Cockpit gratings - the saga continues ...

This is turning out to be a much more time consuming project than I hoped. Oh well, fortunately time is not money! Not much happened with the project over the winter, for a whole raft of reasons I won't bore you with but I finally got back into it a few weeks ago

The first stage was a whole lot of ripping down planks and cutting them to rough length on the table saw and the mitre saw.

One of the distractions that kept me busy elsewhere was a major excercise clearing the venerable parent's garage which was all but unusable due to decades of accumulated junk. The upside of that being that I could move my table saw and mitre saw in there temporarily which gave me more space to work with the full size planks.

Once the main cuts had been done, it was back to my shed to do the final ripping of the grating rails.

So I ended up with a whole lot of sticks 😁 which I laid out on the bench to check I had all the right parts in all the right places.

Now way back last summer, my brother and I invested quite a lot of time and a very modest amount of money building a router table and jigs in order to cut the halving joints (of which there are a LOT!) quickly, easily and accurately.

You may recall that back then I knocked up a test grating out of pine using that setup and it worked very well.

Sadly, when I dug it out to use it for real I ran into a whole lot of problems. Firstly, the MDF base, despite being a> MDF, b> stored flat on a flat surface and c> stored in a dry shed, had warped in both planes. MDF should not warp! That's kinda the point of the otherwise cursed stuff (I hate working with MDF). I was able to pull the base back flat(ish) by bolting a steel u-channel frame under it.

So far, so good. However, when I ran some tests on the Iroko hard wood I discovered unacceptable chipping out on the back edge. Re-testing with pine confirmed that the 22mm router bit runs through softwood with no noticeable chipping out (as previously discovered) but it doesn't do the same with the hardwood. Mea culpa, I should have tested it with hardwood back then.

So with Plan A in the bin, it was time for a new Plan A ...

Digging some suitable scraps out of the offcuts bin, I knocked up a back stop and simple cross cut sledge for the table saw.

I then glued a printed cutting marker strip to a length of pastic L channel.

From there, it's simply a case of screwing the marker strip to the rail and making repeated cross cuts with the saw blade set to 10mm depth of cut.

And when I say repeated cross cuts, each halving joint takes about 9 or 10 cuts. The end cuts are the only ones that have to be made with accuracy, the intermediate cuts can just be waffled out by eye.

How many cuts? Well, there's no less than 348 halving joints to make, each of which is in two halves (who'dve thunk it eh?) so that's 696 slots to cut in the rails. So something in the order of 6,000 to 7,000 cuts.

Oh the tedium!

Oh the pain!

Yep, pain. I didn't, I hasten to add, remove any digits! I had gone to some lengths when building the cross cut slide to add finger guards and even so was taking great care. However, my arthritis limited cutting sessions to two or three hours a day.

It took about 8 days, maybe 25 to 30 hours of actual working time.

The end result was a big stack of rails with roughed out halving joints roughly where the halving joints needed to be.

And rough is the critical word. The router method resulted in halving joints that fitted together with very little finessing needed.

The table saw method doesn't! They're close but there's an awful lot of clean up and final fitting needed for every joint. By hand with a rasp and file.

It is going to be a laborious and time consuming process to fit all the grating pieces together and it is what it is. I suspect it will take weeks.

With the benefit of hindsight ...

I would either ...

a> invest in a more effective router table setup that could rout the slots across the entire width of a plank before ripping the rails out (this didn't work with our creation as the slide table was too prone to wobbles) or ...

b> set up to run the router out of hand with a guide rail setup to create the slots across the full width of the planks.

In both cases, it would be necessary to sacrifice some plank width with fewer rails per plank (or wider planks to start with) so that any chipping out on the back edge would be removed when the rails were ripped out from the planks.

Or option C would be to spend a sh!t ton of money on much better professional grade machines! And a large enough workshop to put them in. That isn't on the cards unless I win the lottery!!!

I do not buy the old saw that "a bad workman blames his tools". A good workman will manage to do an OK job with shit tools, up to a point, but he'll do a better job with good tools. And to be frank, some of my tools are not great. The table saw was a cheap DIY machine I bought many years ago and it's just about OK for basic stuff. There are way better machines available now even on a tight budget. My mitre saw (which came from my brother) was fairly tired when he acquired it for peanuts second hand. Again, there are way better tools to be had for £200 to £300 now.

If I was starting again on this project, I would splash the case on some better tools. As it is, I don't currently have any future projects in the pipeline that would justify spending the money.

There'll be another hiatus on the project now as I'm off to the floaty thing next week for a few days to make sure she is still a floaty thing and get her ready to do some sailing. More of than anon.

What a May day

 Well, technically more April than May but who can resist a cunning pun. Not me, for sure.

So we kicked off the 2026 "sailing" season (and hopefully the quotation marks will prove erroneous) with the usual mad dash to do all the jobs that have to be done before launching. Actually, this year there wasn't too much to do as the relatively truncated season last year meant a lot of things, like anodes, seacock serviving etc., could be carried forward.

We got down to the boat a week last Friday and got straight on with things on Saturday.

Pagan did need a fresh coat of barnacle food (a.k.a. antifoul) and a good check all round but that was all pretty much done and dusted in a couple of days.

Monday saw me head down to Sussex to pick the new domestic batterys and charger / inverter. In the end, it made financial and time management sense to collect rather than have them delivered even though it wasted half a day plus. I got back in time to make a start with the install so all was not lost.

Tuesday, however, was a washout. I had one of my occasional bad days (low grade headache, mildly upset tummy, general lethargy etc., best summed up as feeling ugh). I think these days, which happen every few weeks, may be migraine related (I also suffer from classic (a.k.a. real!) migraines (which are not just a bad headache). Anyway, write off Tuesday like it never happened.

Fitting the bulky and heavy charger / inverter in the chosen spot tucked up out of the way in the port cockpit locker wasn't much fun but it got done. I had to strip out redundant components of the original autopilot and loads of redundant wiring and work in a rather awkward space (nothing new there then) but I got there in the end. 

Then, with just a teeny bit of wood butchery, I managed to squeeze the new batteries into the battery compartment under the navigators seat. That also wasn't easy as each battery weights 33kg!

Friday was The Big Day.

Yep, time to get her back in her element. And as always the first task when she's lowered into the water is a mad dash around all the underwater intakes and outlets to make sure there's no leaks.

Happily, there were no leaks! Always a relief.

Once alongside the pontoon and safely tied up, the next question was would the engine start. Yep, first turn of the key! There's no reason to doubt that she would start but our confidence in the engine needs rebuilding.

The weekend saw me sorting out the very heavy duty 12v wiring between the new battery bank and the charger inverter. It's meaty 70sq.mm. cable and had to be run through from under the nav table to the port locker and kept as short as possible. Annoyingly, the port fuel tank is in the way of taking the most direct, and least visible, route so I had to run the cables across a visible bulkhead. I'll box that in at a later date. Making up the cables and wiring everything up took a lot of time so it was this morning before I finished the 240v side of the wiring.

And lo! It all worked like a charm.

So we now have a pair of Victron Super Cycle 120a/h AGM batteries coupled to a Victron Multiplus 12/2000/80 charger / inverter with a remote Multicontroller panel at the nav station.

That gives us 80A battery charging when plugged in to an external mains supply and 1600W continous with up to 2000W for short periods of mains power from the inverter when we're not plugged in. Being super cycle batteriers, the battery bank can be regularly discharged by 80% of the rated capacity and will survive being completely discharged occasionally.

There's much more to do on that side of things (battery monitor, solar panels etc.) but it's a very good start.

Once that was done, late morning, it was time to sort out for getting back on our mooring. Dig out the outboard, fetch some fresh petrol, unload anything not needed overnight from the boat etc. Then a dinghy trip up to our mooring to put the mooring tails back on (they're removed for the winter otherwise they end up as a tangled mess of rope and weed) before, with a coffee break to wait for the tide to turn, firing up the Merc and casting off.

We picked up the mooring first time of asking although it has to be admitted that the conditions couldn't have been any better - virtually no wind, flat calm and an ebb tide. Then it was a case of make all shipshape on deck and relax.

 

It's good to be back on our mooring!

One last night on board tonight and then it's away home in the morning.

We've got a fortnight plus lined up towards the end of June and I'm hoping to get down for a few days to work on the to-do list before then (if the big shed will give Jane the time off as she'll need to stay home with the venerable parent while I'm away).

PS. No, there are no photos of the wiring. I'm perfectly happy with *my* efforts but the rest of the wiring on Pagan is, frankly, a mess. I'm working on it but I'm not showing it off!!!