Bollards, Chocks, and an Eye

All the hull-mounted hardware is installed!


This picture shows the beautiful bow eye.

The bow eye is bolted thru the Angelique wood bow stem and Shagbark Hickory inner stem so it is very strong. All the deck hardware is "bedded" in polyurethane caulk. Bedding seals the interface between the hull or deck and the piece of hardware, preventing water from getting into the wood. Bedding compound comes in at least two varieties, the very expensive and very popular 3M 5200 caulk and the very cheap and nearly as good PL S30 Polyurethane Roof and Flashing Sealant for about 1/3 the cost.

I used the cheap stuff.


The left picture shows the 3D printed bow chock and bow stem extension (see earlier post), and the unusual Clam Cleat Bollard. The right picture shows all bow hardware.

Aft of the bow chock is a very unusual "Clam Cleat Bollard". This strange thing has a tapered clam cleat inside it which is shown holding the black line. The harder the line is pulled the more it jams in the clam cleat. The bollard can also be used as a typical bollard to hold a loop of line or a couple wraps of line around it. I decided to have this on the boat as a nod to the huge bollard on Tally-Ho, the 52' Gaff Cutter that was rebuilt by Leo Goolden, from whose videos of the 7 year project I learned a lot about wood working and boat building.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCg-_lYeV8hBnDSay7nmphUA/community



You can't quite see the bollard in this incredible picture. The bollard is right under the jib. On Tally-Ho the bollard is powered and is used to pull up the anchor chain and can be used to haul in heavy lines.

 

A closeup of one of the stern chocks, and a view of the stern with the stern light lit. I added a protective cover over the stern light to help prevent it getting damaged by lines or hands.

There will be a deck that covers the steering system and wires, and the deck will have some sort of cleats to hold the lines coming thru those chocks. The deck is the penultimate part that needs to be designed and built, followed by the canopy.



A couple pictures of the Charcuterie Table with night light and boarding assist handles.

The large wing nuts hold the table to the central post. There is also a line that holds the aft end of the table to the Helm station. Remove those, unplug the horn (which is under the table and is extremely loud!) and the table lifts off.

The table is the Main Attraction of the boat. It is made from a 150 year old American Chestnut plank from the floor of an old farm house in Connecticut. This Chestnut is unusual by today's standards because it is not what is commonly known as  "wormy Chestnut". This board has no worm holes.

It came from a tree that grew before the blight that killed nearly all American Chestnut trees by 1950. The original plank was about 15" wide. I sanded it mostly smooth on top but left some saw marks. The bottom shows the original rough cut surface and will be left unfinished.



The whole boat, minus the deck and canopy.

Next steps:
Install the floor. Not yet sure how that's going to be done.
Design, build, and install the deck.
Varnish everything with a minimum of 4 coats of varnish (most wooden boats I have seen have 9 or more coats!).
Then hopefully design and build the canopy.

An important little detail: I have signed up to present the boat and the Wooden Boat Show in Mystic Seaport this June 27-29!!!   https://www.thewoodenboatshow.com/


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
Varnish Nearly everything is varnished. Lot's of education and frustration with the varnishing. I never learned how to get a perfectly smooth, bubble-free surface. Rubbing hard with brown paper bags after the varnish has dried smooths out the bubbles, but they are still visible. I put four coats on the plumbing cover, bow foot well floor, gunwales, and helm station post; six coats on the benches and table; and eight coats on the rear deck. Here's a picture that shows the true color of the hull in early morning sunlight, which has been a rare thing lately! I made two chairs out of White Oak boards that I bought in the 1980's to make a boat out of. The chairs fit in the open bow area of the boat, but can also be used as beach chairs. Obviously they are not done in these pictures. The head rests will be rounded over and then everything will be sanded and varnished. The long legs sticking out the back have been shortened because they looked silly. The seats are from the Eckerso...
Read more
Image
 Ballast Tank, Ballast Pump, Bilge Pump, and Rear Seat Lot's of progress!   The ballast tank is closed in. The floor is 3/8" AC plywood. The dark hole above the charcuterie table post is access to the tank. The hatch that goes over that hole is gluing up in the upper left. The front edge of the rear hatch is unsupported so I added a small oak board (eventually two boards) under it. That's what all those clamps are for. The rear floors are also installed. I cut the slot for the ballast tank fill/drain port in the wrong place in the rear hatch and had to fill in the goof. The end result is probably a better fit than if I had cut it correctly in the first place, and the grain in the plywood patch miraculously matches almost perfectly! Here's what it looks like with the rear hatch removed. The bilge pump and float switch are screwed to a piece of plywood that is set in an epoxy puddle. The grey hose at the top is the bilge drain hose. The blue valve and pipe below it are c...
Read more
Image
Drive and Steering FINALLY! The steering and drive systems took significantly longer to design and install than I was hoping, mostly due to many many mistakes, miscalculations, and lack of adequate planning. Very frustrating. Note: The orange cable in this picture goes from a battery on my work bench to a motor driver to test the drive system. Steering The steering system is electric with manual tiller backup. The black and white parts are 3D printed on my printer. The blue and silver blocky thing is a waterproof giant scale servo from the Radio Control (RC) hobby world. It has gobs of torque for being so small and should   be strong enough to turn the rudder. It is back-drivable so the tiller can be used to steer, without removing the servo. However, for electrical-safety reasons the servo's cable must be unplugged before using the tiller. The tiller is made from a large red oak board that I think came from Scholar's Retreat, aka THICUT, aka what used to be my grandmother'...
Read more