Cabin sole

It rains the whole weekend. Good to work under roof.

I continue rebuilding cabin sole boards. Measurements with joggle stick take some time to optimise the process. The main fault to my tool is that I’ve made it from cardboard. Cardboard tip can bend upon touching inclined board and without me noticing it gives the wrong dimensions. It costed me lots of time yesterday when cut boards did not fit between frames and required several interventions with a hand plane. The proper joggling stick should be made from wood or metal so that it will not rise upon meeting the surface.

To fit nice and tight between the frames and towards planking the boards need to be bevelled. In this configuration it is bevelling the end grain. Not the easiest nor favourite surface to work with a plane: easy to chip wood on the edges so I needed to plain from both sides of the plank.

I considered bevelling with power grinder but that is noisy and makes a lot of dust. And gives no workout, unlike hand plane. With hand plane it is fun but it took too long to make just 4 boards yesterday so today I employed electrical plunge saw, cutting bevels at 47 degrees and finishing them with smoothing plane. Much quicker and less wood is wasted since negative bevels become positive when I turn a plank and cut next bit, with already finished one bevel.

Planks width - jointing edges - were finished with smoothing plane sliding on the bench, to make sure I have 90 degrees edges.

I’ve reached amidships where planks are almost perpendicular to the freeboard. That even further amplified progress so I’m almost in 3/4 of the job.

Before leaving the shipyard I recirculated oil. I’ve managed finally to adjust the flow so that oil is dripping at constant flow and during the week I need to re-fill the containers only twice.

I have buckets under the boat which collect dripping oil seeping through garboard joint or rudder fittings. During one week the bucket collected 2,5 litres of oil which otherwise would just soak into ground. It is easy to fool oneself that the wood takes so much oil if one does not encounter that lot’s of it just spills outside.