fretwaterlines: Hatch Hatchy

This restoration stuff starts to run into a bit of money. Fortunately my friend Cort just send me a big bag of boatmen's bucks.

The Avery ladies came by a few times to work on the last of the bookshelf boat fleet. It's nearly done.

Up at the house, Secret Handshake opened a house concert.

Followed by the lead act, Growling Old Men. Such wonderful music all evening. I think the house loves to soak up those vibrations for later.

And I made a run to Apache Junction to give a lecture. According to my careful calculations, I was speaking to approximately 50,000 years' worth of humanity.

And back to work. With the hull stabilized we began framing it the hatches. I made a tough call on the accuracy of this restoration. The original side hatch lids were in the middle of the long side hatches. This meant they could not be opened with passengers onboard, leaving the boatman with nowhere to put things. And the hatches were very awkward to get gear out to either end of them. I went ahead and added a bulkhead, making two hatches out of each side hatch--a cargo hatch under the passengers, and a boatman's hatch to the rear of that.

Sometimes you just have to show those rusted in bolts who's boss.

The magic of storyboard spiling.

On with the decks.

And for the final mystery, off with the floor. What terrors lie within?

The boat looks pretty good, but the floor, which I'd really hoped to save with a few small patches, had a terminal case of the nasties. For about a foot in the center of the boat, the center ply of the plywood had failed. See all that black stuff? But the outer plies were fine on both sides. Deal breaker. Can't fix that. By the time we scarfed in a whole new center section and new ends, there wouldn't be much left but joints. The bummer is that is was defective plywood, not boat damage. If it had been good material to start with we could have kept it.

And here's a cool thing. The chine had been smashed in at some point, so they just filled in the entire depression with MarineTex and painted it. MarineTex is still available. Scary weird stuff. It comes in two containers--a gray putty sort of stuff in a big metal can, and a clear jar of amber colored gel. When you open the gel it starts visibly vaporizing. Freaky. Also it's super heavy and extremely brittle. Not really the best thing for patching wooden whitewater boats. But back when I worked for Martin Litton, we used tons of it.