2009 building logs

February 2010 Start on bed steps

I am getting pretty bored with the endless plumbing of the ensuite but fortunately I am almost finished with it. I still have to glass in the furniture as for now it just sits in place while I secure all of the pipe work that must service it, but now that is complete I can set to finishing this bathroom and moving on to the bedroom steps and beds to finish them and then the fun part the bridgedeck, saloon and galley. I have held off running wiring so far but that will also need to be run as the bedrooms are finished.

Feb 7 Toilet finally plumbed in.

The weather for the past 6-8 weeks has been strange. Not so much hotter than other summers though it certainly feels that way, but more humid. I sweat from the simplest of tasks. It fogs my glasses and makes working difficult and uncomfortable. It is the kind of weather I would expect to encounter in the tropics where I intend to cruise. And as irritating as it is to work in it, it will be a pleasure to kick back once the boat is finished and cool off with a swim whenever it becomes irritating. There is a silver lining (there always is). I have had to fiddle around in a cramped ensuite fitting the toilet plumbing, in this very humid weather where my shirt gets soaking wet just fitting pipes and doing up bolts, and the beauty of these difficult conditions is that they emphasize how difficult it would be having to do repair work on the toilet in the tropics on a boat that is moving about so if I cannot do it on land in the shed, I wont be able to do it once launched. So it focused my attention on keeping every fitting easily accessible, easy to remove independent of the other parts etc.

I rethought a couple of fittings but because I was committed to the overall design I modified a part or 2 to keep it easy to fix. The part I changed was the hose fitting from the toilet to the first pump. I just could not get the white inch and half hose to bend around to make the connection. The walls of this hose are about 5mm (to keep smells in). Over such a short span it was just too difficult to remove or more accurately refit without removing everything just to get it to fit one end or the other but never both which is useless. In the end I made a hard fitting with pvc elbows and pipe and using rubber joiners on each end. It all now goes in easily and can be removed without removing any other items (the toilet or either pump).

With the toilet plumbing sorted, I glassed the back of the toilet area into the hull. The reason for it is to contain any leak in a confined and  easily cleanable area and to separate it from the area in front of it that will contain the cistern, which will be difficult if not impossible to get to the section of hull under it. So while I wait for the float valves to arrive so I can finish the cistern and fit it and then fit the 2 holding tanks so I can finish this section off I started to work on the shaving cabinet. To fully finish it I will need to bring in power and water, and fit the exit valves once the tanks are in. Still a lot of work to do but some of the nuts and bolts stuff are falling into place. In regard to getting water and power in I have glued a pvc pipe through the bulkhead so that the hot and cold water hoses and a power line can go through to the toilet and then back into the ensuite for the shower.

The panel that covers over the D section will have a shaving cabinet embedded into it opening from the ensuite. I had initially intended having sliding doors but in the end it was simpler to just have them hinged (and probably with mirror doors). Behind the shaving cabinet there is still a lot of the D section cavity space and I will utilize that by putting doors in the bulkhead in the bed area in front of it and it can store spare pillows and blankets or be used as clothing storage by any guests on board, because that berth does not have as much clothes hanging space as either of the other 2 berths, the rear bunk has hanging space to the side of the walled off room in front of it and of course the port hull has a walk in robe, so this cupboard space will be needed in that berth.

The panel that covers the D section is semi structural so because I have cut a big hole in it I filled the edges with glass rope instead of filler. My intention is to just screw the shaving cabinet in place rather than glue and glass it so that I can get behind there should I ever need to rewire or re-plumb any of the ensuite. This may change though. I am rethinking whether I should have drawers or a cupboard through the bedroom side wall (the bulkhead) and if I have drawers then I can access this are through the drawer openings but if I have a cupboard with a shelf then this will require a side wall to be glassed in closing off my access to the wiring/plumbing so access would again go back to a removable shaving cabinet.

Usually a glass reinforced rope would be uni. I did not have any easily accessible (I only have a wide roll so I need to pull it out and cut some lengths off as I will need many uni rope edges around every through deck opening) so I decided to try double bias. Bad move. Double bias does not roll up anywhere near as well as uni does. In fact I made a bit of a mess as I desperately tried to keep the glass rolled as a rope as I tried to get it into the half filled (with filler) decored edge. I eventually got it all in but the edges are nowhere near as nice as in the doorways that I uni roped using the same method. It is because the edges dont look very nice that I am having second thoughts about having a removable shaving cabinet rather than a glassed in one, the glass would cover those poorly done edges. I will see if I can clean them up sufficiently before making a final decision.

Work has continued on making panels. I will need about 10 more and I am making about 1 a week at the moment, only because I dont want to interfere with the work schedule of my friend whose table it is. I am in no great hurry. I have a few weeks work to go before needing them, and I have 2 sheets done which means I can get a start at any time anyway. I have been applying peel ply to one side and making the other smooth against the table top. I may need some panels with peel ply on both sides which may mean doing one side at a time as we want to avoid having to turn a panel over once glass is applied as this leads to creases in the glass. What happens is the sheet bends slightly stretching the glass but when you lay it flat again the glass cannot contract to flat again and forms creases with air under them.

Feb 14 Toilet cistern completed.

Having decided after much research on water delivery methods, on a cistern I studied the float switch options. Most toilets have bottom fill vertical float switches with a float that climbs a vertical tube when filled to close the tap, and as the name suggests, they fill from the bottom. I wanted a top filler and initially I thought an agricultural lever arm ball float switch would be best as it would have a lever effect to help keep the tap closed off when full, but in the end I settled for a more compact animal trough float switch. They are robust, and being compact it meant I could reduce the size of the holding tank. The tank is in the V of the hull so the smaller (height) it is the narrower it gets, and if I used the lever arm float switch then I needed to make the tank taller in order to get the width I needed for the arm to clear the sides without touching. So with the more compact float switch I could cut down the height of the tank (I could not take depth from the bottom of the tank as I needed the outlet to be below the height of the bottom of the toilet so that it could not siphon) and as a result reduce the weight of a full tank. I dont need an overly large tank, even cut down the tank is still 12 liters and a full flush is 1.5 liters, so I have about 8 flushes in the tank should we lose power (the toilet has a hand pump).

I attached the float switch with stainless steel bolts and sikaflex and I also fitted a breather hose fitting (a skin fitting sika'd to the top. With the skin fittings on I glued the top onto the tank being sure that all the ply had a good layer of glue as obviously I would not be able to glass the joins on the inside of the tank. Once the glue set on the cistern top I rounded the corners and glassed it down on the outside, completing the tank. I tried to test it but 2 things stopped me, more on this later, but one of the things that kept happening is the hose would blow off the tap outside when the float would turn the valve off inside the tank.

As I will need to fit all of the plumbing into a very tight space I found the QwikLock skin fittings to be perfect for fitting the toilet water take in point at the bottom of the cistern to the toilet itself. It needs to be removable as the toilet may need to be removed for maintenance and whilst the tank will be glassed in, the hoses may need replacing at some future point, so having a clip on clip off system is very handy.

Feb 21 Shaving cabinet completed

I had already decided on a size and position for the shaving cabinet, and cut out the opening from the D panel it will sit in. The panel closes off the foredeck of the boat from the ensuite, but has plumbing and electric wiring go through it and therefore I felt it necessary to ensure that I could get to them should I ever have a wiring or plumbing issue in future. My plan is the build the shaving cabinet to exactly fit the cut out and slide into place and screw into the core of the panel to hold it in place. I will use 25mm white plastic 90 degree flashing to cover the unevenness of the joins. It will be visible whenever the mirrored doors are opened and no matter how careful I am I wont be able to make as neat a join as the flashing will provide.

So using the cut out as a template, I cut sides, top, bottom and a back and dry fit it all together. I had previously edge filled the edges of the panel with glass rope, I used double bias instead of uni, I wont ever make that mistake again. It does not roll up anywhere as well as uni and as a result I made a bit of a mess of it. I fixed that mess with filler and in the end it looked ok but will all be hidden by the flashing. I used glass for 2 reasons, first the panel I had cut the shave cabinet out of is semi structural so I wanted the strength put back, but also so the screws will have something solid to grip into and cant crack the filler because of the glass.

To finish the shaving cabinet mounting set up I made three guides (2 bottom 1 top) that also act as stops so the cabinet cannot be pushed through. If the cabinet could be pushed through it could be most frustrating to get it out again once the panel is glassed into the boat. The guides also act as feet to support the weight of the cabinet. They are just offcuts of polycore with the edges backfilled. I decided on a slightly off center shelf to accommodate taller items on the bottom shelf, shorter items on the top shelf. I also ummed and ahhed about whether to have sliding mirror doors but in the end decided hinged mirrored doors would be easier. I used my usual method of white epoxy inside the cabinet, but I may give it a sand and a second coat to make it just that better finished as being at eye level it will be more noticeable.

Shit happens.

Before I bolted all of the plumbing back into the boat I wanted to test it. That is, connect the cistern to a water supply, connect the cistern to the toilet and connect the pumps and black holding tank, in roughly the positions they would be in the boat and fire it up. Just water no waste, but otherwise just checking the flushing cycles and the ability to pump to the holding tank height. You know, all the things you should know is working before you commit it all to installation. All went pretty well, I had some leaking issues and for some reason the hand pump was far more effective at lifting water to the holding tank than the electric pump, both so far so good. As I said the only issue I had was keeping the water source constant because as soon as the tank filled the hose would explode off at the tap outside because the hose fittings I had were cheap and nasty or the pressure is too high, either way. Then when the hose came off one time to many, I moved to go turn the tap off and tripped over one of the hoses pulling it all over and......

To say I was annoyed would be a bit of an understatement. It took me 15 minutes on the day to calm down enough to get back to work. But I could not concentrate much for the rest of the day. That night at home I started to think a bit about what I could do to make a good thing out of a bad situation. I started to wonder why, besides the fact that they have been done this way for so long, that a toilet needs to made out of heavy, fragile porcelain. There is not much too a toilet bowl, even a vacuum one like this. Its just a water intake rim with multiple angles water jet holes, with a rim that can seal with the lids and a bowl that has the correctly shaped exit to enable the vacuum to do its work and evacuate the waste. I spoke to a friend about making a mold from the 2 halves of the toilet I now have, and whilst he said it could be done, it would be expensive and perhaps no cheaper than buying another 2 (1 replacement and the 1 for the main toilet). Making the actual toilets is actually cheap in terms of material, but the mold would be extremely labor intensive and expensive in labor terms, and the toilets would also be labor intensive, because most of the work is fairing and finishing. Perhaps I could make one without a mold, or even 2. I am going to make some enquiries to see if a toilet out of glass or carbon. They would be much lighter and nowhere near as fragile, so cheaper or not, perhaps I will go down this path. I will post more on this if and when I do more about it. If I make molds I might talk to the importer about whether they would have any interest in them, but I imagine the porcelain ones are made in China (no pun intended) for a fraction of the cost of a glass resin one..

Feb 27 Ensuite vanity door cut

The ensuite is almost plumbed, the through hull tank exits are the last physical fitting to be fitted and the vanity cabinet glassed in. So I marked the doorway in the shaped vanity front and cut the door out. I had already faired the front as well as I could and also some of the back, although the inside is mostly hidden once the front is glassed on, with only the back of the door ever being seen again. So with the position of the door marked I cut it out with a jigsaw. Cutting the door out reveled how much bog I had needed to fair the front. When I made the front, I molded it by screwing the unglassed polycore sheet to the shelves and framing in the ensuite where the vanity would be fitted, but pulled the middle screw down a bit too tight and it caused a hollow in the panel that I could not see at the time. Once it had set I could run the flat batten over it and could then see the hollow. I filled it and faired it. It is a bit more bog than I like, but the door is thinner than I would like also (I used 10mm core instead of the 20mm I am now using) and was originally going to add a frame around the door and doorway but that wont now be needed.

The next step having cut the door out, is that both edges of the doors and doorway must be decored and back filled. It is here with the curved edges that the air powered die grinder with a tapered bit that comes in so handy. You cannot use the router so the edges are removed with the tapered tool, it works really well. Then backfilling is the same as filling any other edge.

Feb 28 Bridgedeck furniture.

I am getting a bit bogged down (no pun intended) in the ensuite plumbing, and losing a bit of motivation to go into the hot shed and fiddle around for hours and not have much to show for it so I have decided to reinvigorate myself by getting some high visual impact work done by marking out the saloon furniture and starting to install some framework for it. A few tentative moves in the bridgedeck is very exciting work. Just measuring and marking it all out, it took all day but it was fun work and I did not notice the heat whilst I was engrossed in it.

As soon as I have something to show for it I will post some pics but for now all I have is the plans I have drawn up. Its not quite to scale but gives me something to work to. The saloon sofa is 3000mm wide and the islands protrude 1500mm.