It's starting to be worth all the effort!

One thing about laying teak: it may be somewhat tedious and is very messy, but when you stand back and look at it, it's all worth while.  I would have to say, that on odds, fitting out the cockpit (once I'd decided what to do with it!) has been fun, if slow.

 You will remember my agonising over the teak trim around the transom for the outboard, and persuading it into place with a heatgun.  Well, to my astonishment, when I undid the screws and took it off, it retained its shape with hardly any spring back.

It was a cinch to glue in place.  I was so relieved.

 The next job was to paint out the fuel lockers, in which I had put a small platform to take the containers.  There is room for plenty of petrol.  I don't anticipate using a lot; on the other hand, it's not particularly easy to obtain without going alongside a fuel dock for which you generally need a special card.  If I can carry sufficient that I only need to fill up once a year, I shall be very happy and can't see that being an issue.

  There was a certain amount of eye-rolling among my friends as I solemnly set to work cutting out strips of teak and fitting them into the deck lockers.  They were too kind to say it, but I could hear them thinking: "I thought you wanted to get this boat finished"!  However, when (particularly plastic or cloth) containers sit on painted surfaces, the water gets trapped and reduces the life of the paint job.  My aim is to minimise future maintenance and these strips of teak should help keep the lockers less wet.

 

Here is the teak capping in place and sanded flush.

The next thing was to start extending the decking over the lockers so as to form the lids.
 

 While these pieces were being glued up, I cut out the top for the lockers.  I often find it's easier to use my large Japanese saw (for which I recently invested in a new blade) than to set up a guide for the little circular saw, and in this case, one long side had a curve in it, anyway, which the electric saw won't cope with.  It's much easier to follow the line (for me) with a handsaw than with a jig saw, too.

 I was now ready to start laying the first teak.  I puzzled a little while as to whether I should run fore and aft, or parallel with the  cockpit or with the back rests.  In the end I decided it would look better if it was the same as the centre deck and cockpit sole.

In the meantime, I had been fitting the locker top.  Once it was all cut to shape, I then cut out the separate lids for the lockers.  This time I used the hand saw to keep the kerf down to a minimum so that the lids wouldn't be a sloppy fit.  I'd rather sand them down afterwards than try to add extra bits of wood.

 Having said which, I did put teak capping over the sides and ends, which then reminded me that I needed to add teak to the ends of the lockers.  This was done with lots of offcuts left over: it's always satisfying to use these up.

 Here the lids have been pre-coated and I'm preparing to lay the rest of the teak around the cockpit.

 It was quite a fiddle tapering the pieces along the edge, but fortunately I still have heaps of decking left, so the odd mistake isn't too much of a catastrophe.

 Gosh!  That was quick, wasn't it? I wish.  However, when I'm up to my ears in black epoxy, it's not easy to take photos and besides, you have seen the teak-laying process in the past.Although not perfectly symmetrical, the two sides aren't that far out.  The teak varies in width by up to a couple of mm and even I am not so obsessive as to ensure that they match either side.

I fitted the teak to the lids in full length pieces and then took the lid down and cut the lids out, which left me with a kit of teak pieces to fit.














I did all the lids as one, gluing them up in situ with masking tape separating them from each other and from the rest of the locker lid.  Once the glue had cured, I took the hatches off and did the rest of the lid.  This wasn't quite as straightforward as I'd hoped and for the second locker, I glued down the wood on the fixed part first, which made it easier.

The lids than had to be sanded, the gaps filled, sanded, filled, sanded ... you get the idea.

The next stage is to put teak on the fuel lockers.  When that is done, the boat will essentially be finished and I can open the bottle of Bollinger that a kind friend gave me ages ago.  There will be much rejoicing - even if I did hope to have had this finished by the end of October.

Of course, I still need to make the companionway, sort out the pram hood, put on the toe rails and rubbing strakes, fit the stanchions, finish and hang the rudders, work out the tiller arrangement, make the bilgeboards, paint the boat, make the mast, make the sail, sort out blocks and rigging, make the self-steering, fit and wire in the solar panels, finish the davits, make patterns for cushions and sew up their covers and I dare say many other things that I can't think of at the moment.  Please don't remind me of them: I can promise you they won't be forgotten.

I thought the cockpit was going to be a mission...

... and I was right.    It is more complicated than it would normally be due to the fact that there are two rudders and thus, at least in theory, two tillers, in addition to a (physically) large outboard motor.  If I were designing a cockpit from scratch, the things I would consider are putting the seat high enough for me to see over the cabin and having the cockpit sufficiently narrow that I can brace my feet against the other side when the boat is heeling.  I am, you may recall, a tad under 5ft 2ins tall (155cm) and also have very small feet which means that the cockpit has to be relatively narrow for me to be comfortable in it.  Easy enough with just one tiller in the middle, but a whole different story when the tillers are well out from the centre.  To my mind it is an obvious impossibility to steer from a comfortable distance outboard of one of these tillers and brace myself against the side of the cockpit.  I can't imagine that steering from in front of one is going to be very comfortable, so the easiest solution would appear to be to join them with a bar, as with many catamarans, and steer from that.  But let us not forget our outboard motor: the Big Black Beast sits up high and sits up even higher and intrudes into the cockpit when it's tilted at right angles, out of the water.  To be perfectly honest, for a while I was tempted to get rid of it.  But then I remembered what it's like to have one's destination within sight - but not within reach due to lack of wind.

In addition to the cockpit, I have also had to consider the storage under it. I have a rooted objection to deep cockpit lockers that can get filled with water and which go deep down into the boat, so that many of the objects stored there are almost impossible to retrieve.  I wanted a nice, dry lazarette, which I can access with ease at present, and hopefully without too much difficulty for another 10 years or so before old age puts an end to such gymnastics.

I had a boat; I had a model; I had drawings.  They all told a slightly different story.  The latter two were finally dismissed as more of a distraction than an aid and I started again from scratch.  Please keep your fingers crossed that I've done it right!

 Since I couldn't make any decisions without the Big Black Beast in place, this had to be manhandled onto the stern.  The BBB is nearly as tall as I am and about half my weight.  Thankfully, my friends Rob and Maren have their boat at Norsand and are both bigger and stronger than I, so that solved that little problem.  Of course one of the bolts to hold it in place was seized. 

The BBB looked enormous.  In this photo the drive leg is resting on the bottom of the boat right at the stern.

 Tipped horizontally, it seemed even larger! Obviously, the first thing to do was to cut a slot so that it could hang vertically - and the question on every lip was would the propeller be in the right place.  It needs a slot 6" (153 mm) wide. Thankfully, I had a 6" hole saw.

 With my trusty Japanese saw, I cut out the rest of the bottom of the boat, which wasn't the easiest job I've ever done.  And thankfully, the anti-cavitation plate was 60mm below the bottom of the boat.  50mm is the recommendation, with an addendum that where thrust is more important than speed, an extra 10mm should be added.  We got that bit right!

 I had already done preliminary framing for the cockpit before fitting the motor, but the BBB's presence made me realise that Plan A wasn't going to work.  After a couple of days of looking at drawings, model and boat I realised that nor were Plans B, C and D.  This was when I abandoned all preconceptions and started to deal entirely with harsh reality.  The first obvious point was that the seats needed to be raised, which meant that the cockpit sole had to be raised and the bridgedeck and, therefore, the sill into the saloon.  I'm small, as we all know, but would like to welcome guests down below.  Most people I know managed to get down below on Fantail with only a few complaints.  I put in a new sill a few mm lower than the one on Fantail.  Sorry, friends, it's the best I can do.

 My idea is to have the cockpit seating extending right out to the side of the boat.  There will be back rests and lockers built behind these for gear that can get wet.  The lids of these lockers will provide additional seating which will be great if I have friends on board, or in hot weather when I want to be able to feel the breeze.  Things were still somewhat tentative at this stage: I wanted the BBB to stay in place to get a proper feel for how the spaces worked.

This meant my manhandling a sheet of plywood 1040 x 1430 rather more times than I care to think, up the ladder, over the side of the boat and down onto its framework while I marked, planed and fitted it several times.  After a bit of tweaking of various pieces of framing timber, I decided it should probably do the job.

 

 Finally, the BBB could be removed and fitting the mirror image piece was straightforward.

 At this stage, it behoved me to think about the lazarette under the cockpit.  It is certainly going to be easier to fit it out before the cockpit itself is in place.  I need 20 litre containers for my cooking fuel and I need storage for items like paint, tools, bosun's stores, spare fastenings, glue, etc, etc.  I'm now regretting having given some of my empty 20l epoxy containers away.  Just between you and me, my enthusiasm for building lockers is waning and the space under and around the cockpit is HUGE.  The wood entailed in making lots of lockers will weigh a good few kilos, but worse, a person will feel a duty to fill said lockers and they will hold a lot.  It occurred to me that a better plan might be to use plastic boxes on shelves as being a highly inefficient use of space and therefore saving a fair bit of weight in a critical part of the boat.  I have some mega boxes (courtesy of Rob and Maren) that I am storing my Stuff in, so I tried these for size.  I could make storage for them, but they were going to be a nightmare to person-handle about:  something about a third of the size would make more sense, so I bought a sample from the Red Shed.

 Back to mocking up (can I get head and shoulders in this space; can I reach that far back?) and I concluded that what is required is a shelf for 40l of meths down low and a shelf above this and outboard for 4, 26l plastic boxes.

I had had an excessively complicated plan of boxing in the meths entirely, due to a desire to have a pump for one container to save having to lift it and decant from it.  My friend Gordon looked at my empty WEST drums, looked at the full one and asked why I didn't use on the their mini-pumps for the meths.  Duh.  Sometimes I can't see the wood for the trees.

Here is the space under the starboard seat/deck slowly taking shape.  The jerricans will be lashed down - no lid required.  The shelf will have a fiddle and there will probably be a long bar of wood to keep the boxes in place in excessively inclement conditions.  A knee is going in the middle of the shelf.  Between the jerricans and the shelf is space for things like plywood.  I may run an upright 100 mm strip of plywood so that a certain amount of Stuff can live there in peace.  You always need odd bits of wood, plywood, etc. 

Here we are at Plan K viii (f):  I can put spare oars right across the stern and have a couple of tool boxes that will fit perfectly on the bottom of the boat, under the cockpit sole.  The plywood on the right hand side of the photo will be cut down so that the seat runs all the way to the stern.  There's a fair amount of joinery has to go on around here, too: this space will be used for petrol tankage.

Now, I have to glue down framing, fillet various corners, glue in knees, sand and paint.  Then I can start actually to assemble the cockpit.  It's all more or less taking place and I think I have more or less "nutted it out" as my friend Marcus would put it.  But it nearly resulted in a nervous breakdown, my abilities to be able to see things in three dimensions being severely limited.  There are still more than a few unknowns, but I am hoping nothing trips me up too badly.  It's good to have a plan to be going on with for a while, anyway, if only to let my brain stop hurting!

Painting and painting

Painting in tight spaces is never much fun.  Painting with two-part polyurethane in same is far worse.  I am told - quite rightly - that I should wear protection when using this paint, so that I don't inhale the fumes.  Unfortunately, any that I have tried has caused my glasses to steam up, and as I need my glasses to see what I'm painting ...  I console myself with the fact that I'm getting old anyway, so what the hell.  And the shed is more than adequately ventilated!  However, I would never do this for money and I have completely abandoned using the epoxy primer, because I could still taste it, each time I exhaled, the following morning.  I was only using it to build up the colour, but now that I'm using the locally-made Carboline, I'm finding that it coats very well.  Considering that it is the stuff made for industry, it's going on surprisingly well with a brush.

I painted the inside of the locker and then both sides of the shelves.  I had to leave some parts unpainted for the glue, of course, but I still reckoned I'd save time - and fumes - doing them all separately.  Here there's the stack of shelves waiting to be fitted.

I glued in the first one and then masked it off and filleted it.  Again, it made sense to do as much as possible before putting in the next shelf and reducing the space available to work in.

Once all the shelves were fitted and filleted, I could go around and touch up where the fillets where, or the parts where I'd been a bit too generous with the masking tape.  This didn't take too long and, while probably not strictly necessary - who spends time gazing at the paint job in their lockers - gave me a feeling of satisfaction.

Another thing that gives me satisfaction is making my own beer.  I hardly touch it in the winter, but I really enjoy it for lunch or on a hot afternoon in the summer.

So space has to be found not only for the brewing barrel, but also for a good supply of bottles that can stand in peace, so that their contents settle.  Oddly enough, if the bottles can't move, the sediment remains undisturbed, even after a good beat to windward.  I made some interlocking pieces of plywood to keep them located. 

Of course, all these shelves are going in behind a bulkhead, the openings of which will provide the necessary fiddles.  So the next job is to cut out the doors.  I hate doing this.  I can't cut straight enough with a jigsaw and the multi-tool saw won't make a thick enough cut for the jigsaw blade to go down.  I tried it for one, then gave up and resorted to my Japanese saws.  The took longer, probably, but produced better results.  You are supposed to be able to 'plunge cut' with the smaller one.  Well, maybe.  But even sawing the cutouts by hand, they are far from perfect. 

Doors that are obviously just cut out from the plywood don't look that nice either, so I'm going to put a 'beading' around them.  This also gives the door something to land on and, while everything will be painted white, I think it will look better. 

 Ideally, I'd have made the doors and then routed a nice round over the inside of the framework, but they would need to be made of about 25mm stock for that to work.  You can't round the wood over in advance,either, because it all goes to custard in the corners.  So I just took advantage of epoxy's fantastic gluing abilities and carefully set up the beadings pushed together.  As long as they hold together long enough to be routed and sanded, that will suffice.  Once they are glued to the doors, they won't be going anywhere.