Monday

After a few coats of varnish, the new shelves were ready for final installation.  With the support cleats already in place, installation was relatively straightforward, with a few screws on each side of both shelves to secure them to the cleats.

Next, I installed matching cherry fiddles on the two original shelves, using glue and screws on the main shelf midway up the compartment, and, because there was no access beneath for screws, glue only on the lowest shelf fiddle, which I held in place with clamps while the glue cured.  These fiddles were designed to help hold in the storage bins the owner planned to use, but with minimal height clearance on some of the shelves the fiddles couldn’t be too high lest they prevent the bins from being removed or installed.

Later, once the glue had enough time to cure, I removed the clamps from the lower fiddle and test-fit the three bins the owner had left, which completed this small project.

Total time billed on this job today :  1.5 hours (including varnishing time)

0600 Weather Observation:  36°, light rain.  Forecast for the day:   Showers and rain, 45°, becoming sharply colder overnight

Friday

During the week, as time allowed, I continued work on the cockpit storage box fairing, starting with the newly-sanded first coat that I’d left from the weekend.

Second round of fairing:

Another round of light sanding, then a third, minor, coat of fairing:

One more round of finish sanding brought the cockpit box to ready-for-primer state.

At the holding tank, I installed a 45° elbow at the top of the pumpout tee to provide better access:  The original setup  had been somewhat impeded by the hose directly above, an oversight that could easily have been (but wasn’t) avoided with a slightly different location for the fitting in the tank.  Fortunately, the elbow made for a quick and successful fix.

Continuing the closet shelving project, I transferred the marks from my cardboard patterns to a sheet of 12mm marine plywood and cut out the new shelves, which fit well on the first try other than needing to cut out a little corner of the top shelf to allow for some wiring to pass.

For all the shelves, to help hold the proposed storage bins in place while still allowing the bins to be removed (more of a concern with the lower shelves where clearances were tighter), I milled 1″ tall fiddles from cherry and cut them to length to span the widths of each shelves, including the two original shelves still in place.  These fiddles would also add strength and stiffness to the relatively wide shelves.  With the two new shelves available on the bench, I chose to install these fiddles now, using glue and screws.  I’d install the remaining fiddles on the other shelves in place a little later.

In keeping with the existing shelves, I chose to finish the new shelves with varnish, which looked pretty good even on the meranti plywood but more importantly would provide protection going forward.  I applied a thinned sealer coat of varnish to both sides of the new shelves, supporting them on some simple spikey things I use from time to time, and also finished the two new fiddles for the existing shelves.

Total time billed on this job today (and preceding days):  3.25 hours

0600 Weather Observation:  15°, clear.  Forecast for the day:   Sunny, 30°.

Monday

After some shipping delays, the straps I’d ordered for the holding tank arrived, and with an afternoon available I looked forward to finishing the installation.

I began by reinstalling the modified port divider in the holding tank compartment.

After determining how to position the new angled base platform to allow room for the stainless eye straps that would hold the ratchet straps to secure the tank, I installed the platform with eight screws, four to a side, through predrilled holes in the platform, and with slight recesses to accept the screw head and a washer.  I secured the eye straps to the sole substrate with screws and pre-attached both ends of the ratchet straps, which featured stainless steel buckles and carabiners at the ends.

Now I could put the tank in place.  The tank fit easily through the overhead hatch, as planned, and soon it was in position.  However, I immediately ran into a problem.  Because of the various tank fittings, the hold-down straps only worked in two obvious areas where the way was clear–no problem there.  I’d used these positions to locate the eye straps and ratchet straps in the compartment.  What I’d not foreseen was a twofold problem:  First the starboard strap and ratchet buckle ended up interfering with the saltwater washdown pump and its filter housing, which were located on the bulkhead just ahead.  This meant there wasn’t clearance to operate the ratchet, and it also posed an ongoing clearance issue for the filter assembly.

In addition, the two ratchet buckles ended up closer to the top corner of the tank than I’d wanted, by virtue of the 12″ dead end measurement of these (and most similar) straps.  The starboard buckle, notwithstanding the filter issue, was more or less OK because the tank was higher on this side because of the angled platform.  But the port buckle (not shown here) ended up awkwardly and unacceptably at and just above the corner of the tank, and tensioning it in that position would likely tend to put undue pressure on the tank itself.

In a vacuum, as it happened, I could have made the starboard problem work, since the filter assembly and hose from the pump were actually easy to remove at a whim thanks to the design of the pump housing (a little plastic clip holds things in place).  So by removing the filter and hose assembly, I had enough room to operate the ratchet, and then reinstall the filter.  But this still wasn’t ideal, and in the end the fix for the port side worked a treat for the starboard as well.

The fix was to take the carabiners on the buckle side of the ratchet out of the picture.  Fortunately, I could remove easily enough the eye straps and slip the sewn loop of the ratchet strap over the eye, then re-secure the eyes.  Because the carabiners were permanantly attached, with the webbing sewn though a closed eye in the hooks, I couldn’t remove them, so I taped them above the webbing loop and out of the way to keep them from flopping around loosely.

This had the net effect of lowering the buckles by close to three inches at each location, which solved both issues nicely:  On the starboard side, the buckle was now below and clear of the pump housing (check); and on the port side, the buckle was now nicely below the tank corner where it could be safely tensioned (check).  This was a relief.  Now I could strap down the tank properly and finally, using some strips of 1/4″ thick rubber (left over from the first attempt at the new anchor pad on the stem) as chafe gear beneath the straps.

Continuing, I moved on to the hose connections, which were straightforward and didn’t take long, and went according to plan.  I secured the loop from the tank discharge to the nearby  pump with a pair of clamps to hold it securely and avoid any undue tension on the fittings at either end.  Afterwards, I reinstalled the water lines to the head shower setup, which I’d removed for access early in the project, cut off the excess strap length from the tank hold-downs, and wrapped up other details in the space to call this installation complete.

Total time billed on this job today:  3 hours

0600 Weather Observation:  12°, partly clear.  Forecast for the day:   Mostly cloudy, snow and rain in the afternoon and evening, 35 °

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.

That was all I had time for at the moment, but one more good work session ought to see the shelf project to completion.

Total time billed on this job today:  2.5 hours

0600 Weather Observation:  23°, cloudy.  Forecast for the day:   Cloudy, chance of show showers, 30°