A little work, A little play

Completely unrelated to boatbuilding... had a chance to take the family to see Joe Satriani at the Fox Theatre in Oakland the other night. Satriani is one of the best players around and its always a blast to see him do his thing. At the end of the show Sammy Hagar made a guest appearance for the encore. Great show. Back to boat stuff... spent a few "after work" hours starting to plumb the fuel system. The big manifold is the tank fill distribution, fed by a single deck fill behind the wheelhouse. The 1 1/2" hoses drop to the hard piping leading to the six fuel tanks. The smaller manifold below is the supply from the six tanks. Fuel transfer pumps (electric and manual back-up) will be mounted in between the two manifolds on the bulkhead. When its all hooked up, we'll be able to transfer from any tank to the day tank, or from tank to tank as needed for trim or fuel polishing. Thanks again to Chuck for all the aeroquip fittings and the lesson on making up the hoses.

Aft cabin insulation finished

Well mostly... still a few little spots to finish. The difference is dramatic. We can heat the space nicely with a small electric heater and the resonance of the hull is significantly reduced so it is much quieter now. We now have the fwd part of the boat cleaned and prepped for the insulation install. Its over twice as big as the aft cabin, but now that we have developed a system for installing this stuff, it will hopefully go a little faster. Did a stove top flame test last week with a piece of scrap and this insulation is indeed self extinguishing. Nice to know.

Insulation

Happy new year to all... 2011 finds us beginning the process of insulating our boat. In a steel boat, insulation serves three purposes: condensation control (especially important when cooking and heating the boat in colder climates), sound control (so it doesn't echo like a big oil drum inside), and keeping the interior temperature stable. After researching to death the choice of material and process to insulate our hull, we decided on Armaflex closed cell foam- 3/4" for the hull sides and overhead, 1/4" for the frames and longitudinals. This will give us an insulation "sandwich" of 3/4" Armaflex, 2" air gap, then 1/2" interior tongue and groove planking. There is no easy solution to insulating a metal hull but having spent a lot of time looking at all the alternatives, this solution made the most sense for us.  Armaflex is similar in density to neoprene except it is completely closed cell and will not absorb water. It is also manufactured with microban which is supposed to control mold and mildew. It is really nice stuff to work with- no dust or particulates from it, and very clean. It also has no smell and is relatively fire resistant and self extinguishing. The down side is the cost (it will probably be about 50% more than a professional spray foam job) and the labor to cut and fit it into all the frame spaces. It also dulls our cutters very fast so we're going through a lot of blades. We opted for the plain Armaflex instead of the self adhesive type as it allows us to control the adhesive and it is also cheaper by a factor of three over the peel and stick variety. stock sheet size is 3' x 4' which works out nicely with our 36" frame spacing. After a few days of cutting and gluing and fine tuning our installation techniques, we are starting to make some good progress although it can be very tedious cutting and fitting the foam. The best part is that once I get done cutting and installing all the bits and pieces to fit all the hundreds of odd shapes that make up the inside of our boat, I'll likely be ready to spend some time in a rubber room... which is just what we'll have at the end of this process. 

Anchor Winch

Here are a bunch of pictures from the last week of assembling and installing our anchor winch. We had plans to stage a crane on-site for one day to do a job on one of the Baylink ferries. I put our anchor winch project on the front burner so we could get it assembled in time to use this crane for our installation while it was here. I had completely disassembled and cleaned all the parts last winter and so they were ready for the galvanizer. Here they were dipped in a nice bath of molten zinc which should protect all the parts from corrosion for many years to come. Since it had been a year since I took the thing apart, it took a little head scratching to figure out how all the bits and pieces went back together - next time I need to take more pictures. The winch body and drum are very heavily built from 5/16" steel. The main shaft is 1.5" stainless steel riding in bronze bearings with grease fittings. It is powered by a hydraulic motor that turns a chain drive running in an oil bath. There is a clutch type assembly with a large clutch pad on either side of the drum. This allows you to engage/disengage the drum from the shaft by turning the large hand wheel on the port side of the winch. A nice robust design that shouldn't give us any problems, and will be easy to fix if it does...

Dorade vents

Painted and installed dorade vents on the bow deck. These are a traditional style nautical vent that includes a water trap in the base so they can still allow dry fresh air into the boat when it tis wet on deck. Especially nice in the tropics. Went with traditional paint scheme on these and I think it turned out very "shippy" looking. As with most things on this boat, I put a lot more time into designing and building these than I planned... but I think the results are good and they add a lot of ventilation capability below decks.

Making crooked boxes

These are the boxes that form the frames around the port lights. As the title implies they are not really square, but more of a parallelogram in shape. Each set of port frames has a slightly different angle that was determined by following the line of the shear rail. We also tried to line up the top and bottom of the boxes so that when we install the interior tongue and groove planking between the frames, all the lines should flow nicely fore and aft. In the last couple of shots you can see the nailers installed that will support the interior planking. Next big project is insulation...