More port settee

I put two coats of primer and two coats of paint on the underside/backsides of the settee locker coverings.  I'll come to regret this decision later because it got the order of operations all wrong. I have a new rule:  do NOT paint anything until I'm absolutely sure I've attached all the things that need attaching.  Here you see that I don't have the locker cover supports attached yet.  I'll also end up adding cleats, stiffeners, sliding rails, and retaining toggles.  Each of those things requires me to sand down to the wood again, and instead of using Titebond III woodglue, I have to use thickened epoxy because of the uneven surface that results.  And of course, epoxy eats at the one part paint I used, so it gets a bit gummy.  Much time wasted for an uglier result.  So, yeah.  Paint goes on at the very last minute.  

And now for many photos of how I put the sliding tracks on for the sliding berth top.  

The trick here was to get the 4 slides EXACTLY parallel.  

Here you see them laid out generally where they'll go.

I decided that these would be mounted upside down compared to how you'd do it for a normal drawer; I want the sliding top to have the most support, and therefore the wider female part of the slide.  Plus, anything that falls under the berth top will have less of a chance of getting jammed in the slider. Not a major issue, but an example of how many little design decisions go with every part of this boat project thing. And nearly all my decisions are guesses. 

Anyway, I drilled pilot holes and counter sinks on the ends of each of the male rails.  Note to self:  your countersinks suck.  They go dull nearly instantly.  It might be worth an investment in a good one.  

I temporarily attach one side only of each (the left hand / inboard side in the previous picture) rail, except for the second from the forward end, which is attached on both ends.  This will allow the other three to shift to parallel to this fixed one in the next steps. 

I slipped the female slides onto each, laid a long narrow piece of scrap 1/4" ply across all of them at the INBOARD end, and carefully drilled a pilot hole in the the outboard edge of each just big enough for a brad to fit in. 

This locked the distance of the inboard ends of the female sliders to the distance between the inboard ends of the male sliders which are fixed to the support surface. 

Sliding those sliders to the outboard end now guarantees that the distance between the sliders on the inboard ends are now equal to the distance on the outboard ends.  To whit: contraption's sliders are now parallel to each other.  They may not be exactly square with the back edge, but they don't need to be.  I thought this rather ingenious 'cause I thought it up all by myself.  It's probably a technique the ancient Egyptians knew. I'm not really breaking new geometric carpentry ground here. 

I screwed the males sliders to the under-piece, locking in that delicious parallelism. 

I clamped the top on to keep anything from shifting, then drilled pilot holes and temporarily fixed both ends of the female sliders to the top. The top now has four parallel female slider fixed to it to match the parallel male pieces below. 

Another note to self:  put some butcher's wax on the contact surfaces of the sliders before all this assembly.  I ended up needing some significant taps with mallet to get this apart.  With the wax everything slides much better. 

Then the whole thing gets marked with various pencil lines so I can take it apart, put glue on it, and hopefully realign the screw holes again while it's all messy and slippery and squeeze out is covering said pencil lines and I'm cussing quietly to myself while moving quickly and trying to catch significant glue drips and turn clamps with one hand while holding the wood in place with my teeth and my other hand and ignoring my phone which always chooses this time to ring and then one of the screws strips out and I have to get the needle nose vice grips to extract and replace it and now another piece has slipped and oh crap the clamping caul is too tight and distorting the assembly and...

So, normal glue up procedure.  We see the calm clamped result here.

 And the exciting process repeated for the underside of the top with the female sliders here. 

And the whole assembly.

I did end up buying a better countersink. Carbide and soooooo much better.  I'll have to think about whether it should be used on fiberglass, or get a second one for that.  They are quite expensive, though. 

I made up a whole bunch of these stand-off blocks and epoxied them in the lockers.  They are 1" thick to match the insulation (which I ordered) and will serve as the anchor points for the insulation cover panels I need to make out of 1/4" or 6mm ply.  I am tempted to use luan door skin for this because it's so cheap, but it's probably false economy.  It's not strong, not waterproof glues, and has the potential to make my life miserable if it fails in three years.  I'll probably go with okoume 6mm. 

Port Settee Work

With the main tabbing completed, I could turn my attention to the settee design and bits.  This photo is about all I have for what I'm sure was many hours of thought when I laid out the starboard side. There are kinda similar marks on the port side bulkhead - but mostly I'm cursing myself for not taping plans or schematics or... something to the boat somewhere.  Or a notebook. That's what regular people do.  My memory is truly terrible - so this loss of brainwork over the last two years in which the project languished fallow is a real drag.

Anyway, I know the original plan was to make the settee seat slide UNDER the settee back, with a cushion on it that magically revealed itself as the seat was pulled out into a berth.  The problem there is that the forward-most portion of the seat actually meets the hull in the closed position, so there's no room to hide the cushion.  This would lead to a strangely shaped infill piece needed for that.  Two strangely shaped infills, actually, because the berth will have two different available depths - 22 inches wide for rough seas and a lee cloth, and 28 inches for calmer weather sleeping. 

Also, the hidden mattress trick (which is what the original Pearson 10M had on the starboard berth) is a bit more challenging construction:  the seat backs need to float above the sliding mattress.  The payoff just isn't worth it.  So it will be a simple slide out berth with infill pieces stored somewhere around the saloon lockers. Somewhere.  Maybe in the bottom of the locker where the slid-in mattress would have been.

In putting in the cleats for the settee back and main shelf, I somehow let this horizonal cleat slip upwards.  Since I also stripped the silicon bronze screws holding it in (glued and screwed), this piece could not be simply unscrewed while glue was still soft.  

I had to let it cure, then came back the next day and used the miracle that is an oscillating tool with a wood blade attached to slowly rip the cleat to the correct height.  It worked a treat.

The underside of the side deck is very unfair.  There are huge globs o' polyester resin from the original liner-to-deck construction.

A few years ago I had taken down the worst parts with an angle grinder, but it's still very uneven. Here you can see some of the gaps for the cleats are up to 1/2 inch thick.  It's epoxy and wood flour to the rescue

With the cleats in place and the decision to not put a sneaky under-the-settee-back sliding berth base in, I cut and fit the settee top, the back and the shelf.  This settee top is not the thing that will be sit upon - it's more like the locker top.  Attached to this top will be wooden sliders, and attached to the slider top will be the settee/berth bottom.  So these holes we see here don't get hatch covers.  The settee/berth bottom will get those, and when those are lifted I'll be able to reach down through this under-bottom into the locker. 

I'm also not sure about keeping the openings in the face of the settee above the sole.  The lockers are low, deep, and slope forward, and these openings are very close to the sole itself, so there isn't much room for hinges.  Plus I haven't figured out the saloon table situation, and it's possible that the forward most opening, and maybe the middle, will be inaccessible with the table in place. So I may end up glueing the cutouts back in place.  My goodness am I glad I've decided that this thing will be painted.  You can cover up a multitude of design changes with Boat Fair, moulding, and paint.