BoatBuilding - Finishing the Deck Structure! (EP73)

Hi, my name's Leo and I guess you know what I'm up to by now. This week I'm hoping to focus on the deck structure to get it finished off, bedded and fastened and take the cross-pulls out. First of all, while I'm figuring some of that stuff out, Pete and our new volunteer Clark are concentrating on fastening the build stringer, which we put into the boat last week, to the frames so that it's all finished off and we can take all the clamps out. The build stringer is fastened to the frames with 3 8 silicon bronze bolts. We're hammering the heads and threading the bolts ourselves because it's a lot cheaper than buying bolts, but also because you can make them the exact length and style that you like. We have tried making the head with a rivet set bit in an air gun, but actually for these particular bolts we found that hammering the head by hand is almost as quick and we get a better result. The next thing is for me to start working on the deck structure and what I'm doing here is correcting the shape of the carlins. Because we cut so many notches in them after we made them straight, some of the longer ones actually bent. So all I'm doing here is clamping them back into shape before I pre-drill the fastening holes before we take it all out and put it back in again. Hi everyone, my name is Clark. I actually live in town here and my work has significantly slowed down. I'm an airline pilot so I figured rather than just sit at home and do nothing, I can come out here and help Leo build a pirate ship and learn some cool skills to help me work on my own boat that my brother and I own. It's a 1965 Chris Craft. It's been in our family for upwards of 50 years. The first time I was ever out on it I was two weeks old. So it holds a place near and dear to both my brother and I's heart and so we spent a lot of time and money and effort trying to keep it up and make it look nice and rebuild it. All right, well it's time for a job that I've been looking forward to because I think it'll be very satisfying and that job is to chop off the top of the frame heads. We left all the frames long when we made them but it's going to be much easier to cut them short now before the deck structure is finally installed. Frame heads are often cut following the deck camber or flat even but they're also one of the first places that you'll find rot in an older boat and that's because their end grain is facing up and any fresh water that leaks through the deck is going to rest there and cause rot. So I think a better idea is to cut the frame heads with a downward slope inboard and what that means is that the outboard edge of the frame is going to support the planks right up to the sheer but the rest of the frame head is going to have more space for air circulation which will help to prevent rot and also it should help to shed any fresh water straight off. For this job I'm going to be using this battery-powered Makita chainsaw and this tool was actually a very kind gift from my Amazon wishlist so thank you Randy. It's a small saw of course, it's got a lot of power for its size and it's very lightweight so it's perfect for a job like this. I've actually already modified this one by drilling a couple of holes in the bar here and screwing an old piece of wood to it. It's not very scientific but it should help me get nice clean straight cuts on the frames because this piece of wood is going to rest on the top inboard edge of the beam shelf. I'm going to point the blade to a mark that I make on the outboard edge of the frame and I should be able to just slide it straight across and cut that frame head off. What's going on Pete? Right here? Yeah, what's going on? This here? Yeah. I'm chamfering all the deck beams so we're doing final touches before install. They're all getting chamfers on their bottom corner so when you hit your head on them it doesn't hurt so so bad. Softening the edges, one last sanding. We're blowing them off, wiping them down. We'll slap a couple coats of sealer on and get them in the boat early next week. Permanently in the boat early next week. What are you up to, Clark? Sanding. Oh yeah. After Pete does his thing, I sand, make it all smooth and pretty. And then blow it off, as Pete so eloquently put it. And then wipe it down and take it inside. Nice. Is it past the test? I don't know, you tell me. Looks fine for me. No, I think it's good. So we've done quite a lot of prep work on the deck structure and the beam shelf to get it ready for installation and to make our lives easier later on. We gave everything a really good sand, the beam shelves and all the parts of the deck structure. We rounded off all the hard corners, that's just for the varnish. We sealed all of it with two coats of varnish sealer. We pre-drilled for all the fastenings and we painted all the joints in red lead primer. But now finally we're ready to install the deck structure for good. And with any luck, once it's in now, it's not going to be going anywhere for a long time except sailing, hopefully. The red lead primer is to prevent rot because these are all areas where fresh water could collect if there was leaks in the deck. The varnish sealer coat is really just to protect the wood. It's to help stop it checking so bad and it's to help it keep its nice color and to stop it from getting paint on it or knocks and scratches and so on. Eventually we'll be putting many more coats of varnish on it, but for now this just keeps the wood a little more protected and stable. Well, we finally got the deck structure bedded and fastened into place and it feels really, really good. The king beams are all bolted through the beam shelf and the smaller beams are screwed with some really hefty bronze screws into the carlins and the beam shelf. The only bits we haven't fastened yet are the carlins into the king beams because we're just waiting for the right length of screw to arrive. We haven't actually driven the bolts all the way home because once the cross-pulls are out, we're going to be putting a bead on the bottom corner of the beam shelf and the bolts, once they come through the beam shelf, will get in the way of the router. But the bolts, going almost all the way through the beam shelf, are holding everything together really securely. So now we can take the cross-pulls out and finally get a proper look at the interior of the boat. Okay, well, the deck structure is in, the cross-pulls are out, Tally Ho is holding herself together once again under her own timbers. We have a running joke around here, which is that whenever someone comes and looks at the boat you're working on, whether you're putting up the first frame or you're finishing the last bit of bright work, they'll look at it and they'll say, ah, she's starting to look like a boat. And we joke about that, but actually, right now, I really feel like suddenly, to me, she feels like a boat again, not a building site or a climbing frame or a wreck. Now she suddenly feels like a boat. I was standing in the bow, looking back, and I can imagine the boat, I can feel her crashing through the waves and what that would feel like, and it's really exciting. This project is completely funded now by people who watch these videos on YouTube, and I don't know how I would have got to this stage if it wasn't for their amazing generosity. So I'd just like to say a massive thank you to everyone for watching and following the project, and especially to those people who have donated or otherwise supported it. It just makes a huge difference, and it makes this possible. So thank you, and I'll see you guys next time.