Salish Sea Pocketship

 Just back from a 2 week sail up to Nanaimo.  Now to get back into building.  I'm almost ready to add the hull sides, but before I do I want to get the battery box setup. I decided to go with a 46AH LiFe battery.  It is compact and quite light.  I've build a shelf to hold the battery against BH1.  I also made a conduit to hide the cables, which will go up and across the roof to the instrument panel.    

A few projects, a trip to Minnesota and some summer sailing has kept me too busy to work on the boat, but I was able to spend some time on it today. Since the last post I managed to get conduit installed.  I also installed a drainplug in bulkheads 1 and 8.   Today I installed the floorboards.  I made these from western red cedar and covered them with 5 coats of varnish.  I think they look good!

 This is a nice milestone for me.  I milled my floorboards from a pair of large western cedar planks.  That was a fun job made easier by having access to a full woodworking shop equipped with a large bandsaw for resawing the planks into smaller boards and large jointer and planer to finish them to size.   It took some head scratching but I finally was able to get a pretty fair curve on the boards.  Now I'm ready to varnish. I started by putting a layer of epoxy on all surfaces of the boards.  Cedar is a pretty soft wood and the epoxy has hardened it up nicely. For varnish, I'm planning to apply several coats of Epifanes.  At this point I'[m using the high gloss but may decide to use the satin as the last coat. Space is at a premium so I came up with the idea to string wire between the cradle arms to hold the long boards while they dry.  I also made to smaller stands to support the smaller boards.  This has worked out great.  

 I milled up a pile of western cedar boards for use as the cabin sole.  It's mostly knot free and the knots I have are small-ish.   Here is the port side roughed in.    

 While I wait for my hull epoxy to dry I'm going to get started on the floorboards.  I've got a number of large planks of western cedar that I'm going to use.  First I have to mill these 3-in x 15-in x 10-ft planks down to size.

 Finally done with the inside hull fiberglassing.  As you can see, I'm following the steps suggested by Brent's blog and doing alot of work on the lower hull before installing the sides.   Getting these areas around the floor boards glassed was hard enough - not sure I could have gotten there if the sides were on. I also did a variation on the way I glassed between the floors. First I put glass in each corner.  I actually used a bigger piece that extended farther toward the center of the centerboard. Then I glassed the sides of each floor board with it extending out over the hull panel.  Finally I laid a wide strip down the center.   This took longer, but was much easier to lay down.  The first section I tried using a single sheet and total messed it up.  This worked well.