Bunk Progress, August Report!
Someone asked me on Instagram the other day if we were done with the bunk project yet, and I had to laugh. It's hard enough to get projects done when we live 2.5 hours away from the boat; it's been harder lately with competing demands on our time that have kept us away.
This weekend, though? We headed down to Deltaville and our patiently waiting Calypso on Saturday morning, cutting short (but not skipping!) our weekend morning routine of coffee and sailing videos, armed with plywood, pencils, a measuring tape, some 2x6 pieces of lumber, and a jigsaw.
First order of business was deciding how to support the mock-up. We'd marked the bulkhead with blue tape, showing the various options for height/depth, and it was time to see what we could really do.
That's a lot of blue tape.
After a lot of discussion and sketching to help me visualize, we (er, Jeremy) wielded the jigsaw on a 2x6 and we got to work, screwing the piece along the bulkhead (where you can see the "43" on the blue tape!) to act as the brace.
The base of the bunk will be a 1/2" sheet of plywood, made solid by a vertical piece of 2x10. I was amazed as I watched floppy plywood (because over an unsupported span of almost 7 feet, it gets floppy) get straight and solid just as the 2x6 was screwed into it vertically. Worry 1, gone. Yes, the plywood will be just fine with that structural component!
Then he added in support underneath, scribed the right shape onto the outboard piece of plywood, and POOF we had a solid bed platform to lie on. (How did he scribe? He held the pencil and the batten together and ran the end of the batten along the hull, transferring the hull shape to the plywood.)
Scribing the right shape.
We had old cushions we could cut into (a bread knife rocks for this work); the cushions from the v-berth are 25 years old and will not be used again for various reasons, primary being that the v-berth is not going to be a bunk any more. So we could even try the bunk with a mocked up mattress on it!
Cutting and measuring the old cushions.
After all of this, I forgot to take a picture of us lying on the bunk.
Major progress! We're confident this will be a fabulous use of space. We're confident that this bunk size will work for us. We're confident that the plywood will be strong enough for its intended purpose.
We disassembled the mock-up, made more measurements, and made a list of what we need to bring down next weekend, when the next steps will involve templating to be able to actually start constructing the bunk!