The bad...
In the previous post I mentioned that it had been both a good and bad week. I mentioned the good...now the bad.
As readers of this blog know I originally planned on building 'Natural High' in Thailand where I have a subsidiary of my New Zealand business so it was quite convenient in that I could visit the boat yard frequently.
I started construction there as planned but earlier this year I became somewhat disillusioned with this decision and decided to 'eat a considerable loss' and pull the hulls out of the yard and ship back to New Zealand for completion. One of the triggering points was that various parts of the vessel had obviously been build 'by eye' rather than using good boat building principles of string lines and ensuring everything was square.
I picked this up in Thailand when some nida-core furniture in the master stateroom was built and when I saw it I could see that everything was out of square. It turned out that the bulkhead that it was attached to was about 35mm out of square. The out of square bulkhead was not obvious until the furniture was attached.
I considered it was pointless in trying to have it corrected using the same tradesmen as they didn't seem to understand the importance of using 'squares' to line things up instead of just placing things where they thought it looked OK. In fact one part that they built which I had to have removed in NZ was so far out that I actually had to laugh about it. It was the runners for a drawer and they were on such an angle and not parallel that it would be impossible for them to perform the intended function.
Anyway, back to why this week has not been so good.
I was in the master cabin with my architect finalising the the layout for that cabin and deciding upon the best way to resolve the out of square bulkhead. We decided that the best solution was to put in a dummy bulkhead that was square and work from there.
Then the thought struck me...which I should have thought of earlier. 'duh' If the bulk head was out of square then the 'slot' for the cross beams may also be out. So, we took a line down the center of the hull and squared of the section for the cross beams. And, sadly it was way out. So, there would be no way that the cross beam would match up with the other hull. The photo shows a little of this.
As with everything on a boat one thing leads to another. It now looks like that not only we will have to rip that part of the hull deck out and rebuild it but also rebuild the aft end of the cabin as that is also out of square. So, all the fairing work and undercoating will have to be redone.
Only found all this out at the end of the day Friday. Early next week we will align the hulls and use stringlines and check out the alignment of all the other beam 'slots' and then make decisions which as to how best proceed.
I always say that making assumptions is a dangerous thing and in this case I ignored my own advice. I had assumed that the slots for the beams would have lined up and be square given it is such a basic requirement in boat building.
But, looking on the bright side...it was better that it was discovered now rather than after the hulls were complete and painted and then finding the cross beams would not line up.