With our great and unexpected success in removing the six, 3 to 4 foot long 3/4 inch bronze bolts that hold on the tailfeather and pull together the deadwood and keel, we now needed all of our stock of 3/4 bronze rod to make the new replacement tailfeather bolts. Meanwhile, we wanted to finish up the last floors and frames in the main cabin and forward. Floor 24 was made and ready to install. It originally had 3/4 inch bronze bolts holding it to the keel. The keel bolts were generally 3/4 inch diameter, but there were some 7/8 inch and 1 inch bolts. We had some left-over bronze in both of those two sizes. Frame 24 is a “fat” floor near the middle of the keel. It seemed the ideal candidate for an upgrade to 1″ bolts. Not only would this use up our remaining 1″ bronze, we would be able to postpone an order for more bronze rod. read more
Category Archives: Counter Timber
The next big job
The huge pile of supplies is dwindling as work progresses. We are basically out of purple heart for anymore floors. We have enough mahogany laminates for about 10 long frames and 10 short ones. We are out of silicon-bronze bolts for installing the last 4 intermediate frames we just finished laminating. We ran out of bronze rod for attaching floors, mast steps and keel fairings. The supplies we had ordered were just about enough to complete the floors and frames back to the cockpit. That was our plan, because we were uncertain about what we would do about the tailfeather/horn-timber. We have now decided to bite the bullet and replace the tailfeather. Read More
The counter timber photos…
There are some pics of the Mahdee counter timber on the “new” counter timber project page. We’ll be discussing the repair or (likely) replacement in upcoming posts. We’re running out of frames and floors to install in front of the counter timber and the yard carpenter is also running out of “whittling” to do.
Link to counter timber project–note the fullsize images are very, very, large
