These last few weeks have been a scramble. Inbetween trying to earn a living I have been grabbing whatever time I can in the workshop to get my boat ready for the coming season and I am not done yet. I am especially looking forward to getting the boat in the water this year as last year due to an unexpected extended stay in hospital I did not manage it although I did go boating on other peoples boats. Amongst all the painting and re-varnishing I have also undertaken a few upgrades. One of these has been a reconfiguration of the cockpit where I have been able to do away with one of the seacocks and install a sump pump to dispose of any water that finds it's way into the cockpit. All that has worked out really well and I am so far at least very pleased. The alterations also meant that I had to install a couple of water tight hatches in the cockpit sole and although they seem robust enough I am a little nervous about walking on them. I don't think that they would break but somehow the cockpit just does not look finished. So I have spent a long time agonizing over what I should do and I have decided to go down the route of the classic teak grating. I had some teak in the workshop left over from some other job so I have been turning that into the grating that you can see the start of above.
Teak is expensive stuff and not wanting to muck it up I have spent ages trying to work out the best way to cut out the notches for the slats. One way to do this is on a circular saw bench and I could have done it this way but it seems to slow and frankly not the best way to do it. I have some fairly sophisticated machinery in my workshop and after a lot of false starts and rethinks I feel that I have come up with a fairly fast and accurate way to cut out the nibs. It's late in the day and I am tired now so I promise to write more and include a sketch of the set up in the next day or two, even tomorrow if I get time. For now if any readers have made teak gratings I would love to hear how they did it for I am sure there is an even simpler way than my method.
Comments