An other week gone by and yes some more changes on the boat, but also new ducklings, storm damage and spring gardening.
This weeks main project: framing the floor in the main and front compartment. I have finally celebrated walking on some flat platform in my boat, this is a great event. I had been pushing back this job as I figured it could be easier to keep the space clear and open to sandblast inside the water tanks. The other side of the coin is to just keep building. For most of it, I know what has to be done but I’m continuously facing the other unknowns as where, how, when….always hitting the famous question of the chicken and the egg. At this point, when a task glows as obvious, it’s just time to get it done with out complicating my life with extra minor logistic details.
I framed my floor with ¼ x 1 ½ in flat bar steel. Using flat bar will make it easier than angle iron for blasting, painting and attaching my wood framing, I will simply bolt on some wood beams to which my floor will be fasten. It may seem as the structure could be flimsy but it turns out to be impressively stiff, even before bolting on the wood.
The decisions around the floor were quite strait forward. For the structures layout, I was limited by the water tank and trim ballast openings, with which the permanent framing couldn’t interfere. If I need to add support, it won’t be complicated to do so with removable wood beams.
For the floor hight, constraints where also clear. Under the cabin top I have no head room limitations as the ceiling is really high but….the galleys counters will be under the side decks and there I do have limits. For proper ergonomics, I need to keep a minimum clearance over counter tops and a reasonable counter hight; to achieve so I’m limited as for how high I can bring my floor, 6 inches up. In the back end of the main compartment the floors are raised an extra 6 inches to provide space to keep batteries in the heated section of the boat. Forward of the cabin top the floor steps down as low as the structural floors, head room is limited; price to pay for the flat wide decks.
I also mentioned new ducklings, storm damage and spring gardening? Well, I guess it’s spring and as stimulating as spring can be it also brings its load of extra work. A few good storms came threw, one of them bringing a good size tree to the ground and monopolizing some work force to clean up. The seedlings are coming along quite well, the garden is now ready for planting and if hale can spare it, I’m hoping for more veggies than we can eat. Ducklings? Well…we have a lonely drake, Stumpy, who lost his mate, Daphne, last winter and as Boo, the other drake won’t share his girlfriend, Coco, I figured I should get more ducks and hopefully make Stumpy happy again. …the original plan was to have “canard a l’orange” or “BBQ duck” but as I keep naming them, this is still not about to happen. 🙂
