3043Hrs – Hyper Ventilating

Another productive day today the bulk of which was spent working on ventilators.

First job was to make some dorade boxes for the forward cabin ventilators. Rather than try and explain how a dorade box works here’s a diagram:

This design is ages old but I don’t think it can be improved on. They are a little tricky to build but it’s work that will pay off when things get hot.

Here’s a couple of photos showing the box I made for the starboard hull sitting in position. In the second photo you can clearly see the drainholes that allow water to escape.

After I’d tacked them together and test fitted them I epoxied the insides and added some good fillets to make them strong. Next job is to cut the downpipes through the decks and then epoxy the boxes into position.

I finished up by fitting the small mushroom ventilators to the outboard forward corners of the main cabins. To be honest I envisage fitting dorade vents here at some stage but the budget doesn’t stretch to them right now so these will have to do. The biggest draw back with these mushroom vents is that unlike the dorades they have to be clamped down shut in any heavy weather.