Having a fight with Meself.

I’m almost done with the big plywood aspect of the interior lining throughout the boat. Well, clearly that’s a rubbish statement, as it doesn’t include a myriad of future projects like boxing around tanks, bathroom subfloors and built in furniture. But since none of those things actually exist yet I can conveniently ignore them and say, aha yes- for now I’m almost done with plywood. This is good because I’m bored, bored, bored of working with the stuff. Each time a piece is templated, cut/planed/sanded and finally into position I experience a deflating sort of miniature anticlimax. This can be attributed to the idea that although getting every one to fit tight is an achievement one part of my brain won’t be fooled, merely confirming to itself that the panel just looks the way it always thought it would. After all, the desired result is large featureless areas of blank lining, and that’s what you got. Another part of my brain demands to know why all the usual boaty excitement buttons are getting really hard to push, and threatens to sabotage the whole day by wandering off and getting distracted by something completely frivolous. A third part has had to learn to ignore the constant bickering and quietly do-the-dance-to-attract-pencils ready for the next piece instead.

An Experiment.

I’m almost ready to begin cladding out the interior hull sides of our vessel, and am keen to maintain the lovely shapes that they describe. I’ve also been spending a bit of time thinking about how to do lately (it’s called daydreaming I think). So on Sunday morning, more or less while I waited for coffee, I pinned this lot to the hull side in the forward accommodation. It’s just a couple of packs of the cheap 8mm thin rubbish from wickes thrown up with complete disregard to where the butted joins fall, but two cups of coffee later, it seemed to answer the following questions.

1) Will the wooden panelling happily follow the original sweeping platelines in wendy’s steelwork, which I handily remembered to mark on the battens down one side before she was sprayfoamed?
A) So far so good, I need to go have a play in the engine room to be absolutely sure though…

2) Do all the battens fair up nicely in relation to one another, or will I need to fart around with them too?
A) Buggering hell, there’s always one.

3) My, this wickes panelling is certainly very cheap, so is it really too thin, or am I just overimagining things again?
A) Nope, it definitely is too thin. And also appears to be made from balsa.

That was fun. Next please.