Month: June 2022

Tools and memories

dave42w1 Comment

Today I was building a part for the boat out of Plywood. It brought back lots of good memories.
Some of the the tools (2 clamps) I was using I inherited from Dad. They originally came from Pop’s building firm in Wolverhampton (Biddulph and Thrift).

One (circular saw) was bought when we had to scrap our first boat (a 16 foot Hornet that we eventually gave up on stopping the leaks – I think we paid £50 for the boat and used the trailer from an earlier free boat, a GP14).

Others (electric plane and workmate) we bought soon after we were married when we were creating built-in wardrobes from particle board and louvered doors.

Still others have been bought since we started working on the boat (orbital sander, drill, finger belt sander, table saw.

Those memories reminded me of Dad’s passion for keeping things lightweight on boats. I remember him hiring a router to cut out a complex web shape in the bottom of the table he built for the Eygthene 24 in 1977.

So I used my hole saw to make extra holes in my project to reduce the weight by 508 grams – the final weight is 3350 grams so I’m not in the same league.

However, every time I look at our mizzen mast (the part I was making is a support for it) I will be reminded of Pop, Dad and the years of projects Jane and I have shared.

Mizzen supports

dave42w2 Comments

I haven’t been posting much here as I’ve mostly been working on our YouTube channel, however, I thought I would show some pictures of the new mizzen mast foot support work.

Water had damaged the mizzen foot bolt holes so I used a 44mm hole saw to get to dry solid ply. I’ve already removed the wet wood below the 5 leaking deck glands and filled with thickened epoxy.
There was no backing plate, the original bolts just had washers beneath the deck head. The plywood support between the bulkheads fell off, not attached anywhere apart from by the headlining.
This is my new FR4 backing plate (well it isn’t really a backing plate as the load is down from the mast foot). Attached with thickened epoxy so that the load spreads evenly onto it. I’ll be using 10mm bolts with large washers to attach the mizzen mast foot.
I’ve filled the holes from the top with thickened epoxy. Notice the extra holes at the sides to make sure that there are no voids between the deckhead and FR4 sheet. I’m going to put a sheet of fibreglass on top of this to provide abrashion resistance and bind it all together. Then butyl before the mizzen mast foot.
These are the new support beams, I’ve epoxy coated them (apart from the ends in the workmate, I’ll do them tomorrow).
These show where the support beams will go. These will be through bolted to the remaining port and starboard bulkheads and the 3 upright posts that we have added (plus glues with thickened epoxy and I’ll add fibreglass tape to the joins with the deckhead. There will be a plywood “pad” filling the gap between these and the FR4 sheet. The goal is to tie everything together and make sure that the loads from the mizzen mast are carried without distorting the structure.

I am also adding some fibreglass tape to increase strength where we have cut away the starboard bulkhead to provide access to our “pullman” style double bed.

While doing this work in the aft cabin we have also finished (at last) the chainplate backing plates in the aft cabin. They were the first we did and we over complicated things with a full length plywood backing plate, plus a shorter plywood backing plate for the 3 shroud attachment points. Anyway the FR4 plates have been added and so that part of epoxy work in the aft cabin has been completed.

We have also been working in the lazarette on supports for the solar panel frames. As part of that work we found and fixed a void in the stern at the hull/deck joint and the damage caused by the davits that had been fitted without backing plates.

Now back to the video editing that will show all this.