Week 1 progress

There’s not a lot to tell this week, mainly because things have been held up by a problem with the portholes. As I mentioned over on Living in Sanity, when they came to glaze the portholes ready for installation, it was discovered that most of the glass, which needed to be 334 mm diameter, was 343 mm. It’s not hard to see how this happened.

Procast, the supplier, promptly came and took them away for replacement, together with two of the porthole rims that had not been finished off and were still rough from casting.

It’s not like Procast, I’m told, and at least they were prompt to deal with it - the replacements were due in yesterday.

Peter’s particularly irritated to be caught out like this; he’d planned to have the portholes glazed and ready for the start of this week, in which case the problems would have been discovered sooner, but catching up on other jobs in the yard meant that it hadn’t happened.

So my photos for this week are of a shell that looks exactly like the one we towed last week. This is a bit misleading; the lockers have had further coats of paint, and some trimming of the steel work has been done internally, but that can’t really be shown in a photo.

(The steelwork comes with some stubs left internally, where cross bracing members were used during construction and then cut off. Sometimes the resulting stubs get in the way of the battens, and need to be trimmed back further.)

Once the portholes are in (very soon now), then work can start on battening and ballasting. Doing this before the shell is weather proof is not a good idea; we’d end up with rainwater trapped all over the place.

So there’s just five photos on the new Flickr set this week, including this one of the rudder. Tim’s taken to adding lateral strakes to the rudder blade, presumably to improve the steering.





The other thing to report is that we’ve had a long (four hour) meeting with Peter, going over the whole plan and spec from stem to stern, cross checking everything, making some previously postponed decisions and agreeing which items of kit Peter will buy and which we will source. So, for example, I’ve found and bought the VHF antenna, and I’ve just ordered the radio to go with it, but Peter is getting the Blaupunkt Nashville DAB radio and aerial from his supplier.

I'd planned to get the iCom M401 marine VHF radio, which is their most basic, without the fancy DSC autodistress facility, but the M411, which comes with DSC but is otherwise the same, is £20 cheaper. At least if we're attacked by pirates on the Trent we'll be able to call for help easily.

We’ve decided to have painted TGV on the ceiling, and ash veneered panels on both the cabin sides and hull sides. We’ve also agreed to locate the wine cellar under the inboard half of the aft dinette seat. The cupboard above will be the veg store, also taking advantage of the cool air emerging from the bilge. This will, in addition, improve the air circulation under the cabin floor.

I think that’s all for this week: hopefully more changes will be visible in next week’s photos!

Later (14/11/09): we happened to walk past the yard on our way to get a paper today, and noted that they've taped poly over the porthole apertures for now, so as to be able to get on inside whilst waiting for the glazing Sikaflex to set.

The shell arrives

Well, we'e done it. The shell duly arrived at North Cheshire Cruising Club, was craned in and then towed by us (in incredibly wet weather) to Poynton. Graham Johnson from Priscilla very kindly turned out, went to Tim Tyler's yard and took some shots of the loading, then followed the trombo over the hills, taking more shots on the way, and finally recorded the tow. Here's one of us in mid tow:


Lots more like this on Flickr here.

Today we went and took the first of what we plan to be weekly sets of photos of the fit out. Here she is, waiting to be taken into the yard on Monday, for a start on battening and ballasting, before spray foaming the following week:



The full set is here.

We're hugely pleased with the shape of the shell. Not only has Tim given us a Josher bow, he's also put a decent sheer on the stern.

I'll try and post every Friday with the update photos.

Shell tow confirmed

I spoke to Peter Mason on his return from holiday today: the shell is definitely being delivered tomorrow. It should be arriving at North Cheshire Cruising Club at High Lane at half one, and be ready to tow by half two.

I hope to post some pictures on Friday (we'll be too excited tomorrow), and that excellent man Graham Johnson of Priscilla is going to take a load both of her going on the trombo at Tim Tyler's and of the craning, so may well be able to add some of those when I get them.

Only problem now; getting some sleep tonight!

Advice about the Hurricane

Derek Mills of NB Clarence gor in touch via the other blog, and has emailed me the following advice about fitting the Hurricane heater:

Re the Hurricane; It is excellent and we use the heat control in exactly the way you propose.

1 - The unit is however noisy, not so much in volume but in that it is at a much lower frequency (thrumming rather than whine) than say an Eberspacher and is therefore more noticeable further down the boat - we found however that some judiciously applied sound deadening mat on nearby bulkheads and on the underneath of engine room floor boards has worked miracles and we cannot now hear it at all further forward than the bathroom and it is quite possible to sleep through it although it might wake you when it cycles if you sleep lightly.

2 - Same thing with the pump, try and get Braidbar to arrange the system so that the pump is suspended by the plumbing (it is very light) rather than mount it with the saddle clamp onto a hard surface for the same noise transmission reasons. We are close to Calcutt currently and have checked all this with them and they are happy with what we have done re warranty etc..

3 - Don't have the remote switch unit in your line of sight at night because if it is active (and there is not much point in having it if it isn't is there :-) ? it has constant scrolling / writing display to tell you what it is doing and I suspect it would drive you crazy at night. It is still nice to have it within reach though. We have ours on the wardrobe return side and even there you can see the green ghost glow changing on the cabin side.

4 - An extra of our own, we plumbed in a length of Finrad into an extension of the circuit to the saloon radiator flow pipe, this we have boxed in (loosely) with a computer fan drawing air over this and out through a grill at feet level - it is totally invisible and what a difference to comfort - the fan can always be switched off and the heat from the finrad then dissipates through what is normally the air intake when the fan is on.

5 - I think you have covered this but there will be an aquastat to switch on the pump when the engine gets up to temperature in case you want to run the system with the boiler off - If you don't have a switch in the aquastat feed to the control unit, the pump will run when the engine gets warm and the radiators will be hot in summer - great at the moment though when you don't need the full boiler temperature in the day. There are other ways around this but the switch is the easiest I think.

I'm very grateful to him for this, naturally, and will pass it on to Peter Mason in due course.

Delivery Date

I just heard from Peter Mason today that Tim Tyler has confirmed Thursday 5 November as the delivery date for the shell. It should arrive at North Cheshire Cruising Club at High Lane at around 1 pm, and we'll be towing it round about 2, I would guess.

I'll take a load of pictures, naturally, and probably post them here on the Friday.

Plans

Not a lot ot say this week. Hopefully the baseplate was laid on Monday.

I've finally uploaded the two plans I've got to Flickr.

One is the original sketch, which is right in the main outlines, but a lot of the detail has and will change as we go. In addition, the precise proportions have changed a bit. Here it is:


The other is the shell drawing as sent to Tim. That's changed a bit too, since we are now having the Josher bow, which will take up another 6 to 9 inches of the well deck. It's not a brilliant scan, but the best I can do.

When they start actually fitting out, I'll try and get a scan of the working drawing to add to the set.

Tim Tyler Turns up Trumps

We finally had the phone call from Tim Tyler yesterday afternoon. He apologised for the delay in building our shell and indicated that he’d like to offer us something extra in by way of recompense. Since Sanity Again will have quite a long bow and well deck, he suggested that instead of the planned standard bow, he should make a Josher style bow.

This is a very generous offer, since we’d normally have to pay quite a bit more for the more sophisticated steel work. Needless to say, we accepted with alacrity.

The revised schedule is for the base plate to be laid next Monday and the shell should be ready by the end of the month according to Tim. Realistically, this means it will probably be delivered during the first week in November.

Meantime, most of my energies have been directed at the Mac Mini. I’m moving from a 16 bit PowerPC iBook running Mac OS 10.4.9 to a 64 bit dual core Intel processor Mini running Mac OS 10.6.1, so it's quite a jump.

I’m pleased to say most of the applications I use have transferred successfully. Adobe Photoshop Elements 4 resisted initially, but throwing away the preferences file and reinstalling did the trick. Cheetahwatch, the little signal strength app for the Huawei modem, and calibre, the e-book library and file conversion app, have completely failed to perform despite downloading their latest versions.

My copy of Dreamweaver MX 2004 also flatly refuses to run. Checking the various Mac forums showed that these are all known problems, mostly relating to the 64 bit architecture.

I’m presently exploring alternatives to Dreamweaver; the Mac came with iWeb which seems to be good for uploading new stuff from Pages or Text Edit to a website, but not for editing existing stuff like the site at www.nbsanity.me.uk. Further progress with this will be reported here in due course.

Meantime, Sony has at last released a version of its e-book library software which will allow the Reader to be seen on a Mac. What it doesn’t have is calibre’s file conversion facility which is very useful for handling books we download from the Project Gutenberg sites.

Meantime, of course, we still have all the facilities of the iBook, which I’ve now got connecting to the internet via the Mini reasonably reliably, so none of this is a major problem.

Readers of the other blog will know that I’ve also got photo uploading sorted, so once I start taking pictures of the build it will be possible to show some here and put more extensive sets up on Flickr.