Cabin sides and portholes

Next was to install the cabin sides. Before I could do that, I had to figure out what I was going to do for portholes, as well as get the cleats installed on bulkheads 2, 3, and 4 in prep for the cabin sides.

Portholes

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I looked briefly at some nice brass portholes, but decided against them. They’re all very expensive, and they honestly seemed like overkill for a 12’ boat. The scamp has pretensions towards being mighty, but it’s not mighty, that’s kind of the point. So custom portholes it would be.

I decided to make custom portholes myself. The basic plan for these was pretty simple:

• Get some pre cut 5" diameter pieces of plexiglass that are 1/4" thick - the same thickness as the plywood of the cabin sides themselves.
• Cut an ever so slightly larger then 5" hole in each cabin side for the porthole. Goal is that after coating the interior edge of the hole with both epoxy and paint that there’s just enough room left for the plexiglass to easily fit in there.
• Cut two round pieces, one each for the interior and exterior of the cabin side, that will be screwed together and form a “sandwich” that holds the plexiglass in place. I went for an inside diameter here of 4.5" (so 0.25" overlap over the entire plexiglass) and a 6.5" outside diameter (so overlap with the cabin side of 0.75" on all sides)

I used the same mechanism to cut the perfect circles as I did when cutting the hatch cover holes. You’ve just got to remember to cut the outside diameter first.

Figuring out how to exactly space the holes around the perimeter for the screws was a nice bit of a math trick that brought me back to grade school geometry.

Given that water could potentially get trapped between the two layers of the sandwich if the windows get splashed, I wanted to make sure that everything here is well sealed with epoxy (I could have designed in some drain holes, but decided not to for simplicity). That meant I needed to drill/fill/drill each of the holes for the portholes.

Turns out, I did this at least three times.

You see, when I first drilled the holes, I paid attention to whether I was working on the port or starboard side sandwich halves, but I didn’t mark the two halves themselves to make sure that I had the orientation to themselves perfect. And of course since I drilled the holes by hand they weren’t perfectly aligned either. And so after doing a cycle of drill/fill/drill I found that not all the holes I drilled secondarily were exactly through the epoxy plug because I hadn’t noticed that I had rotated the halves relative to each other. Oops.

I should have used the index marks at least from the beginning, would have saved me some work.

Cabin sides

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Now that the portholes and bolt holes were drilled in the cabin sides, it was time to install them. I decided to coat the inside of the cabin sides in three coats of epoxy before installing them, since it was going to be awkward to have to do this after installation.

I also needed to put some cleats up on the bulkheads to accept the cabin sides.

Now in dry fitting this all together beforehand, there was a quite a decent sized gap between the edge of the deck (which I had trimmed flush with the edge of the carlin) and the cabin side when installed against the bulkheads. It seems that the size of the “gutter” left on the bulkheads between where the carlins are installed and where the rise for the cabin side begins was too large.

In thinking about how to deal with this, I decided that rather then use a gigantic fillet of some kind, I’d just install my cleats a little proud of the bulkhead near the deck and have them gradually taper to flush at the top of each bulkhead.

How much to make them proud was a matter of dry fitting the cabin sides in place and then using clamps to put the cleats in and pushing on the cabin side to make it flush with the deck edge.

After bevelling the cleats a little bit to match the curve of the cabin sides, installing the cabin sides themselves was relatively straightforward.

You can see that I used a block with a screw as an extra clamp for the first cleat on both starboard and port. In fact I used two of these on the port side. I obviously pulled these after glue up and filled the screw holes.

I also choose to add in the little drainage hole. The plans do indicate this may not be necessary but I can’t imagine how, if you omit this, you don’t have standing water on your bow.

The cabin side top cleat

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The last bit needed before moving on to the cabin rooftop is to put a cleat along the outside edge of the cabin sides that can be used to attach the roof to. This turns out to be unfortunately less then straightforward if you use the kit.

As many people have noted before I discovered it, the sides of the cabin are cut a little too short - they don’t extend all the way up the sides of the bulkheads. If they did, adding a cleat would be a straightforward process of cutting a solid piece of wood, carving out one of the curves, and slapping it on there.

But since they’re lower, when building the cleat you need something:

• that extends out sideways from the top edge of each bulkhead, that can eventually be bevelled to match the slope of the roofline and serve as the attachment point for the roof
• extend down the edge of the bulkhead to the top of the cabin side, to fill in the gap that exists between the top of the cabin side and the top of the bulkhead sides
• notches out and down the cabin side further, overlapping the top edge of the cabin side, in order to provide more “meat” for the cleat and the cabin top to bind to.

And to make all of this slightly more difficult it’s a compound curve - it curves in two planes as it goes from the front to the back of the cabin side.

I decided to not worry about having the cleat match both curves on the bottom edge - it’s going to be flat on my boat. For the top edge, I needed measure the gap that needed to be filled in above the top of the cabin sides.

I started down the path of using a solid piece of cedar, marking out the curve, and then removing material the thickness of the cabin side below it. This would give me a single piece that would fill the gap, sit down overlapping the cabin side below the gap, and could be bevelled on top.

In doing this though I couldn’t find an easy way to remove that material. I was working at it with a chisel but found I didn’t quite have the patience to really tackle this.

So I decided instead to build the cleat in a different fashion.

First I’d plane a piece of cedar down to the same thickness as the cabin side plywood, then I’d cut out the right curve to match the cabin side top, then glue it to a thicker piece of cedar that would be the main cleat, and then glue the entire assembly on to the boat. So not a single piece of wood, but only a single epoxy glue line (which we all know is stronger then the wood itself), and much easier to make in this two piece fashion.

I don’t have any pictures of the tracing or the cutout (done with a bandsaw), but in the below picture you can see the finished glued-up cleat ready to be installed.

Once the two pieces were solid as one, gluing them on to the boat itself was simple.

Once this dries I’ll need to bevel the top edge and take out a little material in the middle to match the dip of the cabin roof top, but that shouldn’t take long with a spoke shave in hand.