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 The basic tools I use most. 

 My must have boat building book list.

Anyone who thinks the hull or even the hull and deck are the biggest challenge in building a boat this size has another think coming.  Finishing out the interior is enough to frustrate the best finish carpenter or cabinet maker. Nothing is square! Your reference points are an imaginary vertical plane down the center of the boat and another imaginary horizontal plane at the sole.  The bulkheads may be square but are probably 4 or 5 feet away and the wall you are installing things on is anything but square and flat.

Even if you do get the cabinet faces square, the curve of the hull will usually  make most of the volume unusable so you have to shift things a little to get a blend of practical space and visual acceptability.

Another complicating factor is that those right angles expected in a house are not so desirable in a boat.  Sharp corners cause stress points in openings and make nice straight bruises on your body when underway.  After a particularly bruising delivery of a boat up from the BVI,  I decided that there would be no squared off corners in my boat. To limit the number of jigs required, I set some standard radai. All bulkhead cut outs are 2 1/2" radius and all outside corners are 4 1/2" radius.

I didn't pick 4  1/2" arbitrarily. This is a picture of the galley peninsular.  Hidden in the bottom of it will be a pair of L-16 batteries which are 7 1/2" wide so the cabinet hat to be 9" wide. That is where the 4 1/2" radius got set.

This is the jig for the peninsular fiddle rail.  It is not an illusion.  The sides are tapered towards you. That is to compensate for spring back and also insure that the rail will clamp closely to the cabinet. It is easier to spread the rail out than pull it back in.

Most of the laminated parts were made up from 1/16" cherry veneer but the bending radius is a bit to tight even for thin veneers.  My steam box was not wide enough so I built another one out of a length of 12" ABS sewer pipe. I also built a rack with stainless wire fingers that fit inside the box to hold the veneers apart while they steamed.

Companion way steps were the next project. Climbing flat steps with the boat heeled can be a problem at times so I decided to mold them with wings to give a surer footing.  I made a pattern of the step profile and cut copies of it out of a sheet of MDF.  To make sure the clamping pressure  stayed even, the female side was trimmed 3/4" smaller than the male to allow room for the veneers

With the corners trimmed and one side mitered to the slope of the engine compartment hatch the steps were ready to be mounted. The question was how?  The wings gave plenty of depth so I really didn't need brackets to hold them but I couldn't trust wood screws and epoxy completely.

The answer was to chop small mortises about 1" in from the back corners just large enough to fit a #8 hex nut and drill a screw hole in from the edge. The screws were waxed and the screws and nuts temporarily put in place.  Then the mortise was filled with epoxy thickened with cherry sanding dust.  I masked off the hatch in the area around the steps so I could clean up any squeeze out Then located and drilled holes for the screws using a bevel guage for a guide .  Machine screws at the top of the wings and wood screws in the edge of the tred held the steps in place while the epoxy cured.  The test was my 200 pound body jumping up and down on the steps. Looks like it will hold as long as I don't gain any more weight

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It is amazing how many pieces of trim there are on a boat like this.  They don't make standard door trim in cherry and I couldn't afford them if they did. This picture is just one of 3 batches that had to be laminated, trimmed, shaped, sanded and varnished.

In the foreground are the companion way steps. Behind them on the left are a batch of ceiling strips for one of the aft quarter berths. On the right waiting to receive their first coat of varnish are the parts for the settee coaming and down the center are 24 door frame corners.

Except for the ceiling, all of these parts were made up from steam bent 1/16" cherry veneers and Gorilla Glue. (See?  I am not a total epoxy bigot after all!)

I still have another 28 cabinet door corners and 3 batches of ceiling to go.

While I was waiting for the glue to set so I could start another batch of corners, I worked on the gratings.  Both heads will have teak grates for the shower drains.

I was horrified at the price of precut grating kits so I appropriated some of the teak for the decks and made my own. They are actually fairly simple. Same principle as a finger box joint. except that rather than cutting little fingers across the end of a board you cut big fingers across the face. Then you rip the board to the width of the fingers and stick them together like a puzzle. The only hard part was fitting the frame.  Together they took one evening with an occasional break to glue up another set of corners.

I still have one more to make for drain at the bottom of the companionway.
The narrow grating on the left is for the
 forward head. On the right for the main head.

Site last modified:04/12/04