Now we are demolishing the boat!

At least a little bit. This weekend we ripped out the settees and the sole in the saloon. We are going to make the sole slightly higher, since we were redoing it anyway. The first one was more of a mock up.

The grand lit in the aft cabin is also almost finished with a tank for the head underneath.

Under the settees in the saloon we will have flexible watertanks about 200 liters each side.

We also planned and cut out for hoses going through the boat. The main pump will have hoses to three different places: the forepeak forward of the watertight bulkhead, the galley/saloon and the engine areea/aft cabin. The reason that we isolate the engine bilge is due to possible oil spills that shouldn’t be pumped out without taking care of the oil.

… and the mast is off!

A couple of days with a dehumidifier and proper limber holes in the mast step did the trick.

Some pictures:

Bye bye mast.

Joel actually only calls boats with their sails up for sailing boats. When the sails are down he calls them “mast boats”. When boats don’t have any masts he gets confused.

Offending mast step.

Mast partners and partner knees

Warning! Old pictures. This is how the mast is reinforced.

Laminated pine for the mast partner under deck. Also works as an oversized backing plate for deck hardware. I don’t understand why some people use grp-tubes or stainless bolted to deck. This is much simpler for a wooden hull, anyway.
Mast partners

The partner knees are epoxied with large a large radius filet to the hull and deck and taped with a number of layers of glass/epoxy.

Partner knees

Then there is a watertight bulkhead, slightly over an inch thick. According to the plans that one isn’t really needed for the hull strength, but it sure feels fine to have it there.

Also, the mast foot, made of laminated ash, running over numerous floors goes through this bulkhead. So it shouldn’t move.

No winter sailing this year

Even though we want to be able to sail Linnea during wintertime it won’t happen this year. (When I raced an optimist dinghy as a kid snow was never a problem if we just taped our boots to our oilskins real tight.)

Actually it sees like we might not get any more sailing at all before it’s time to take Linnea up. Maybe if I go up the mast and we get some strong winds, we might be tempted to try out how the sheeting arrangement works when reefed.

Anyway. On Sunday in three weeks  it’s time to take her up and before that we need to take the rig down. With a junk rig, unbending the sail is the hard part but the mast should be easy if it hasn’t swelled so it is totally stuck in deck or at the mast foot.

Now we are actually more motivated to continue with the interior than going out for more sail trials. Sure we need to continue to tweak the rig a bit. But it actually works fine as it is.

Important headlines on the to-do-list:

• Making new window frame patterns for the steering station. (Should we use plywood or mdf?)
• Mounting the head tank under the bunk in the aft cabin so we can finish here.
• Ordering a Dickinson Pacific stove.
• Ordering bow rollers.
• Ordering water tanks (anyone have experience with soft ones?)
• Ordering a diesel tank for the fore peak.
• Start to think about electrics.
• Find a way to make the deck box lids watertight.
• Finishing the companionway hatch. (Started this one yesterday)
• Put up a new video for Ricard to watch.

As you can see we will have stuff to write about in the blog during winter as well!

Drilling in the drizzle

Today we drilled some stainless. It is no fun even if the sun is shining. But it rained and was cold. It was quite fun to polish the stainless afterwards, though. Now no one is allowed to put fingerprints on the companionway hatch rails. They are shining!

If we get some hard wind before the middle of October we might take Linnea out for one more trip to check how she sails in a blow. It is quite likely. I have to go up the mast and turn the halyard block around first though. It was installed not to swivel but it did.

Dirt, teak and windlass

Some work on a wood/epoxy-boat is quite dirty and unpleasant. I am sure a steel boat is worse. Anyway, sanding the teak deck was such an unpleasant job. The teak itself was OK, but the graphite filled epoxy in between created a lot of black ugly dust. Fortunately the day was still and damp, so we didn’t contaminate our boat neighbors.

Here am I with the belt sander:

After maybe half an hour of hard work and two hours of cleaning it looked like this:

We also fastened the windlass. It looks good, even though we haven’t made the bow rollers yet.

I am thinking about buying a handheld wind meeter to use to get some data during sail trials. I used to have one but it is broke. Can anyone recommend a cheap model? Are they acurate?

Companionway

So here is the companionway pine ladder almost finished today. Needs some bug fixes but otherwise seems ok.

The handle at the bottom is for two year olds.  The next one is for six year olds.

Anyone needs saw dust from the planing of the yard and mast?

We also fit the mast top hardware. Tomorrow it will get some paint. Then we just wait for the line to find it’s way to this godforsaken place until we can raise the mast! (Ricard can you come and give us a hand?)

The tiller!

On this picture the tiller looks a bit slim but in reality it is quite hefty. It is laminated from ash.

Window frames too expensive

We made some really nice plugs to forge the port hole frames in the deck house from bronze. Found a nice place where they made sculptures our of silicon bronze. They recently made a nice one of Astrid Lindgren. They understood what we wanted, 12 really simple frames of bronze. Everything seemed ok. … until we got the price quote. Too expensive for now. So we are thinking about overlaping the lexan on the inside, and make an inside frame, thick as the hull to hold it. It will probably look ugly, so we keep thinking about this one. Any good ideas, anyone?

Tiller thriller

Ok, it wasn’t really a thriller. I just thought it sounded funny. Today we finnished the routing and sanding of the laminated ash tiller. Now comes a couple of coats of epoxy and then clear polyurethane.

We will bore the rudder head from the top down through the tiller to be able to be able to secure it with a bronze rod or something. That way we will be able to quickly unmount it when we want to set a table for eight people on deck, or something.