With Seapod turned over it’s time to turn my attention to the internal structure. The first two blocks of work consist of the floors and centre board case..
Floors (for the non-boat aware) are like the flooring joists in a house. The go across a boat and reinforce the whole structure so that it doesn’t flex. The centreboard case, that takes up a fair bit of the middle of the boat, complicates things so that the floors can’t just go straight across the boat but have to be split in two for quite a distance.
I start by making hardboard templates to give me the outline for each floor. The floors are then cut out from a oak plank (using a bandsaw) then fitted to the boat.
Nothing is level and no line is straight so getting all the angles to fit (called bevelling) is quite time consuming.
The centre board needs to be well supported and I glue up a couple of combination floor/knees to brace the casing adjacent to the the centreboard pivot point.
Once all the floors are bevelled and ’sitting pretty’ I will lay a batten across them and fair in the top faces so that the floor boards (or ‘ceiling boards’ as they are sometimes called) sit properly. This was ‘worked out’ with the templates but I’m sure that the effort of fitting the bevels will mean that some floors drop a bit. The floors will then get ’shaped’ – I’m still deliberating on what profile they will have and finally glued to the timbers, hog and centreboard case. Oh yes, I have to build the centre board case too – and finish routing out the slot (or most of it)! And … I’m hoping to do all this by next weekend??? More late nights coming on I think.
