- [Pascale] Hi guys.
I'm in the final stages here
of cleaning up, sanding
and just prepping this space,
because this is our all new quarter berth.
But it wasn't always like this,
so let us take you back in time
to two months ago,
when we first started
fixing these things up.
(gentle percussion music plays)
- Welcome to Free Range Sailing.
For those of you that are new here,
our boat Mirrool is a Clansman 30.
She's a fiberglass, 30 foot masthead sloop
built in New South Wales in 1969.
Troy bought her seven years ago
in Cairns and sailed her around
the top of Australia all the way to Perth.
Three and a half years ago,
we sailed north from Perth
to circumnavigate the
Australian continent together,
filming our cruising adventures
and attending to any essential maintenance
along the way.
We are currently in lockdown in Tasmania,
the southernmost part of the continent,
where we've decided to carry out
a long overdue refit.
If you want to be notified
of all our weekly refit videos
over the coming months,
make sure you subscribe to our channel
and hit the bell button.
Previously on Free Range Sailing,
we showed you the state
of our rotten plywood
and water damaged lockers
in our quarter berths.
Last week, as part of the overall
demolition process, Troy removed
the rotten ply using a multi tool,
keeping a nice inch-wide fiberglass lip
ready for us to place the new floors in.
With the old ply removed,
there was more room for us to work.
The next step was to transfer the line
of the hull onto a strip of MDF
in order to get the correct shape
for our new quarter berth floor.
Here, Troy is using a compass
with the arm set at the width
of the greatest gap so the needle
is following the contour
with the pencil recording the path.
That line gave us an accurate guide
to cut out the thin shape of MDF
to the contour of the hull.
The final touches and shaping
were done with 80 grit sandpaper.
- [Troy] As long as the corners
of each side of these
are at the corners where I want them,
then this only has to register
against that surface,
and these take care of the other corners.
So we'll just make that 700.
Using a right angle to cut
that was totally unnecessary,
the corners are already sorted out here,
so all I need to do is put that down
so that the contacts
and lines up with the
corners here and there,
just so that line is continuous,
and there's our template.
- [Pascale] Hot glue is a
quick and convenient tool
for making templates with MDF.
- [Troy] This MDF didn't
come as sheets like this.
It was like that long,
but 60 centimeters or 600 wide,
and our friend Peter was gracious enough
to allow me to use his table saw,
so I just ran a whole
bunch of these into strips.
So we'll be able to do this,
and I'll be able to make a template
to determine the size of the plywood
cutouts that are going into here,
and then I'll be able to make them
and the hatches that open
away from the boat.
I'll be able to take these templates
and that'll all be really great.
Once I'm done with that,
I don't need to throw these away.
I can undo the hot glue,
you know, like a paint
scraper or a chisel,
undo it all, and then use it again
for when we're making our cabinetry.
MDF is medium density fiberboard,
so it's not cardboard,
it's made out of wood pulp,
but it's very dimensionally stable,
and it's easy to cut
and it's easy to sand,
so it's really ideal for
making these templates.
So rather than thinking of templates
as like a solid shape,
exactly like the finished product,
if we think that we only
just need the outline,
you can just get away with these strips.
Of course, when it's all made,
I'm gonna just need a few
bracing strips across,
all right, to make it a little bit solid
so it's easy to transport
and this stuff is really great
because you can make notes
all over it as well,
and we'll be doing that, okay.
Once this is all glued up,
then we'll write a whole bunch of notes
and we'll see if we can
get this out in one piece.
So there's basically
a quick way of just making up a template
so now I know that that, when it's cut out
on the bends or on a bit of plywood
will all be accurate.
This bit here I just need to cut that off,
I just wanted to make
that relatively square,
and it was relatively easy,
and we didn't have to depend very much
on measurements.
So remember back in the
old days of carpentry,
a lot of carpenters,
they didn't use numbers,
and a lot of them were illiterate,
so they used story sticks,
they actually put marks on a stick
and carried it and cut
everything to pieces.
So this is sort of a modern variation
on the theme.
We're laying out these,
purely to trace the outline,
and then we can take this off
and we can cut it into our expensive
marine ply, this is cheap stuff.
Make all your mistakes on the cheap stuff.
[gentle guitar music plays]
- We've made our plywood templates,
they look a bit rough at the moment,
don't they, because they had to fold them
to get into that crazy little hatchback
we've been given,
and, while we're on the theme
of people helping us out,
this is Lance.
(laughter)
- [Lance] Hi.
- We don't want to give him
too much camera shock at the moment,
but this is a great workshop
you've made available to us.
We really appreciate it.
- That's okay.
- So you've set all this up
yourself over time, and
just add to it when you can?
- Yeah, over several years
and keep the Gumtree alerts active,
and when something comes up
that we've been looking for,
at a good price, we snap it up.
- You'll have a whole bunch
of people on Gumtree now.
- Yes, that's right.
- [Pascale] Lance's woodwork shop
is comprehensive, well laid out,
and all of the machines
have been meticulously set up,
which took a lot of the challenge
out of doing a reasonable job.
- You can see the ply is not long enough
for the stencil,
but we have a cutting scheme,
we've already cut one before,
where these quarter berths will go,
there's a little divider that makes up
the various compartments,
so we're going to just cut
it where it rests on one of those dividers
and I'll be putting a
support in and they'll join
when we put some fiberglass in there
and you never know.
(gentle guitar music plays)
- [Pascale] With the
panels cut to the size
of the compartments,
we needed to make hatch openings
for locker access.
We'd taken a measurement
of where each compartment's bulkhead was,
and we just transferred that onto the ply
to establish where to cut.
With the lines accurately marked out,
we planned to use two
saws to make the cuts,
starting on the straight cuts
by plunge cutting with a circular saw,
and then the curve cuts using a jigsaw.
With the first hatch lid cut,
it was time to quickly measure out
and repeat the process
for the remaining three hatch lids.
- What I want is the
same in from each end,
not necessarily the top.
Instead of measuring each time,
I just find it's easier to find something
that I can measure once and adjust it
and set it nice and firmly,
and then just mark it off.
What it does,
is it speeds your work up,
avoids errors creeping in.
I'd like to be able to just,
the ultimate of no errors at all
would be to just lay one straight on,
but they're two different things,
they're two different sides,
they're two different sizes of a Clansman,
or the same Clansman,
but everything is just totally different.
Because what they did with the Clansman,
they built it of course in the mold,
and they just put workers
in there and said "righto, build it up"
and they got ply and
they just glassed it in.
So, depending on the sort of day they had,
was how square everything is.
We're having a great day,
so we'll try and make it a
bit squarer than they did.
All I need now is something
that's pretty straight.
That side has bad side,
so we use the other side.
All right, and I want the hatch
to be 400 millimeters.
It's an arbitrary number,
but suffice to say,
I'm going to find where
400 is, 40 centimeters,
400 millimeters, and rather
than put that blunt side
and just sort of try
and put it on that mark,
if you've seen some of our videos before,
you'll know what I'm gonna be on about.
I prefer to put the 400 on the mark,
where I'm measuring from,
and I've got a nice hard metal edge
that I can run a pencil on.
It's probably going a
little bit overboard,
making some lockers for a boat,
but if you try really hard
to do the best you can,
even if you screw up
you'll probably just get good enough,
whereas if you just try to slap together
some good enough job,
it could end up anywhere.
There we go.
So the other thing that we want to do now
is some nice round corners,
had those two things,
it's a nice smoother cut,
it does three things, it looks better,
it's smoother to cut,
but also, on a boat,
any time you have a
sharp 90 degree corner,
or even more acute,
stresses will concentrate there,
and you'll get a crack leading off.
And in fact, if you're on a steel boat
or an aluminum boat, more particularly,
if you see a crack leading,
what they'll do,
is stop that crack with a drill hole,
with a round hole,
and that distributes the forces.
I just want a 40 mil radius bend
going around there.
Do you remember how to construct
those sort of things?
It's not hard.
So we'll just go back for a visit
back to primary school geography,
we'll go to the apex of the corner,
and we'll mark out 40 mil at one leg,
40 mil on the other leg,
and that gives us a spot
where we can draw arcs from,
and where they coincide,
we can just put our compass,
and draw in our round corner
that we can follow with our saw.
- [Pascale] Is that geography
or geometry?
- Geometry.
(laughter)
I'm a sailor, I need to know geography.
All right.
I've labeled it, port up.
You can't put enough labels on things.
You can look at that jumble there
and get pretty confused,
so make sure you just scribble over
everything, it's going to be a pain over.
To do our plunge cut,
what we need to do is get a nice,
this is quite a fancy fence, isn't it?
Look at that.
Furniture grade fence,
and I'm just going to set it up.
Circular saws, if you didn't know,
this one's been marked 40 millimeters
from the edge, they usually
have a rounded figure,
and it's usually known,
and that means you can set a fence
from a distance of a line you want to cut
and run along, get a nice straight cut.
So, once again,
we've got our things set for 40,
and that means we can just lay it on there
and actually get something firm
to but the fence up against,
rather than a pencil line
that you just sort of get it at, you know.
(upbeat music plays)
- [Pascale] Once Troy had made the cuts,
I cleaned things up
using this belt sander.
A really great refinement
was that Lance had
connected a dust extractor
to all of his machines.
- Okay, cuts are all done.
So now what we're going to do
is just cut some strips
that are 60 millimeters wide by 300 long.
(saw whirs)
- [Pascale] We cut the supporting strips
on the table and drop saws
and then rounded over the edges
on the rounder table.
Back at the boat,
we did a bit of custom fitting
and measured up support base
for filling into the locker bulkhead.
- When we were talking
about where I was going to brace it,
and, incidentally, join these panels,
this is where, there's that divider there.
So it's a half inch down.
It will be resting on there,
and that will make that
a solid connection.
- [Pascale] Yep.
- That can be screwed down and glassed in
and when those go on top of there,
it will join it all up
and it will support it
and it will be a very
strong quarter berth.
Now these pieces here
that we're using for the lip,
are 60 millimeters.
So I'm marking in 20 from here,
and I'm marking in 20 from here,
and this line
is where I'm going to be
putting in screw holes,
and this line is to line up with the lip.
So what that'll end up is, one third
will be sticking out,
and halfway between the two bits
that are in there,
is where the screws will be,
so there will be plenty of meat in there.
So just setting up my veneers as 20,
it just speeds up the layout really well.
- [Pascale] What's that tool for?
- That's a little center punch.
Normally, a spring loaded center punch
like that, you would use in steel work,
but I've backed it
right off, just for ply,
but when you hear that little crack,
you know that it's made
a little hole in the timber,
and that little hole in the timber
makes it really easy just
to locate the drill bit,
see, doesn't go anywhere.
So now that I've got those layout lines,
all I have to do is match up
that middle line,
which is the middle of this piece,
with that middle line,
which is the middle of that gap,
and I know that if I have
that line there matched
with that edge,
then this line here will be in the middle.
So I'm just pre-drilling all of these now,
because later on when I assemble it,
I'll be giving everything a smear
with epoxy glue and then I'll be screwing
it together with some eight gauge
three and a quarter screws.
This bit, even though it's getting
a bit blunt now, as it drills,
it counters in ready for screws.
(drill whirs)
(gentle guitar music plays)
- This will make it a bit quicker
for lining up.
I've also got my drill bit,
and I just drop it down one of the holes.
- [Pascale] Oh, and you put the bit
in underneath it to hold it.
- Yeah, so it makes life just easy
to definitely, absolutely line up.
- [Pascale] Yep.
- But what I'll do
first is just stick some
of that nice thickened
epoxy on there as a glue.
(gentle guitar music plays)
- [Pascale] When we returned to the house,
Troy got busy giving the panels
a coat of polyester resin.
- [Troy] All the layouts been done,
we've constructed them pretty much,
and now I'm just,
before we go on,
they're getting a coat of polyester resin.
It's cheaper than epoxy,
and the adhesion on timber
should be pretty good.
So we're just sealing the timber,
making it sort of watertight
before installation and paint.
- [Pascale] Before we installed
the newly resined quarter berth floors
and locker lids,
I gave the inside of the lockers
a thorough sanding and wash
and then applied a couple of coats
of alkyd enamel primer and top coat.
- Now the quarter berth timber,
it's all been cut and glued
and screwed into place.
Underneath this timber lip,
you know, the timber quarter berth
that we've put in,
obviously I didn't paint
that before I put it in,
and the reason being is because we used
two part epoxy to not only screw it
but glue it down to this
fiberglass tab here,
and that's where a lot
of the strength was,
there's like an inch
thick filet underneath it,
it's really strong.
So we've secured this down,
but there is going to
be a little gap here,
so what I've done is gone and just
got that expanding polyurethane
foam that's in a can,
and just squirted it in the gap here.
I've done that because I
just want a lightweight
and quick way to fill that gap
without using too much epoxy,
because the strength has
come from the already
existing tab, so this is just to fair it
and give it a nice lead into the hull
so it makes the repair
more or less invisible.
(mellow guitar music plays)
So this is what we've got
after I've cut it with the knife.
- So I've just finished
sanding in the wall here
of our quarter berth,
we didn't film it on camera
but we glassed in the edges here
that Troy had filled in with that foam,
so we put strips of fiberglass
and thickened epoxy over it,
and I've also been sanding
that using the orbital sander,
but also using the multi tool
with the sanding attachment,
which is really fantastic,
it's a little triangle attachment.
So using that just to fair back
the floors of these quarter berths,
so that the join's sort of seamless,
ready for the first coat of primer,
of alkyd enamel primer,
and then a coat of top coat.
I think actually, I might
do two coats of primer
and two coats of top coat
just so it's really tough.
We actually already painted
the wall on this side a bit earlier,
and that way Troy could install
some conduit in there
so that the wire runs and everything
that goes back to the stern,
so that's mainly like our solar wiring,
and also autopilot and deck light,
so that could run back
in a nice, neat, clean finish.
So I'm here, right aft,
and you can see where our new flooring
has gone in, our new really thick
piece of marine ply,
and we've put thickened epoxy in here,
and some layers of glass,
and more thickened epoxy,
and I've fared that
back with the multi tool
and the orbital sander, ready for paint.
It's not a perfectly smooth finish,
but it is the quarter berth,
and it is going to have
a mattress sitting on top of it,
so I mean, and the rest of the boat,
the finish of the boat is rough anyway,
so we're not going crazy,
or getting all pedantic
about fairing this perfectly,
yeah, you can see the rise there,
so, she's nice and strong now,
she's not going anywhere,
and I'm lying on top of
one of the hatch lids,
and there's another hatch lid behind me.
(gentle guitar music plays)
Really hope you enjoyed
the episode this week,
and if you did, it really helps us out
if you give it a big thumbs up.
It kind of gives us exposure
to a broader audience and
like minded people also.
And if you haven't already,
please subscribe to our channel,
that really helps us out too,
and if you hit the bell button,
you'll get notifications
to keep up to date
with everything we're up to
and our new releases.
I'd also like to say a massive thank you
to Lance and his family
for letting us use the workshop space.
We're gonna be going back
there a lot over the coming weeks
as we fix up and do the
interior of our sailboat
so there's lots
to look forward to on Free Range Sailing
I'm really excited to share with you guys
the transformation of the
inside of our sailboat.
It's been a really amazing journey.
So stick with us,
more coming your way,
also a massive shout out and a massive
thank you to all of those of you
who supported us on Patreon and PayPal,
we couldn't have done
this refit without you,
so from the bottom of our hearts,
we are really grateful.
Thank you and see you next week.
(gentle music plays)
