2726Hrs – Cleats Of Oak

After a few days of distractions it was good to get back to some boatbuilding today.

It’s amazing how much work there is to do on these crossbeams. I’m really glad that I’m able to do these things in advance of assembling the boat for launch as I’m sure it would be really stressful trying to do it all at the last gasp.

You may recall that I purchased some super big solid oak cleats at the Beaulieu Boat Jumble back in April. I bought them to fit on the ends of the crossbeams but I hadn’t figured out how I’d get a really secure fixing that would do justice to them.

After a bit of a search around in the workshop I found some beefy  7″ long hex drive screws with flat washer heads and immediately I knew that a couple of them in each cleat would be perfect, particularly as the cleats will be epoxied to the beam as well.

I spent some time marking up, drilling and countersinking the holes and then worked out where they would be positioned on the beams before screwing them temporarily in place ready for epoxy.

Next on the list was to make 12 hardwood pads to take the compression of the beam lashings. Six of them sit beween the cleats and the beam end caps, the other six sit on top of the beam inboard.

I finished off by making hardwood tabernacle locating blocks and deck beam locating blocks which I’ll explain another day.

My next work session will be taken up glueing all this lot on!