Lackey Sailing | Lively Heels Phase 3-24

February 20, 2021

Lively Heels Phase 3-24

Saturday

After a brief round of sanding to the first coat of fairing filler on the cockpit box, I set it aside, planning to add the second coat of fairing later in the day, but I didn’t end up getting around to it after all.

I’d hoped to use the day to finish up the holding tank installation, but alas, hub-related weather delays at FedEx had tied up the straps I’d ordered for the task, which were now days late but supposedly in my state at least, so I hoped they’d be delivered soon. Instead, I turned to a wholly different project: Some additional shelving in the large locker forward of the galley, across from the head. Here, I’d originally, during the main project years before, installed just two shelves, mainly because of time constraints: a low shelf, which had originally been intended and sized to hold an ice chest; and a large shelf about halfway up. Now the owner was more than ready to have this space better available and more useful for the large amount of storage it could hold.

Earlier, the owner had mocked up some plastic storage bins he hoped to use in the space, and these would dictate the relative placement of two new shelves. Using these bins as a guide, and allowing for room to pass the bins over fiddles at the inboard ends of the shelves (to be installed later), I determined the location for new shelf support cleats and made various measurements for the cleats themselves. Most crucial was allowing room for the two bins in the lower space–the large bin (shown here) on the lower shelf, and a shorter bin to fit in an upper shelf. There was enough room for both, but not a lot of room for leeway.

The new uppermost shelf would fit just at the space in the closet where the cabin trunk began, and would be much shallower than the other shelves below it, which extended all the way to the hull below deck level. With the measurements complete, I milled four new shelf supports from scrap hardwood, along with some new shelf fiddles to help secure the storage bins, and prepared and sanded these all smooth before installing the cleats on the bulkheads for each new shelf.

After some basic measurements, I cut cardboard roughly to size to fit each new shelf location loosely, and scribed the actual shape and dimensions of the two shelves directly on the cardboard mockups, which I would then use to cut the actual plywood shelving to fit accurately. With the cardboard “shelves” in place, I mocked up the storage bins in the lower shelves to illustrate their fit.