Re-building my Ketch Tonga (1960)

[Phil Y]

In the original configuration maybe they were not notched because the didn't need to be, if they were just there as a belt and braces reinforcement for any aftward forces transmitted from the Samson post. Now you have a 30mm deck I don't reckon you need them at all.

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[Dody]

Hmmmm, all of you, John, Rumars and Phil, good thoughts ...

Could that have been installed later? In Theory yes - if I don't take into account that before the changes I made access was next to impossible from below. Unless of course they did that the moment when they changed the stern. Some of you might remember that the "negative" stern Tonga had originally was actually something that was added to the "positive" stern Tonga had when she was launched. At that moment they would have had to open the last part of the deck which would have given them access to the whole area, depending on how far further forwards they were cutting the deck open.

At the Samson-Post the distance across is 132 cm. All my deckbeams and frames are between 49 and 51 cm apart.

When taking the deck off I did have tiny nails going from the bottom-sheet of ply down to these stringers.

Just wondering ... could it have been that these were kind of an afterthought just before closing the deck just in case something ugly should hit the outer bottom of the added stern? Right now I don't remember where exactly the joint between sheets was which might give a hint. I've got to have a look at the photos I took when I dismantled the deck. Unfortunately I've got to get up early tomorrow and these photos are on the computer downstairs in the Caravan. I've got to make a note and check on that when I come back from Vila do Conde!!!

[Rumars]

I don't think you need any stiffeners at your spacing and deck thickness.

[John Meachen]

When taking the deck off I did have tiny nails going from the bottom-sheet of ply down to these stringers.

Thats conclusive evidence that the stringers went in before the deck was laid.Which makes me suspect that the ply may have flattened out between the beams had they not been present and this might have caused additional problems with additional layers.

[MN Dave]

If the deck flexes or not depends on the unsuported area of the plywood and it's thickness. Basicly how wide the boat is and what distance there is between the deckbeams.

I don't think you need any stiffeners at your spacing and deck thickness.

I don't think that you need to understand the purpose of the stringers as much as you need to design the new deck properly. There are span tables for plywood that might be of some help. They do give you loads and deflections that are instructive, if not intended directly for boats.
http://www.pacificwoodlaminates.com/...SpanTables.pdf
For a boat, I suppose you design around the depth of water that you might see on deck in a storm and impact from dropped anchors or even people jumping or falling.

If I understand it correctly (please correct me as needed) in table with your 50 cm (~19.2") span, it would take 120 pounds per square foot to deflect a 1/2" panel by .14 cm with the face grain running across the deck beams(fore and aft). (L/360 = 50/360 = 0.13889).

[Dody]

Thank you Dave! It can never harm to do some calculations and 0.14 cm deflection with an impact of 60 KG on the square foot could be better but is not that bad I think. Although, I'm not really sure if the outcome is the same for the curved beams we are using on boats. Don't ask me where please, but I'm fairly certain I read somewhere that on boats we are using curved decks because they are so much stronger for a given thickness than if they were flat. And boats in the water are able to move with impacts, not like a firmly installed structure on land. So, what kind of impact should I recon with? Frequently seeing these monster-waves here in Nazaré and the big-wave surfers talking of several tons burying them when it goes wrong doesn't really help me with getting it right ... well, of course I don't want to get in such a situation if I can avoid it. But I guess this might be more a situation of getting capsized, rolled over, head over heels or whatever.

I had Albertino (the shipwright for wooden boats) come over for a few minutes as I had some questions and I used the opportunity to ask him also about the stringers. In his opinion these stringers would help prevent flexing of the hull. He had another close look around and said I don't really need them, but it wouldn't do any harm to have 2 stringers run from the stern to the deckbeam where the little house starts, and maybe 2 short ones going to the Samson-Post deckbeam. And he found it quite important that I add reinforcement where the ruddershaft comes through the deck.

So I guess I'll best follow his advice. I won't be able to do a nice straight line on the portside, but it doesn't really matter and I started preparing.

[Dody]

A tiny fraction more work at this position and possibly not the most effective but it will be out of the way of things, which I find pretty important too. The re-inforcement for the ruddershaft still has to be sanded to the correct shape once the Sikaflex has cured.



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[Dody]

My lovely Fein Multimaster died on me. Well, the bearings need replacing, which can take months here. I've had it on the boat since 1996 and before that she had a life at the carpentry of my ex-husband. A tough little one - the machine I mean! So, I gave in and ordered a new one which probably won't be here before Monday. Meanwhile I'll try to get on with the Parkside I had grabbed at Lidl's some while ago because it was cheap. Unfortunately the difference in accuracy between the two is huge! Real woodworkers can probably make up for it easily, but I haven't reached this state yet. Let's hope delivery doesn't take too long fingers crossed!



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[Rumars]

Dody any electric motor repair place can change your bearings and brushes and polish the comutator. Parts are cheap (they are standard items) and labour should not be to much. Why should it take months, is everybody so booked out?

[Dody]

Aaahhh, Rumars, that's a really tricky question! I've seen things happen with unbelievable speed and brilliant workmanship here in Portugal, provided they've got the spareparts in their shop. In case they don't one usually needs to bring patience, normally a lot of patience. Portugal is a small country and most of the supplies needed come from their bigger brother and neighbor Spain. For one certainly because they've got the concessions for nearly all the brands existing worldwide and second because they've got a lot of different factories making stuff, which one can't expect from a small country. Summer-season has started, and a lot of the Spanish companies are closing down for 2 months or more. Tough luck if you need something, but people are used to simply wait. And, to be honest, I really don't understand why they don't order parts from somewhere else instead like people from other countries would do.

It's certainly not for me to say something. I'm a foreigner in this lovely country and am made welcome with open arms, something I really appreciate very much. The least I can do is to respect their ways, and they seem to be happy with it.

But, I have to admit, sometimes I am struggling with it. For example: we had a company here in the port selling International Paint. The prices he was asking for in his shop were 65 % higher than what I would have to pay for including shipping if I ordered it from another country. I showed him the prices in my catalogues and he got his bills out from when he bought the paints. Turned out his supplier charged him more than I had to pay elsewhere. At least at that time no-one had a Concession for International Paints in Portugal but, as the law was at the time, he would only be allowed to sell International Paint if the paint comes from someone with a proper Concession. So, he got his paint from a company in Spain that had the concession.

However, I'm not going to throw the machine away. I'll have it fixed and either sell it or keep it for the occasion I might need a second one. And once my new machine has arrived I can happily do as everyone else does: wait !

[MN Dave]

06-22-2017, 09:16 AM

Hi together,

I've found some amazing projects and very interesting information in your Forum, and am now one of your newbies !

Wow, 2 years later and you're one of the experts with an amazing project.

[Dody]

What??? 2 years already?!!!! Time flies when you're having fun ... OK, 2 winters, 2 accidents and a somewhat limited and slow progress. With all your help I have learned a lot and am very grateful for that, be it about tools, techniques, construction, dealing with wood and best of all: getting a little bit of a feeling for what might be right or might be wrong. Expert? No, certainly not. Feels more like being halfway through my apprenticeship. But, thank you heaps !

[Phil Y]

All I'm doing is replacing my deck and it's not hard to see 2 years slipping by before that's really finished. I hope to have it pretty much done before the end of August but you know how these things go.

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[Dody]

All I'm doing is replacing my deck and it's not hard to see 2 years slipping by before that's really finished. I hope to have it pretty much done before the end of August but you know how these things go.

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Ha! That was me, wasn't it? Didn't say which year in August lucky me

Or ... were you referring to your deck Phil? Somehow I thought you were pretty much there already, or did I get that wrong?

[Phil Y]

Not too far wrong. You could almost day I finished today. I put the last coat of non slip paint on today. But. Now I've got to refit all the deck fittings. Toe rail. Sheet tracks. Lifelines. Samson posts. Cockpit sides. Winches. Davits. And now I've done such a great job there's a whole new standard to meet. Paint the interior. The hull. The cabins. The masts. New hard dodger. Sails. Oh dear. I don't know that I will ever finish.

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[Dody]

Awesome, congratulations Phil, makes me happy for you to hear that! And getting it all back on is much more fun than destroying things or ripping stuff apart, I guess you'll get there much sooner than you think right now!

Hahhhaaaa, yes, the standards, good point! At least most of these jobs will allow you to sneak out for a bit of sailing in between. But, whatever you decide, don't forget the saying "A boat is never finished!".

[Dody]

Moving around aft is getting more and more complicated with all these new obstacles, so I'd like to get the holes in the Samson-post done before the last 2 stringers go in. Whoever might remember: I would like to use M10 bolts, so the hole needs to be done with a 10.2 mm drillbit. I only found a 10.25 mm one in the shops, it doesn't really matter I think.

Distance between holes ... I'd like something easy, with nothing behind the comma. 180 mm from centre to centre looks about right, so thats what it's gonna be!



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[Dody]

Got carried away ...

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[Boatsbgood]

Hi Dody:
Wait, what am I seeing here? Is that a new piece of deck over the new stringers and such? But, we havent had the chance to worry about that yet!
Teasing, of course, great to see you're feeling well enough to push ahead!
Brian

[cstevens]

Fantastic!

[Dody]

Thank you both very much, and I'm celebrating - even though I couldn't finish it completely today. Tonga hat her 59th birthday yesterday. It's her belated birthday-present, and for me it feels like a fresh start. This bloody sheet was varnished and completely ready to go in in, I dunno, it must have been March or so last year or even before that when all the trouble started ...



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[Phil Y]

Nice. Now do another, and another. And then a few more on the weekend.

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[Dody]

Would be lovely Phil, but I haven't closed the stern yet, I haven't ripped open the last bit of deck on the starboard-side, I haven't installed the Carlin on starboard, I ... I'm sorry, I got carried away, couldn't resist and just had to install this, I'm only human !

[Phil Y]

A step forward every now and then is satisfying. I have a few details I should have attended to before closing in the deck, before final painting etc. Impatience. Instant gratification.

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[Dody]

Yep, extremely satisfying. Makes having patience even more difficult every time. I thought I had managed to get that a bit under control and relaxed nowadays, but ... NO WAY.

And you know what? The worst for me is "I'll do this another time", coz I know more than well that it's gonna be a perfect nightmare doing stuff in hardly accessible places when I could have done them in comfort with easy access before. Which means it'll need even more effort to make me do it - if I do it at all.

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[Dody]

A step forward every now and then is satisfying. I have a few details I should have attended to before closing in the deck, before final painting etc. Impatience. Instant gratification.

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Phil, honestly: where should we start and where should we stop?

We've got to draw a line somewhere if we do want to get the job done one day. Because if we don't, we're better off scrapping our boats and building a new one using all the equipment we've already got. Much faster, cheaper and far less maintenance in the near future. That is if we use logic and our heads. I'm attached to Tonga, she's been my trustworthy companion for nearly 23 years and she's always taken care of me. Completely out of the question for me to do such a thing.

Still, the question remains: where to stop?

I definitely don't want to have to get the heavy tools out when I'm 90 and start all over again, and I have no intention at all to live ashore any time in my life again. I turned 57 the 22nd of May this year, so what I'm doing now needs to be tough enough to cope with whatever life wants to throw a me.

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[Phil Y]

Ah well you are 3 weeks older than me. My boat is otherwise very sound so it really is just a new deck. Even the interior is complete and nice, although we are planning on putting a decent double bed in the aft cabin. But still, how many years do I have left to enjoy the sailing I want to do? I don't think 57 is old these days. I don't necessarily see myself taking in a 3rd reef in the middle of the night when I'm 70. Very unlikely at 75. Should be OK at 60. But somewhere in between age seems likely to impose some real changes to what I think I can do, let alone enjoy. That's not as far away as it used to be.

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[Dody]

Phil, we don't know, do we? We might be as fit as ever with 75 and have a good laugh about the concerns you are mentioning now. We might get run over by a car and won't be here next Sunday. Or, or or .... I guess best is to enjoy as much as we can and see how it goes!

17:00 pm today my phone rings, it's Victor.

Victor is the friend of mine who had my sister and her partner stay on his boat "Sul" when they came to visit me last October. I had given him a hand to get her back in the water on Friday. Together with Family and Friends we had a little good-bye celebration at a Restaurant not far from here on Sunday lunchtime (the same Restaurant I went to with my mates of the Fishing-boat Avo Ricardo a few hours later for dinner, what a day!!!), as he was planning to head off for the Azores, a group of Islands about 1.000 NM off the Portuguese coast. All the previous years he did a little Atlantic-Summer-Round down to the Cape Verdes or further south, but he was already a bit late for various reasons so it would only be the Azores this year.

"Dody, no idea if you've seen it, the wind has finally changed, we're ready to cast off. Why don't you just grab Mr. Max the cat, hop aboard and sail with us to the Azores?"

I was more than tempted and don't think it would have taken me more than 30 minutes to get my stuff together (including paper-charts, handheld GPS and VHF, binoculars and oilies without which I'm not going on any other boat), but, to my own disappointment, I heard me saying "No, thank you heaps, I do need to get the deck of my boat sorted before the next winter is here." - "Alright, but then next year maybe?" - "We'll see how it goes, have a happy trip and fair winds!"

Still in the middle of my Epoxy-Filler-business a few minutes later I could see the mast moving towards the harbour-entrance. Damn, a few more minutes and they will be out there on the Ocean for the next days. They will enjoy the stars, the dolphins, the wales, the sparkles of the sun on the surface of the waves, the deep blue and the limitless space around them, they will feel the breathing of the ocean, there will be these awesome brownish birds chasing down the waves, the little turtles far away from anywhere, the sunsets and sunrises, and then this smell that always scared me after a passage because I would always think something on board is wrong, till finally I realize it comes from the land even if I can't see it yet ... gosh how I miss all this!!!

Needless to say the filler was at the edge of being workable by then.

I'm in a bit of a struggle right now what to attack next. It took me nearly 4 years to get a very good friend of mine to start moving some of his stuff out of my workshop because I desperately need the space to get more things off the boat. He made a start which is nice, but the mess in my workshop is even worse right now. I should be sorting this, but working inside would be better on rainy days when I can't get on elsewhere. Which probably won't happen till December or so.

Concerning Tonga ....

I don't want to have any plywood-joints in the 12 mm bottom-layer where the Samson-Post is. In theory this means I could already make a template, cut the sheet and varnish the underside ready for this part to go in as it won't interfere with installing the carlin on the starboard-side and will make moving around nicer.

Also, I'm wondering if there's a way to have the ladder in a convenient way on the portside so I don't have to step on open deckbeams when coming up the ladder on the starboardside once I took the last remaining pieces of deck off. It wouldn't be a problem if I just moved my masts to the starboard-side, but if I do the driver of the Travellift will get kittens as he's parked the other boats too close for him to move the machine in between.

And actually, I could just do something which is super-important and for a long long time on my list: finally close her aft!

I'll have a peaceful sleep over all this and I guess I'll have the solution by tomorrow morning breakfast-time, fingers crossed :-D!

[cstevens]

Isn't if funny Dody? I've also found the logistics of doing the work to be harder than the work itself! All the moving of things, ladders, tarps, tools... I'm sure I've spent more time on Petrel making covers and supports and "temporary" platforms of one sort or another than on actual progress. And that's not even counting all of the time I've spent trying to map out the projects so I don't work myself into some corner and have to undo a bunch of completed work in order to get the next phase done.

[Phil Y]

Same. Although I just took a calculated gamble that I could get the deck off and back on again and waterproofed during our long very dry summer. I did it with about a day to spare. But the planning of which bit to do before which other bit, and in my case making sure I don't skip the small invisible but important bits in favour of instant gratification, that's a lot of thinking effort.

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[Dody]

Haaaaaa awesome, Christmas didn't come a minute too early this year



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[Phil Y]

New toys are always good.

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[Dody]

They are always the best ones - for motivation and fun!

Mental note: it's difficult for me to get a decent result with this kind of job when access is poor and the wind picking up!!! It doesn't matter at all for the moment as I only applied the peel ply so the surface is less slippery (especially in case I move the ladder), and the Epoxy coz there is some rain in the forecast Friday night - don't want to have any accidental mishaps here! But, when doing the fibreglass on the deck better access would be nice.



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[Dody]

Finally doing something that needs doing for a long time: clean and check my masts, then cover in a way so people don't use them to clean their paintbrushes on or similar.

Glad I did: one of my steel-halyards was secretly touching the aluminium of my new furlers. Seems it's only this segment affected as far as I can see. Will isolate the steel-halyard with some thick plastic so it doesn't get worse.









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[Phil Y]

Ouch on the furler. Profurl? I like them, had them on my previous boat. Glad I'm not working under tarps. That would be a real drag. Crap weather here at the moment, rain and wind. Good for painting the deck underside.

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