Installing the deck framing

Its been about six months since I originally traced and cut the deck beams from the full size patterns given in the plans. I finally got to install them, if only temporarily, so I could fair the framing so the plywood decking will lay flat. I didn’t glue them in so I could take them out and epoxy coat them for waterproofing.

After encapsulating the deck framing in epoxy, I permanently installed it with thickened epoxy glue and silicon bronze screws. I recruited a friend to help install the carlings, which made it much easier! We used some moving blankets to protect the hull from any epoxy drips.

The next day, I finally got to take the plastic drop cloths and moving blankets off so I could see what it looks like

I also brushed a coat of clear epoxy on the carlings to protect them from water.

The last step before I can install the mahogany plywood decking is to add blocking to support the deck hardware.  The deck will have four 6” cleats to tie the boat to a dock (port and starboard at the stern and bow), a pair of 18” slide tracks for the jib sheet fairlead and cam cleat, and a pair of stand up swivel blocks for the main sheet.  These will all be under some force so they need to be solidly attached; the 6mm deck plywood alone isn’t strong enough on its own. To make in stronger, I added  3/4” mahogany bracing between the carling and sheer clamp at all the points where the deck hardware will attach.  This way everything will be attached through the plywood decking into the 3/4” blocking, which is attached to the boat’s frame.

The blocking for the deck hardware is attached with screws and epoxy. I used a belt sander and hand plane to fair the blocking so it is flush. Now I am ready to install the actual decking. 

Next Page

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome

Image
Welcome! This is the story of my Glen-L 15 sailboat build.  This is a 15’ long wooden sailboat I am building at home from a set of plans I ordered from Glen-L. It will be my first sailboat so I’m looking forward to learning to sail on it. This is what I hope it will look like when I am finished: This is my current progress: I spent a few weeks looking at several sailboat plans and chose the Glen-L15 because I wanted a traditional Bermuda rig (the classic triangle sail on either side of the mast).  Glen-L also had a long history and great reputation, an active online community, and sold hardware and rigging kits for this boat.  Construction will be plywood sheathing on a solid wood frame.  The links below are in chronological order, as they are best read The Plans My Shop Patterns and Templates 3/4” Plywood Parts Rough Cutting Wooden Frame Members Trimming Frame Members Waiting for the plywood Cutting the gussets Building the frames (finally!) Finishing up the parts T...
Read more

The Plans

Image
The plans were delivered quickly and included Five sheets of detailed drawings Two sheets of full size patterns for all parts A 15 page instruction book Glen-L also published a Building Plywood Boats book that I bought.  I hung up the plans to study them before I started building with a goal of being able to picture the entire build process in my head. It took a full day of reading (and re-reading) the plans to get mostly there.  The plans have a very old fashioned feel to them, which is no surprise given their age. In fact the plans had an almost familiar feel to me. Then I remembered we had a set of Popular Mechanics books when I was a kid and one of them had an article on how to build a boat out of plywood at home. I used to pore over the pictures and instructions in that article and think how fun it would be to actually build something like that. I am pretty sure now that those were Glen-L plans I was looking at way back then, albeit for a different boat (a one-man po...
Read more

Trim and some rigging and fittings

Image
I’m nearing the home stretch, which involves a lot of small tasks. Many of these tasks are just for appearances. For example, I wasn’t careful enough when painting the gussets on frame 5 so they looked kind of sloppy and were bothering me. A small piece of scrap wood epoxied in place cleaned it up nicely though.   The centerboard trunk also needed a cap.  The cap needs at least one opening for the centerboard lines to pass through to use to raise and lower the centerboard. I also cut a good size opening in the aft end of the cap so I could see the centerboard to check it’s height and unstick it if necessary.  I’m also going to attach the centerboard cap with screws but no epoxy so it is removable if I need more access to the centerboard.   The tiller is made out of Sapele too.  I had to deviate from the plans a little bit and added a second layer of wood on the bottom of the tiller so I could lower the hole for the pivot bolt to raise the tiller and prevent it f...
Read more