They are constructed of a synthetic nylon type material and are quite light and have stickers on them indicating they were manufactured to a Lloyds Register of Shipping standard. They seem pretty strong and robust.

I have it in mind to fit one over the port side dining area, one over the forward port side bunk and one over the starboard side double berth. They should provide plenty of light and plenty of ventilation.

I’m getting a little impatient to get building again and although I know it’s a short term pain I think I’ll try and sneak a Gleda session in over the next few days just to ease my mind a bit.

With so much yet to do having Gleda on the water this time next year is a big ask but it’s one I’m going to fight hard to achieve.

Although I am again at a bit of a standstill with regard to hands on work I’m still beavering away behind the scenes and Gleda is part of my daily routine. This week I’ve acquired some bargain hatches and an opening portlight of eBay (more on these when they arrive) and the additional timber I need for construction of the crossbeams has been ordered . As I’ve said already Gleda time will be short until the end of next month but I’ll then be in a really  great position to accelerate the build significantly.

Look at it this way, I’ve actually been building for 1,952 hours over a period of 1,978 days so that’s an average of about an hour a day (ignoring the fact that I actually put the build on hold for 8 months last year). From July onwards I’ll be in a position to put in maybe 40 hours per week so that gives me the potential to put in something in the region of 1600 hours of work over the 10 months to 6th May 2013. JWD suggest that 2200 hours is needed to build a Tiki 38. Everyone who’s built one says that’s wildly optimistic. If I use the figures above I’ve got a total of 3552 hours which is a pretty decent margin, particularly as I now have access to a lot of time saving woodworking machinery right next door to Gledas barn.

There is of course another aspect that can’t be underestimated and that’s the cost of additional materials, fit out items and expensive equipment like sails, rigging, engines etc. etc. But with the help of hard smart work and eBay I’ll find a way.

So here we are heading into the home stretch, hang on it’s going to be fun!

Anyway the upshot of all of this is that work on Gleda will be probably be sporadic and sparse until the end of June but that this short term ‘pain’ will put me in a fantastic position to really kick on from July onwards.

Today had been pencilled in some months ago for a possible visit to the Beaulieu Boat Jumble down on the South Coast but with my workload we decided last week that it wasn’t on. As things turned out that was a good call as the event was cancelled due to the gale force winds and torrential rain that’s blown through us today.

We’ve had a really unusual North Easterly 5/6 gusting 7/9 which has caused some damage and bought down tree’s and branches. The photo shows a big oak branch that’s come down at the end of  our driveway. At the barn today we lost part of the roof (luckily not anywhere near Gleda) and I got a taste of working the rigging on a windjammer round the Horn as I worked off a pallet lifted to roof height by the fork truck trying to nail down flapping roofing sheets that were in danger of being ripped off. The wind chill and stinging rain made it feel more like January than the end of April. More fond memories to store away for recollection one balmy evening in some faraway tropical anchorage!

Anyway despite the probable lack of build progress please keep checking back as I’ve got some exciting plans for this website over the month of May.

Bye for now!

The glassing has become a somewhat routine operation now, masking up, applying resin, laying biaxial glass, saturating, waiting for it to tack off, trim and remove tape, clean up. I pretty much got the cabin top on the port hull finished today.

The beam work is far more interesting and also a little challenging. My aim today was to get the first two of four 43mm x 43mm strengtheners glued to one side of the ply beam web. The web has quite a curve on the top edge at each end and also a 20mm lift in the centre of the bottom edge ( JWD recommend this for ‘visual’ purposes on the forward beam).

I was somewhat dubious about wether this quite substantial 43mm section would bend to the right profile but pleasingly I managed to do it. Basically I worked my way from one end to the other using a combination of leverage and clamps to gradually bend the timber around fixing with temporary screws and washers as I went. I half expected to hear the sound of splitting wood at any time but no, even my scarf joints held up. Here’s hoping the rest of them go as easily!

I glass reinforced another 6 or so metres of joints on the port hull, I filleted all around the cabin tops ready to glass tomorrow, and I spent some time on the forward beam construction. I lifted the ply web off the build floor and scarfed up eight lengths of 45mm x 45mm pine ready to use for strengthening the beam tomorrow.

Photo shows the timber and beam web on the floor and the filleting/glass work on the hull.

All fairly straightforward stuff, all adding to progress though!

I took it a bit easy today, it’s been a heavy few weeks one way and another and looking ahead things look much the same. It’s all good but I felt I needed to catch up a bit, I sometimes forget myself and plough on regardless until I find that I’m losing momentum , making mistakes and starting to feel stressed. That’s counter productive, especially when tackling a long project like this, so today I just did an easy 4 hours.My main job was to glue on the second layer of ply for the forward crossbeam web, that’s what the photos show. After that I did a bit of pre-glass filleting around the cabin top on the port hull and cut two pieces of my eBay mahogany into shape for one of the stemheads.Looks like it might be next weekend before my next work session, we’ll see.

When I got back from my trip it was a bit late to start any glass work so I opted instead to make a start on the first cross-beam web. It’s exciting to get back to some proper construction of big bits of the boat after so long tatting about with bits and pieces. I got the build floor covered in polythene , cut the six beam sections to shape and got the first layer nailed to the floor with joints glued. If all goes to plan I’ll laminate the upper layer on tomorrow.

I’ve continued with the glass reinforcement of the port hull and got all the 18mm ply cut down for the cross-beam web sections. I just need to buy another sheet of 18mm so that I can cut two remaining pieces for the mast beam ( I remembered I’d cut into one of my stock to make a stand up desk!)

I spent ages pouring over the plans and ply cutting sheets before I got the 18mm marked up ready to cut. Each beam web is made of of two layers of ply in with 3 sections in each, so that’s 24 pieces in total. It wasn’t clear from the cutting plan which piece came out of which sheet so I ended up cutting little pieces of paper scaled off the plans so that I could ‘assemble’ each one to get them clear in my head. Maybe it’s because I’m a bit slow but it worked and I can now move forward and work with the real timber safe in the knowledge I cut it right.

This leads me to Erics question about how detailed the plans/instructions for building a Tiki 38 are. Well they’re pretty good, you get the detailed plans of each component with dimensions, although as they’re copies you can’t safely take scale measurements off them. You get a large format assembly instructions book which ties down the sequence of events and gives further detail and several ply cutting sheets showing which components to cut out of your ply sheets to minimise wastage. There’s also a very general techniques book  which I found of limited value although it does contain an important if a little scary materials list.

Anyway here’s another video blog for you.

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. Get the port hull joints glass reinforced as per the starboard hull
2. Get both hulls sheathed
3. Build the cross-beams

I struggled a bit with the glass-reinforcement on the starboard hull as it’s quite repetitive work and there are a lot of joints!

The sheathing will have to be broken down into small sections as I’m doing the job on my own and the amount of epoxy I can mix and work with at any one time is therefore limited, and, even with a mixture of differing hardeners the right temperature is needed.

Building the cross-beams is a big job and technically quite challenging, the work needs to be of a high standard and not rushed. There are many jobs on a Tiki 38 where you can cut corners and still get a workable result but not the cross-beams.

So what I intend to do over the coming months is work on all three of these tasks as mood, time and weather suits best. After all it’s a priciple I’m finding works well in my income generating activities so why not apply it to Gleda as well?

Today I’ve started glass reinforcing the port hull working from the stern forwards and I’ve built a sturdy construction floor on which I can make the cross-beams. Obviously it’s critical that they are put together on a perfectly flat surface with no twists or distortions so I made up a 6.5 m long ‘table’ using 3 lengths of 4″x2″ and some 1/2″ birch ply,  then levelled it using plastic shims before epoxying it down to the concrete barn floor so it can’t move. Should do the trick nicely.