A Bulkhead Takes Two Days
I’m spending days drawing and checking each bulkhead so it fits my hull, with only eight sheets of 12 mm plywood available and no room for mistakes.
You probably wonder - “what is the problem to draw few bulkheads and cut them out! Why she is taking so long!” Well, today might serve as a case study. This one sheet of 12 mm plywood is keeping me busy second day in a row. The largest part of it - bulkhead number 6 - was drawn yesterday and it took only some 5 hours :) I started after lunch and finished after 7pm. Today I have already spent 5 hours on bulkhead 7 and half of bulkhead 5 (half as the second part of it is actually a mast beam knee on the other side of the hull. It is not connected to the opposite side except for the lower hull part of the bulkhead- it is simply right in the middle of the main cabin). I still need to draw mast knee which goes on the same sheet of plywood. It will take another couple of hours.
Why so long? Well, you remember that I mentioned slight differences between the ideal hull from the plans and mine? I said I’m going to check and re-check every single bulkhead - and that takes a moment while you are drawing them. The differences are minimal (which still surprises me a lot) and these few millimetres at the top of the hull level are easy to incorporate into the bulkhead to ensure good fit - but it takes time to make sure I’m not making some mistake in the process.
On top of that i cannot afford mistakes. Never mind the cost of one sheet of 12mm Lloyd certified plywood (which isn’t small!) - I simply have 8 sheets of it which is EXACTLY what I need for the hulls (rest of it is used on the deck pod, engine boxes and sleds and other stuff between the hulls). So any error here means I have to wait for plywood to finish fitting out the upper hulls… no pressure whatsoever! 😳
#tiki38 #buildingwharram #theseanation #allelectricboat








