As described in the last post (4/26/16), a practical, spacious galley might be achieved by simply extending the engine-flanking bulkheads forward to meet the salon bulkheads perpendicularly. This option “got the green light” and work began by using 2x3s to join the smaller templates into one-piece templates.

Incidentally, a grabber is a great tool for retrieving items accidentally dropped into the bilge, and one like that in the photo below will be part of Thalassa’s permanent gear.

And here are the templates coming off the boat.

A trip to J. Gibson McIlvain’s Connecticut lumberyard yielded three 4×8 sheets of 5/8-inch Okume marine plywood.

A 4×8 sheet was just big enough to take the whole pattern, leaving some long scraps that might be used elsewhere.

The router was used to finish the four straight edges on each of these templates.

The bulkheads were assembled with relative ease and then the spacers were employed again to ensure they were parallel to each other. Fillets of thickened epoxy were applied here and there to tack them in place so that the spacers could be removed as work continued.

The next task was to make patterns for the bulkheads that separate the under-cockpit area from the galley. The original pieces were trimmed, in hopes that a good pattern would result, but the result was not very good. Instead, they were used to transfer the rough shape to the cheap “mock up” plywood.

The photo below shows the cheap pattern, where a giant hole has been cut out of the middle to aid in alignment.

Before moving on with the pattern, a temporary shelf was constructed above the forward end of the engine. The spacers, having precisely the right width, were used as the supports for the plywood top. A removable shelf like this will eventually be installed in the same place, but that’s a long way off. (The positions of the steps on the ladder needed adjusting so that toes don’t bump into the shelf when a foot lands on the middle step.)

The hot-glue gun and small pieces of door-skin plywood were used to fine-tune the pattern, which was then used to transfer the shape to the good plywood.

The finished pieces were set up, and fit nicely after just a bit of trimming. A little more adjusting ensured that they were vertical and also perpendicular to the engine-flanking bulkheads.

In the photo below you can see a piece of 2×4 that was screwed to the bulkhead to be used as a “handle” for positioning. Small blocks have been hot-glued to the hull to hold everything in place.

Finally, fillets of thickened epoxy were run along some of the edges. The glue blocks can be removed when the epoxy dries.

Eventually these new bulkheads will be tabbed to the hull and to each other (except along certain inboard edges that will require molding). Among the next steps is the planning and construction of the icebox, whose placement will be port/aft in the galley (look right, aft in the second photo above).