Poshing boat furniture.
With recent delivery from Toplicht came brass and mahogany rings. I wanted to upgrade a bit the look of my boat furniture and frame simple finger holes with rings. I’m going to make additional folding table in the pentry, with two openings for the kitchenette so matching all others seemed to be proper now.
Since there are no rings of diameter 20mm, as my current openings, I needed to re-drill them to 32mm. This cannot be done freehand with smaller openings already in place so I took all door to proper workshop to do the job on the drill press.
I wanted to keep the centres in the same place so before drilling with 32 Fornster bit I callibrated the machine with 20mm drill above each component.
Compared to freehand drilling this job was quick and easy. Cuts went cleanly and perfectly smooth.
Dry fit prove that all fits so I could go to my boatshop for final finishing and re-installation of all parts.
Having door still disassembled was a good moment to clean them from old stickers and solidified blobs of linseed oil which previous owners left after oiling. Scraping with sharp blades, followed by 320 grid paper smoothed up all surfaces without removing too much of beloved patina. To bring back the colour all surfaces were treated with light coat of linseed oil, dried after a while to avoid blobs. The surface became satin and smooth.
By keeping the centres in the same position I hoped to have everything aligned as it was - I did not notice any misalignment with the old, smaller holes. However, after drilling I found that double-door cabinet had these holes shifted a tiny bit and it became obvious with bigger holes. Well, I thought, I will have to live with that now.
To my surprise, after installation it became all right! Even though the openings are indeed shifted it was purposefully made like that (apparently) since the whole cabinet is not levelled - it follows boat’s rake (curvature)! So while shifted they harmonise with the interior.
At least in my eyes and that’s what matters.
Rings and openings were coated with linseed oil. Most of them were press-fitted, enabling easy removal should I decide to varnish these cabinets. In one case I needed to add little Ettan as one ring was slightly undersized.
I modified brass rings to be mounted in cabin sole - filed down side extrusions as in my experiments they did not work with hardwood. After some measurements with holes placement I removed the sole and drilled freehand the openings for fingers, enabling easy lifting of cabin sole for bilge access.
This took considerably more time than on drill press but the result is the same.
I primed these holes with generous amount of Ettan - after all there will be moisture here and with epoxied wood I don’t want to trap water there.
Rings went in as press fit so I will be able to remove them for future renovation of the floor. That concludes the work on new cabin sole. Small touch ups on the bottom side with epoxy will be done in spring, when temperature allows proper curing.
The weather was really nasty, with heavy rain and wind so after five hours in the boatyard I called it a day. Tomorrow I will resume cleaning planks for cabin ceiling.