Sunday, April 15, 2012

Day 183 - Pieces of eight

Made small amounts of sawdust today, but tackled a project I've been thinking about for a while.

I started the day out by continuing the work from yesterday at the back of the cabin. I cut and drilled two filler pieces to fit between the deck and rear cabin wall.



I also built a box to cover the connections into the belly tank.


I think I may go back and redo this though, as there's no way to get to those connections. I'm thinking a small swinging door may be the ticket.

Next up was finishing the cutting and sanding on the anchor bow pulpit. I sanded all the upper corners and cut out the front. This will all be epoxied together and then epoxied to the bow and then painted.



The big project for the day was working on the windows. The sides of the cabin were built with 1/2" plywood, but the window channel is not quite 7/8" wide.


So I needed to increase the thickness of the sides to accommodate this. My solution was to glue a one inch wide strip of 1/4" plywood to the inside of the cabin around the windows. My original thought was to trace the window opening, transfer that to a piece of plywood and cut it out. That thought was quickly thrown out as it would have taken a ton of plywood and work for very little results. So plan B was to cut more of those one inch strips, four for each windows for the sides, and four square blocks to go in the corners.

I carefully cut the angles on the side pieces to make sure their top and bottom edges were parallel to the top and bottom of the windows. Then the four strips were glued and clamped in place. One corner at a time a square block was placed in the corner and the opening traced. The piece was cut to the line, then a parallel line was cut so that the piece was one inch wide. A little glue and a clamp and voila'!, a corner was done.


Tomorrow I'll take a sanding block to these to smooth the outside edges and the sander to the inside of the frames.



Sorry for the dark picture, the phone didn't know what to do with this one. :-)

Oh, and another trip was made to Home Depot as a man can never have too many clamps...



:-)

Even with 30+ spring clamps it was a constant shuffle trying to leave enough clamps behind to hold things in place while the glue dried, but having enough clamps to clamp the new pieces going in.

8 Hours