Completed floorboards and seats plus trying a trolling motor on the transom

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.

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.

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!

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". 

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.

Seats and floorboards

I'm taking a break from spar making to put together the seats and floorboards.  The seats will be varnished, like the spars, so I figure I'll get those done.  Then I'll be able to get all (or at least most) of the varnish done while completing the rest of the boat.  With luck, the multiple coats of varnish won't hold me up in the end.

The slatted seats are attached to Douglas fir cleats spaced about every 18".  Here I've got them cut a bit overlong (they'll be cut down later) and back-screwed to the 1/4" ply top of the underseat watertight lockers.  I've also milled out the slats for the top, and I've placed one along the edge of the cleats just to take a look.  Note that the seats overhang the lockers by about 3".  I'm going with Cypress, 9/16" thick, for the slats, except the edge will be 5/8" Western Red Cedar.  This is a very soft wood, and I might regret this later...but it'll match the W.R.C. transom, which I really like the look of.  (Incidentally the cypress is renewable "ranched" cypress, NOT old growth.)  If it gets banged up, it can easily be replaced later with a tougher wood like, say, Douglas fir (that's one advantage of slatted seats).  I thought about oiling the seats, but the cypress looks so nice varnished I said "what the heck" and decided to varnish them.

Here's the completed seat on the port side, you can see how the W.R.C. edge piece contrasts with the paler cypress.  All that's left now is putting in some bungs, rounding the inside edge, and sanding/varnishing.   The cleats have been cut back to about 1/2" from the edge, which hides them nicely while still supporting the edge.  Along the hull there's a small shelf which hould be good for small items like docking lines, etc.  I used scrap pieces of 1/4" ply as spacers between the slats.

Meanwhile, the starboard seat is coming together and I've started on the floorboards.  These too are slatted, this time of Port Orford cedar.  This is a West Coast cedar, it seems to be a bit heavier then the East Coast varieties but it seems to be a bit tougher too.  A few knots, but that's fine--heck, they're floorboards, they will get beat on.   I've never worked with this type of cedar, but I know they use it for decking out West.  It will be left completely unfinished, so the sun should bleach it to that nice grey color you see on old houses with cedar shingles.  I used scrap pieces of 3/8" ply between the floorboards to set the spacing.

This photo shows the slatted floorboards in place.  Next, I'll remove the whole thing all as a unit and make various cuts to make the lift-out hatches.  There will be hatches either side of the centerboard trunk and a centerline hatch aft.  That grey "fish" in the middle is a lead weight that proved handy as a "third hand" to bend the boards down to the underlying floors.  I used blue tape to make various notes to myself:  Cut Here!  Don't Cut Here!  Plane to line!

In the last photo, you can see that there are fewer cleats for the seats than in the first photo.  That's because three cleats are permantlly attached to the seat slats:  one at each end and one down the middle.  This is so the whole seat can be removed as a unit for varnishing or what-have-you.  I'll try to get a photo of that next time.  About 10 screws then hold the seat to the cleats that are permanently attached to the 1/4" ply.  Hope that's clear.

That's it for now.  I'll be taking Thanksgiving week off from work, hurrah, but I do hope to have a few more photos in about 10 days or so.  Happy Turkey Day!