With all the timber for the cabin top beams nicely machined its time to put them to good use on the boat.
The beams are spaced 300mm apart and each beam is made up of 3 pieces of 12mm x 30mm spotted gum bent over the jig to shape and epoxy glue laminated.
The ends of the beams are glued and screwed down onto the side frames. A picture says a thousand words…
Lots of glue squeezing out between the laminations
Bending the strips of wood over the jig gives a nice shape to the cabin top
Finishing in the dark again!!
The whole arrangement is fairly flimsy at this stage. The laminated beams have a nice curve, but the jig is only just strong enough for the job it has done.
To get some rigidity into the structure we need to put the ends on. The stern end is a good place to start.
The stern end is made up of 2 laminations of plywood, one 6mm and one 12mm expoxy glued together, giving a total of 18mm thickness. Using 2 pieces of ply makes it possible to bend the ply to follow the shape of the jig. It would be very difficult to bend one piece 18mm thick.
The ply goes on just as a square section that will be cut to shape once the glue has set.
Stern plywood glued on
THe ply is glued and fixed with boat nails to the deck beams
Wasted opportunity
This is something I really dont like. Nearly half the logs on this truck are as good as or better than the ones we sawed up to build our house, and now build this boat.
All these ones are destined for the woodchip mill, to be chopped into chips and sent overseas to make paper. It is such a waste of wood that could be put to a far better use.
Its a long story, but wood chip is a volume product (low price per ton) as compared with saw logs. To make it economic, huge volumes of logs must be processed. This is turn means large areas of forest must be felled.
All these logs come from old wild growth native forest, the loss so many trees so quickly is devastating.
Wasted opportunity