Hatch Cover

Ten days ago I was away enjoying a few days sailing. On the last day I tried out the rope ladder that is supposed to make getting back on board possible; it is only a small sailing boat but has quite high freeboard. As expected the rope ladder idea isn't very good. When you put your foot on the bottom rung your foot goes under the boat and it requires a lot of upper body effort to counteract this. It was possible but I strainf all sorts of muscles in my body and arms! I will invent a better ladder!

When I got home and back to boat building the next job was to finish painting the outside of the hull. To make this easier I lifted the boat up onto two sawhorses. This was easy enough to do using a couple of chain blocks - no arm strength needed. Here it is:

The white undercoat needed a light sanding and you can see all the paraphernalia under the stern. I managed to do less than an hour before the clicking and grating in my shoulders and muscle pain made me stop. It is now a week later and I have just managed to do another half an hour on the sander. In the meantime I have been "resting" which is something that I am not good at.

To fill in the time (light duties) I finished the cover or lid for the access hatch in the stern deck. The hatch is there to allow access to the steering arrangements. The cover is 420mm outside diameter and I wanted to display the boat's name in it. Almost the hardest part of the job was deciding on a name! Not very original but I settled on "Lady Susan". This is a "gentleman's launch" and the gentleman often named the boat in honour of his wife so we have Lady xxxx. Susan was my late wife.

The outer ring is one piece of cedar. There is a 12mm thich plywood disc epoxied inside it and the inlaid pieces started out about 3mm thick before they were sanded flat. There about 60 pieces of inlay all cut out on my small CNC mill with a 1mm diameter end milling cutter. The timber came from the scrap box.

I also made a couple of name plates for the sides of the hull at the bow.

There are 3 of them because I made one as a test piece. It has a couple of imperfections so I made 2 more, neither of which were as good as the first one!