Well I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving, I took a week off from boat building--horrors!--to attend to family matters. This update shows the completed floorboards/seats before sanding/finishing, plus the pad that I've made for clamping the outboard to the transom. At this point, I think I'm going to put the spars aside for a bit to concentrate on finishing the hull, centerboard, and rudder/tiller.
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| Here's the roughed-out floorboards and seats in place, glad that's done. I'll have a photo soon of the floorboards cut up into the various pieces: there will be a centerline liftout aft of the centerboard trunk and liftouts on either side of the trunk as well. |
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| Here's a test fit of the outboard pad with my old Seagull. It is a bit smaller than I'd like, but I had a scrap of nice southern longleaf yellow pine that I've been hanging onto just for this piece. Yellow pine is a hard pine (not soft like white pine) and an excellent boat building wood; I wish I had more of it. Plus it has a wonderful resiny smell. A shop with nothing but cedars and yellow pine would smell great! |
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| While I was at it, I borrowed a trolling motor to try that out on the transom. It is way longer than I need, if I ever buy one I would shorten it by at least 6". |
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| Good to see the trolling motor easily fits in the well, even a full-length one. The idea is to convert to electric drive at some point instead of buying a new(er) gas outboard to replace the vernerable Seagull. A 12V battery under the foredeck, with wires leading through the bilge all the way aft to this well, should do the trick. A small solar panel on the foredeck would help to keep the battery charged up. |
That's it for now. I just put the first coat of varnish on the seats, they look pretty good. I'll have pictures of that--and other work--next time. I'll be starting on the coamings soon, too, so should be interesting. I'm hoping to get a lot done on BELLE before the Xmas break! So long.
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