Bob Oram’s two week visit ended too quickly, however the progress made whilst he was here was a great motivator to keep building happening at a respectable pace. The weather is beginning to become unbearably tropical as we enter our “build-up” season, and we are racing to complete the shell so that we may fit a domestic window-mounted 1.5hp airconditioner into one of the hatch openings. Then we can continue working inside the boat, despite the temperatures hovering over 36°C and the humidity in the high 90%.
We slid the two (now joined) roof panels into position. Using ratchet straps we pulled down the roof sides to meet the cabin side walls and secured them with long plasterboard screws through ply offcuts. Importantly, a single screw was used to hold the forward edge of this roof panel to the centre of the temporary beam running fore/aft down the middle of the boat. This screw remained secure whilst Tom backed off the rear screws and jacked the panel up a couple of centimetres to allow application of glue between it and the top edge of the back cabin bulkhead. Then it was lowered and screwed back down, so that we could tape the join.
Before Atticus went away on a cadet camp, he helped lift the third panel on top of the boat.
The front cockpit still required work before positioning this third panel – round-over of inside corners and taping.
Tom chamfered the forward edge of the the existing roof panel before we brought the third panel alongside it. This was to allow the join to be glue-filled from the top.
He rigged up a combination of slings and ratchet straps over the entire roof and under both hulls, which allowed him to singlehandedly torture the roof panel into shape. The following short video of this process has an added bonus of the siren of the Bushfire Council’s control and command aircraft flying overhead, alerting rural residents to a threatening grassfire.
Then he screwed ply strips along the entire underside of the join to bring the two edges flush with each other.
We then taped the panels together, top and underside, and declared that Binary had a roof! Albeit a huge ungainly rectangular roof for the moment.
Once the roof tapes had cured, we backed off the straps and screws, and jacked up the forward section of the roof sufficiently to squeeze glue between it and the tops of the front cockpit walls. Then it was lowered, strapped and screwed back down, so that we could tape the walls to the roof.
Now we have a Tardis!
The Scrumble Project 