Week 17 - General fitout cabin

It's a bit different now to write posts in my diary of the built of Glóey...

The reason is that she is finished since some days! We launched her on december the 5th in the COBB harbour of Lyme Regis on an amazing sunny morning with a ideal breeze.

The last 4 weeks were so intense that I didn't find time to also go on writing my diary...

However there are about 8 posts left to complet the documentation of the whole buildingprocess of my little gaff cutter and I will absolutely bring this to an end which can be a inspiration to any other boatbuilder or any friend of wooden boatbuilding.

OK... week 17 was dominated by a range of different general fitouttasks on the cabinstructure.

The first thing was the frameconstruction for the dropboards. As shown on the photo I fashioned this frame twosided... clamped around the 1/2" plywood of the mainbulkhead.

Framecorners are rigid and nice looking halfingjoints made with saw, chisel and plane.

It is very important that this framingelements as well as the rails for the sliding hatch (comes later) are positioned very accurately to ensure a smooth gliding when opening and closing the cabin.

A long awaited moment... fitting the portholes!
These beautiful portholes are made in very solid bronze and have a inner diameter of 100mm (outer diameter 170mm). They where placed just in the centre of the scarf where the coamings are joint. This reduces the visibility of the scarfjoints.
The portholes are openable and therefore a good possibility to ventilate the cabin.
I found them at www.toplicht.de a fantastic store with parts for classic boats in Hamburg.

Before completing the coachroof in marine plywood we had to build several reinforcing elements into the roofbeam-structure.
Between the laminated beams of mahogani (3mm Khaya veneers) we added a strong 1" plypad positioned under the future masttabernacle and a 2" round stainless compressionpost inside.

There also were two 60 mm strong knees to bring the loads of the mast into the coaming and deckstructure. The "mastpartner knees" are made with laminated khaya veneers in the same way as earlier explained on the stem and sternpost etc..
The bend laminatepackage got fitted into a concave shaped solid back.

It's hard to believe that the following two photos where made at nearly the same moment. It shows that the insideparts of the cabin-structure were totally finished at that stage while the outside still is rough and unvarnished.

In the near future the interior of Glóey's cabin will be completed with 2 berth so that she can be used as a little cruiser.
But during the time at the Boat Building Academy we'll only keep the interior empty... she is anyway quite an ambitious project to be completed in 22 weeks :-)