Floor #3 - final fitting
It is still tricky to drive through this huge amount of melting snow and ice on the road but I was eager to try the floor timber assembly on Meritaten.
Besides - I was about to meet Jim who took over from Börje the big, beautiful Laurinkoster beside Meritaten.
Once I finally arrived I set up improvised workshop under the boat. As expected, the floor timber assembly was slightly too wide so I needed to gradually remove wood from some places for getting it fit nicely.
During last week I’ve prepared the bottom part with drilled 20mm hole, following my measurements and patterns. I’ve used a proper, heavy duty drill press for getting accurate positioning and angle.
Now comes a moment of truth: does pre-drilled hole match the keel bolt hole on the boat.
Well, not too bad for flimsy cardboard patterns - I’ve missed by less than 1mm!
That’s nothing to sweat about, I can adjust the position of final drilling through the whole timber to accommodate for that.
I could now move on to shaping the rest of the assembly. Pencil lines helped in guiding high-speed, aggressive grinder.
In the end I got snug fit but after a while I figured that it should not be too tight - after all, this component will also swell and expand during its lifetime. The last thing I want is that it pushes out the garboard and causes a leak!
The role of floor timber is to hold both sides of the hull together and transfer forces between frames (pulling up and away) and ballast keel (pulling down). It is attached to keel timber and ballast keel with keel bolt going thru it. It then holds garboard plank with bronze screws and frames which are cross-bolted with rivets or machine screws, also in bronze.
The bigger the floor the better it functions in distributing these huge loads.
Having that in mind I’ve shaped it little more so that I don’t need to hammer it down for tight fit. It should rest on keel timber and leave as small gap to the freeboards as possible. Inevitable air gaps will be closed by bedding compound during assembly - to inhibit moisture accumulation and resulting rot.
So finally it sits in its place!
What is left now is to glue the very bottom, pre-drilled part. Learning from experience of sliding wood blocks on slippery epoxy I’ve made 2 wooden dowels which act as guiding pins.
The glue will set overnight and then, after final cleaning of the assembly, I will measure and drill keel bolt hole through the whole thing.
