A resource that I have found to be so valuable as to consider indispensable is Don Casey's book "This Old Boat". It has been incredibly helpful in almost every project on Dolphin. If you're going to be working on a boat then, unless you feel confident that you could write it, you probably need this book.
Be warned: Some of these are so simple as to be trivial, but I think that they're nevertheless worth recording.
"Wouldn't it be nice", I thought as I cleaned up, "if the desktop could be level when you need more counter space". It was a week or two later when it dawned on me that the answer to that problem was almost trivially simple.
All that I needed was a piece of wood and a couple of hinges. The wood has a length somewhat less than the width of the desk (not critical), a thickness of about a quarter inch (not critical) and a width that corresponds to the amount the front of the desk should be raised to make it level (critical). I had a piece of wood handy with a width about a quarter inch more than I needed, which left me with another piece about the width of the desk and a quarter inch square.
The drawing shows a side view of the addition to the front of the desk. The space between the desk front and the leveling piece is only shown to make it clear where one ends and the other begins -- they should actually be in contact so that the hinges (I used two) don't bear the weight of the desk lid. The small second piece of wood is there to make it harder for you to accidentally push the main piece in by requiring that the lid be lifted before folding the leveler away.
This quick and easy project has proved to be really useful and the cabin sole has been soup-free since I fitted it.
After I'd let the idea sit around for a while, another option presented itself when I found a local supplier for unfinished hardwood lumber. (If you're in the metro DC area, the supplier is Vienna Hardwoods, 241 Mill St NE, Vienna, VA 22180-4523, Phone: (703)255-9663). I was able to buy a couple of 2 by 6 (or 2 by 8, I can't exactly remember) pieces of iroko for $40. They had teak, but it was significantly more expensive and I decided that iroko would be just fine. I'm being vague about the size and amount of the lumber needed because it depends entirely on the size of the cockpit -- your mileage will certainly vary.
The width of each slat to be used for the grating was to be the thickness of the lumber. In this one project the El-Cheapo table saw that I'd treated myself to (just over $100) would have paid for itself if it hadn't already done so many times. I just set it up to make quarter-inch (or so) slices and turned the lumber into slats in a few minutes. After making the rough slats, finishing is up to you. I'm lucky to have a friend with a jointer who ran all my wood through it to make it nice and smooth. Sanding would take longer, but I think the result would be fine. For the slats that would be on the top, I rounded over the top edges with a small roundover bit in a router to give it a nice appearance and keep my feet happy.
As to the shape and size of the grating: Although Dolphin's cockpit is an unusual shape, I suspect there are very few cockpits that are entirely regular, so a template may be a good idea for most implementations. I used foam-core for this, although cardboard could work reasonably well as a final template (foam-core is the stuff that prints are mounted on and is available from art supply houses). I started with a paper template, worked through to cardboard and finally foam-core. I still had to make some adjustments to the grating when it was finished.
After carefully laying everything out on the template, I put it together using a wood screw (from underneath) and a waterproof (important!) wood glue at each intersection. The result seems to be easily strong enough.
So I made some.
Once again (like the cockpit grating) foam core was a good material for making templates for the finished product. This was particularly important because of the rounded cockpit with resulting weirdly-shaped seats. Start with cardboard as the rough template and use that to make the final foam core template. It's important to use closed-cell foam for cushions that will get wet.
For cover fabric, Sailrite is your friend. I used a waterproof vinyl, but would probably use exterior Sunbrella if I had to do it again. Although I can't promise you will find this job easy, I can promise that it's easier than you think. The only awkward bit is fitting the zips, and I might be tempted to use Velcro closures if I were doing the job again.
Even the piping around the edges is easy: double a strip of contrasting Sunbrella over a length of the thin nylon cord that you will find in any boat store (e.g. West Marine) and sew close to the cord using a zipper foot. Speaking of which, my sewing machine has a walking foot, which means that it pulls both sides of the work under the needle, not just the bottom as is done on a standard dressmaking machine -- this makes a huge difference when you are sewing canvaswork or other heavy fabric.
Any cooking area is short of workspace, so if there's an option of using the same space twice, I'll take that opportunity. This was a relatively simple piece of woodwork that I really had to work at before I could make it complicated.
Instead of just a single cover I hinged it in two unequal pieces so that I could hinge up the front and use the cooker or hinge up the back to get to the pot storage beind it. Also, I decided to cover it with formica, which was probably a really good idea but I ended up putting raised sides on it to protect the formica's edge. To stop the whole thing from swilling around on the cabin sole whenever the boat heeled I put a screw into the side edging of the cooker and drilled a blind hole into the cover. So now the cooker cover is the only thing that doesn't crash to the floor on a regular basis.
So I did something about it in a way that turned out to be rather easy. I was thinking about stitch & glue construction one day, and it occurred to me that it would be even easier, with simple objects, to skip the first stage. So I pulled out the table saw and a few pieces of plywood with nice looking surfaces and started making these racks. A coat of epoxy resin both made them strong and gave them a nice surface that was further improved by Cetol. Bingo!
It would be embarrasing if you knew just how easy these racks were to make once the epoxy was waiting in the cup and the table saw was ready, so let's just say that you really don't need to buy those expensive store-bought racks.
I was trying to come up with somewhere to keep the autopilot where it wouldn't be always underfoot, but would always be available. I couldn't come up with anything I liked, but my son, who was around eight at the time, came up with this idea that has worked superbly. The only problem is that it obstructs the opening of the port, but if the port should be opened we're probably somewhere that has the autopilot living on its mount in the cockpit. The other rack in this picture is for a GPS.
I needed a few more breakers than the boat's builder had allowed for. The electrical panel itself was a rather nice and surprisingly inexpensive item by Blue Seas. But where to put it? It turns out that a box to hold an extension electrical panel is actually pretty much the same as a rack, and can be made with the same no-stitch and glue method.
The same box gave me somewhere to mount the pump cycle counter.
Pump cycles are worth knowing about because they could give you warning of a leak. After working with computers for a long time, I've come to prefer electro-mechanical devices on the boat. A 12V cycle counter is fairly easily available from an industrial supply house like McMaster-Carr, but I found mine in the Radio Shack catalog and it seems robust.
It's simple to wire the cycle counter up to the float switch, and every time the bilge pump runs, the counter increments. So I never have to wonder whether the bilge pump was running every ten minutes for the last week. The counter sits next to the extension electrical panel.
The old sail cover was horrible. It was also an exercise in frustration stuffing the sail into it. When I put new sails on Dolphin I decided on a fully-battened main, and there was no chance that would fit in the old cover. So I ordered a sail cover kit from Sailrite. All that you have to do is take a few measurements, buy the kit and assemble it. Much easier than expected. The only possible advantage that I might have had over you is that I own a sewing machine with a walking foot, so that the fabric is pulled through at the top as well as the bottom. This was an easy project, and helped give me the confidence to tackle further projects like the bimini and dodger. It also means that when the time comes to make a repair, I know how to do it because I made the thing in the first place.
Oh, and I saved a bundle, too.
If you've been to a boat show you've probably seen the Dutchman system. A friend has that on his boat, and it's wonderful. It's also pretty expensive. With a fully-battened mainsail lazy jacks work really well on Dolphin. I looked at lazy jack kits, but they're pretty expensive, and I didn't particularly like the implementation.
Then I found this idea:
Although I ended up simplifying things, this was a good implementation. The only complication was going up the mast to put a couple of cheek blocks up there to anchor the lazy jacks. It's not perfect, of course. I have to be careful to be headed right into the wind as the sails go up to avoid having the battens foul on the lazy jack lines. But overall, it works well.
Eventually I sprang for roller furling. As with so many other things that are specified by the length of the boat, Dolphin needed something more than the suggested size, and I bought the ProFurl next-to-smallest system. It worked well. Fitting it was much easier than I expected in almost every way. "Almost" because I chose to fit it with the mast in place, and it was no great pleasure going up the mast to fit the pieces that needed to go up there. I bought a Mastmate mast ladder for just a bit less than it would have cost to pay somebody to do the job, and still think that I would rather climb a ladder than be hoisted up. I used a safety harness on a halyard and a linesman's belt, too.
It was a surprise to me (but perhaps shouldn't have been) that the distance from the top of the mast to the bottom is so much greater than the distance from the bottom to the top. Great view, though.
I understand why purists prefer not to use roller furling, but the convenience is wonderful, and I'm very glad to have it.
By the way, I sold the old sails through Bacon Sails in Annapolis. It took a while, but eventually I received what felt like a bonus check, and it's good to know that the old sails continued in a new life.
I had bent stainless steel tubing before, using a home-built bender (as described in This Old Boat by Don Casey) but had the frame for Dolphin's bimini made by Atlantic Rigging in Annapolis because I needed the size to be more exact than I expect to make. It was expensive, but they did a good job. The other (aft) end of the bimini is attached to tubing that is held by the boom gallows. The Sunbrella fabric came from Sailrite.
Sewing the fabric part of the bimini was rather easy, using instructions from This Old Boat, and was part of a larger project when I upgraded the dodger that had originally been fitted to Dolphin. The end result is very pleasing, and completely transforms the boat on a hot, sunny day.
By reducing it from three hoops to two, and adding some fittings, I was able to make the frame fold down. Unfortunately, it also meant that I couldn't simply pick apart the old cover and duplicate it in new fabric. So this became another project from This Old Boat, which contains all the instructions needed to make a new dodger.
Well, almost all the instructions. The book doesn't include what turned out to be a crucial section, that should have read "be sure not to assemble the panels back to front, because it won't fit, and working out what you did wrong will drive you nuts!". Other than that, the only comments I would make are that you probably need a walking-foot sewing machine for this kind of thing, and that making a pattern using thin plastic needs to be done on a day with no wind; "virtually no wind" isn't good enough (guess how I know).
This project is another one that will surprise you in several ways. The first surprise is the cost of having a dodger made for you, the next is that you will be surprised you could do it so easily (note that I do not say "quickly"). The final surprise will be when you're grouching to yourself about the imperfections in what you made, and then start looking critically at professionally-made canvas work.
Oddly enough, Dolphin's designer had not seen fit to include any sort of real table in the cabin. You could use the top of the captain's desk, although that would happily dump a bowl of soup on your lap unless you used my desk top leveller. There was, and still is, a sort of coffee table that attaches to the settee, but it's not very convenient. So after looking at a few boats at the Annapolis show I decided on a project that was rather ambitious, given my level of woodworking expertise.
The result is pretty good, and I'm proud of it.
The table is based on a half-sheet (I think) of good quality plywood, and the surface is Formica. The only tools I used that are in any way special are a table saw and a wallpaper steamer. (A wallpaper steamer? Read on...)
The pictures show just about everything needed to duplicate, and improve upon, what I did. All the fittings are available from West Marine. Cleaning up the edge of the Formica is easy with the appropriate bit on a router. I like the rounded shape, but made a mistake by not leaving gaps in the fiddle around the edge to make it easier to sweep crumbs off the table.
The wallpaper steamer provided steam needed to bend the wood that made the fiddle. PVC water pipe made a usable steam chamber, although it wasn't really usable as water pipe afterwards. Epoxy resin holds everything together every securely.
I consider the table a definite success!
The chain plates were of the normal interior type, passing through the deck and attached either to a bulkhead or to pieces of wood fiberglassed to the inside of the hull. The problem was that it wasn't only the chain plates that passed through the hull.
Yes, I know that the slots must be caulked to prevent the ingress of water. But it's almost impossible to do that, given the movement of the hull and deck. Worse yet is what happens to the water once it has passed through the deck. By the time I fully knew what was going on the bulkheads were damaged -- and that was the good part. Four of the chainplates had been attached by bolting them to pieces of timber, which were then fiberglassed to the inside of the hull. When I burrowed into their well-hidden locations I found what looked like giant insect coccoons attached to the hull. The worst of all was that there was absolutely no way of inspecting the condition without cutting them out!
Actually, I had a pretty good idea of their condition because some of the chain plates were higher than others. After cutting the whole sorry mess out I found that all four of the "coccooned" plates were no longer attached to the boat in any meaningful way because the water, having passed through the deck, had nowhere to go. The result was severely deteriorated chain plate mounts.
Well, drat! Then I looked at the fuss and bother required to get to those areas to fix them. Double drat!!
Having this problem fixed professionally was very attractive, but turned out to be unattainable. The very helpful professionals at Phipps Boat Works in Deale urged me to do it myself, and they told me the secret: A Fein Multimaster tool. This amazing tool is ridiculously overpriced, as are all of the blades and accessories, with the single redeeming feature that it all works superbly, and that much of what it does would be incredibly difficult any other way. That's not to say that spending too many winter afternoons contorted into various parts of boat interior was either pleasant or easy with the Fein tool in hand, but it was at least possible.
And then it was done. Six chain plates out of the boat. I have always though that external chain plates made more sense than hiding them, and I was able to speak with some boat builders who use them and saw nothing wrong with my plan. So Dolphin now sports a nice new set of external (where they should have been in the first place) chain plates. I had them made up by a local machine shop, longer than the old ones, to better spread the load. Surprisingly, the most expensive part of this project was having the new plates polished on all surfaces -- mill finish would have been fine functionally, but was just too ugly.
The mast had to come off for all this, of course, so I took the opportunity to replace the standing rigging
It's entirely possible that there was no urgent need to replace the original rigging. When it came off there were no signs of deterioration, but it was more than twenty years old and the new chain plates required slightly different shrouds anyway.
The supplies needed for this project came mostly from Rigging Only, who supplied good quality wire and the Hayn Hi-Mod swageless terminals that I had decided on at reasonable prices. They were also happy to cut each piece of my new standing rigging slightly over-length and swage an upper fitting onto each wire. I used a swaged fitting at the upper end bcause it was cheaper and because the upper fitting, facing downward, is not vulnerable to water being trapped in it and causing corrosion. I could then use a swageless fitting at the bottom to adjust the length.
Problems? None, really. I had learned from much reading that it can be difficult to cut the rigging wire without fraying. That turned out not to be an issue; after trying various methods, wrapping masking tape around the wire and cutting it with an angle grinder made that job trivially easy. Fitting the Hayn terminals is almost as easy as the documentation tells you it will be. The hardest part, in retrospect, was keeping track of which wire went where.
This is a job that I would have no qualms about doing again.