Rain, rain, go away and more secret designs
Since yesterdays post was so long, I thought I’d take the time today to do a mini-update. Given the verbosity of my writing, this may end up being another ‘war and peace’ style epic, but we’ll see how it goes!
Everyone who knows me will agree that I’m a chronic procrastinator.
I start things and I don’t finish them.
After a few weeks of no updates, people have begun asking me if I’ve given up yet.
The answer is a resounding NO.
For the last 6 weeks we’ve had nothing but rain, thunderstorms and flooding and it’s driving me absolutely crazy.
A boat is just a bucket
I’ve been driving out to the boat just to clean it up and pump it out.
What do you mean “pump it out”?
Well, since everything is half done, the deck plates aren’t as attached as they could be and it’s letting a lot of water in. After the last torrential rains I had to pump several hundred litres of water out of the hull.
This in itself is a funny story because we discovered that the old manual bilge pumps are still working — and how much manual bilge pumps suck.
After the first time, I got smart and drove to Whitworths and bought an electric bilge pump. It’s now obvious why people put these things in boats! After hooking it up to my car (no electricals in the boat yet) I pressed the button and 5 minutes later all the water was gone.
Anyway.. that’s WHY the posts have been few and far between.
Secret designs
Since I haven’t been able to do anything physically with the boat, I’ve been hard at work planning.
Since I’m a geek that means of course creating vectors of the boat in Illustrator. I could use photoshop.. but vectors are more fun and I can create them to scale.
Design 1 — The deck
I’ve thought a lot about this one and I’m pretty happy with what I’ve come up with. Now I just need to find someone to make it happen.
- Grey carpet / Seadek / New Teak decking. We haven’t decided on this yet, but the dark colour works and we’ll figure out the final solution later.
- Largeish ice box with a comfy cusion on top.
- Coaming bolsters around the gunwales to make things comfortable. Vertical stitching and the name of the boat monogramed in red once we decide on it.
- Fold down bench seat with life jacket storage behind the chair back.
There’s actually a surprising amount of space under the gunwales and providing I can make this work structurally it means we can keep a clean deck AND have comfortable seating at the same time.
There’s a few technical hitches to overcome since just putting hinges on the hull will put way to much strain on the 5mm aluminium. BUT, with the right support struts it shouldn’t be an issue.
Design 2 — The cockpit
I’m SUPER happy with how this is looking — more important is the fact that I’ve ordered most of the pieces to make this work.
- The VHF radio is a pretty awesome piece of tech from Lowrance — the Link8 has AIS and loudhailer capabilities. All of its features feed into all my other devices via a NMEA2000 network connection.
http://www.lowrance.com/en-au/Products/VHF-AIS/link-8-en-au.aspx - This will be a glass helm setup meaning there are no physical guages. This will instead be replaced with a MFD (chart plotter / fish finder / digital display) from Ray Marine. The new Axiom 9 unit is released at the end of this month and looks AMAZING.
http://www.raymarine.com/multifunction-displays/axiom/axiom9/ - Radio is a fusion marine radio with Bluetooth and AM/FM — not exciting tech, but good for playing some tunes!
- I’m having issues tracking down the wheel which is made by Ultraflex in the USA. Their Australian distributors don’t purchase it because it’s not very common. That means it’s unique and gives it a bit of much needed blink.
http://www.ultraflexgroup.com/easyStore/SchedeVedi.asp?SchedaID=575
The switch panel I’m quite proud of as it’s custom designed.
This will control all of the lighting, navigation lights, horn and spotlights. I’ll still have a small switch panel for turning devices on and off and controlling bilge pumps etc.
The switches are a stainless steel ON-OFF button with LED lighting for the on position. They also come in a momentary switch for the horn.
Well, that’s it for this update! Hopefully the rain eases up soon and we can get back to some serious work!
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