Room in the Reefer

Guilty.

I am guilty as charged.

Yes, there has been an unconscionable gap in posting to this blog - it's just that not everything in our lives is related to boating, and a bunch of that stuff came up recently.  OK, enough of the Mea Culpa.

Eolian's refrigerator compartment is huge for a boat.  But because it is so tall, much of the space in it either goes to waste, or we spend a long time sorting thru piles of things in there with the door open, looking for something.

Something had to be done.

I decided to make a shelf that would add 50% to the horizontal storage space in there, and put some of that vertical space to use.  Because I am a professional scrounge, I have a good collection of teak scraps discarded by others, gleaned from the dumpsters.  I brought some of this, and a collection of tools to the boat:

Some of the tools

Making a mess of the dock

In a project like this, it is important to make dimensional decisions that will fit with what you plan to store in the reefer.  To that end, I think I may have disturbed some folks at Safeway by walking around with a tape measure, measuring beer boxes, soft drink cartons and other things.  It was kind of surprising to see the variability in carton sizes, even for canned drinks.

The trick in building this shelf was that it needs to be removable, yet it needs to stay in place with a load of food on it when the boat is in a seaway.  I was most worried about the shelf tipping over toward the door when on a starboard tack.  Here's how I dealt with that:

• The left-hand support bracket has a foot that goes all the way to the door, about twice the length of the bracket.  With this extension, it would be very difficult indeed to tip the shelf on this side.
• On the right-hand (aft) side, I made the last of the shelf boards extend behind the holding plate, preventing any movement on that side.

Finally, to lock things together when it is in place, I made rabbits in the top edges of the support brackets to accept a rabbit on the cleats on either side of the shelf.  When the shelf is installed, it cannot move toward or away from the door because of these interlocking notches.

Three pieces, with clever interlocking

Yes, the shelf slats seem to be sort of unevenly spaced from side to side.  This is because the left-hand side of the reefer is deeper than the right-hand side due to hull taper.

Sadly, in my first attempt at making the side brackets, I failed to take into account that the rear wall of the reefer matches the hull contour.  So I had to redo the brackets.  In fact, every board was custom cut and fitted because of the hull contour and because the hull is tapering in as you go aft (to the right in the picture).

But in the end I got it.  And we've added 50% to our reefer storage.

Et voilà!

Seems like a pretty small thing for a day and a half's work.  But there was a lot of thinking and trial fitting.  And that beer box is no longer full...

Room in the Reefer

It's About Time

I can't believe that so much time has slipped by.

Needing to do some straightening and cleaning out, I delved into the dark recesses of our storage shed and found...  No, you probably didn't guess it.  Eolian's old bowsprit.  The one I removed in 2008, seven years ago.  SEVEN YEARS!

So, how do you dispose of a 10 foot long piece of partly rotten mahogany?

A symbolic act

Exactly.  You chainsaw it up into two foot long pieces, stack it up and burn it.  Stuffed in the bottom of the pile there you can also see the remains of the mizzen spreaders, which I also rebuilt, but just this last spring.  I really don't have a good explanation for why I kept the old bowsprit around so long.  But each time I looked at it over the years, I told myself, "I'll hang onto it a little longer, just in case."  Just in case what?  I have no idea - but somehow I felt that I was making a prudent decision to keep it a little longer.  No, I don't understand how my mind works either, but I have learned to live with it.

As it turns out, replacing the bowsprit couldn't have waited...  shouldn't have waited as long as it did.  When the saw dug into the last cut, two feet from the butt, a flurry of powder exploded out instead of chips.  There was not very much wood in there...

Not good

In fact, the rot had hollowed out the inside of the spar.  Frightening!  Despite this, there was very little evidence of the rot on the outside.  A sobering exposé for those whose boats have wooden spars (hopefully not made of mahogany, a terrible wood choice for outdoor service).

At this point, the only remaining unreplaced wooden spars on Eolian are the main spreaders, which I continue to inspect carefully every year, and to which I apply a fresh coat of paint as often as needed.  So far, there is no reason to replace them - they are as sound as when they were new.

It's About Time

New Spreaders For The Mizzen

Rot.

It's funny, isn't it - how something like this can prey on your mind - kind of subconsciously, but still gnawing away just below the surface.  Just like the rot - slow  but relentless.

Yes, I've known about the rot in our mizzen spreaders for a while now.  And I have been intending to deal with it for all that time, but the "right" time hadn't occurred - until now.

So I tied off the mizzen halyard to act as an auxiliary cap shroud and climbed the mast with my tools.  Removal of the spreader was far easier than my worries had been leading me to anticipate, even tho it had been up there for 37 years, untouched and uncomplaining.

More rot at the root.

I had decided that the replacement spar would be made from  pressure treated lumber (like the second-generation bowsprit) so that rot would never again be an issue.  Now if you have ever hoisted up pressure treated lumber at the lumber yard, you know that it is heavy.  And heavy is not good aloft on a sailboat.  But most of that weight is water:

To pressure treat lumber,

• it is put into a sealed vessel,
• the vessel is evacuated, removing nearly all the contained water in the wood as well as air trapped in its porosity.
• Then after a suitable degassing period, the water-based treatment solution is admitted to the vessel, and it is pressurized, forcing the solution deep (well kind of - see below) into the wood.

That's why the wood is so saturated with water when you buy it.   But if you simply let it stand in a reasonably dry place for long enough, it will return to a more "normal" moisture content - and much lighter weight.  In fact, the replacement spreader is actually lighter than the old one (which of course does have a lot of water in it due to the rot).

Well it only took a couple of hours with a skill saw, power plane, belt sander, and a router to duplicate the shape of the old spreader:

 

If you've ever cut into a pressure treated board, you know that despite the violence of the treatment process, the treatment does not reach the core of the board.  And since the spreader tapers from 1-1/2" thick at the root to 1" at the tip, and from 5" to 1" side to side, a lot of wood was removed from the surface and from one side.  Tapering the thickness and cutting away the sides revealed wood that was only lightly treated.  What to do?

People who handle pressure treated lumber day in and day out (building decks, for instance) have always had to deal with the cut ends of boards, where the untreated core gets exposed.  Long ago they found the answer:

Want to rot-proof some wood?  This is just the ticket

 

This stuff, which you can find now that you know its name, is just the ticket.  You just paint it on and wait for the solvent to evaporate.  Wear rubber gloves - its not nice stuff.

Add a coat of epoxy to permanently seal the surface.

Bed the hardware in polysulphide.

A couple coats of paint, and et voilà!

And now, even tho I still have one more spreader to go, it feels like an invisible weight has been lifted from me. The subconscious mental anxiety that was silently eating away at my contentment, my satisfaction, my peace, is now gone, just like the rot.

New Spreaders For The Mizzen

A Small Little Project

Oooo!  Shiny!

Our rail-mounted BBQ table (it's really a fish cleaning table, but Fish Do Not Fear Me...) was really showing its age. The plastic had suffered extreme UV degredation -  the surface had turned porous and chalky.  And with use, grease and other food stuff soaked into the porosity and then bacteria went to town, meaning that it was porous, chalky and spattered with black spots and streaks.  Truly ugly.  And unsanitary.

So, not too long ago when I went to a garage sale at San Juan Yachts (yup, the place that made the San Juan sailboats...  now they are only making RIBs), I bought a scrap of Starboard for cheap.  Then I cut it up with my trusty little table saw, copying the shapes of the pieces in the old table.  I even used the same screws to put it together.

Not bad for $15 and a couple of hours work in the shop!

A Small Little Project

Project update: Valances

Work continues on the valances. 

I bought a white-finished particle board shelf and cut it into strips.  Then each valance got one of the strips glued to the back, using Gorilla Glue (because of its tremendous gap-filling property), held back from the top of the valance by 3/8" to make room for the LED strip lites.  The strip serves as a stiffener, as a means to retard warpage of the relatively thin valance panels, and finally as a lite reflector for the LEDs, directing their lite back toward the cabin side and upward.

Back side of a valance panel, top edge to the bottom of the picture

And then I ran a 1/4" rounding-over router bit along the edges, sanded, and varnished the panels:

Unfortunately, because of the size of my workspace, I can only deal with the valances from one side at a time. 

These are from the starboard side; the port side will have to be completed another time.  And then there will be the wiring of the LEDs...

Project update: Valances

Invisibility, covered

It's funny, isn't it?  How if you look at something long enough, it becomes invisible.  Even if it is surpassingly ugly, you eventually cease to see it.

Eolian's blinds are a case in point.  Having blinds is a neat idea - even neater, these were custom made for the windows.  And the installer made a good materials choice, with plastic louvers instead of metal ones.  But unfortunately he did a pretty poor job aesthetically.  Covering the blinds with valances has been on the list since, well since we got Eolian.

First, it was necessary to procure the materials for the valances:  six pieces of teak, 4' x 4" x 1/2".  Then there was a lot of thinking.  I had two conflicting design criteria:

• There should be no visible screws
• The valances should be removable for full access to the blinds and windows

So screwed and plugged fasteners were out, since they wouldn't be removable without requiring complete refinishing of the valances.  As it turned out, there were four types of areas, each requiring a different mounting solution:

• Where the valances met the over-sink cabinet
• Where the valances met the wire chase coming up from the nav station
• Where the valance terminates against the wall behind the nav station
• Everywhere else

First, the "everywhere else" solution...  I cut blocks of hardwood that were thick enough to hold the valances away from the blinds and 1 1/2" tall to give a good base so that things wouldn't wiggle.  These I screwed to the cabin sides between the blinds to form a mounting point:

Next, I epoxied blocks to the backs of the valances.  Then I drilled pilot holes up thru the blocks and into the mount points.  Screws hold the valances in place - accessible but not visible.  (Note:  when gluing teak, always wipe it down carefully ahead of time with acetone to remove the waxy teak oils from the surface.)

Invisible mounting #1

Next, at the nav station wire chase.  The wire chase was (amazingly) exactly the right height for the valences, so I just overlapped them with it.  The valence is held in place with a pair of L-shaped brass corner reinforcements, one each at the top and bottom, screwed into the side of the wire chase and the back of the valence:

Invisible mounting #2

Just barely visible in the photo is the saw cut I made in the wire chase cover panel - this was necessary to allow the cover panel to be removed without having to remove the valances.  With the cut 1/2" up behind the valances, it is invisible but allows the cover to be slid down and then removed.  (The wire chase was the very first carpentry project I did on Eolian, way back in 1998.)

At the over-sink cabinet I was less fortunate - I was not able to find flat corner reinforcements in brass, so I had to settle for stainless, which is much harder to work with.  By cutting and bending, I laboriously fabricated these little brackets with the tools I had onboard:

They work like this to support the valances with screws driven up into the bottom of the cabinet:

(Almost) invisible mounting #3

So here's what it looks like with everything up: 

I still need to take the valances down and route the edges, sand, and varnish them. And while they are down, they'll get a 2" wide strip of 1/2" white MDF attached to the back for stiffening.  And then the pièce de résistance:  warm white LED strip lites will go on top of the MDF to create some indirect mood lighting:

Invisibility, covered

Fill'er up

So, you have a beautiful, bright-finished teak and holly sole. And your brother-in-law brought along his favorite piece of heavy steel 3" angle iron when he came aboard to spend the night (not telling you of course). And he dropped it when getting his jammies out of his duffel.

Now you have a big ugly gouge marring your beautiful sole.  What to do? 

I can tell you that it is possible to fill such a gouge with varnish - our Previous Owner had a TV fall onto the sole - came off of the mount in a seaway.  Not a flat screen... remember those big heavy things with the big cathode ray tube?  Yeah, one of those.  It made a gouge about 1" x 1" and perhaps 1/4" deep.  I did manage to fill it in with varnish - a little at a time.  If you put in too much, it will skin over and not cure.  It took weeks and weeks, all the while with an upside down margerine tub taped over it to keep us from stepping on the work in progress.

I now have a better way.

Use 5-minute epoxy.  It fills the gouge without shrinking, and it cures in, well, 5 minutes. 

Here is an example from the sole in our forward cabin, which I am preparing to refresh.  The example is of a bung that chipped out when the sole was installed 36 years ago.  It has been varnished over many times, but there is still a hole there:

5-minute epoxy applied

After the epoxy cures, it will need to be sanded flush.  To do this without sanding thru the adjacent areas, first tape around the epoxy:

Tape (and a sticky note, lower right)

Now you'll be able to sand it flush to the floor, minus the thickness of the tape.  I used 150 grit open coat aluminum oxide paper from Norton.

Use a sanding block - something to keep the sandpaper flat.  A short piece of a paint stirrer stick works well for this small work.  Only use light pressure on the sand paper.  If you press hard, the paper will conform to the contour of the bump you are sanding - you don't want this.  Instead, you want the paper to cut down the high spots, and eventually the entire bump.  If you find that you need to press hard to make the sand paper cut, then it is dull - it is time for a fresh surface or a fresh sheet.

When you have the repair down as far as you can get with the tape in place, remove the tape (it will probably be partly sanded thru), and carefully take the repair down the last couple of mills until it is flush.  Then remove the 150 grit scratches with 220 grit paper.

Ready for varnish

Your brother-in-law been here?

Here's a big gouge that was also in the area being refinished.  Sadly, I didn't have the foresight to document the process using this one.  It too is now ready for varnish.

I imagine that the correct way to handle the big gouges would be to dutch in a small piece of teak.  I may give that a try in the future.

Fill'er up

An end to chopsticks

Chopsticks are Jane's go-to tools, whatever the problem.  This frequently has me looking all over for them when I make a Thai curry for dinner.

One of the most frequent problems she solves with chopsticks is the escape of our wine glasses from the wine glass rack attached to the underside of the cabinet above the galley sinks.  She jams a chopstick diagonally into each "track" to keep the glasses from jumping ship in a seaway.

In January of 2012 I shamelessly used Small Boat Projects (my other blog) to solicit ideas on how to remedy the escaping wine glass problem, sadly having drawn a blank myself (I am embarrassed to admit that).

That was nearly two years ago.  The many  50  3 of you who read both blogs probably thought that I had forgotten the whole thing.  Not so.

A lot of great ideas came in - thank you for lending me your creativity!  What I ended up with is a combination of a couple of the ideas you let me have...

First, I bought a package of small neodymium magnets; they are 1/4" in diameter and perhaps 1/16" thick.  I got them at a local hardware store (Hardwicks) that is still in the old mold - it is a jam-packed building with stuff stuck everywhere in every nook and cranny.  All the regular things you'd expect to see in any hardware store, but also unusual stuff that somehow crept in and hid itself in odd places.

Next, I cut a teak strip sized to close off the exits of the wine glass tracks in the rack.  It is the same thickness as the bottom strap of the rack so that it will lay flat when it is in the open position.

Then I used a 1/4" forstner  bit to bore holes just deep enough to accommodate the magnets - two in the teak strip, and two at the matching points in the rack.  I then epoxied the magnets into the holes.

Finally, I applied a pair of tiny hinges to the teak retainer strip, located in such a way that when the strip is folded up, it closes off the exit tracks and ends up flush with the edges of the track pieces.

And then, finally, a few coats of varnish and mounting.

Retainer open

Retainer closed

I had originally planned to let a couple of the magnets into the bottom of the cabinet to hold the retainer strip in the open position.  At the moment, the hinges are stiff enough that this is not required (I probably got some varnish in there). 

One thing that made the job a little tricky...  the magnets are unmarked as to N or S poles.  And they are tiny little things.  With my big clumsy fingers it was all too easy to flip them over unintentionally, and more important, unknowingly.  It would have been a disaster if I got one of them glued into position upside down...  I tested (and retested...) with a spare magnet to make sure that I had the polarity correct.

Finally, a tip of the hat to the readers of Small Boat Projects who contributed suggestions!  Thanks - I couldn't have done this without you!

(And a rhetorical question:  Why don't the manufacturers of the wine glass rack do this?)

 

An end to chopsticks

$$$

Teak is expensive.  You'll know this if you start looking for it on eBay.  There you'll find sellers offering individual boards, really more as jewelry than as lumber.

Six pieces of teak, 4" x 1/2", 4' long

Those six little pieces of teak, easily carried in one hand were breathtakingly expensive - $173 to be exact.  If you don't have a calculator handy, that works out to $40/net board foot (plus WA state tax).  It's easy to see why modern boat builders have all but abandoned the use of teak.

Eolian was built before the price of teak went thru the roof.  This is both a blessing and a curse.  Blessing because she has a rich, full teak interior.

But that is a curse too.  It's why I had to buy those delicate little boards to make a valance for above her large fixed ports.  With the rest of the interior made of teak, it just wouldn't do to use something else.

And yes, that means a new project is coming...

$$$

Project ST5000: Finis

The final step in the transition from our old Benmar 14 autopilot to the new ST5000+ was the creation of a place for Ray (yeah, I know it's the obvious name, but still) to live.  The old Benmar was installed in the cockpit coaming, mounted to a decrepitating wood box.  We had gotten used to that position, and in keeping with our desire to not turn Eolian's cockpit into a video game, I decided that the old location would suit.  But the old box had to go.

I bought a sheet of 1/2" UHMW polyethylene and cut the necessary pieces to make a replacement for the wood box.  To make it easier to view the display, I canted the actual autopilot mounting surface back at 20°.  Finally, since nothing sticks to UHMW, I screwed it together using 1" #6 stainless screws.

Ray's new home

Design was a little tricky. The space inside the coaming is not very much larger than the desired size of the new mount.  Thankfully I had the old wood box to use for setting dimensional constraints.  When it was completed, the moment of truth arrived:  Will I be able to get it into the space? 

Yup.  Just.  The 20° taper helped by making the bottom side of the box thinner.

Snug as a bug in a rug

This has been a fun project, but it has gone on for a long time, from inspiration to now.  And now I am finding that there is a gap in my thinking, a gap that used to be filled up with all the various kinds of problem-solving involved with the project.  It's a little unsettling.  But I am confident that another project will soon arise to fill it in.  It's a boat, after all.

Anyone need spare parts for a Benmar 14 autopilot?  I have a bunch...

Project ST5000: Finis

Symbolism

Sometimes you have to do something totally for its symbolic value. Humans seem to have an in-built need for symbolism.

I don't know if it is a marine tradition (boy, there are a lot of these), but it certainly generated warm feelings when Scott torched his old bowsprit.

This came about like this.  s/v Ghost had a rotten bowsprit, and Scott decided (inspired by moi) to build a new one.  And like when I did ours, this was a long, drawn-out project.  At the end, there is a great feeling of relief.

And what better way to celebrate that then to invite some friends to the little sand beach on the outside of the breakwater - it only shows at high tide, so timing is important! - to a ceremonial burning of the bowsprit.  In case you are wondering, yes, that orange bucket is full of ice and beer...  necessary ingredients for a ceremony of this solemnity.

The ceremony continued until well after dark.  My only regret?  Eolian's old bowsprit is languishing away in a storage shed, waiting for the cleansing fire. But now I am inspired to dig it out.

I wonder if John Vigor has words useful for this ceremony?

Symbolism

Woodworking, writ large

When Jane and I were building a house back in 1978, we needed two 24 foot long 4x14 timbers to use as heavy hip rafters.  Now, this was before the era of Home Depot, but I assure you, you couldn't then, any more than now, go to a lumber yard and find such timbers.  Rather surprisingly, the tough part was the 24 foot length.  Even in 1978, most lumber mills had carriages only long enough to cut 16 foot logs.

But amazingly, in Chewelah at that time, there were two operating lumber mills with 32 foot carriages.  So I was able to see the logging truck head up into the mountains past my under-construction house, and a few hours later come back down with one enormous log on it.  Two days later, the lumber mill delivered my timbers.

Today of course, you'd use a glue-lam or one of those things made up of glued together wood chips.

But suppose it's today, and you wanted an 80 foot timber to replace one of the C.A. Thayer's masts?  And a glue-lam or woodchip thingy simply wouldn't do?  A century ago, this would not have been a problem...  any number of West Coast mills would have been happy to fill your order. 

But not today.

Amazingly, you'd still have one mill that could handle the order - the Hull-Oakes sawmill, near Corvallis, Or.  The link leads you to Gary Katz's excellent website where he takes you on a tour of this still-steam-powered mill.  

I am gratuitously posting a linked version of one of the pictures from Gary's site here only to whet your appetite.  You really owe it to yourself to take Gary's tour of this mill.

A hat tip to Craft a Craft for pointing out this treasure.

(Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I am tagging this post "carpentry")

Woodworking, writ large

Project: Stbd saloon refit

Project from 2002

---

Before

Although we lived with it for a few years, we didn't like the original arrangement of the cabinetry on the stbd side of the saloon. The only enclosed cabinet was the liquor locker - everything else was open, and although equipped with brass rod sea rails, prone to dumping the contents in a seaway. Aside from that, the clutter was exposed, and made the interior feel smaller.

Let the project begin! Notice the opening below the liquor locker (the far right hand cabinet). It's another opening cut by the near-sighted drunk, although a sharp blade was apparently used in the sawzall for this cut. I do give credit to that previous carpenter tho - the factory left that space under the liquor cabinet covered, inaccessible, and useless. He exposed it.

I squared up the opening and cleaned it up. Next, I removed the doors from the liquor locker and dedicated them to one of the spaces forward (to the left of) of the TV cubby. This left a dilemma: Now I needed two more doors to cover the other space ahead of the TV cubby, and doors for the liquor locker. I had much earlier interrupted two doors on their way from some other boat here at the marina to the dumpster. They would work with some modification. I disassembled them, cut them down to size and reassembled them. Here's a test fit, and a chance for us to see how things were going to look when done.

Next, I made two doors from scratch, using more salvaged teak. I made up two stained glass panels, intended to evoke Calla lillies, and inset them into the doors. I'm still not convinced that I shouldn't replace them with something made from beveled glass pieces, but that's an evaluation and project for another time. Then sand, and varnish, varnish, varnish.


Final product. Much improved... at least we think so. And the clutter, tho still there (trust me...) is hidden, expanding the interior. (The obsolete tube TV is now an LCD.)

Project: Stbd saloon refit

Project: Dickenson Heater

When we first took possession of Eolian, the installation of the Dickenson heater was somewhat different than it is now. This picture, taken too early in the morning after our ownership celebration in November 1997, shows the heater as it was then. (I don't have too many pictures from that timeframe, and the ones I do have are not very good quality - we were just in the beginning stages of switching to digital.) Please note the stainless steel shield behind the heater chimney. I know you can't see it in the picture, but it made a right angle turn at the ceiling, and then proceeded another 18". This was kind of necessary, because the Dickenson heater is not provided with any mechanism to circulate the air it heats - it just rises straight up. The Previous Owner attempted to alleviate this problem with the heat shield, and a small 12V fan, mounted just out of the picture to the right.

I thought the shield was ugly, and decided to take it down, forcing me to find another way to address the problem.

When I did, I got a pleasant surprise. Behind the heat shield was a metal grill with adjustable vanes, venting from the plenum just behind the heater. This was a left over from the original air conditioning installation, at that time mostly removed. For real air circulation, I got a 12V electric radiator fan from an automotive shop, and mounted it in the plenum behind the grill. These are designed to move a lot of air, and are pretty bullet proof, being intended to run outside, under the hoods of cars in all weather.

Next, I thought the metal-framed grill was also kind of ugly, so I made a teak bezel for it. You can see how I have set the vanes to blow the heat away from the bulkhead and ceiling, and out into the boat proper.

Next on the agenda was the treatment where the chimney pipe penetrated the deck. Outside, it was fine. But inside, the trim installation left something to be desired.

A hole had been cut in the headliner, and the trim ring supplied with the Dickenson had been installed to the deck with long screws (the headliner is about 1" below the actual underside of the deck). But the headliner hole was ragged and oversize, and the trim ring was not large enough to cover it.

I glued some wood scraps to the underside of the deck with Gorilla glue (great for large gap filling), scraps thick enough to fill the gap between the deck and the headliner. And I made another teak frame large enough to cover the headliner hole and have some reveal around the stainless trim ring, and attached it to the now-glued wood scraps, trapping the headliner between.

Oh yeah, and I took down the little 12V fan and its associated wiring.

This arrangement works very well for heating the boat, and I think it looks good too. Don't you?

Project: Dickenson Heater