March 24 2010

Yesterday after work I cut some out the rest of the cockpit templates I had been drawing up.

Just 1/2 inch birch plywood, good enough stuff to hold a straight line without much help.

I spent some time re-leveling Pylasteki, as I noticed a little air under one of the once tight jack stands. Hazards of working in a boatyard with a sand lot... Just used a water level and marked the scribed waterline.

I'm calling the cabin top/hatch sliders level, which is pretty close to the scribed waterline. Most of the time I measure top and bottom of stuff that runs athwartship (from one side to the other) off of a known true plane... Or something that isn't going to get changed. So, while I could hang a plumb bob to see if the vertical faces on each end of the cockpit are inline with gravity, what matters more to your eye is that they are inline with the rest of the vertical lines on the boat... So if the companionway bulkhead mirrors the main bulkheads, thats what I'll build to. Otherwise with the hatch boards out bulkheads will run at a different angle than the cockpit.

Not to say that is something even worth thinking about... but if you have a boat set up in one spot and steady you can pick a bulkhead to work off of and build a whole boat that looks right, or try to trust a plumb bob and level and build something that doesn't match. The trick is to take a level, and cut a wedge off one of the bulkheads so everything is evenly out, to the center of the earth, for the entirety of the bilge.

I'd probably change my tune if I mostly built boats on land, but the big one floats... so my brain wraps around thinking the boat is in its own little world.

In other news, my 24 inch wide cockpit won't work. I had a boat in the past with straight, narrow cockpit seats... but it had a transom hung rudder. Pylasteki's tiller sprouts up from the cockpit sole (floor) and needs a greater swinging clearance for knees and other things. Because of this you have to be far enough away from the tiller to make a tight turn, but also close enough to push it over the other way past center and gybe... The close enough in side of things, means I'd need to shove the coamings in about a mile to make it comfortable to push a the tiller past center.

The reason for the Triton's tapering cockpit is so when seated, your forward knee has somewhere to be. It tapers wider at the front than the back from 26 inches to a hair over 37.... at the forward end... at least at the top.

If I were not building a blue water boat, it'd be easy to square everything off and do away with the bridge deck, gaining the clearance to make things work. But, I'm not... So, no matter how much I like the aft end of a Herreshoff Alerion 26, things will go back more stock than not.

I also fired up the pad sander and started on the starboard side gelcoat removal and stopped as the sun was setting. It's not real smart to plow around with 40 grit after dark, at least in my book... as the fairer and flatter you can keep something while chewing off the old finish, the easier it is to arrive at an end product that is smooth and fair...

In other news, I found a 6 inch pad for the 7335 Porter Cable, and a counter weight that lets it work together. Locally I can't walk in and grab 5 inch paper with a stick back, while not a big deal to order and bring in... I try to keep everything standardized so whatever works. The 5 inch pad at full tilt boogie never wanted to stay flat for me, and always had the feeling it was about to do something unexpected. Expecting the unexpected is something I try to do, but not a desirable trait in my sander.