28-Foot Cabin Cruiser "Mollyhawk". Part V.
Anyone capable of building 28-Foot Cabin Cruiser "Mollyhawk"'s hull knows enough to lay a quarter-inch tongue and groove cabin floor, and to build the seats and bulkheads either of one wide board set on edge or by first building a spruce frame and staving up the front with cypress or yellow pine tongue and groove staving in narrow widths. Boards two to three inches wide with their edges champhered so that when they come together they make a "V" shape seam is just as good and far cheaper to build than a transonic front all formed of panels or other forms of expensive, joiner work. All such ginger bread work, while it makes, a boat look a little more stylish is no better than a plain pine board painted or a tongue and groove staving as we have suggested, and you can refinish the latter with one half the trouble and expense of a fancy panelled transom. The advantage of the "V" seam formed by the champhered edge is that it hides any slight unevenesses in the thickness of the seam where the two boards come together, which is not the case where the boards are square edged and, especially, if it is painted white. But as to just how you finish the interior of your boat, whether you use expensive joiner work or the plain cheap kind does not in any way affect the serviceability of Mollyhawk. It is a matter of personal taste and entirely up to you to say just how much money you care to spend on it. You can use cypress at about 5 cents a foot or use bird's eye maple or Circassian walnut at about 30 cents a foot. The same thing applies to the hardware below decks. Some owners will use the ordinary lacquered iron door-knobs and locks and drawer-pulls. Others will use glass ones, and others solid brass ones, the latter are far preferable, but when you buy them makesure that you are getting solid brass and not iron simply dipped in brass, as much of the boat hardware now sold is made. You will find, in a couple of years, the rust will strike through and your' boat hardware will be anything but a thing of beauty. Especially is this true of the deck fittings, such as flagpole sockets, chocks and other deck plates, although my choice for such fittings would be galvanized iron in preference to brass. They are just as strong, if anything, stronger than brass, will not look so shoddy as brass does when it becomes tarnished, and if for any reason the galvanizing does get nicked you can retouch it with a bit of aluminium paint and make it look as if it had just come from the store. Let me call your attention to one apparently insignificant point about fastening on your deck plates and that is to see that the screw heads fit perfectly into the countersink bored in the chock or deck plate, whatever the fitting may be. Sometimes a hole for the screw is bored vertical, while the face of the deck plate is slightly bevelling. The result is that one sharp corner of this screw-head sticks out like a knife, and will cut you when you polish the brass, and on which strings of cotton waste generally cling, looking anything but pretty. Use a metal counter sink in your brace and bitt and ream out the holes until the screw heads just fit flush with the surface of the metal. Do not leave the heads standing up, and, on the other hand, do not let them sink an eighth of an inch or so below the surface of the metal. In that case you should use a screw with a larger head to fill up the hole, for such holes, form puddles for the dirty brass polish or water.
Molds in place of 28-Foot Cabin Cruiser "Mollyhawk"
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