For the past two weeks, John has been working on building the cockpit and cockpit combing. On Friday, he took the completed cockpit apart so he could coat it in Smith’s CPES before it is permanently installed. The combing was coated with CPES inside and out as it was built. The inside of the combing also had red lead painted onto the wood strategically to help prevent rot.
While both David and John prefer power tools, many parts of the cockpit fitting required the use of hand chisels. Here, in the pic below, John is finishing up a rabbet on the “inside bottom” of the cockpit combing. This rabbet will sit atop a cleat that is already fastened to the deck beam carlin along the cockpit sides.
The cleat that all the combing parts are attached to is quite an impressive bit of Sapele woodworking in its own right. We’ll never see it after the combing is installed. Like so many parts of the boat, the woodworking is really lovely, but quite invisible when done. Here, John is putting lots of TREMCO bedding under the cleat.
Below, John is putting TREMCO bedding on the already CPES’d Sapele combing before screwing it to the cleat.
Inside the cockpit, the seats are built over the fuel tanks; they have Sapele (Mahogany) framing and meranti 1088 marine plywood panels. In the pic below, you can see a detail of that construction as its going together. We used the old teak cockpit grates to make sure our “new” cockpit was the same size as the old. Under the floor grates, the new cockpit is framed of Sapele with marine ply panels.
The back corners of the cockpit combing are curved. Here, John is bending layers of Sapele around the corner for glue-up.
The combing interior matches the slope of the seatbacks so the seats are comfy. The combing also wraps around quite a bit of real estate as it encloses from the charthouse over the side-bridge decks and includes a seating area behind the helm.
Originally, Mahdee did not have a combing around her cockpit and had no side-decks along it; the cockpit had extra deep seats and went from covering board to covering board. We decided to add a combing and bring in the sides a bit to a more ergonomic seat depth. Mahdee’s cockpit was also very deep in that the sole was “low” so that only a very tall person could actually see over the charthouse. We raised the cockpit sole by about 5 inches and modified the seat height to match. Now there is space on top of the tanks for all the tank fittings (previously outlets were on the bottom of the tanks–a bit of a liability if the fittings sprung a leak). All the little changes made reduce the volume of water that the cockpit can take on in rough seas–even though the combing, of course increases volume… We used the book of SS Crocker’s designs to determine a “Crocker-like” design for the cockpit combing. We also looked at the cockpit designs of Crocker schooners Tyrone and Skookum III for inspiration. We’re happy with the results so far. We’ll post pics of the completed cockpit once it is reassembled this week.
