Saturday, December 16, 2006

The decking of Poppy!


Ok so I have been busy for a while and although I have spent some time working on Poppy Until recently there had been no major changes. This week I took delivery of the marine ply for the deck; two 8x4 ft sheets of 4mm 3ply for the princly sum of £30. Not bad eh? It came protected with two sheets of thin cardboard, just the job for making templates! So now I have two templates cut, one for half a foredeck and the other for the side deck. The 'differences are small enough not to require differnt templates for each side, I will simply over cut and trim down each piece to the required fit.

I have cleaned away the old 'Sadolin' from the gunell and I am now at the stage of cutting the plywood sheets, a fairly major step and best done when I won't feel rushed. Plus I want to check the templates, check the marking out and check again before I cut anything. I can't afford to make mistakes, its too costly! I am tempted to cut the two sheets together but I'm not sure, I would need to make sure the underside piece didn't move whilst cutting or it would wreck it.
The pictures show the template cut out and placed on the 'deck'. The template was created by measuring the distance from the centre line of the hull to the gunell and 4" points, then 'plotting' the curve onto the template cardboard like a graph and cutting it out. Simple!
Here are the templates laid on the plywood sheets ready to markout.
The bottom picture shows the new corner piece (there is one either side!) to strengthen the hull when the rig is tensioned. I re-glued much of the framework and it is much stiffer now.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

c-clamps are your friend... go ahead and cut both at once, but clamp them well...and it shouldn't be a problem.

Tim Coleman said...

Thanks for the tip. However I have measured again and discovered that one side is not the same as the other. There's not much in it but I decided to cut them seperately. I am currently fitting the portside foredeck being careful not to shave off to much!