Over the years, besides me earning half the prospected income that the business promised, Jo and I had a supplier dud us with a faulty shipment that cost us around $40k, then her son needed her to move interstate to help him through his last year of high school, which meant renting another household (at that stage we had 4 monthly rents to pay, 2 houses, our shop/offices and the shed I build the boat in). That year cost us another $20k we had not budgeted for, then last December her oldest son had an accident and broke just about every bone in his body, his spine being the most serious, and he now has a metal rod supporting his back. Then as if the first weekend of December is cursed, 2 weeks ago her youngest son was struck by the bullbar of a car whilst on his motorcyle and broke both the bones in his leg. Jo flew up to look after him and he is now down living with us for a while to recuperate. Each time we would just be getting our heads above water again for one or other of these issues would divert our resources again and put us back behind again, only for us to claw our way back up. Maybe we have now had our share of them and we are about to have a prolonged run of good luck? I dont usually mention our hardships, because compared to many others we have it fairly easy. But she wanted to tell it exactly how it is, because after all, this is what life throws at you, and we are no different to anyone else, so over the period of a build life is going to throw itself at you and sometimes it gets in the way.

Long story short, it had been anticipated, had these financial setbacks not beset us, that we would be semi retired to a frugal cruising lifestyle by now. Unfortunately because the boat is not yet finished and we have run out of savings I have had to “get a real job”. I found a full time job a month ago (I found a part time job filling shelves at a supermarket at night about 3 months ago and for the time being I am doing both jobs in the hope of getting back on top faster) and now I work in retail for a well known and aggressive consumer electronics retailer which means I work long hours and most weekends (and a couple of evenings on top). This in turn has meant little or no progress on the build for a month. The plan now is to get our finances back in order then return to the build personally or if I can become a top earner with them, pay others to finish the boat.

The actual construction is almost done and there really is not that much more to do despite it looking like there is. The rudders (are made) need to be hung and the steering mechanism (hydraulics and steering binnacle) fitted, the outboards and their mechanisms (raising and lowering and closing off the hole through the hull the leg goes through and fitting the controls) once done the rear steps and davits fitted (both already made) and glassed in which finishes the external construction and then the boat can be faired. Then after fairing some other small constructions works such as port holes cut (if they were cut before fairing they would cause the long board to snag on the openings making fairing more difficult), stanchions fitted (same deal, they get in the way of fairing so the fairing is ground back, the stanchion bases glassed in then the area around them is re-faired) and the mast posts, when they finally arrive (they have been delayed after delayed, but my finances meant that I welcomed the delay, but sooner or later I need to pay for them and get them in) and finally the small ply deck hardware pads for such things as winches, sheeting points and cleats need to be glassed on, before final finishes (top coat paint and non skid) can be applied. Then everything gets bolted on or in the case of the windows silicon sealed in to finish the exterior of the boat.

If I had the money now, it would take a team of say 4 guys that knew what they were doing about 3 months to finish my boat to a point we could launch it. 2 guys say 6 months, one guy a year, maybe less, although long boarding a boat single handed would be hard going.  Anyway that’s where we are. Close but yet so far. I dont like work. I would much prefer to be sailing but what can you do? We are determined to finish and if that means I have to work a while again then so be it. I hope this does not sound like a whinge. I feel especially blessed and love my life. I wake up each day thankful for what I have. And the motivations I keep telling myself is that these little setbacks and perceived hardships will make those sunsets from on board all the more spectacular, the beer will taste better and the fish that much more satisfying to catch.

So here is where I had got to (I had started to write the blog update) before I started at the new job, I had glued the ply pads for the solar panels down and partially faired them in:

When you first start building every measurement is crucial, every saw cut critical, every hole carefully pondered and procrastinated over. As time goes by you get to realise that there is not much you can do on one of these builds that cannot be undone or repaired. Granted some mistakes or changes of mind are harder to remedy than others but pretty much anything can be moved, removed or replaced. But cutting holes in the boat is still a sphincter tightening experience for me. I cant get past the psychology that anything I do can be undone one way or another. A friend of mine building the same boat cut out his cabin windows then changed his mind about their shape and position and simply glassed pieces back in and re-cut the openings to change them. And if you did not know he did that you would never be able to tell, and the boat is just as sound as if he got it right first time.

So I surprised myself on the weekend when I finished the work I had set myself for the day a little early and was looking for the next project to make use of the spare time. I decided on the spur of the  moment to fit the hatches to the cabin top that had been in the back of my mind as part of the plan for some time. The cabin wrap around windows are fixed non opening plastic (either polycarb or acrylic probably the latter) sheets and wrap around pretty much the entire 360 degrees of the main cabin (the aft facing bulkhead windows and main doors will open but the rest are fixed). The cabin roof is pretty much taken up with the solar panels leaving just the downward curved slope of the front of the cabin to fit hatches to, which as it happens is the perfect spot for ventilation hatches. Opening hatches here are very necessary for getting fresh air into the saloon especially at anchor (at anchor the boat is always facing the direction the wind is coming from) so having opening windows on that front face will be super effective at ventilating the main indoor living space.

I found 2 plywood offcuts and using the hatch as a template I marked out 2 pads for them to be mounted to. The highly curved cabin top in the area I want to fit the hatches has a compound curve to it. That is, it curves front to back as the boat goes from the angled flat panel of the front then curves around to the flat again of the top, and in that curved part is where I want the hatches. But it also curves left to right as again each side of the cabin is fairly flat and the front is flat but the corners are large radius curves, so over a short distance the curve is not so great but over 2 meters the curve covers 90 degrees around the corner. Where the hatches will be has those small elements of both curves in it but they are there nonetheless. You cannot fit an aftermarket flat hatch to a curved surface if you want it to not leak. You must first make a flat platform that the hatch will seal to. That flat platform is fitted to the curved roof by filling the areas not in direct contact with filler before glassing it all down. So you turn the curved surface of the roof into a flat bed for the hatch to fit to with a flat ply pad.

So the process was first to cut 2 ply pads out, which in effect is 2 cuts each, first to cut the overall pad out of the sheet then to cut the opening out of the pad. Once cut I routered the edges and rounded the corners to the radius of the hatches and then set them out in their positions on the roof. From there I marked the position of the openings by tracing the internal lines to the roof. To see how the set out worked from inside I drilled some small holes through the roof to align a cardboard template of the opening and marked them out on the inside. Once satisfied with their position (I decided to reposition them based on the internal markings, by moving them a little further off centre) I calmly drilled holes large enough to take a jigsaw blade and I even more calmly cut them out.

With the openings cut, the next step is to glue the pads down. Not particularly difficult, however, you cannot tighten the clamps too much because you dont want the ply forming to the shape of the roof, you want them to retain their own flat level and for the voids to be filled under them with glue or fill. I decided I would glue them first, let it set, sand out the coves and then glass them onto the dried glue, rather than attempting to create neat coves of wet filler and glassing onto them.

After gluing and glassing the roof pads on and with the solar panel pads glassed and partially faired there is just one last piece of construction to finish the roof. I need to construct a radome and aerial mast, with a slightly swept back angle to it, about 800mm high. It is behind the arc of each mast so can be as high as I like but it only needs to be higher than head high from side deck level, and the roof is about 1100mm higher than the deck, and then another 800mm would make it 1900mm which is probably tall enough (I am 1820mm tall). I have chosen a broadband radar because of my concern about radar radiation, because broadband is supposedly fine, but I would still rather know that it is clear of our heads even when standing on the decks. In the meantime the cabin hatches finish the look of the boat from the front. The more surface area I cut out of the boat the less I have to fair!

Another job that I have ticked off the list was to hinge all of the outside hatch lids on and latches fitted. This would seem a rather simple task. Unfortunately there are no simple tasks! Every task is complicated by some other requirement. And on a balsa core boat it is that every exposed edge of balsa must be sealed with filler. So every hatch cut out on both the hatch and the opening must be decored 5 to 10mm and back filled with filler. Every bolt or screw hole for the hinges must be over drilled, back filled with filler then re-drilled with the bolt holes to the correct diameter and the same for the latch hole. I was told (by Stefan in WA) that the easiest way to fit the latches was to find the correct diameter plastic pipe, cut the holes for the pipe in the appropriate position, decore and then fill with glue then glue the pipe in, grind off the overhang each side and they are sealed.

The openings in the boat were decored and backfilled when I glued and glassed the ply pads into the underside of each hatch opening (the ply pads support the lids so they can be walked on). But the hatch lids I have only just done. And of course, most were a little more complicated than the usual flat hatch. All of the forward hatches were cut out of curved decks, which meant that I could not use my usual easy method of de-coring  by running my router blade around the edges and then just levering the balsa out. In order to de-core the curved door edges I used a bent chisel and used it as a chisel. I tapped it into the balsa edge then used the curve in it to lever out the balsa against its grain rather than along it in the usual way. I tried using a die grinder to remove the core but one of the problems with de-coring in this way is getting chips or gouges out of one side or other of the skins.  The filler will fill it and it will disappear once the edges are sanded back but its just another of the little jobs that get that little bit more complicated than they otherwise seem to be. So the easiest way to de-core was to simply chisel it out.

 The D section hatches posed another problem in fitting, at least the middle one did. Because they are curved I must hinge the lids along the top or bottom edges because the sides are very curved and you cannot hinge along a curved line. Not such a problem with the ones either side of centre, I will just hinge them from the top as you usually would. However the middle one must hinge from the bottom because I need the lid out of the way should I ever need to use the anchor winch capstan, which is inside the well directly behind the middle well so hinge in the usual position would mean the lid would be in the way to do that. Now ideally, because of my love of symmetry, I would have all the hatches hinged the same way, but unfortunately there is no support for the lid in the open position on the side hatches in front of the tramps, so if someone stood on that lid it would break the hinges off as it would be unsupported from beneath. When hinged from above the lids are supported underneath by the cabin sides. So I must hinge them from above. As mentioned the middle one must be hinged from below, but fortunately the catwalk supports the lid from beneath in the open position so if someone stood on the open lid it would not break the hinges off. All good. So with the main anchor well open to access the winch and the forward, D section, emergency anchor hatch lid open forward I can the lid opens low enough for the anchor rope to clear it, onto the winch, around the capstan a couple of times and off the winch into the forward hatch. It all works as if designed to work the way I made it, which of course most of you know by know, I fall ass backwards into these little design triumphs.

The hatches fitted was one of the last tasks I completed before starting work. Hopefully I get to resume some work in the New Year, or even better I start earning some decent money and I can get some help finishing this thing. I still love that I am this close. I love that I have such a loving and supporting wife and family, that have not put the slightest pressure on me about the time it has taken or suggested that I wont finish it.

If you are contemplating building and have been reading my blog for inspiration or motivation, dont let this little setback set you back, it wont set me back for long. And long after the boat is finished and Jo and I are enjoying a beer at sunset and my fishing reel starts screaming line off it, I will have long forgotten about the frustrating delays I am currently experiencing. Happy Christmas if that is your thing, have a safe holidays and I hope the New Year brings you what you want from life, and hopefully I too will get that little bit closer what I want.

Catch you in 2013.

Cheers,

Paul

When we started building the boat we also started sourcing products to go into the build. It is no secret to many Australian boat builders and to consumers generally now, that the same goods are available overseas much cheaper than we can buy them for here. In many cases you can buy from US or European retailers, pay freight and still save hundreds or even thousands of dollars on exactly the same brands available here. One of the things that really starts to irritate, is when the goods are made in China, ship to Europe or the US, and are then available cheaper to buy from EU or US including delivery back down to Australia when we are as close or closer to China in the first place, so we now know for sure that the old excuse of the distances needed to ship the goods to Australia is the reason for the higher prices is quite simply bulltish.

We helped Dennis on Nine Lives buy a brand new current model Lewmar windlass that retailed here for $1750, for $1050 delivered from a Canadian retailer ($895 retail plus freight, that is a staggering half the price!!) And that was 3 years ago when the exchange rate was about 15% worse than it is now. It took 5 weeks to get here, but he saved $700 for exactly the same model. Then just a few weeks later I was at SC boat show and saw the Lewmar remote control kits, “on special” at the show for $340 and rang him to tell him about them but told him to do a quick search online first. He bought it from West Marine shipped from the US for $140 and it arrived to him before I got back from the show! Come on guys, this is getting silly.

I will support local retail and manufacturing where I think the deal is fair, but for that kind of money difference, I am sorry Whitworths and Bias but that is silly money difference and there is no justification for it. It may not be your fault, maybe its the importer or high rents but it certainly isnt the freight or the exchange rate as was the excuse for many years because self importing sales via ebay and the freight consumers pay is way more than importers pay to import commercial quantities, we know we do it. So someone is getting fat. And what salespeople dont get is that contrary to appearances, most people building boats are doing so because they dont have the money to buy one! In other words, cash poor. Sometimes it seems that if you put the word marine in front of any item it translates to “has a boat so must have heaps of money so double the price”. Just starting or owning a boat makes some not so poor people turn into them. In our case our financial circumstances changed after we started building and our income dropped dramatically so we had no choice but to hunt for bargains to finish it. It was in our nature anyway (Jo says I have an inbuilt tightarse gene and that I set the prices I was willing to pay for things in the 60′s and wont buy until I find such pricing again!) and it was with this in mind that we first started importing the hatches we sell.

I simply couldnt see where the value in them is, after all they are simply a hinged aluminium or plastic frame with glass or plastic lens. Some simple but larger hatches are over $1000 each. We have been selling a similar size, similar or better quality hatch that we import from a reputed factory in the USA for $350 and we still get a little profit from it and the equivalent sizes retail here for more than double and in some cases (brands) triple what we sell them for. I could have doubled the price on ours and would still be undercutting some of the other brands. Its just crazy. By the way (shameless plug time) we are in the process of trying to wind down or sell out of our hatches for 2 reasons, first I want to go cruising when the boat is done so wont be able to warehouse and sell hatches any more and secondly the suppliers are such wonderful people (no, they dont read the blog!) that I want to do right by them and by customers here and pass this wonderful product on to someone that can fund it properly and keep everything in stock. I kept some customers waiting a long time while I got some money together to buy the previous shipment. So reluctantly we are getting out. So if you want to buy some hatches from me before I finish at super prices let me know soon because if I dont have them in stock or on my last order (I dont have hatches for my own boat, I sold them!) I am placing soon from the factory then you wont get them at my prices unless the next people to import them run their small business from home or with minimal overhead and do not need to price them in a normally commercial way or their rents are not squeezing the life out of them that they have to charge way over the odds for them, or whatever it is that causes Australian prices to be so much more than US and Euro pricing.

But that plug was not the reason for the post, this plug is. I have put together a solar panel import deal. Like it was originally intended with the hatches, I was planning on just a one time shipment in order to get the items I need for wholesale rather than pay retail. But if like the hatches, more demand arrives after this first deal is done and dusted I may do it again. More unlikely now that I am so close to finishing the boat but you never say never and it may be that I can put these kind of deals together while cruising and make a modest cruising kitty whilst providing other builders with good products at great prices (and this may apply to the hatches too, but only if the factory cannot find another importer in Australia, which given how good the product is, is probably unlikely).

So here is where we are at with the panels. I figure solar panels are a bit like hatches, in that they are super expensive for what they are, not really all that complicated (I even know of people that are making their own panels now and you can buy the parts on ebay and I even got an email from a reader that is going to do that for his boat) and the current technology and manufacturing processes are fairly mature, so in other words, the risks in importing ourselves rather than buy from an established expert retailer (by the way, many retailers know less than their customers, especially savvy ones that do their research first) is far outweighed by the benefits. That benefit of course is price. I have often said that the discount has to be substantial in order to make all the bother (and risk) worthwhile. In this case we are again talking about more than half price. And on something as expensive as solar panels this could be thousands of dollars saving, depending on the size array you were planning on having.

As with any product I research, I have a set of parameters I want and whilst other options may be available I am looking first and foremost for what I want or need and if that then fits in with what others want and I can put a deal togetther I am always willing to share that good fortune or at the very least make a very modest (5% -10%) margin for my efforts or to offset the risks I am taking. For example those risks are if there are faults or transit damage I wear that not you. Because of the type of products I have imported those damages have been minimal, there is also exchange rate risk again, if managed properly this is also minimal. And because most manufacturers have minimum order quantities that other risk is that I have to buy more than I need or have pre-sold and have to hold on to stock and sell it and if it does not sell I am stuck with them. So whilst minimal, the risks are there and that is why there has to be a little profit in it for me to do it in the first place or to do it again once the first shipment is done. I am not apologizing for it, nor justifying it, just letting you know its there. There is absolutely nothing stopping you importing stuff yourself if you can find a factory or agent that does not have a restrictive minimum, but usually if you go through an agent to avoid the larger order sizes, his margin (everyone needs to make something or else why would they do it) would be no smaller than mine, so often the small margin I take is made up for in better pricing from factories for putting together the bigger order anyway. So my gain is not your loss.

Anyway back to the product at hand. What I wanted to find and need is semi flexible ultra low profile panels. My boat has a very curved roof and flat panels are not ideal because they will have to sit well proud of the curved roof at some point, so curve-able panels is the solution I need to fit them  close to flush on the roof.  Originally this was only possible with the hopelessly inefficient Amorphous panels. I dont know a lot about them because at 7% efficiency, even my big roof was not going to be big enough to generate enough power from the footprint they require. So I scratched them from the list fairly quickly. Then manufacturers discovered that monocrystaline and poly (or sometimes known as multi crystal) panels could be fixed to a semi flexible substrate, in many cases they already were but were then stiffened with glass on top and an aluminium frame to protect the glass because the moment the panel flexes the glass would break, and packaged them into the panels that way. This is probably what you see on peoples roofs around the suburbs.

With the newer flexible panels, instead of glass the photo voltaic cells are embedded in a material called EVA (ethylene vinyl acetate) which is a clear plastic with good durability, UV stable and good characteristics for use in pv cells (lets maximum of light energy through) but it is not so flexible that it is self supporting, it needs a certain stiffness so as not to compromise the pv structures (each pv cell is joined to the next one with thin strips of conductive material), and they cannot be broken or the panel will stop working, hence the substrate to keep all of this in place. The silicon can also only bend a little because it too has similar properties to glass. So whilst the panels I have found are somewhat flexible they can only bend about 25% of their length or width and can really only bend in one direction. I have a slight compound (curves in 2 directions, left to right and front to back at the same time) in the front section of my cabin roof and my panels can bend in both directions a little.

I saw some really flexible panels at the last Sydney boat show that were not on an aluminium substrate which obviously contributed to their flexibility, very nice product but too expensive for me. They want about $800 for an 80 watt panel or in other words $10 per watt (they have 2 qualities and this is their lower quality panel price, the better quality panel was $1300 for an 100 watt panel). I plan on about 1000 watts and I simply cannot afford $13000 for my array. I am sure their panels are superb, but I figure 1000 watts of pretty good panels is better for me than 200 watts of superb panels.

The substrate on the panels I have is aluminium, I guess it could also be for example a simple fibreglass and resin panel so that they can be glassed directly onto a boat roof, but as they already make them with aluminium, getting them to make them to my specs would mean the minimums go from the current minimum of 50 panels to hundreds if not thousands of panels. So again I will settle for attaching the panels to the roof rather than glassing them down in a more permanent way.

Price will blind me to many imperfections and whilst the very flexible panels I saw at the boat show looked very nice, and these panels on aluminium are not quite as flexible, having said that they easily bend around my roof so they are plenty flexible enough for my needs, but that aside they dont look to be much different in terms of what they do (produce power from sunshine!) and for the massive difference in price they are plenty good enough for me. The higher priced panels from the other company (I wont mention their name in this public space, but I am happy to email it to you if the best is what you want and you have the money to have that) are rated at 22% efficient and their lower priced ($10 per watt) ones are rated the same as mine, at 18% efficient.

The factory price of my panels is about US$2.00 per watt which works out to about AU$2.50 per watt landed in Australia (shipping, customs clearance, import duty and gst). What I did with the hatches and I propose to do for the solar panels is to offer foundation customers what I call indent price. What that means is, if you order and pay for your panels from me in advance to me placing an order, so that I dont have to fund your order then you get them at landed cost plus 10% (my fee for putting the order together). After that, any stock I pay for and carry, you pay a little extra (in other words I start making some money for the aforementioned reasons) and will probably end up at around $3.50 per watt. If you are interested in paying $2.75 per watt 0r $275 for 100 watt semi flexible monocrystaline panels read on, if not, the rest of this post probably wont interest you too much (and of course you are in Australia, if you are not, the cost of shipping to you would most likely make them about the same as you could get them for from a reasonable retailer there, and of course going on the price of many items we see you enjoy you are already getting a fair deal).

The 100 watt panels are 1250mm x 550mm x 2.5mm and weigh about 2 kg’s each. The junction box is on the top (PV side) of the panel and includes both a bypass and blocking diodes and 300mm cables with clip on MC4 connectors and are wired for series connection. You can change the plugs to wire in parallel or put longer cables on if you wish, this is just the way I order them. They have smooth  and rounded edges with mounting rings in each corner. Besides permanently mounted to a solid roof they could be hung from those corner rings on ropes in a temporary set up.

I have 6 panels left from the first shipment, all of the customers that have them are happy with theirs. One of them sent me test results, he is on the Gold Coast and achieved 20.5 volts at 5.5 amps which is actually 112.75 watts from a panel rated at 100 watts. Whilst this is great, (it means the factory has rated them properly) the way solar panels are rated and tested is at a fixed nominal sunshine rate of 1000kw per square meter of panel. This is because the sun shines at different rates depending on where you are and when so a standardised method of rating is required to properly compare one panel to another without having to have them tested in the same location and at the same time to make a meaningful comparison. On the equator the actual sunshine intensity exceeds that of say Sydney and of course “when” relates to both time of day (the closer to noon the more direct the angle of light onto the panel) and time of year, obviously Summer light is more intense than Winter. Long story short I am very happy with result. Its Spring here, and the Gold Coast is a long way from the equator, so the panels perform well.

If these 6 panels sell and there are still buyers wanting some I will do another shipment, if not then that will be it. Send me an email if you are interested.

One last point about solar panel technology. It is about to change. When is the big question. There is a new type of panel being developed called multi junction solar cells. In effect they are multi layers of silicon designed to read different spectrum’s of light which are capable of about double the current  efficiency. The first commercially produced panels cost in the tens of thousands of dollars each, but its only a matter of time before they become reasonably priced and properly commercially produced (they are currently experimental rather than mass produced). So lets say we are 5 years from such panels, the last thing you want to do now is pay top dollar for current technology. At the same time, you dont want to go without until this new technology turns up, as I said, it could be 5 or even 10 years before they are ubiquitous and affordable.

* note that the panels on my boat roof still have the shrink wrap on them to protect them from the dust in my shed.

I decided I had kicked them one too many times as I was continuously climbing over the decks to the catwalk. So I glued them on, reshaped them a little and glassed and bogged them in preparation for fairing. These side panels are really just cosmetic appendages. They were designed to provide some protection from the elements at the helm but because of the extended roof, I need to have the ability to stand on the side deck and reach the helm to steer. I would need to be standing on the side deck in order to be able to see the port bow, it cannot be seen seated at the helm looking through the cabin windows across the saloon. Because of this requirement I have cut back the size of the side panel extensions so that the wheel is accessible from the side deck, and at the size it is now, it does not offer much in the way of protection from the elements. To combat this loss of protection I eventually intend to fit clears to each side that will extend from the back of the saloon around to just behind the helm and matching on the other side. They will clip to the roof and to the cockpit seat tops.

So the side panel shaping became an extension of the roof edge line and the cabin side profile. The transition of the roof edge line down the extension panel is complicated by the fact the roof is 3 panels thick (60mm), the roof itself is 2 panels thick but the sides protrude above the roof surface to form a ridge line that stops water from dripping or flowing over it and is directed along the edges and down the sides. But the side extension panel is only one panel thick plus the edging which means that the joins needed shaping down from 60mm down to 40mm. I could only really do this job once the panels were in place.

So going back a few months, I had already decided on the side shape by experimenting with cardboard shapes until I had the look I liked. I cut the kit parts down to the template shape I had chosen and then glued foam around the edge of the curved shape on the outside edge to make the continuation of the roof edge ridge, and after some shaping I glassed them with thin surfboard cloth to protect the soft foam. I didnt do a very good job and knew some extra work would be needed at the time of bogging and fairing but didnt worry much more about it.

I glued the side panels on the boat last week and the next day glued some foam onto the side and front edges to shape that transition of thickness. The other area I had to shape was the transition from side panel to deck. I used glue to create this edge as it tapers out to flat. I used glue because it is harder than filler and this edge could get stepped on a lot so I wanted it to be hard and durable.

Glue is much harder to sand than foam and the foam additions were glued to the base edges so inevitably I would be grinding or shaping foam and or glue at much the same time. And as a result you must be extremely careful when shaping transitions from foam to glue as the different hardness means if the grinder blade touches the foam it rips away very quickly whereas the hardened glue takes more effort and time. But eventually I had the basic shape worked out and all I needed for it to be finished was some filler here and there to fill gaps or straighten lines (actually the lines are curved but here and their the constant radius would break into a flat section that needed filling to re round it). But this shaping takes time. Each time more filler is needed, so is 24 hours minimum while the filler sets. Fortunately we have had warmer weather which ensures 1 day is time enough for it to set.

Once the basic shape was created, I glassed it all again, glassed over the glued edges and re-glassed the foam shaped edges. I waited for resin to tack off and then covered it all with bog in preparation for fairing. The reason for the wet on wet bogging was because the curved edges are very hard to cover with peel ply and I didnt want to have to hand sand all of that by hand more than the once or twice that the fairing will require anyway!

The cabin side extensions follow the cabin lines which are angled slightly toward the middle of the hull decks. I made sure to extend the taper toward the outside of the boat. This helps deflect flowing water (not so much rain but higher volume flows such as perhaps if a wave washes down the hull side) away from the cockpit coaming.

Whilst this work was going on I also started dry fitting some plumbing and electrical items such as light switches into walls and mixer taps and water outlets into the bathrooms. And the start of the outboard wells construction started with the creation of the outboard leg boxes.

Now that they are done they have become another of those shapes or angles that I just love staring at and admiring in this build. The way they sweep around and complete the roof line and the way they fade to nothing at the deck impress me. Imagine how excited I am going to get about all of these parts when they are all shiny gloss white!

Whilst this work was going on I also started dry fitting some plumbing and electrical items such as light switches into walls and mixer taps and water outlets into the bathrooms. And the start of the outboard wells construction started with the creation of the outboard leg boxes.

The kitchen has been waiting on me buying the convection microwave and then fitting a rail at the appropriate height just above it then making and fitting a cutlery drawer above that. The space I have is tight, it will fit a regular microwave easily, but a convection microwave is somewhat larger or at least needs to be so as to be big enough to fit a roast in it for example. I settled on about 32 litres being about the optimal size. There are a couple of brands that fit one way but not another. The most critical size deficiency I have is depth of the cabinet.

Directly behind the kitchen back is the bathroom, so the backwall position was a compromise between saloon space, bathroom space and cupboard space. Cupboard lost. Anyway, the LG is the right width and height isnt an issue for most of them, but the depth is about 40mm too deep so that the front will protrude about 20mm beyond the drawer fronts above and below. Not a big deal but not ideal. Other brands are not as deep but are too wide for the space I have. I made the space a little bit too narrow for most brands. I have had the dimensions of the cavity in my phone for months and every now and then I check out a different brand for size. And the other day I was walking through Aldi and they have a convection microwave on sale for $150, 30 litre, and the dimensions are as close to the cavity I have found. Tight width but ample depth and height. It fits into the cavity but the overhang lip I left on the curved front needed to be trimmed off. Its fun to fit some of these items that have been planned for so long.

Being such a tight fit I will need to remove some of the side panels inside the cavity in order to allow breathing space for the oven. I have space each side of it on the other sides of the cabinet walls, on the right hand side is a void that is perfect for the purpose, its not used for anything anyway. On the left hand side, the other side of the cabinet wall, the space is deep inside the undersink cabinet which will store larger kitchen items such as big pots etc. This area can also act as a heat sink but I can also fit a bilge blower (to rapidly remove heated air) to the outside of the boat from the other side of this cabinet which is the main bulkhead, and it would emerge inside an outside hatch well. I probably wont need a bilge blower, but it would be very easy to fit at any stage so I may wait until I have used the oven a while and see if it is needed. The oven has an over-temp cut out and of course I will be able to feel if the spaces either side are overheating. I find it very unlikely. Lets face it, have you ever burned your hand on the outside of a microwave regardless of how hot the food inside got?

Another job that took me way longer than I thought it would was glassing ply pads onto the cabin roof for mounting the solar panels to. It didnt help that I made a basic measuring mistake. I made the mistake of measuring from a front face or edge on one measurement and back face/edge on another and I have made it many times but usually I catch it on the measure twice part of the saying. This time it got by me  and I marked the positions after taking a measurement off the wrong edge of the front pad, which meant that each pad after that could be effected by the mistake. And unfortunately a change in plans compounded or at least allowed the mistake to go un-noticed.

Here’s what happened. First the reasoning behind the ply pads. Solar panels get hot. The hotter they get the less efficient they become. Its not by much but its there. A normal solar panel has a frame around it which raises the actual panel and the backing substrate off the surface the panel is mounted to. The frame around the panels makes them rigid, or even more rigid than they already are, because normal panels have a glass cover. The panels I have dont have either a frame or a glass cover, which allows them to bend. But the frames in rigid panels serve another useful purpose. They allow air to circulate under the panel which dissipates heat from under the panel. My panels are designed to bend around the curve of the roof. I dont want the underside of my panels in contact with the curved roof though. If they were, the panels could not dissipate heat fast enough but perhaps worse, they will dissipate heat through the roof and into the cabin. Or enough heat will be generated to damage the paint on the roof under the panels.

My solution is to glue and glass plywood pads to the curved cabin roof, so that only the first 30 or 40mm of each panel on each side is in contact with the ply pad, then a void is created by the height of the pad under the panel to the actual roof line. I used 12mm ply and put spacers under each end so that the top and bottom edge of the panels is 15mm off the roof. Thin pads like this are easy to bend around the curve of the roof. This allows hot air under the panel (heated by the dissipation of the heat in the panel) to rise up the curved roof and out from under the panel and this in turn would draw in fresh cooler air from the bottom of each panel. This constant circulation will achieve 2 things, keep the panel cool and keep the hot sun off the roof which in turn would keep some heat out of the saloon. The pads also provide a fixing point that does not compromise the integrity of the cabin roof glass skin. If a ply pad gets moisture into it eventually via a fixing screw and eventually rots then it can more easily be replaced rather than the structural danger that the roof getting moisture into the core presents. And it also means there is a very large footprint on the roof that will be permanently covered by the solar panels, which in turn means I dont have to fair it to the same standard that a fully visible roof will need to be.

It is a change of mind of fixing method that caused me to be in a position to attach some of the ply pads in the wrong place. My original idea was to mount nuts called T nuts to the underside of each ply pad in each corner. A T-nut has teeth on it so that it grips into the ply and cannot rotate so that when you apply a bolt from above it can secure tightly without being able to spin in the hole. So I bought 40 of these nuts (10 panels one nut in each corner of each panel). In the process of planning out the positioning of each nut I decided that it was too easy to get the ply pads down in the wrong place (how prophetic!) out enough that over the course of the 5 panels some of the bolt holes would not line up with the holes in the panels. In fact I noticed a very small discrepency with the position of the holes on 2 different solar panels which convinced me that if I was out 1mm on 2 different ply pads and the hole on the panel was 1mm out that would be enough to mean that the hole centres would not line up and I might have trouble having all the bolts find the then permanently fixed nuts.

I decided that self taping hex head screws 10mm long x 4mm or 5mm shaft would be much easier to make fit. I wont need pre-determined fixing points and just have the ply pads to screw down into when final fitting. So not having the precision placement that the nuts required may have caused me to be, lets say, less diligent with the placement of the pads. I glassed down the very front and very rear pads first, then the next pads inside each (so second from front and second from back). The front and back panels dont share one pad with another panel on the other side of that pad (the very front or very back pad), but as there is no panel on the other side that pad is just for that panel , there are 5 panels so 6 pads each side in all and 2 sides of the dividing centre brace. My intention was for the panels on the front and back to be fit just inside the front or rear edge (depending on if we are talking about the front or back panels on the array) so I made these pads 60mm wide with the expectation that 40mm of the pad would be under the panel and 20mm exposed. The middle pads that had panels sharing them either side would be 120mm wide with 40mm between each panel and 40mm under each panel edge.

I had 4 of the 6 pads down each side and decided to lay the solar panels on the pads to see how things were working out when I discovered that some of the pads were too far apart for the panels to reach deeply enough into the pad to ensure a meaty support for the 4mm screw that would be holding the panel down. WTF? How could I make such a silly mistake. I thought for a moment about ripping the pads up again, but I had glued and glassed them down, it would be near impossible to remove them now.

So I set about trying to figure the best way to remedy this. Most pads were the correct difference apart one way or another but not both. Each way I placed them (front edge of panel 20mm in from the edge of the front pad or back edge of the back panel 20mm in from the back edge of back pad). In the end I figured out a way to mount front and back panels in 20mm and the front panel 10mm in from the edge of the pad and what would be needed would be to make one pad just forward of centre another 40mm wider and another pad just behind centre a full another pad wider. The panels would all be equal distance from their neighbour except for one pad that would be much wider. What it allows for is a path between the panels to be walked on up on the roof should I ever need to go up there.

From time to time I may need to stand on the cabin roof to work on either of the booms that might be over the cabin. The solar panels can bend enough that they can be stepped on and that they will just bend the 12mm or so until the cabin roof stops any more bending as they are stood on. But these panels will get super hot, so much so that perhaps standing on them would not be such a good idea, barefoot would simply burn your feet and with rubber soled shoes, who knows perhaps hot enough to melt them, so perhaps having standing room between some of the panels is not such a bad thing. Not planned for, but the path is a nice justification for the gap should I ever be asked why its there. That will be the story anyway! Not too big a deal really. It will look as if it was by design.

Having all the pads down, next step is to bog and fair the roof and pads so that the glass edges are faired out. As I mentioned, very little of this area will be visible, just a strip along the top of each pad about 40mm wide, about 40mm at the top of each panel before the centre strake (this space is needed to provide the ventilation needed to remove heated air from under the panels and to hide the wiring) and for 20mm or 30mm under each panel which would be the limit of your ability to see under the panels. Because roof below each sides panel array is highly curved it is not an area you could comfortably stand or walk so I will have that faired properly and painted high gloss white. The roof under the panels will also be painted gloss white but I wont be as fussy about the finish under the panels between the pads.

Next blog report should have the outboard wells finished, rudders hung, and maybe even rear steps at the very least dry fit ready for glassing. This will complete the final appearance of the boat and I cant wait. The only other big changes to the overall appearance to the boat after that will be the entire boat being shiny white and maybe the windows fitted. Yep, I cant wait.

We have a friend that would nose his 40ft cat into our local public wharf and we would have to climb up one of his bows onto his boat. That bow might be a meter taller than the wharf and a meter out from it, so a jump and a climb was the order of the day. I could do it, but it wasnt the most graceful entry, and Jo could barely do it. As we get older that mode of entry to the boat wont work at all. And it was about this time that I hit on the idea of a gang plank over the forebeam onto the jetty instead. A far more dignified way to board a cat that noses into a jetty.

So when I originally built the catwalk I was sure to make it a 100mm deep box to house a ladder that could swing out over the forebeam and down to the water, and under it, on the same hinge pin would be a gang plank that would swing out over the top of the ladder, the ladder resting on a jetty and then the gang plank sitting on the ladder as its brace to stiffen it, and being hinged to the boat, the ladder and plank would swing up and down as the tide moved the boat up and down relative to the height of the jetty.

One of the complications of anchor deployment and retrieval is the shank and the shape of modern anchors such us the super sarca, manson supreme and rocna anchors. They have a round roll bar that self rights them so they self set as they drag along the bottom. This roll bar makes them difficult to stow. I was originally going to make a bow roller over the forebeam and then somehow (via a roller) direct the chain down to the flat catwalk but the complicated need to get the chain over the forebeam but below the height of the forebeam meant I shelved that idea.

Many cats have the anchor come up onto the catwalk via a slot in the catwalk usually with a stainless steel frame that is shaped to take the anchor shank. As I ran out of money some time I ago, all of my initial fancy plans for custom (I hate the word bespoke!!) made bow roller started to slip away and I have had to figure out a way to make an off the shelf bow roller do the same job. To motivate me further, I was given an old bow roller that just needs a new rubber roller, but is stainless steel, albeit 304 not 316, but beggars cant be choosers as my late great aunt Tess used to say.

The catwalk height/depth in relation to the forebeam and forward deck was set months ago when I first constructed it. Well, it sort of set itself. The catwalk depth is about the same depth as the forebeam is thick, so that the catwalk sides offer the same profile shape as the forebeam and the trampoline support tubes are constructed into the catwalk sides in the same way as they are in the forebeam (conduit glassed with 3 layers of glass with stainless steel rod inside then scallops cut into the conduit/glass to reveal rod to which the tramp will be laced) and this method was repeated on the hull sides and the foredeck). It worked out that the catwalk would be 100mm deep, plenty deep enough to house a ladder under  lid so that top face of the catwalk becomes the top of the lid. I also made the catwalk wide enough to house a ladder and a trough that the chain could pass through, so that I could hose down the chain as it travelled through the trough so that should the chain come up covered in mud, most could be cleaned off before the chain went into the chain well. The anchor would remain in the bow roller, secured with a pin of some kind.

So after much online research about how others have done this, and there is pretty much a different method employed by each boat builder, and seeing many up close at boat shows, I decided that rather than go over the forebeam I would come up from under the catwalk through a slot behind the forebeam. I would still need to put a bow roller on the forebeam in order to employ a mooring buoy and not have to thread the line under the forebeam and up into the slot. The bow roller on the forward edge of the beam would therefore allow the mooring buoy line to come over the forebeam and onto a cleat on the catwalk. It could also allow me to deploy an emergency anchor over the forebeam and still have it retreave via the windlass direct to the gypsy but my heights were a little out so a little revision was needed. More on that in a little while.

So first step was to design the bow roller sides onto the forebeam. I decided to use 5mm solid glass plates cut to shape then glassed with another 5mm of glass onto the forebeam. So I used my now trusty method to decide on a shape. Take photos of the way others have done it, so having taken said pics at the Sydney boat show a few weeks ago, I then made cardboard templates of a variety of different shapes based on the variety of different pics I had and settled on the one I liked best. I cut the solid glass to the template shape I settled on and then dry fit them to the forebeam to see them in place. Then I glued them on. Once glued on, I glassed each side of the plates with 4 layers of 450g uni and 4 layers of 457 double bias each side. This made them about 10mm thick each.

I set them apart 100mm in order to fit a 90mm roller. Once I had them glued and glassed Dean suggested that the loads on these would be enormous and that I should beef them up even further, so I coved a bigger cove and added some extensions to them under the beam and aft on the top side to shape them into the catwalk and gave them another 6 layers of each type of glass to the outside of each plate and 2 layers of each type of glass to the inside of each plate so now along with the 5mm of solid glass plate they now have 12 layers of uni and 12 layers of double bias each side and the glass plates are now 15mm thick each at the base tapering out to about 12mm thick at the edges. I figured the stress of the boat would pull from the inside of the roller sides to the outside each side as the bow pitched from sided to side so I put the extra glass to the outside of each side plate to better handle those stresses. I also glassed another plate onto the other side of the catwalk so that the hinge pin for the bow roller extends through to the other side of the catwalk and becomes the hinge pin for the ladder and gang plank.

I didnt bother to shape the underside of the ladder side bracket as it would only ever come under very moderate stress in that it only has to support the weight of the ladder and gang plank and the person travelling over it, maybe 200kgs tops, only one person at a time would ever go over it. So it can easily handle those stresses. The bow roller sides may meet loads of many 1000′s of kgs. I am pretty confident that the bracket will handle the load but you never really know until the boat has ridden out its first storm on a mooring buoy. But even if the roller sides were to fail, the worst that could happen is that the mooring line could demolish the side and then be able to slip onto the forebeam and slide along it, and of course damaging the paint, but it would still be attached to the cleat on the catwalk so the boat would not come adrift of the mooring. But if a comparison between what look like flimsy alloy bow rollers on some of the boats with an alloy beam are the comparison mine should be ok.

Next job was to cut the slot into the catwalk to take the stainless steel anchor roller. The anchor roller needs to be in a directly straight line to the windless so that the chain is pulled in a straight line from the gypsy through the anchor roller. The boat will pitch from side to side and be steered to the anchor under power but once the anchor chain goes over the anchor roller, the run to the winch needs to be straight. I have the anchor roller (Dean gave it to me) and he suggested I ought to have it angled down so that an anchor can be pulled up onto it and clear the underside of the beam and catwalk. So I made a solid glass mold of the anchor roller that I could glass into the boat to house the stainless steel frame on an angle protruding under the catwalk. I covered the s/s frame with clear tape and glassed directly onto it as a mold.

Once the molded glass anchor roller holder was cleaned up I glassed it into the slot at the angle that worked for me. I had to play around with anchors (I have a way over size CQR and access to an undersized Delta and also tried a Manson Supreme but its roll bar meant I could not fit it under the beam the way it is currently laid out, but the other 2 work) until I had it at an angle and in a position that worked. The deeper I have it protrude the better it can house each anchor under the beam, but the further out it is protruding the less substantial it can be glassed because less of it is in contact with the boat and more of it is just jutting out into the air under the boat. And the greater the angle the sharper the turn from angle to flat on the catwalk and the higher up it protruded above the catwalk. If it got too high I could not have a lid over the trough as I had hoped, and too high and it becomes an obstacle on the deck that can be tripped over. As with everything else on a boat it became a series of compromises until I had the best I could get that ticked all of my boxes. As it stands, an anchor with a roll bar wont pull up into the slot and be secured properly, so I will probably eventually get one of these modern anchors but only deploy it over the beam when the delta, my choice of standard anchor does not hold. I will also have that massively oversize plough that I was given. They dont hold very well so it will be my emergency anchor in the D section to go over the beam in the case of a dragging anchor in the hope it grabs enough to get the motors started and the main anchor reset. I also added a ply stiffening pad (25mm thick ply) under the catwalk to take any banging that may occur and to beef up the bolt points where the anchor roller will be bolted to the boat.

The angle and raised height of the end of the bow roller on the catwalk this created meant I had to rethink the chain trough. I was originally just going to have a ply wall either side and a ply base for it to skid along, that could be replaced if it wore out. But because it is now raised I needed a shallower trough that still fit in under the lid height of the catwalk once the lid is fitted. I thought about a pvc pipe cut in half but then realised I already had the shape, the mullion mold. So I made up a trough in the mullion mold 4 uni layers thick (about 3mm) and once that was set I started cutting out the D section and bulkhead that this trough needed to get through to bring the chain out beneath the windlass in the main anchor well. I made the trough over length so that the pieces I cut off could be used as lids to the trough to protect the D section and bulkhead. I had thought about having a stainless steel hawse pipe that the chain would travel through to get to the main anchor well and this would be flared at each end so that the chain could not catch on it. It was also to be slightly bent to subtly change the angle of the chain so that it emerged at the angle to the gypsy (because the gypsy is higher than the catwalk), But this has inherent in it a number of problems one of them quite serious. First is that anywhere chain rubs it will eventually wear. Also the pipe would be about a meter, and should the chain kink inside that pipe it could well jam in there and be unable to be unjammed by the winch, and Murphy will tell you, that jam would occur at the most dangerous and least opportune time and finally, metal on metal is noisy and rough. So by having the chain exit the trough at a continuous level means it can change direction up to the gypsy by a roller on the end of the trough in the anchor well, and it too can be replaced if it wears, simple and effective solution. Smoother, replaceable, and most importantly no way it can jam.

The mullion mold made a trough with flat edges that I could use to mount the trough. I knew the height the trough needed to be based on the back edge of the anchor roller frame, I then cut some duflex rails and glassed them into the catwalk at the height that would make the base of the trough the same height as the aft edge of the roller frame. I set it at level. I was going to have it tilt slightly so water would run out of it but the boat pitches so much that what is level? There will be drain holes along it and the well has a drain hole too of course so it doesnt really matter where the water goes, it will find its way out.

The easiest way to cut away the hole for the anchor trough was to drill a series of holes and then use the drill to cut the small way between each drill hole until the mass is moved. Its a slow time consuming method but because of the angles and spaces saws wont fit. A die grinder may have worked but I found the drill working so I went with it. Once it was all cut out, and the trough dry fitted, I glued and glassed it all in. The point where the anchor chain changed direction from the angled anchor roller frame to the chain trough is a point that will wear, so I set the chain trough back 100mm to leave a void. In that void I will put a nylon pad. It will wear but is designed to, and will be replaceable. The final piece of construction on the catwalk was to glass in a ply side wall that separates the chain trough from the ladder cavity and also provides a hinge point for the lids. Two lids, one narrow one over the chain trough and the larger one over the ladder. I intend for the lids to be able to be kept closed or open and the anchor deploy or retrieve to work and for the lid over the ladder to be able to be closed with the ladder deployed or not.

Because there may be times when an anchor is deployed over the beam it will need to be retrieved over the beam and I want to be able to use the windless to bring the anchor up in this scenario. I used a long aluminium pole I have to run a straight line from the gypsy to the likely roller position. I have made the bow roller plates large enough to take a roller and a pin above the roller to hold the chain or rope in the slot so that if the bow drops in a wave trough the chain or rope cant come out of the slot and run along the beam. So the roller will be low in the slots. When I ran the pole from the gypsy to the roller, it just touched the hatch bottom edge. I dont want to have to re-shape the hatch opening and lid so the easier solution is to raise the winch on the table inside the hatch. But I cannot raise the winch much, because then the hatch lid wont shut. I managed to raise it enough with just a 20mm ply pad between the winch and the table so that the chain would clear the hatch edge and still be low enough for the lid to close. But this increased the angle to the chain trough, which meant I had to reshape the table slightly so the chain clears its forward edge on its way from the roller that will change its exit angle from the trough to the gypsy. All these small changes were easy fixes but highlight how one change has implications for others.

The next step to finalize this section of the build is to make the ladder. Yes make it. I cant find one the exact size I want, that is they are either too narrow at the top, too wide at the base, too long or short or 3 of the 4 (it would be hard for a ladder to be simultaneously too long and too short!). The other issue with commercial available ladders is they are not made for the marine environment. You can get them with fibreglass sides, electricians use them to minimise charge grounding through them into the ladder, but they use aluminium rungs bolted to the glass sides with steel nuts and bolts. In the marine environment that would last a few months at best.  And the glass ladders are simply glass U beams made from chop strand. So I will make 2 glass U beams with uni and double bias on a simple mold of a timber rail. Then I will make rungs the same way but just slightly narrower mold so that the rungs fit inside the side rails, and then glass it all together so there is nothing to corrode, and I get to make it the exact width at the bow (400mm) and aft end (500mm) and the exact correct length to fit in the cavity (2000mm) with one rail square to the rungs the other side tapered to the width top and bottom, again to fit the cavity. Below is a mock up using one of my cheap ally ladders to show the effect I am after and the first rail on the mold. And I can build my exact size ladder for about $20 instead of the $200 a similar good fibreglass ladder would cost.

Once the ladder is made I will need to make brackets that run over the forebeam to the axle that will run through the 2 bow roller sides and the bow roller itself to the plate on port side. This axle is a 3/4 inch solid stainless rod. I was going to have thread tapped into each end or just have a hole drilled in it and a stainless split ring each side. There wont be any side to side pressure on that axle. The brackets will need to be strong, strong enough to easily carry 500kgs. Not that 500kgs would ever be on the ladder or gang plank but you have to have a margin of safety built in. And then once all of that mechanics is made the lids can be made and fitted to finish that section of the build until fairing and painting.

Whilst being on a boat in beautiful locations will probably mean we have other interesting things to do (I will have to replace all the time I have spent building with other pass times!!) we will still love watching tv and surfing the net especially in the evenings. And that, on top of the other requirements of life aboard a boat such as the fridge, the lights (LED’s throughout so they run at a fraction of the power of old incandescents) will require electricity. And we will need to generate and store our own most of the time. We are not trying to escape civilisation and from time to time we think we will like being in marinas, so we will have shore power. And who knows, we may even find a marina we like so much we want to make it our base and “live” there. But most of the time we will probably be mobile and on mooring buoys or the anchor. And for that we need to have our own power.

Cats are very weight sensitive, and traditional power generating and storage is very heavy. We intend on a very big solar panel array on our massive roof (10 x 100 watt monocrystaline panels) connected to (to start with) 400 amp hours of LifePo4 batteries. For those that dont understand this new technology let me explain what I have found.

Battery Bank

Lead acid battery technology is about 150 years old now. And apart from some different ways to manufacture them, not much has changed with them. Without going into too much detail (which I dont know) the car battery you know has lead cells and an sulphuric acid catalyst that originates as water and is turned into acid and back again in the process, that reacts with the lead plates to take a positive ion from one plate to another in the form of an electric current. Each cell in the battery is about 2 volts per cell hence 6 cells (often marked by 6 points where the cell needs to be topped up with water) = 12v battery. The size of the cell denotes how much charge (life in time to discharge) the battery is. So a battery could be 100 amp hours which theoretically could run a 1 Amp item for 100 hours or a 100 amp item for an hour. I say theoretically because a battery is rarely if ever at full charge after its manufacture. About 20 years ago the electrolyte (water to acid) changed from liquid to gel in some batteries to improve their ability to work somewhat inverted (often needed on a yacht) without leaking and also self venting batteries that released the gasses created (hydrogen) but not the electrolyte meaning at least you did not have to keep them topped up with water, making them “maintenance free”. (Another technology is the Absorbed glass mat battery but again they are still basically lead acid technology, the glass mat just holds the electrolyte so it cannot spill). But whilst you may not have needed to physically maintain them you still needed to manage them in order to prolong their life. The biggest maintenance issue with Lead Acid batteries is that they cannot be continually used past half their storage capacity. They can of course but each time you do it you shorten their ability to keep doing it, so you shorten their life cycle.

And the final nail in the lead acid battery coffin is they are huge in both size and weight. A 100amp hour deep cycle (ability to be deeply discharged on a regular basis, as opposed to a starting battery that only ever uses a fraction of its storage before being recharged but has the ability to output a lot of power very fast, needed to turn over a car to start it) gel battery is about 35kgs and is about 300mm x 200mm x 200mm meaning 4 of them would weigh in at 140 kilograms, 300mm x 200mm x 800mm (0.05 of a cubic meter). Its the 140kgs that is the killer on a cat. And because of the inability to drain them past 50% you effectively have a 200 amp hour usable bank.

One final point before going on to the advantages of Lithium chemistry. Lead acid batteries are resistive to charge. So you need high amp chargers to push the power into them, and once you get to about 90% charge they resist even harder meaning that the effort required to top them up past 90% gets harder and almost impossible beyond 95%. You expend more energy than the last 5% trying. So in effect, each 100 amp hours really only has 45 amp hours of regularly usable power. Another 50% is there for emergencies, but you ought not be using it on a regular basis if you want to prolong their life. Lead acid battery manufacturers dont like discussing life cycles and site the multitude of variables that can effect the outcome as their reason, which is fair enough, but the average seems to be about 500-700 full cycles. Which usually means about 5-7 years on a boat, assuming two cycles per week. There are other minor disadvantages with lead acid, such as shelf life (they self drain if not recharged within a certain time) but this ought not be a disadvantage if you are living aboard or have solar panels and a decent solar regulator, unless you take a break from the boat, which happens. Its not all doom and gloom for the lead acid battery. The one area they have it over other battery forms is initial purchase price. But even that is a false economy as I will show. I guess the one redeeming feature they have is that being very old technology people trust it and they distrust new technology, but new is only new for a while, then it becomes old or mature so lead acid batteries days are numbered.

LifePo4 is a Lithium iron phosphate battery, invented in the mid 90′s at MIT (the iron is the cathode). Other forms use cobalt, nickel or magnesium as the cathodes and they have some advantages over iron but also some disastrous instability issues (they explode!!!). Lithium iron chemistry, despite being slightly less energy dense than other lithium chemistries, is much more stable and safe and are now found in electric cars such as the Prius or the Volt as examples and is a far lighter and smaller chemistry than lead acid.

The most striking advantage for use in a vehicle is weight. Unlike lead acid (2.1v per cell for a total of 12.6v) a cell of Lithium is 3.6v. So 4 of them equates to 14.4v or slightly higher than an equivalent  fully charged 12v battery. So in layman terms, it means you start at a slightly higher voltage, and with lead acid batteries, as the power of a battery drops so too does the voltage and below a certain voltage the power is unusable (many items wont work below a certain voltage). Not only do Lithium retain full voltage all the way down to 5% of their storage capacity, the higher voltage you start with the more power you have before the voltage drops (through too long a wire travel) to unusable levels (within the tolerance of the appliance, you cannot pump 24v into some items for example).

While we are on the subject of 24v, the reason some people still use it is because over a given length the wire gauge required is much less to keep the voltage drop in check and that drop is disproportionately less on higher voltage, for example if you lost 1.2v over the length of wire, it represents 10% of your voltage at 12v but only 5% at 24v. Heavier gauge wire is not only heavier but more expensive. Long travels of wire reduce voltage through resistance, again the higher the voltage you start with the higher it emerges at the end of its wire, meaning you dont end up with unusable voltages at the appliance end that can happen with lead acid over long wire runs with inappropriate wiring (the thicker the wire gauge the better it handles or minimises voltage drop). Batteries compensate for voltage drop with raised amps, meaning the same appliance draws on more of the reserve of the battery at lower voltages which in turn means the battery is drained even faster. Its a viscous circle.

Back to the size/weight issue. The unit in the pic above (left) is 3.6v at 200 amp hours. It weighs just 5.5kgs and is 275mm high, 182mm wide and 70m deep. 4 of them wired in series gives you 14.4 volts at 200 amp hours and 2 lots of that (pic on the right) wired in parallel gives 400 amp hours. The total size of this bank is 275mm x 182mm x 560mm (or .028 of a cubic meter compared to .05 for lead acid) at 44kgs. So about half the physical size of a lead acid bank but at about 1/3 the weight.

But it gets much better than that. Because of the draw down maintenance issues of lead acid, you only really get full use of half the amp hours. With Lithium it is not only applicable but recommended you periodically drain them to about 5% and recharging them to about 95% is not only easy (less resistance) but much faster. It would not be an exaggeration to say that compared to the resistance of lead acid, lithium’s practically suck the power into them. On shore (or generator) with an appropriate charger you could go from 5% to 95% in a couple of hours compared to all day and night for the equivalent lead acid. So in daily use terms 400ah of lithium is about the same as 700ah of lead acid, which would easily add up to 245kgs compared to 45kgs. 200 kilos saved for the same effective bank size. The boat is about 4000kilos unladen and the payload is about 2000kilos. To give up 10% of it to lead acid seems pretty dumb these days.

Its hard to argue with those facts, but one area that puts people off is the initial purchase price. 400AH of Lithium would usually cost about $3000 at retail compared to about $1600 ($400 per 100AH) for reasonable quality lead acid. So about double the cost. But because you get about triple the charge cycles with Lithium they ought to last 3 times as long making them cheaper in the long run. And given you need nearly double the AH in lead acid that halves the cost of lithium again. And just to add no brainer to the equation, a bunch of us had the importer import us a special order which got us close to wholesale on them and we only paid $500 per 100AH. So I paid $2000 for 400AH only slightly more than the cost of a decent quality lead acid battery. And I get all of the benefits. I imagine, by the time I need to replace these, the volume in production will have dramatically reduced the prices even further to the point that they are as cheap as lead acid at retail. I am usually the person importing stuff for other builders to particpate in the deal, but in the case of the batteries, Mike in Perth, also building the same boat as me so we are getting the masts together as well and probably sails too, has organised a great deal from a local (Perth) importer. It saved me having to import them, the prices were as good as I could find direct from the factories, so a big thanks to Mike for putting the deal together for us all. About 6 of us took advantage of it. 3 building the bi-rig  1230 all with 400ah banks. One guy bought 600ah, in all I think Mike bought about 2000ah between us all. Thanks Mike.

About the only real downside with Lithium, is that you need a slightly more sophisticated solar regulator which makes them a bit more expensive but that aside, its hard to find a compelling argument for sticking with lead acid batteries and only fear of change would keep people from Lithium in my opinion. One other downside is that as much as they are easy to charge (little resistance) they are also more giving of their power so you could melt a spanner if it shorted the battery terminals as an example. They give out a massive load if called upon, big enough to kill you, so you need to take extra precautions when working on them such as rubber gloves to insulate you from them, you have to be super careful with metal tools around them so as not to short them, or where and how you store them so nothing can fall onto the terminals and short them and you require very good circuit breakers to ensure that should an unwanted high load be generated the circuit breaker kicks in. Other than that, there really isnt any known downside.

Power generation

All of that power storage needs to be collected. Our original plan was for about 400 watts of solar and a 400 watt wind gen and a 2kw petrol generator (2000 watts at 12v = 167 amps x 2 hours =  334ah recharged for extreme emergency power. Of course that is theoretical, in reality you lose power at every turn, from the generator output at 240v down to 12v at the battery charger, the reality is you probably get about 80 amps an hour charging at best).

When we first researched the build, solar was at about $10 per watt. So 400 watts was about $4000. It has come down considerably since then, but still not as much in Australia as it has for the rest of the world. In the US, it is about $2 per watt. In Australia it is still at about $3 per watt for standard monocrystaline panels. More on cost in my next blog post. Here is the low down on the current technology. Again, I am no expert, this is just what I have learned from my hours of research.

There are 3 types of solar panel, Amorphous, Monocrystaline and Polycrystalline (also known as multi crystaline). Amorphous panels use a method of printing to create the panel. Cheap to produce but not very effective. Fine if you have unlimited space I guess but not of much use to boat owners due to their poor performance numbers. These cells typically have less than 10% efficiency and 7% is the most common.

So it comes down to mono and poly silicone panels. Mono are made by slicing thin single crystals, poly are made from crystal fragments glued together. The difference in efficiency is minimal and condition dependant. Mono panels are more efficient in general terms, the best panels being 22%, but of course this is also the most expensive at as much as $15 per watt. Most average about 18%. Poly panels are rated about 1% less efficient in normal conditions (so about 17% instead of 18% for a given physical panel size, a difference of about 4-5% less efficient for the same footprint) but they handle high temperatures better than mono and they also handle partial shade and extreme angles of light (they start to work earlier on rising sun and longer into setting sun) than mono panels but again by very fine margins. All panels lose about 2% in the diodes and transfer of the energy to the batteries. So there are 2 measures, cell efficiency and module efficiency. Most mono panels claim about 18% cell efficiency and 16% panel efficiency. So the slight advantages of poly in certain conditions are usually not so advantageous that they counter the overall efficiency advantage of mono. Poly is usually 5% cheaper than mono but because space is such a problem on a boat, I think mono is the best option but its a close run thing.

Because I have found panels at a fantastic price (by importing them myself, more on that in the next post) I have decided to not bother with a wind gen and to put a much bigger solar array on the massive roof we have. A lot of people dont like wind gens because of the noise they make and I dont want to pull into a quiet anchorage and be the one making noise that the other boats anchored there instantly notice. So to compensate for the lost wind generation I will put 10 x 100 watt panels on the roof. 1000 watts. 100 watt panels are rated at 5.8amps per hour. So 10 of them gives just under 60 amps per hour in ideal conditions. Lets say not so ideal conditions are say 20% less then the test conditions the factory used to quote their numbers. And say 6 hours of usable sunlight hours per day. Thats just under 300 amps per day. There is no way we could ever use that much power per day.

Its not very hard to use 100 amp hours per day on a boat though. The fridge would probably use 60AH’s per day alone. 100 watts of LED lights on in the boat for 2 hours uses about 15ah. And while its unlikely we would leave lights on for so long, an anchor light might run at 10 watts but run all night. So with just the fridge and some lighting we are up to 75AH per day. Most LCD (backlit LED) TV’s run at about 20 watts per hour and are already on 12v and use a transformer in home use, so you use a direct power cable to the 12v power on board, and save a little power loss that usually takes place in the transformer lost to heat. But even at 20 watts, that is about 2amps per hour, and say we watch for 4 hours a night that’s another 8 amps and we are 83AH per day. Make toast or boil an electric kettle, turn the radio on during the day, flush the toilet or have a  shower which operates 2 pumps, one to get the water flowing the other to pump the waste water into the holding tank and of course keep the laptops charged and you can see how easy it is to bump up to 100ah per day.

On days where we are sailing there will be various equipment running on power, the chartplotter, the autopilot, the depth sounder, the radar etc. This will require further management and understanding of usage, but under sail there are other power generation methods, such as motor sailing (the alternators run at about 12amps each so 24 amps per hour charging if both are running) or running the generator (if you already have the noise of the motors, running the generator to top up is not a problem. You can even get water powered generators that you can tow behind the boat when sailing. Often cats sail faster than you would like them too, so slowing them down by towing a hydrogen is not always a problem. Buying one is, they are not cheap! But with so much power generation in the panels and so much storage I doubt even on the long passages where the instruments and auto pilot are on non stop that we would have power issues. Wind gens are now quite cheap (you can get a 400 watt model for around $500) so one day, if our power use seems to exceed our ability to generate and store, we could buy one and only deploy it when needed under sail for example, where the noise it makes is not so noticeable, and the other purchase one day might be another 200 amp hours of batteries. But as I say, I doubt I will ever need more than we are setting out with.

Using about a third of our generating solar power per day and only a quarter of the storage power, it means we could have 2 or 3 really poor days (raining and no sun) in a row and still not completely drain our power storage. If this occurred we would run the generator to top up the batteries. As I said, in one hour we would put about a third of our storage back in. But I dont anticipate that will happen often. Even on poor days you are still generating some power. So even if we were only getting 20% generation on poor days, that is still 60amps per day and if we use say 100 amps per day, that means a 40 amps per day shortfall, and that would take 9 days before we ran out of power and needed to run the generator. Those sort of numbers make me feel very comfortable about our requirements.

The solar panels arrive next week. Once they do, I will post some pictures and more information on them. The panels are not the usual solar panels (glass tops and aluminium frames, they are semi flexible so they can curve to match the curve of our roof. That makes them a little more expensive than regular panels but as I am importing them, they still come out cheaper than retail for normal panels. Its all very exciting now. So hopefully I will post again next week on the solar panels.

The website seems to be back up and running normally and posting will become more regular again. Dont hesitate to make a comment or drop me an email. A lot of this tech stuff is new to me, so if I have any of my sums wrong, let me know.

Most of the bulkheads give you access inside the boat and for the area between bulkhead 0 and 1 I cut a hole into bulkhead zero, glassed the hull to deck through the hole, glued the piece in the cut hole back into the hole (I cut it with the jigsaw table on a slight angle so the sides sloped in so the piece cut out could not push through) and glassed over the front of bulkhead 0 before the nose cone foam was glued on. That only left the area between bulkhead 1 and 2 (between 2 and 3 were accessed from inside the boat) and from aft of bulkhead 3 back is inside the living space of the boat. And I put a false floor into the space under this proposed hatch so that it remained buoyancy below it for about 2/3′s of the volume and only the top 600mm or so is hatch space.

The plans tell you exactly where the bulkheads are so I didnt need to have them marked from the outside of the boat. Same with the D section mini bulkheads. So marking out the hatch positions was fairly simple. I settled on 400mm high and 600mm wide. The spacings between the D section sections is 800mm so 100mm either side of the hatch to the side walls worked well. Whilst the size of the D section is about 1000mm from the peak to the bulkhead aft, the catwalk kicks into the D section at about the half way point, so I again spaced the hatch at about 100mm forward of the bulkhead wall at the aft of each well and 400mm lids stopped them just short of the catwalk for the middle hatch and of course the hatches either side had to match it.

The openings are still big enough that I can climb into each well if need be. The middle well is the emergency anchor well and will hold surprisingly enough, the spare anchor with a mostly rope rode (you have to have at least 10 meters of chain to weigh down the anchor shaft otherwise it wont hold because of the angle the shaft will take if not weighted down by chain). The main anchor is directly behind the emergency anchor and will have an all chain rode and has the anchor winch inside the well. I will use the windless on the rope of the spare anchor to retrieve it and for this reason I will probably hinge this hatch lid from the forward edge, but the hatches either side (spare sails, spare halyards and sheets and spare mooring lines).

The hatches in each bow will have mooring lines and fenders. The bows of course are tapered. But for a hinged door to work, one edge needs to be square to the sides. So to keep the hatch lids roughly the same size all over I made these also 600mm along the square edge. Then the narrower forward edge I made 300mm and the wider aft edge I made 500mm and then drew a line from each corner to finish the dimensions of each side. I rounded the all the corners with the same radius curve, I am not sure of the size, but about the size of a soft drink can.

Will all the hatches marked I simply cut them out with a jigsaw. I started the cuts with an angle grinder with cutting disk on it along a straight edge then finished with the jigsaw to go around all the curved corners. All of these sections are curved decks. That means that the piece cut out of the deck becomes the hatch lid because it is already the exact correct shape. And of course it is made from the same stuff the rest of the boat is made from, in particular in these sections, duracore strip planking, which is balsa core with pine veneer each side that was cut into strips to create the curved decks, then glassed each side after the strips were glued to each other. During the cutting of the D section hatch lids I hit on a rich vein of glue which is much tougher to cut (and blunts jigsaw blades in seconds) than the balsa core of the rest of the hatches.

And of course having the balsa core means the edges of the opening and the hatch lids must be decored and back filled. As I have done with every opening in the boat I back filled with a uni rope around the opening than filled with filling compound. The combination of curved corners and uni rope ensures that cracks cannot form in the hulls or decks. My usual method of keeping uni in the trough is to make a strip of 3mm mdf with plastic to stop the resin sticking to it and forming a smooth edge and I secure it with elastic bands to screws I drill through the panel. But I cannot drill any holes in the deck now, I can have any points of possible ingress into the core. So I made the uni rope much thinner so it did not fill the trench much, and I used dress making pins through the uni into the balsa core to secure it until the filler went in over the top of it.

These hatches will all be wet hatches, that is, they will have drains in the bottom and store items that could or would go in wet such as fenders, rope or sails. And for this reason I am not bothering to have them properly seal. For a hatch to be water tight you need to build a watertight flange around the opening, which is usually a vertical flange that created a dam around the opening and in the case of a sloping deck hatch a place for the water that channels around the vertical hatch flange to drain. But I am not bothering with any of that. As nice as they are, I dont need them to be watertight. I have plenty of places on the boat for things that have to stay dry.

What I will do is glue and glass a ply pad under each hatch opening onto which the lid will sit and the pad stops the lid from falling through into the well and I will recess that ply pad slightly to allow for a rubber seal to go around the opening on the ply and this will keep water from pouring through but if water drips in, it will find its way out again via the drain and that is good enough for me. I will glass a thin layer of 200g glass from the front deck skin down the backfilled edge and a small cove around onto the ply pad. And I will glass the ply pad to the underside of the deck inside the wells. This ensures the ply pad is rock solid secure and protect the ply from moisture and the glass that runs from the deck to the pad ensures the backfilled hatch edges are completely sealed to protect the deck core from ever allowing moisture into it. The deck lids need to be able to be jumped up and down on and not give way at all. Not that anyone would ever jump up and down on a curved hatch lid but I want to know that no-one will ever fall through one of my hatch lids.

When all the lids are back in place (I have not yet decored and back filled the lid edges) I can set the hinges and latches and back fill the hinge holes. The method is to oversize drill each hole, back fill with filler then re-drill with correct size drill bit. Its a time consuming process but you cannot have any point anywhere on the boat where raw balsa core is exposed to the outside world because if you do, water will find a way to it and into the core which would eventually cause rot, which turns the balsa into mush, and you lose all structural integrity of the composite panel. Ironically, salt water does not rot timber only fresh water does. So its the trickles of rain you must guard against not the waves over the deck.

The pic on the left above shows the anchor well and the emergency or spare anchor well in front of it, with both hatch lids off. The row of 3 D section hatches would ideally all be hinged from above but I cannot hinge the emergency anchor lid from above because in the open position it covers the windless up down buttons and I would like to be able to use the capstan on the windless to raise the rope rode on the spare anchor. And the pic next to it shows why it will need to be hinged from below and open forward. The curved lid means you cannot hinge it along a side edge because as it opens the edges move away from the deck and a hinge cannot do that, it has to remain a constant distance in any position.

Whilst the hatch work was happening I finished the trimming of window and door frames. I stumbled upon a minor error in the kit when I came to create the main door frame and I had missed it up until this point despite having glued a panel into the doorway to narrow it to accommodate the pantry. I just had not been looking. My method for creating the glass frames is to de-core 50mm back from the edge of the door or window and I had already done that for all the windows including the 2 windows in the main aft cabin bulkhead, the doorway was the last opening to be done. I was about to use my usual method of de-coring these openings using the router with fence when I noticed that if I decored 50mm not only would the edge now be very close to the roof line but that it would be 50mm higher than the windows on either side. The windows and doors in this panel are part of the kit so apart from gluing the piece back in to narrow the door I have not altered any other aspect. So for some reason the designers decided that the top line of the door should be higher than the windows and not in a neat line. Many times it occurs to you that building a boat is a series of problem solving issues. The issue now became how to add 50mm along the top edge of the doorway into the doorway so that the top edge is in line with windows. I have no issue with the side or bottom edges just the top. I could either add a 50mm strip of duflex along the top and reshape the door before de-coring the all of that 50mm except the inside skin.

I decided against that when another idea presented itself. The doorway is a big opening and because it extends to within 100mm of the bridgedeck it needs to be well reinforced to withstand a wave crashing into the cockpit and not being able to stove the doors open, the flange that stops them must be very strong. I have some plates of 5mm solid glass that were offcuts from another boat build in the shed. I cut it up into 150mm wide strips and glued and glassed them to the inside edge of the doorway all around to form what would have been the inside skin similar to had I decored in 50mm from the edge, except this closed the doorway in 50mm all around. No big issue. I could then do my glass layer frame against the new inside skin created by the new 50mm frame around the doorway.

One the 5mm glass backing plate was glued onto the door frame I shaped it by using the router and the already shaped opening as the fence to make the 50mm plate (which mimicked the decored glass backing that would have been there if the opening matched the other windows and I de-cored in the usual manner) I could glass in the frame in the usual way, cove the edge and lay multiple layers of glass all the way around. I only laid 4 layers because of the 5mm solid glass backing all the way around. (I also only laid 4 layers of glass around the aft windows because they are high up and very unlikely to have waves hitting them directly so they dont need quite the strength of the rest of the window frames. Even with 4 layers of glass and no backing plate to thicken it out, the aft window frames are very strong. So the door frame become the thickest frame at around 7mm, the windows around the sides and front at 5mm and the aft window frames are about 3mm.

All of the window frames are trimmed and ready for the boat to be faired. The boat is painted before the windows are glued in and of course the frames would also be painted. So they will need to be bogged and faired. They are very smooth because of the peel ply but here and there are rough patches where the peel ply did not get fully adhered to the top layer of glass and in about 4 spots I had an air bubble under just the top layer of glass, all less than the size of a 5 cent piece, but the only solution to this is to grind that bubble layer out. There are 8 layers of glass so losing the top of a bubble here or there is of no concern but it will need to be filled over with bog and faired out.

The side windows are flat for about 80% of their surface area but curve in at the top forward corners. I am hoping that the small distance the window will need to be pulled in by, about 100mm will pull in with just a little effort and the tape and sealant will hold. Maybe it might just need just a little heat to make it pliable and it would set with the curve as it cooled again and was adhered in place.

I have mentioned a few times that building a boat this big is a series of problem solving exercises. I have thinking for a while how I was going to fit the shower arms. They have a thread on one end that is only about 20mm on the end of the post but the bulkheads they will go into are 20mm so the hole they go through has to be oversize so the entire arm goes through so that the thread is of any use. However, there is nothing to secure the post on the shower side of the bulkhead for the nut on that thread to tighten down onto so it was baffling me how I was going to get that to secure into the wall. The solution was to glue a female threaded whale fitting (the quick click plumbing system I am using) into a ply pad that would glue to the inside of the bulkhead the arms (there are 2 showers, one in the ensuite and one in the main shower side wall) will go through. Then the arm can go through the bulkhead and screw into the fixed whale fitting in the ply pad on the other side. Then the water hose clicks in one end and on the other end the opposite male thread whale fitting will go into the flick mixer out port. Into the flick mixer in ports, hot and cold go the same male thread fitting and click into the hot and cold water pipes. Too easy.

And just to finish the month out I started playing with some of the fun stuff that will be one of the last big tasks. Fitting new fangly stuff. Like radios, helm seats and steering wheel. I have a bunch of stuff I have been buying over the years and now I am in the final fit out stretch I have to fit some of it. It will go in temporarily, then need to be removed again to fair the boat, then be fitted and in the case of electronics wired up, in the final fix. Its fun fitting this kind of stuff.

Hopefully August will see the outboard wells fitted out, the rudders hung and the rear steps glassed in. I need the fairing to start in September so all of these tasks plus the pads on the deck for the deck hardware and the davits must be done before the fairing will start.

OK rant over, back to the build. One of the great things about nearing the end of the build, besides being near the end, is that you get to finally do things you have played over in your mind for years and years. And one of those for me is the outboards. Most builders have their engine choice made very early in the build. If you are putting diesel inboards in then there will be many decisions that the engine choice will influence very early in the build. Outboards as an option leaves the brand decision for some time but in many ways that decision may be made for you by some of the limitations of the design.

Most designers that stipulate outboards as an option, build them into pods or nacelles that tuck up under the bridgedeck close to the hull sides. Schionning have devised a way to get the engines into the hulls. This has a couple of advantages (and a couple of disadvantages) over nacelles but overall I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. The disadvantages of pods is that the closer together the motors are, or more appropriately the props are the less manoeuvrable the boat becomes when just using the motors to manoeuvre. This also applies to how far aft they are, the further aft the better they steer and in the hulls they are further aft than under the cockpit bridgedeck, but this can also be a disadvantage.  A skilled multi hull skipper can turn a cat in its own length just by using the 2 motors, and that is much easier if you can get the props out as wide as possible. I on the other hand have no idea what to do yet, that is all ahead to learn but being an unskilled skipper I will want all the advantage of widely spread props I can get.

Another disadvantage of pods is that they are under the bridgedeck and therefore they lower the minimum height you have or clearance as it is commonly known among cat designers, albeit only for the width of the pods which is usually alongside the hulls and protrude out under the bridgedeck about 400mm – 500mm each, but they can still slam against waves where a cat with inboards or outboards in the hulls wont with the same bridgedeck clearance in the same sea conditions. They also sometimes (not always, some designs offer excellent access) make access to the outboards difficult for basic maintenance. With the outboards in the hulls access through the deck is fairly good, in fact I am designing my access hatches through the steps so that the motor can be raised through the hatch for removal or insitue maintenance with plenty of clear space all around for tools and workers either side of it. Another advantage of outboards inside the hulls is that they are harder to steal, not that theft is reported as a massive issue for permanently attached outboards, nevertheless outboards that are out of sight removes most temptation where opportunity arises and access to the props is easier from inside the hull rather than under the bridgedeck should the need arise to clear a net or crab pot line without having to actually enter the water to release it.

Disadvantages of in hull vs pod under bridgedeck outboard mounting is that under the bridgedeck the outboards are generally a little further forward and not as susceptible to cavitation from the hulls leaving the water at the ends over following seas. The moment the prop grabs air instead of water it momentarily revs harder and this can shorten its life, but more importantly the prop is not propelling for that moment and you dont want to lose propulsion because you also lose steerage and control, even momentarily.

Another disadvantage, at least for my particular build and preferences is the compromise between height and depth. Outboards come in 3 sizes, short shaft (15 inch), mostly used on tinnies and speedboats, long shaft (20 inch) used on deeper V’d hulls and then extra long shaft (25 inch) used on yachts as auxiliary power. Extra long shaft is what most designers specify to get the prop as deep into the water as possible so as to avoid cavitation as waves, usually from a following sea, lift the hulls out of the water temporarily. Under the bridgedeck the motors can be tilted using the hydraulic systems that come built into the outboards so leg length has no disadvantage. With the Schionning system where the outboards are mounted in the hulls, under what will be the rear access steps means the longer the shaft, the taller the motor is inside the hull, and this has a direct impact on the height the steps can be set to in order for the motor to retract into the hull and for the prop and skeg to clear the inside of the hull so that the hole that the shaft goes through can be closed off again.

And of course there is the complexity of clearing the outboard of the water in the up position. Being fully retracted is one of the major benefits of outboards over inboards. When sailing, the prop and shaft or leg (sail drive) with an inboard is a drag on the efficiency of sailing. When fully retracted sailing is unimpeded by that drag. Other advantages are as previously mentioned, clearing snags from props with an inboard means getting wet and diving the hull, servicing the motor means a visit from a technician if you cannot fix it yourself, with an outboard you can remove it and take it to a service centre, much cheaper, and speaking of cheap, outboards are half the price of inboards or less, mine are $6000 each, even cheap inboards are about $12000 each. Some outboard brands and sizes are nearly half the cost of mine (about $4000 each for new Honda 15 long shaft 4 strokes).  So on the basis of cost, if they only last half as long as an inboard you are still better off from a purely cost point of view. Running costs of good outboards these days is comparable to diesel inboards. My outboards are said to run at low revs at 1 litre per hour and I ought to get 5 knots. I litre per 5 knots is very reasonable, put another way, assuming 200 litres aboard and used, thats about a 1000 nm range at a cost of about $250. I know a guy that spends that in a weekend on his 20ft sports fishing boat with a massive mercruiser V8! And dont even get me started on pollution, I cant stand the smell of diesel boats when new, imagine what they are like when they are blowing and belching black smoke all over the place. Modern outboards run very clean and quiet.

So to my particular dilemnas and compromises. Firstly, it would appear (although to be fair to Schionning I have not confirmed this, it is just my casual observation) that the idea of raising outboards into hulls was envisaged for 10 and 11 meter designs and as a result designed around 9.9hp motors. The larger size cats of 13 meters or more were deemed too big to benefit from outboards and were designed with inboards as the only option. Then when they designed the 1230 it is somewhat of the cross over size, still ok for outboards but probably better with inboards. But inboards never ever figured in my calculations. I cant stand the smell of diesel fuel and it would almost certainly cause me to be sea sick where I otherwise probably would not be.

I have a friend with a 40ft Crowther cat and have pictures aboard his boat sprinkled through this blog. He has Yamaha hi-thrust 9.9′s and his boat is strip planked cedar so probably just a little heavier than mine. His motors are adequate most of the time however his advise is that the 9.9′s can struggle a bit when pushing against wind and current (or tide) and that he really has to ring their necks to get enough power sometimes and he encourages me to fit bigger engines if I can.

Here is the rub though, everything on a boat is some kind of compromise. With motors its size and weight vs power. A 9.9 high thrust Yammie is about 50 kilos. The next size up in a Yamaha high thrust is the 25hp but it is a whopping 96 kilos. Way too heavy to be hung at the end of each hull. Weight hung at the extremes of the boat (forward or aft in the hulls) acts like a lever and severly exaggerates the hobby horse motion. Another minor setback for the Yamaha 9.9′s as a choice is, and I am going only on the chatter in the forums on this, but anyway, they 9.9 used to be a down tuned 15, but about 3 years ago they switched to an uptuned 8hp and by all reports it isnt a patch on the old block and has less power. Not good for me, a 9.9 was going to be underpowered to start with.

Back to the boat being designed for 9.9′s and trying to squeeze a bigger motor into the cavity is height. 4 stroke power heads are quite tall and the bigger the block (hp) the taller the cowling above the shaft which must fit in under the stair profile. I struggled with this for some time when designing the rear step profile I wanted.

The solution to a number of problems presented itself in the form of the Evinrude Etec 25. This is a detuned 30 so right off the bat I am ahead of the curve. Its components are built for the torque and thrust of a 30 so at 25hp tuning it is not being pushed to its limits. An Etec is a modern version of a 2 stroke motor, less moving parts means less weight for a given hp and a smaller power head means a shorter motor above the shaft length. It ticks just about every box except cost. The Etec 25 is 70 kgs.

And for years this was the plan. But you never really know until you fit one. Then it becomes practical instead of theoretical. And that is what we have finally been able to do. Years ago I raised the height of the rear bulkhead by about 200mm, I needed to fill the void in that would have been the walk through transoms, that is only applicable if you are having inboards, which I had ruled out, so not having inboards meant I was already gluing duflex back into the boat anyway so I took the opportunity to raise the height for a number of reasons, not least to get as much room in the well as possible to raise a bigger motor up into it. Another pleasant side benefit is the extra head room in the  aft cabin and laundry in each hull. But that extra height brings with it other issues, such as getting the steps to a usable height and depth, the taller they are the higher the risers need to be for a given tread depth, and of course the distance out that the steps can go is set by the hull length and unless I lengthen the boat the steps become steeper if I raise the height of the top step by raising the bulkhead. Anyway, I have had a height and depth of step worked out for some time but fitting the outboard was the final confirmation of that.

What fitting the outboard revealed, that I had not considered in all that planning was that the outboard may be too deep in the well when fully lowered. It created a doubt in my mind that the shorter shaft  of the etec was going to be viable. But herein lies the issue, Etec dont make an extra long shaft and even if they did, that extra height compromises the top step height, it simply wont fit under the height I wanted to use and raising the top step height means each step has to have a steeper rise. The 2 motors fitted side by side as it were in the pics above, show that the height for either is about the same thanks to the etec being a more compact motor despite it being double the hp and that the only difference is length of the leg as shown by the depth of the prop for a given top height.

To confirm my fears or suspicions I did 2 things. First I borrowed a 15hp Honda extra long shaft from Terry. This is a 4 stroke so it has a bigger power head and as a result it is about the same size and weight as the 25 etec I had already had fitted in the Port hull. We fitted it to the starboard hull then lowered it for a comparison. The other thing I did was had the guys from the Etec dealership come take a look. The last thing I wanted to do was swamp the motor because it was burried too deep into the water in order to get the prop through the bottom of the hull, and voided the warranty and have Evinrude wipe me because of incorrect fitting of the motors.

The Etec guys reassured me that the motors were easily high enough at the depth I wanted to lower them to get adequate prop clearance out of the hull and also that the extra long shaft when raised high enough for the prop and skeg to be clear and inside the boat would result in the top step being too high. So that confirmed the decision. Evinrude Etec 25′s will be fitted (there is no benefit in springing the extra $500 each for the 30′s because the torque at low revs is what I need not the upper rpm power of a 30hp that a planing boat might value).

Another revelation which was always a concern was the other motor dimensions, in particular the fore and aft size of them. I had made up cars to run on tracks and preditermined their size by guessing how much clearance I would need for the umbilical to clear out the back of the motor and curve around and have enough clearance in front of the bulkhead to make that curve, knowing they dont like sharp turns. The gear linkages are similar to teleflex steering in that it is a push pull cable that cannot make a sharp curve.

So with the car on the tracks and the outboard on the car, the rear edge of the motor has to clear the bulkhead behind the well. That bulkhead cannot be moved as it is the bulkhead the rudder shafts are mounted to, so moving the bulkhead if there wasnt room for the motor means moving the rudders which could and probably would effect the balance of the boat and the steering.

As it is, it fits and there is room for mini tillers to be fitted to the rudder shaft tops to fit to the hydraulic steering rams. But its very tight, and the mini tillers would be short. The shorter the tiller the harder the hydraulics have to work as they dont get as much lever action to help them. There is room in the well to mount the hydraulic rams fore and aft rather than across the boat which is the prefered option so I will explore which is the better option. In the end it may not matter as most hydraulic systems could handle that load or if mounted fore and aft the system works equally well, you just adjust the tiller angle to shaft to suit your mounting points. Across the boat keeps the hydraulic ram neatly against the rudder bulkhead but the tiller would be very short, fore and aft hangs the hydraulic ram out in the well, but I suspect a compromise of along the inside angled hull side might be the answer.

The next task is to build out the buoyancy boxes that surround the outboard leg and turn the massive well into a narrow shaft. The well is about 1 meter square and the waterline about 300mm up the hull sides. That means that when flooded the cavity can carry 300 litres of water, and water is 1kg per litre. 300kgs per hull is a tad too much to be carrying around when sailing. Not to mention the effect of that 1 meter free surface of water sloshing from side to side, I imagine it would be enough to push the boat continually off course having that kind of force in each hull. The solution is to build the well out so that all that is left is a narrow column that the outboard leg slides through that could only be about 300mm x 400mm x 300mm which is about 1/10th the volume and therefore only about 30kgs. And the buoyancy that is built into the tanks offsets this weight to keep the sterns from burying that little bit as a result of the extra 30kgs load.

The buoyancy boxes will be made from ply (I would prefer duflex or even polycore as they are so much lighter but I have none left and I have ply left and rapidly running out of money) be hollow inside or maybe filled with expanding foam and be built to about 100mm above the waterline, and also form a platform for a panel that will fit to the outboard and raise an lower with it, the purpose of which is to close off the column of water from surging into the well. It wont need to be perfectly watertight as this is a wet well, but stopping surges will keep the weight down in the well as well as ensure the motors cant be swamped when the sterns are buried in certain wave actions. The plate if we can figure a way to securely fasten it, will fit into a rebate in the top of the buoyancy box to act as a tight control of the motors movement fore and aft under torque loads as well as an extra device to ensure the motors cannot move off straight ahead and “steer” off dead ahead. Steering is done by the rudders except low speed (no water flow over the rudders means no steerage) which is done by use of each throttle and forward or reverse in one or other motor.

Once all the work in the well is done, including the buoyancy tanks, the rudders hung (the other side of the aft bulkhead but the tillers would overhang into the outboard well to meet up with the steering linkages) and the hydraulic steering mechanisms mounted in the outboard well and general finishing work, the rear steps, which have been made for quite some time, can finally be fitted and glassed in. And I already have a little issue that finally having a full size motor in the well has revealed. As mentioned earlier there is the compromise of height vs depth of prop with any length outboard. The longer the leg, the higher the motor sits in the up position which in turn influence where the steps can be placed in the stairs in each hull. And whilst I have almost worked the height out, the fore and aft depth of the motor is presenting similar problems as can be seen from the various pictures below. In particular the first pic shows that the rear steps need to be moved aft about 100mm so that the motor can raise past the lower step and not hit the inside of the riser as represented by the curved ruler.

The issue of depth in the well fore and aft is not one caused by the choice of motor as the honda is as deep as the etec so this would be an issue regardless of the motors chosen. Its not a big problem to fix, but is a bit of work to extend all of the steps that abut the bulkhead by the 100mm. But it may also manifest itself in a shortened bottom step unless I extend the hull by 100mm or may more depending on how big a bottom step I want and what works from both an aesthetic and practical point of view. All extension is above waterline so it would not effect the way the boat sailed except perhaps diminish the ability for the sterns to bury which should reduce hobbyhorsing at anchor. But that decision will wait until the rudders are in, the rear steps are in and see how it all works. And if I have any money left to make the mods, although I probably have enough offcuts of duflex to do them.

After that there is a little tidy up work with the davits and wells on the duckboard and it is pretty much ready to start fairing. Its coming along. Its coming along. 

This long weekend has been super cold in the shed. It has been getting down to 2 degrees overnight!! And for the first time ever in the build I have been heating the resin before applying it. I didnt at first and the resin was very thick, I could feel it when stirring it and when applying it. My method for those that have forgotten is to lay a layer of plastic down on a table and using a scraper (like a blunt oversize chisel) I dip it into an icecream container of mixed resin and spread it out over the tape, for long tapes I pile it on over itself over the width of the table (about 1500mm) you only have 3 layers for a 3.6 meter tape. I then roll it up wet to transport to the job and roll it out again as I go around the window. When cold the resin takes longer to spread onto the dry tape, but you dont end up using more or less. I heated the resin for a second window (the side windows) and used exactly the same amount of resin for the other window of the same size but it went on much easier and I shaved half an hour off the time it took to do warm resin over cold. But it went off faster, so I had to move faster, so in the end I dont really know if I was working faster because the resin would go off faster or not. But being so cold, even after heating the resin would give me an hour window to work with it. I didn’t need it but knew I had it if I needed it. It took me 2 and a half hours to do the big windows cold and 2 hours with warmed resin. In the end I could have continued to work without ever having to have heated resin (I just had a small electric fan heater blowing on the 20 litre resin drum for about 10 minutes before mixing it), but I just wanted to see how much easier it might be. Not so much. All the window frames have now been glassed. All that is left is to trim them before fairing.

One other point worth mentioning. I ran out of 100mm tape a long time ago, I have just 150mm tape left now. Too narrow to cut tapes in half (they would only be 75mm each or if I cut 100mm off I have no use for 50mm tapes, I already have about 4 rolls of 50mm tape left and have no idea what 50mm tape would be used for anywhere on the build so far but they came in the kit for some reason) so I looked at buying more tape rolls. It turned out to be way cheaper to buy full width cloth (1300mm) and cutting 100mm tapes from it. So I did. It took me about 2 hours to cut 20 meters of full width 450g double bias into 100mm tapes but it saved me about $100. I figure I am worth more than $50 an hour, but unfortunately I now have the time, well not really as I really need to finish and get out of this rented shed,  but I definitely don’t have the spare cash. The boat cant tell the difference between self cut tapes or tapes that come cut to width on the roll. By the way, I didnt cut 2o meter tapes. I cut the full width roll to the length of each of the window tapes then cut those lengths into the 100mm (actually I staggered them from 120mm down to 100mm as I only needed 12 tapes of each length the 1300mm width allowed me to vary the tape widths and wanted the tape pancake to taper out onto the outside skin. Although it will be covered in bog and wont matter, its just easier to ensure there are no bubbles when it tapers out neatly onto the outside skin).

I spoke with a local plastic supplier. Polycarbonate is about 20% more expensive, stronger but more susceptible to scratching than acrylic and clear is about 20% cheaper than dark tint (black). The curved front saloon window will definitely need to go into the oven and be molded hot to the curve and it will set to it which will make it much easier to glue and seal into the boat, almost as easy as if it were a flat window. The bedroom curved window is long and not very tall so as a result may be able to be cold molded (stuck down at one end then tortured around into place) to shape although I would probably prefer they go into the oven too, its only $100 per window to have them heat molded and the front saloon windows are flat so they wont need any shaping and I will just tape and silicon seal them. That just leaves the side saloon windows that are about 90% flat but curve in at the top forward corners about 70mm over the last 400mm or so. So whilst the panel is mostly flat, the bit that curves in does so over a short distance even though it does not need to pull in far it might be difficult to pull in an 8mm thick window that far over just a short distance, so, it is most likely that this will need a little heat to help it bend and cure to shape but probably wont need to go into the oven.

For those that dont know, the method for attaching plastic windows these days is a layer of 5mm foam double sided tape is stuck to the  inside edge, (perhaps 5 or 10mm from that inside edge) of the space that the window mounts to, after the boat is painted of course. This double sided tape has 3 roles, firstly it holds the pane in place until the actual adhesive is applied and second it keeps the window about 5 mm clear of the boat so that the adhesive/sealant can fill the void and finally it acts as a dam for the sealant that will be squirted into the void under pressure with a silicon gun. The window must not be touching the boat. It needs at least 5mm clearance under and around it. The reason is it will expand in the sun and needs to be able to do so without being restricted by the edges of the boat. If it is, it will pop out or break the seal and leak. The sealant is designed to stretch with the window each day (the window will expand each day and contract back again over night then expand again). And the final touch is to cove the sealant with a nice concave sealant edge. Unlike the method used in the past, there are no through bolts holding the window on. Not only are the bolts somewhat less attractive, they have a tendency to leak, and the windows often cracked at the bolt holes. If done correctly the new method is more reliable and more attractive than the older method.

The other thing I am looking to do is to have clear windows with an added tint like a car tint, except on the outside of the windows. Silver tint reflects about 80% of the suns heat so unlike a black tinted window which is in the plastic itself this is in a film on the outside of the plastic and reflects the heat before it hits the plastic. This has 2 huge advantages, first and most obvious is that heat is reduced inside the boat. The black plastic not only absorbs more heat because of its color it radiates it into the boat like a bar heater. The reflective tint does not allow the window to get hot to touch on the inside of the window and as a result does not radiate heat into the boat, at least nowhere near as much. The other advantage is that plastic windows craze as a result of the effect of UV. By reflecting so much the plastic is protected and would take much much longer if they ever would craze. And finally, the reflective metallic film is more scratch resistant than either acrylic or polycarbonate is on its own. Although the clear is a little cheaper than the dark tint, the saving is taken again by the reflective film so cost is about the same as a result. But it is the heat solution I want to use. All up my windows should come to about $2500.

There is one small downside, not sure how much of a problem it might be, but the silver tint reflects toward the side with the most light. So during the day, the sun is reflected and the effect is like a mirror on the outside so you get privacy inside. All good. But at night the opposite is true, so instead of being able to see out, at night you have a mirror wrapped around the saloon. You cannot see out unless a light brighter than you have inside shines outside, and everyone can see in, if the lights are on. The moment you turn the lights off it reverts again. During a night passage you would not have any lights on, so wont be an issue underway at night, but may be an issue at anchor not being able to see boats approach. Having said that, many boats dont display any lights at night anyway and you can hear them but not see them, and of course if you are at anchor what are you going to be able to benefit from being able to see  lights outside at night (assuming them to be less light than the inside lights)? So its hard to say, I cant see any downside but you never know, it may not seem such a good idea once you have lived with it for a while.  It is very hard to argue against it on a cost benefit analysis.

One other thing has me quite chuffed at the moment. I made a small mistake with the placement of my roof that made a distinct change in the appearance of one part of the roofline. It has been worrying me for some time, whether it needed fixing, would it be obvious to others, etc. For some reason it did not seem to perturb Dean the boatbuilder that will be helping me fair my boat. I expressed my concern for the mistake a few times and he shrugged it off with “I’ve seen and fixed a lot worse”. The problem is entirely cosmetic and makes absolutely no structural difference whatsoever. Let me explain it. The wrap around panels in the turret are pre-cut kit parts. The main bulkhead with the doorway in it is also precut. (I know of 2 builders building the same design that modified this bulkhead by adding some width to it, this widens the cabin at the bulkhead and therefore narrows the side decks, but it makes entry to the hulls much easier if the steps are set aft near the bulkhead. I mention this to illustrate that there are many variables available but they do not effect the structural integrity of the boat).

I did not alter the main bulkhead. So as a result the height of my cabin roof is set by that bulkhead height so in that regard my build is no different to any other 1230/1250 Wilderness. What I did do by mistake, is set the roof about 40mm further forward than the plans specify. Because the wrap arounds are pre-cut so therefore a pre set size and it means in order to span the space between the underside of the pre made roof (not part of the kit other than you get mdf molds and instructions as to their spacing which sets the size and curve of the roof strip planking) and the deck which is also part of the kit, the angle that it would sit at is slightly steeper as a result of the front edge of the roof being further forward. So in other words my cabin raises from the deck at a slightly steeper front angle to other 1230′s. It is imperceptible but its there, my guess is it is no more than a couple of degrees difference at most. I guess if 2 of us were rafted up you might be able to pick up on it but I doubt even then most would notice it. The way the roof meets that front panel is supposed to be on a continuous plane changing from flat front into curved roof but because my front is at a slightly different angle to the original that join line is now also a point where there is a slight change in angle. This creates the impression of an “eyebrow”. Its only a very slight change in direction that can be faired out but had my front met my roof at the correct angle there would have been no need to fair there other than fairing out the tape line. If you look at the first pic below you can see the slight change in direction at the join line, the curve should start at the join if it were at the correct height which is lower and you can see this by looking at the middle pic, the roof chine is about 100mm above the window line down the sides of the cabin and stay there until about half way around the curve and then the line moves upwards away from the top of the window line. The window line is level set by a laser, the roof line should be too so should stay 100mm above the window line or about half way between the window line and the now roof line and the 3rd pic shows an mdf batten. It is touching the top of the window frame and also out of shot I am pushing it down to the roof at the top. In the middle it is just touching the “eyebrow”. So bog either side of the “eyebrow” should fill the gaps you see under the batten and would now be about 5mm at the deepest. The shadow that the batten creates makes it hard to see but the gap under the batten is 5mm.

And I guess theoretically, the cabin front being slightly steeper I might have a slightly poorer coefficient and therefore a theoretical windage disadvantage but because every boat is trimmed slightly differently (weight aboard and its distribution), performance difference as a result of this would be impossible to measure and even if it were, it would be infinitesimal. It certainly has never worried me, what had worried me was getting the appearance right.

OK so thats the downside of my mistake if you could call it a downside. More the fact I know its there and why (now…I didnt until many months later) more than anything specifically about it, but here is the neutral (neither good nor bad) part of the issue is that I have been concerned about how to or if to hide this issue. I nearly said defect but as you will read, it really isnt a defect. The visible manifestation is that the line where the angle changes from cabin side to roof does not wrap around the cabin on a level line like it does on other boats. It is level along each side, then the line heads upward about 100mm as it goes around the curve then levels off across the front. Its all very neat and looks good if that was the intention. And with some defects that are not problems unless we make them out to be you have 2 ways to deal with them. You either hide them or feature them. Hiding on the inside is super easy, in fact defect or no, it was always going to be hidden, under the liner. So on the outside I wanted my boat to look no different to other boats or if different looking not look out of place or odd. But for a while in my mind it seemed we might have to highlight the difference rather than go to the extra work of hiding it. Hiding it would require about 10mm of bog across the front of the cabin roof to fair out the hard line created by the eyebrow my uplifted front roof to cabin join line causes.

Until I glassed the window frames in. The extra 5mm of glass height that the window frames create has to be faired out by filling with bog and gradually sanding the angle back out in the same way you hide a fibreglass tape line down the hull sides (or anywhere else) by bogging either side of it and feathering it out to nothing. Except in this case the tape line edge is 5mm high. Well, with the 5mm added height, the depth of the bog required is only 5mm to fair out the “eyebrow” instead of the original 10mm. Imagine a high point in the form of a peak of 10mm but you want a continuous curve, you need to add bog either side of the peak and then sand it (fair it) to your curve radius. If you add 5mm of height to one side of the peak then your peak is only 5mm higher then the amount of bog required to hide the peak and end up with the curve is so much less. Perhaps Dean knew this all along and that is why he dismissed my concerns with little or no concern of his own.

Now every give has a take. Here is where my mistake is most fortuitous and why I have come to be thankful I made it. I have had many visitors to my build that are building their own boats. One of them is building the exact same boat. And every time he and many others visited they commented on how much bigger the inside of my boat felt in comparison to theirs or others they had seen.  I originally put this down to my furniture placement. I built my cockpit and saloon seating to hang out over the chamfer panel instead of fully on the bridgedeck. This robs space from the internal space in the hulls, but it adds 1 meter to the width of our cockpit and saloon as a result (500mm each side). We figured we would spend far more time living on the bridgedeck and only go into the hulls to sleep or use the bathroom so we felt we would rather have a bigger living space than hull space even though the narrower hull spaces is somewhat claustrophobic. The added living space was far more beneficial than the lost hall spaces in the hulls.

But I now believe there is more to it than that. My saloon roof is the same height as theirs at the rear bulkhead above the doorway, but whereas theirs slopes down from the bulkhead forward, mine is level (this is the mistake I made by setting the front edge a little higher as a result of the roof being a little forward). I set the roof as level thinking that is how it ought to be rather than as a measurement from front to rear and as a result mine does not slope down until the curve whereas everybody elses slopes down from the bulkhead and increases in that slope at the curve. It did not occur to me at the time that I was altering the cabin side line across the front of the cabin. I simply did not notice that line curve up.  The result is slightly less than 100mm or so but that extra head room above the saloon seat whilst not needed because it is at a point where you are seated so neither way results in you hitting your head, but the added space gives the impression of size, in the same way rooms with high ceilings feel larger than they otherwise would. And whilst there is no practical use or advantage of that space, perception is everything. If people feel like my boat is bigger then it is bigger, (even though it isnt), its just too many people that have first hand experience of the size of boats all making the same comment, its too many to be coincidence. Its just another example of falling ass backwards into a design improvement that I have a happy knack of with this build.

I thought it an interesting aspect of my psychology and I am sure that of other “amateur” builders regarding the perception of the seriousness of mistakes once they are discovered and the perceived difficulty of remedial action. Perhaps what made me more so or even un-necessarily concerned with this issue (it is no longer even thought of as a problem!) is that when I first noticed that my roofline was not quite right I engaged the advise of a boatbuilding expert (I wont mention his name but he is highly skilled and has a lot of very high profile boats to his name) that was working on Nine Lives (the other cat built in my shed) and he offered to work with me to fix it. But he certainly gave me the impression that the fixing was not a simple matter and that it was a good thing I had discussed it with him.  But to be fair to him, he never said any of that, I just imagined it, in the manner he discussed it with me. We spoke about building molds for the windows, making them off the boat then glassing them into the boat then fairing the boat to them once in, and before they went in, having the windows made to suit the molds. Life for anyone can change a lot in 2 years and about a year ago I visited the boatbuilder to start planning the work on my boat. We agreed on a rate and the approximate time it would take and he offered to start drawing window options for me.  That was the last I heard from him. I rang him a number of times and got his answering machine each time and left message after message. He has left some tools in my shed and in the end my last message was I accept you no longer wish to work for me, but do you want to come and get your tools, no hard feelings? I didnt get an answer to that either. Who knows what may have happened, he is a very nice bloke, I may never find out, which is a shame. I meet people that spoke to him just last week etc, but have not bumped into him or learnt why he did not want to talk to me. And I guess the longer it went the harder it got for him to ring. I get that. But his not answering me started in my mind a little of a panic. I had a problem that I created and then thought I had it solved only to lose that solution again, and the worst scenarios played out in my mind. Perhaps he thought the job was too hard, maybe it just cant be fixed (I even thought that perhaps the best solution might be to cut the roof off at exactly the level line and build it again)……demons start to niggle at you and you wonder if another solution will present itself.

The time came to do the windows and I asked Dean what I should do (remembering that I thought I had a huge problem and he did not) and he said all I have to do is just mark the windows where I want them (use a laser to get them level, not critical but will look better), cut them to the shape I want, remove the outside skin and decore 50mm and glass a frame into the opening. It is pretty much the way I am sure the original window were going to be done, (a solid glass frame) except the frame was built on the boat as opposed to being built off it and glassed in later. And the solution has been easy and revealed that there is nothing wrong with the roof that a little bit of bog wont fix (and bog is a solution to visible imperfections on just about every boat built to some degree or another, and 5mm of bog at its deepest is not considered a lot, we have a perception, there’s that word again, that bog is bad because of our experience of what it means on a car but it is quite normal on a boat, in fact it would be nearly impossible to fair a boat without it).

And apart from the advise on how to do it, I did it. Thats the point of this part of the blog. To try to demystify some of the problems encountered. I was never told that the job was in any way problematic. I built that up in my mind. The original boatbuilder didnt suggest that his solution was particularly expert or complex, I just imagined it to be, because I had decided in my mind that the mistake I made was catastrophic, whereas in reality it wasnt even a blip in some peoples thinking.

But when it came time to do it myself, I not only could but I did.

And what that does is add to your feeling of achievement. And I am feeling it! There are no problems that cannot be solved and there is little so wrong that you could do that cannot be fixed. And if you are lucky like I seem to be, some of those mistakes will actually end up enhancing your boat.

I came up with a way to neatly cut the core away. My jigsaw skills are adequate but not exceptional. So I cut the windows a mm or so undersize (I made sure that I did not cross to the outside of the marked lines with the jigsaw and kept the marked line on the boat as the guide for the grinder) and used the 100mm angle grinder to trim the opening to the marked lines or more appropriately to just smooth out all the lines so that the edge looks to where it should be regardless of what the lines indicated, as they were roughly drawn in some places. At the end of the day, the eye is the judge. I asked a couple of friends with good eyes (mine are not that great, nor is my ability to judge fairness all that good) to check them out. Both found little places here and there where they were too high or low. I fixed one by grinding out the window a little more to make it the level it should have been to match the other side and its neighbour. The other I needed to lift 10mm. I did this by glassing the inside skin back up so that I had a 10mm overhang into the window opening and then not decoring to the original line but 10mm shy of it the new window line is the corrected one.

On the glassing on the inside, I have already decored the cockpit to saloon windows which were pre-cut in the kit. I did not glass the inside around the window (the plans dont call for it). What I discovered once I removed the core to 50mm to create the rebate for the solid fibreglass window frame, was that the skin on duflex may well be 600gsm (grams per square meter) but it is pressed into the balsa under pressure and when the other skin and the core is removed there is nothing supporting that pressure and it buckles under it. Either that or it is pressed really thin, so thin it loses its structure once the backing core is removed. Either way the result is the inside skin is now wavy. I have to get that wave out before I can glass the window frame in because it goes in one layer of glass at a time and follows the form of the substrate, in this case a thin wavy layer of glass. Each layer keeps following that form. If I was making the frame off the boat and glassing it in (another option that was going to be the way I did my windows) this would not be a problem but doing this way it is. I will most likely fix this by hot gluing a flat board to the inside skin to flatten it out before glassing in the frame layers.

But in the meantime to ensure that this does not happen again I have glassed each of the windows around their inside edges for 100mm and put down a layer of peelply. This had a couple of added benefits. First off it solved the issue of the wavy glass. It also gives the inside of the glass another layer of strength, cant hurt right. It enabled me to glass the 10mm skin overhang into the window to re-align it. And with the peel ply on it is a nicely finished edging ready for paint or bog  (I had not previously applied any peel ply so I had to grind the inside of each window before glassing, not super hard, but an extra hours work I now wont have to do again).

Here is a picture of the rear window wavy glass and of the side window with extra layer of glass. Massive difference. You live and learn.

The method I used to decore was after cleaning up the inside edges of each window to the point where I was happy with the opening size, shape and position I used that edge as the former for the outside edge. This was achieved by using a router with a fence made from a bolt with washers on it, through a rail attached to the router. My router does not have a fence so I borrowed Terry’s, and it worked a treat, thanks Terry, makes up for the piece of crap laser level you tried to foist on me! This bolt and washer fence controlled the router blade so that it could not penetrate into panel any further than the exact 50mm that the edge of the washers was set to. The round shape of the washers also enable the router to negotiate the rounded corners and neatly replicate them like a spirograph. I set the depth to just above the inside skin knowing that I would have to clean just a thin layer of balsa from the skin, but this is safer than cutting it too fine and going through the inside skin.

Once I had the inside line cleanly routered, I used that router to take a little more of the core out closer to the edge to reduce the amount of hand clearing with a chisel. Of course you must do the inside router cut before removing any of the rest of it, because without the core at the edge of the window the router fence has nothing to control the cut. On that issue, you need to be careful, especially if your fence is only a bolt (I only added the washers because I could not get the bolt closer than 60mm and I needed only 50mm so the washers were originally only to add that 10mm) that your router blade is not bigger than your fence bolt otherwise there is nothing to stop the bolt as you remove the core from in front of it as you cut in, the way to stop this happening is to go in on an angle rather than at 90 degrees and to be very careful not to fall into it when you complete the cut as you come around the other side. I forgot this and the rounded edge of the washers protruded into the hole cut by the router a little creating bumps here and there that I needed to sand out later.

Routers scare me a little, they make a screaming noise and can very quickly make a mess of the job if they are not well controlled. A fence and the depth correctly set ought to alleviate the fear. It doesnt much. And ironically they make a mess with the waste they create and its almost impossible to add a dust extractor to them, they like an angle grinder work at such velocity that the parts have flown away from the reach of the vacuum before it can catch much of the waste. I cleaned up the boat before I did this work because I had some visitors the weekend before (just after cutting the windows I have had a few visitors, most of them at my invitation to show them the massive change that has happened by cutting them out) and the boat was cleaner than it has been for at least 6 months. It is now dirtier than it was the day I cleaned!

With the bulk of the core and outside skin removed by the router I proceed with a chisel (and hammer but you dont need much force) to remove the rest of the core. The glass that is still left is not attached to anything but the core that remains so it is fairly easy to remove. I prefer to proceed and finish with a chisel because its hard to do much damage with a chisel, but if you slip with the router (which gets increasingly likely as the core is removed), its the core that is stopping the router base from allowing the blade to travel too deep and break through the inside skin and the core edge that is touching the fence that stops it penetrating further than the distance set on the fence so without the core there its completely freehand and easy to slip creating holes in places you didnt want them to be and  its easy to cut a swathe through areas you dont want to  but with a chisel it takes a little longer but you are safe from making any major slips. So having got this far without mishap I prefer to bank my wins and proceed with caution. The outside edge cut with the router is very neat, the inside skin has not been compromised so all that is left is to remove the rest of the unwanted core with a chisel.

I use a combination of a blunt chisel to remove the chunks of core by tapping it with a hammer then a sharp chisel pushed by hand to clean the last of the balsa from the skin. When using the blunt chisel you want to use it with the blade upside down. If the blade is right way up it naturally wants to cut deeper with each tap of the hammer. With an upside down chisel its natural tendency is to return to the surface. With the chisel close to the inside skin and right way up its possible for the chisel to catch an edge of glass and cut its way through the skin. I caught this one before it got through the added skin but it did cut the original skin for an inch or so. Not a big problem but you want to avoid unnecessary work where you can and simply turning the chisel over wont hinder your progress in getting rid of the core but will help you avoid cutting the skin.

Once all the balsa is removed I run a sanding disk over the skin to just ensure there is no dags of glue or balsa left and to ensure the surface is keyed so that the glass layers I put on will bond well. I than ran a router with a rounding bit in it, around the corner of the balsa to round the edge s0 that the glass tapes I apply dont have to go around a sharp corner. A cove in the inside skin to balsa wall will complete the transition of the glass from inside skin to outside skin.

With the outside skin and core removed the inside skin becomes translucent and gives off an interesting effect as if it glows from the outside light being visible through it. Once the 5mm of solid glass is attached to it this effect will disappear and will be further removed when the perspex or acrylic window is siliconed to it. The silicon is black and it fills the entire void to about 30mm deep and 5 mm high between the skin and the inside surface of the window. I am not sure if they do any other color sealant, I have only ever seen boat windows done with black sealant.

The de-cored edge is 50mm wide but 5mm of that will be lost with the solid glass frame I glass in (one layer at a time) and then another 5mm or so will be lost when final trimming of the new edge is done. It will be almost impossible to glass the strips on and have that edge be perfect just from the glassing process so there will be a grinder employed to straighten that edge up and round it smooth. That will trim the overhang down to 40mm. When the perspex/acrylic (I use the dual term because I dont yet know which I will fit, I still dont fully understand what if any are the differences, I dont even know if I will use clear or black tint, all that investigation comes next) is made it is made 10mm smaller than the overall opening, which will leave a 30mm bonding surface. The window pane must have a 10mm expansion area as it can grow as much as 5mm in any direction as it heats in the sun and then contracts again each day. And you need to choose the right sealant that allows for such movement. More of that later when the windows are made and fitted.

In the meantime, I have found a new app for my phone camera that automatically stitches photos together to create panoramas. It can do a full 360 degree pic that stitches to itself and the viewer on the phone allows you to scroll around as if standing in the middle of the boat in an endless photo. Unfortunately I dont know how to post them as an endless looped photo on here, but if you click on the panorama’s below they blow up to a bigger pic than the screen allows and you can use the scroll bar across the bottom to replicate the effect to a degree. The stitching isnt perfect but its pretty neat, dont you think?

Jo has been telling me that I should not be posting super posts that take a day to read through but small bite sized snipets. So maybe I might get back into the habit I had at the start of regular small update posts. I just felt with some of the fiddly furniture build that there really wasn’t all that much progress to report but now that we are getting close to the finish, the boat will change appearance with some of these posts. Todays post was more about the panorama pics I discovered I could take!

So while all the window work was going on I also finished the cockpit and started a few other tasks. Although I had set out the cockpit seating more than 2 years ago, the seat tops were still to be done. The original plan was for the seat tops to overhang the seat fronts by about 10mm and have a 30mm trim made of foam go all the way around and in the 10mm void behind the front trim I would fit LED rope light which I have. I did this for the front of the steps and also for the underside of the cockpit roof overhang. These plans have now all changed. Actually a lot of plans have changed over the years, you get what seems a good idea then not so much when you try to implement it. A lot of my plans are changing because my life circumstances have changed. I have lost my job so the money is drying up, so as a consequence we are trimming down some of the time consuming ideas in favour of speed, as we are now in a rush to get the boat launched. We will likely launch before the boat is complete inside, but of course it has to be complete outside to launch. So the focus has shifted to getting the essentials done in order to finish the job as fast as can be, as cheaply as can be. I will spend more and more time finishing the boat and then once launched I might look for some work again to fund the final internal finish.

So as part of the cockpit simplification I trimmed all of the seat top overhang back to flush with the seat fronts. Two of the hatches were converted from top fill to front fill so that the lids could be glassed on. This was because the seat backs over these 2 seats was curved and hinging a lid to a curved line is near impossible. So I just cut a door into the front, then the cut out became the door, so both the internal edge on the seat front and the edge around the door was decored and back filled and a ply pad glassed around the door opening to provide the internal trim. This was done through the top before the top was glassed down.

The seat tops and the curved aft seat backs have sat in place for nearly 2 years awaiting this. Also the half step had its lid just screwed on (with just one screw that often let go underfoot when people did not step into the middle of the step) as I had intended that a hinge on that lid would be a handy place for a gaff. But in the end that too became easier just to glass on. Also in areas of high load it is advisable to decore edges and round the hardened filler rather than rounding the balsa and glassing directly onto it. The filler being so much harder than balsa provides a sturdier edge on high traffic or wear areas for the glass to bed onto but more importantly is much easier to get a uniform curved finish. It is surprisingly hard to get a uniform curve from a balsa edge. So although their is extra work in decoring and back filling the edge, the finish is so much better and easier to achieve.

Once the doors were cut and fit and the inside of all the wells were white coated and had drains in them I could glass the tops on. Each of these wells will be used to store petrol jerry cans so in case of vapour leaks or actual spills they have drains in each of them, and are not going to be airtight or waterproofed. The jerry cans will be plastic so water wont be an issue. And of course for the most part the jerry cans will be empty, they will only be required if or when going on a long passage or to remote locations. I will have the ability to and plan on carrying 10 24 litre jerry cans as well as 4 (2 for each engine) 24 litre outboard tanks. The original plan was to actually have all outboard tanks so there would be no decanting on board and I would still like to do that, but for some strange reason the plastic in a jerry can is 5 times cheaper than the plastic in an outboard tank. Go figure? Anyway we dont have inbuilt petrol tanks so this way we can still carry 300 litres of fuel if required.

One of the things you must be super diligent about with a balsa core boat is that each penetration of the glass through to the balsa core must be decored and back filled. In order to make the drains I got 20mm pvc pipe, drilled a 20mm hole through, then decored using a sharpened allen key in a drill, you sharpen the short part of the angled key, put the long shaft into a drill, put the sharpened key in the hole against the balsa and squeeze the trigger, slowly at first but once most of the balsa is removed you can speed up and use the key to clean the inside of the glass of any balsa. Then back fill it with glue and put the piece of pvc pipe in to set with the glue, slightly over long, and then grind off the excess flush with the glass each side when done. Easy. A coat of white epoxy to finish and the lids can be glassed on.

The lids of the seats across the middle of the cockpit will be hinged because of the step in front making front access no longer a possibility. As well as these 4 hatch sections (which only have 2 lids, I decided double lids here was an easier option) there is a lid over the seat against the bulkhead directly behind the kitchen and a round lid over an ice well I put in which is like an island under the helm seat. The rest of the under seat areas are part of the internal volume of the boat below, the aft bedroom on the starboard side and the bathroom/laundry on the port side.

After all the seat tops were finished it was on to the seat backs. The cockpit sides where it meets the hull is higher than the side decks as they curve down to the rear steps. There is good reason for this. If a wave (or rain) were to flow along the side decks you want it to carry on past the cockpit and not flow into the cockpit. So the seat backs start about 10mm higher than the side decks at the cabin bulkhead and as the side decks slope away but the seat top doesnt the difference in height becomes about 100mm. So that area has to be faired to look good. My method was to gently slope the side seats down from their height at the cabin bulkhead down to the height of the last bulkhead (the deck slopes even further by 90mm) and then to match that slope about 100mm into the deck area with another upright panel and then put a lid on it. I glued it on then once dry I sanded the edges round and glassed it. This gives the seats a rim that can be sat upon. Once that was done I placed a piece of 5mm ply on the deck with a nice curve on it to bring the look of a molded boat with a raised area from the end of the cabin side overhang to the edge of the deck against the seat back. Whilst the glass was still tacky I added a thin coat of bog. That will probably all make better sense once you see the pics below.

That just left the curved seat backs that lead around from the hulls to the middle each side and how I end the seats in the middle where the bath will go on the duckboard. We long ago (before we had the hulls finished) decided we did not want the walk through transom/inboard motor option but we also decided to try to mimic the feel of the walk through transom by having a walk around transom. This will take some explaining. With a walk through transom (not an option with outboards because you need the height of the hull above the bridgedeck for the outboard to rise into) the top step on each hull is at bridgedeck height and you walk through a cutaway in the bulkhead to access the cockpit without stepping over but through and opening in the wrap around cockpit seating. Really nice and easy on old people which we will soon be in that there is no climbing up and down seats. But because this is ruled out, the other standard Schionning cockpit is fully enclosed, as ours is, but the wrap around seats. There is quite a big first or last step either from or into the cockpit from seat height (500mm) to bridgedeck. To alleviate this I built the curved half step across the middle of the rear curved seat front. From the seat height, you would normally step up or down another 500mm from seat height to side deck height to the steps in each hull transom. Again to rid ourselves of that high step we make our walk to the transom steps on the now raised duckboard, which is raised from bridgedeck height to seat top height, and walk around the back of the wrap around seats behind the final bulkhead down half steps to the transom steps which sweep from duckboard around to the transom. Under the lids of the raised duckboard top is a wide void that will house a bath (so the lid will need to be very well reinforced underneath to stop the flexing) and either side of it is a well for a 9kg gas bottle, one connected to the house gas system the other a spare but connected to the outdoor barbeque. Walk around transoms. It means we have a wide section of the cockpit seat that does not have a back. We may fix this with a stainless steel back with pads on leaving just a narrow middle section as the walk through (although even this can be filled with a “gate”, but that is part of the improvements now, as we dont have time or money to do it right away and may not want it, as there is also a plan for a hammock couch between the davits that may elevate the need for this area to have seat backs, but more on that later. In the mean time, the curved seat backs have been sitting leaning against the back bulkhead also for nearly 2 years, often getting in the way, already kerfed so fragile, awaiting this day. When I kerfed them I thought I would have got back to them much sooner. Whatever.  I experimented with various seat back angles, the more angle the more comfortable but the more of the very narrow seat they ate into so in the end a compromise of fairly straight (good posture) seat back angle was chosen so that the seat was not too narrow.

The easiest way to set this curved kerfed panel to glass was to make the top of this seat from plywood, glue that on then glue and glass it all in with the curve of the top acting as the mold for the curve of the seat back. This hollow section is also a good place to put a mandatory must on any serious boat, rod holders and stubby holders. I made the stubby holder by glassing a short piece of storm pipe with an end cap glued into a tight fitting hole drilled into the ply top. The rod holder is a commercial plastic angled one, I bought 4 of them, one for each seat back top and one for each rear step side panel. The rod holders have a drain hole in the bottom that I am going to have to block, the rod holder would fill with water if any got in but I cant have it draining into the inside of the seat backs, there is nowhere for it to go in there. The rod holders have a rubber lid on them to keep water out when not in use.

The last step in finishing this area of the build was to shape out the sharp corner and make it round. You dont want sharp corners anywhere on a boat really, you never know when you might slip and if you have to hit something hard, you dont want it to be a hard point, a rounded edge is going to do far less damage. And with that rounded, a coat of bog all over it (it is going to be faired and painted so it will need bog, but I also used light plain weave cloth so that it went around the corners and rounded edges well but being lighter, its easier to sand through it, so if there is a layer of bog already covering it, when you see glass you stop sanding, its a very good guide coat. If needed add more bog but you can not sand lower than the glass layer.

Another job I have started is to make the switch panel. It sits in a cupboard in the port hull under the fridge and behind the rubbish bin. There will be enough room in there for an inverter, a solar regulator and all the myriad of wiring that comes from all 4 corners of the boat to this panel and from the panel to the battery bank on the other side of the fridge (via 3 conduits that run under the fridge). I intend to have a master battery isolator (a main off switch), 3 breakers (that also act as off switches) one for the windless, one for the inverter and one for the switch panels. I have 3 panels banks consisting of a 6 and a 4 switch panel 10 in all, one for the starboard hull, one for the bridgedeck and one for the port hull, so 30 switches in all. Each switch is also a breaker. I will also have a 240v switch panel with about 4 switches or breakers on it (as well as a main breaker but it will be at the point where shore power enters the boat in the laundry). Below the main 12v switches will be the water depth read out and the battery meters. The actual panel board will be hinged and form a door behind which will be the inverter and solar regulator and I may have a thermatic bilge blower in there to keep it cool. And then in front of that hinged panel will be a sliding louvre door that will slide through a slot (not yet cut) in the side wall into the stair well to act as a door to the stair well when guests are aboard to make the owners hull more private, but more on that later (as it may end up being one of those things I may not get to do and will end up with just a boring old hinged door on the front of the cabinet. In the space in front of the switch panel and on the shelf below, there is room for a lap top and a printer. I dont intend to have a HF radio but if I did, it would go in this section. Sat phone technology is rapidly making HF radio obsolete, and I am not in the slightest bit interested in being part of cruiser radio nets.

Another small job I have been working on is the davits. I have mounted a sheave on an aluminium axle through a slot in the front of each one. When I laid the uni inside each one I decided on the height of this sheave and split the uni threads around the slot in order to retain the strength of it all, as uni that is cut loses all of its strength. I have round davits, but rope under tension, as it would be when lifting the dingy, travels in a straight line, so in order to have the rope travel around the curve but in straight lines through the davit, I had to put a turn point into the davit. But instead of a block (sheave) which I probably should have used, I decided that another aluminium shaft would be smooth enough and the rope not move fast enough to cause much friction and it will do the job of a sheave. I may also do this at the end of the davit as I may put a shaft through each davit and spanning between the 2 to provide the top of a slung seat. If we dont do the slung seat then a double block will be at the top of the davit. I still haven’t decided. In order to shape the davit backs, I kerfed the panels then screwed them onto the davits, and glassed the outside surface. I removed them from the davits and laid about 5 layers of uni and a layer of double bi onto the inside of the davit backs and put some sticky tape along the davit walls so that the back did not adhere to the davits yet. They will eventually be glassed on, but not until the uni is set. You cover uni with a layer of double bi because the uni transmits load along its threads but they can pop out under load if not tied down with a layer of woven glass. Eventually there will also be a uni rope in the side walls of the davits at the edge that is glued to the backs (the backs will be glued on when the uni rope is wet. And once dry, the back edges will be sanded smooth and a uni stack will also go along the outside of the back wall. In all there will be about 20 strips of uni in 4 stacks (outside front, inside front, inside back and outside back) so I have no fear that the davit could ever break. They have to be super strong because they dont just lift the 60 or 70kg dingy, the dingy may get swamped by a following wave and fill with water and then you are carrying a few hundred kilos in an instant. If this were to ever happen I would think the ropes would be the weak point.

Another job I have done that is visually exciting is to start to fit the kitchen fittings, stove top and sink, and plumbed the sink and faucet in. Not a difficult job considering that everything was in place (the pipe work) ready for this day. So in all it only took a few hours to measure out the positions, cut the holes and plumb in the water in and waste out. Water into the mixer could not be easier, with the whale one click system I just clicked a threaded end fitting to the hot and cold water pipes and screwed the flexi hoses from the mixer into it. The waste water out has a trap but was also fairly easy to plumb in. The gas hob is just sitting in its place but will still need gas plumbed to it which I need a professional plumber to do (I also need the gas hot water to plumbed in. The mixer has one of those ends that has a hose so that it can be pulled out for spraying veges or cleaning fish and is held in place by a magnet, and swivels and from its position can swivel out the window for filling buckets.

The only plumbing left to do (and internal construction) is the toilets. All other plumbing pipework is in place, but the actual hardware (faucet, shower heads, etc) are still to be roughed in, but the toilets, both of them, still have a little more work I need to do before they are finished. And of course I have to buy 2 more of them, having smashed the one I had. Nevermind.