Splash!

 A hectic day today. Picked up Jane from the Big Shed at 06:00, drove down to the boat arriving 08:15 and got our heads down for a few Zzzzs.

Wiggy rocked up about 12ish to put us back in the water for the first time since last year.

It's always nerve wracking when the boat goes back in, the more so when you've drilled new holes in the bottom of the bolt. The moment the boat is lowered into the water, it's a mad dash round all the skin fittings etc. with a torch checking for leaks. And there was indeed a leak!

It was, however, a minor affair. The jubilee clips on the new raw water intake just needed tightening up further. No big deal and soon sorted. Then it was a tow round onto the river pontoon and make fast alongside.

Simon arrived and after carrying out further checks around the engine, it was time to fire her up. We had, of course, run her briefly whilst ashore (a bit naughty but needs must), now it was time to see if she'd start and run properly.

And happy days, she started and ran properly! The new cooling pump is rather effective, much more so than itd predecessor and the cunning bracket designed by Simon to engineer my cunning suggestion of turning the pump through 180 degrees (so that the impeller can be changed more easily) works a treat.

Then having run her up to operating temperature and let her cool back down a bit (per the manual) it was time to see if the head bolts would all torque down. We were expecting two or three of them to strip the threads as they hadn't felt great when initially torqued down a few weeks ago. And sure enough, one did.

It might be possible to sort it without taking the head off but neither Simon nor I feels 100% happy with doing that and for the sake of a new head gasket and a few extra hours work, tomorrow we'll pull the head off again and helicoil the stripped threads. In fact, we've had a thunk about it and collectively agreed that for the sake of an extra hour or two of drilling and tapping, we'll helicoil all the remaining threads and have done with it. It would be beyond frustrating to just do the one that's stripped and then have another one go when we're back to final torque down (hopefully on Sunday!). That would be a proper show stopper as Simon has to be elsewhere for a few days next week, we're not his only customers (hi Neal and Jos ☺)

So there we are for today. Floating, not sinking, running but not quite running in. I'm not downhearted, this was anticipated hence my having laid in the spare gaskets to do it if necessary.

Cockpit Gratings - the project - introduction and first steps

 So Pagan has a once nice set of Teak cockpit gratings. Sadly, however, they've seen better days!

To the left is the largest of the three gratings and as you can see it's in a state. Several of the rails have gone walkabout and an area to the left of the picture had become so rotten that my foot all but went through it when I hopped down into the cockpit a while back. That had been fixed with a temporary piece of plywood.

Underneath, the frame joints are starting to come apart and there's rot and even some "nail" sickness (actually screw sickness) where the steel screws have corroded and damaged the surrounding wood.

As a temporary measure to keep us going, I stripped out all the old grating cores and screwed split lengths of decking timber to the existing frames. It's practical but not especially attractive and, no, you're not getting a photo of them!

I was hoping that the main frames would be salvegable but they're too far gone. I could also buy the gratings to cut to size and fit within either the existing frames or new frames but they're eye wateringly expensive. And I have a fancy for a serious woodworking project so I going to set to and make all new gratings entirely from scratch.

It's not going to be my first woodworking rodeo, I've done a fair bit of wood butchery in the past and I've got a reasonable collection of tools. I've also now got a space to work in, albeit it's not exactly a huge space, having demolished the rotten wreck of what had been my brother's shed when he lived here and replaced it with a new 11'x8' plastic shed (in hindsight, I wish I'd spent more money on a good timber shed - the plastic shed is OK-ish but it's not great). I've got power and lighting to it and a security system although I won't be keeping valuable equipment in there (that'll have to be moved to and fro as needed).

So what's going to be involved? 

I'll post in more detail about the design stage in a seperate post as it's quite involved but simply put there's the timber frame around the outside, a sub-frame underneath that which carries the actual grating, two upright rails down either side underneath upon which the gratings stand and, the complex bit, the actual gratings themselves which are made of interlocking rails.

You can sort of see how they work in the picture of the smallest of the gratings which also happens to be the one in the "best" condition (as it's only got one loose rail, so far!)

To recreate the gratings will mean cutting a lot of rabbets in a lot of pieces of wood and for that we're going to (try to) work smarter rather than harder by building a custom routing jig. In fact, I've already built a Mk.1 version (of which more anon) which has been both a proof of concept (in that it sort of worked) and highlighted a number of issues which we're working to resolve.

The old gratings are made of Teak and I wish I could stick with that. Getting hold of good quality teak in any significant quantity is not easy and when you can get it the price is horrendous. What's more, the FSC certified teak that is available is almost all African Teak, not Burma Teak, and whilst it is similar it isn't considered suitable for boat decks (and therefore it's unlikely to be suitable for cockpit gratings).

So I'm going to be using poor man's teak, more properly known as Iroko. Whilst not quite as durable, it has many of the same qualities as teak and looks very similar. Plus, it's readily available at a vaguely sensible price! In fact, I've already bought and collected it ... or most of it as I'm going to need one more board as a result of a bit of a process rethink. 

The timber is supplied rough sawn that being considerably cheaper than buying it PAR (Planed All Round). And happily I have a small planer / thicknesser with which to process the timber down to exactly the sizes I require. Or I had until I blew it up! In fairness to the poor machine, it had been left sitting on the floor of a damp garage for several years and frankly it was a miracle it worked at all even if it only did so briefly. Replacing it with a new one, the same as the old one, was not prohibitively expensive and the old one has been stashed away as a source of replacement drive belts (prone to snapping) and what have you.

I have an old basic table saw which, with a new blade fitted, is working fine (so far, touch wood!), a sliding compound radial chop saw I acquired off my brother who has also supplied a hefty router which will be used on the aforementioned routing jig, a set of bar clamps and a whole crate of saws, planers, sanders etc. along with chisels, mallets, drills, plus cutters ... in short, I've got most of what I need and what I haven't got I can either manage without or buy for prices I can feasibly afford.

Which brings me back to preparing the workspace ... I won't kid on that it's anything even vaguely approaching a workshop! It's compact and bijou but it's enough. I've got some racking space down one side for storage and two workbenches on the other side.

One, which can be seen above right, is a cheap new bench I've bought to be used as my "engineering" bench. That bench will likely feature in future projects such as a new switch panel, new boom end fittings (how they're going to be made is being hotly debated currently!) and others.

To the left of it is an old woodworking bench my Dad acquired off his friend Richard who in turn had acquired it off his Dad. We didn't give it much thought or even think that much of it until, after moving it from the aforementioned damp garage into the shed and perusing several, mostly American, woodworking YouTube videos, I realised there was rather more to it than initially met the eye.

The planing stop after removal

It turns out to be a good example of a classic "English" style joiners bench and it was probably originally the personal bench of a professional joiner. Whilst on the smaller end of the size scale, these benchs were never huge being quite narrow and only 5'  to 7' long. This one is a 5' example. The giveaways that it's professional kit are twofold - it has a very fancy rebated sprung loaded planing stop and an equally fancy fitting for a holdfast clamp.

The holdfast fitting, removed and upside down

Sadly, the actual holdfast clamp is long gone, I wish I had it! But a cheap holdfast was £12 off Amazon and works surprisingly well as I shall demonstrate later.

I removed these fittings because there was one major problem with the table top - a slight hump in the middle which meant work rocked around on it.

I didn't want to go berserk and plane the whole thing down to a perfect finish but I did need it fairly flat.

So I attacked is judiciously with the planer and the orbital sander until the hump was no more ...

Then I carefully cleaned out the rebates for the fittings with a chisel until they sat back just below the surface of the bench ... which they didn't quite before I started anyway - and reinstalled the planing stp and the holdfast dog hole.

The planing stop springs up as you undo the screw and holds a workpiece as you push against it, usually for planing the top surface as the name suggests.

The holdfast clamp is a primitive beast! You simply drop the leg down the hole with the pad on top of the workpiece then whack it on the top of the leg with a big hammer!

It works!

To remove it, just whack it again, this time on the side at the top of the leg, and it pulls back out. It looks Medieval ... and it is! If not older as there's evidence of bascially the same device being used by carpenters all the way back into antiquity and beyond.

Sneaking into the background there is a modern metal tail vice I added the other day. This style of bench didn't usually have a tail vice but I wanted one. I just need to add some wooden face plates to it and it'll be ready for use.

The original wooden face vice has had it I'm afraid. There's no end of play in the wooden threaded screws, the handles have both broken and it's beyond salvation. I shall be replacing it with a cast metal face vice when I make up my mind which one I'm going to go for!

I shall also likely be making a few other mods to the bench. I'm probably going to replace the backboard (which is almost certainly not original) with a taller one to which I can attach some storage for screws etc. and I'll almost certainly be adding some additional dog holes - one or more on the facing board would aid with working longer pieces of timber and there may be a need for additional holes in the worktop but I shall hold off on that until the need becomes apparent.

I forgot to mention that on a pre-existing paved area out front of the shed there's a larger heavy duty outdoor work bench which doubles up as Dad's potting bench and somewhere I can set up my table saw and thicknesser provided it's not raining.

So there we have it for now. This is going to be a slow burn project, I don't expect to finish the gratings for some time (months rather than weeks) as there's still a lot of work to do on various aspects of the design and process. Especially the process!