottom edge (3/4” thick) that ties in with the bottom-edge trim along the main cabin floor.

 

 

I like this better.

 

Then I relieve the forward end of the Honduras mast step and notch the forward trim to match.

 

..And mount the machined mast base onto the mast step.  This is fastened with four ¼” bolts.  I run the bolts through the Honduras mast step which is then screwed to the African mast step.  The African mast step is relieved to accept the washing and nuts from the ¼” mounting bolts.  The whole mess will be epoxied together at final fitting.

 

 

Next Time

More interior work.