The piece on the left is the engine bulkhead and the piece on the right is the new table. They are of cedar and not yet finished. You will notice that the knots in the beautiful woodwork grew, amazingly enough, in strategically located places to coincide with parts of constellations. (Very nautical, I think!!) In the foreground is the prototype of the table hardware. It will eventually be mounted to the engine bulkhead. In these pictures, it’s laying down in relationship to how it will be mounted. (You can click on these pictures and get a little better view.)
This is a close-up of the table supports. They mount under the table and to the bulkhead.
This is the first sequence as the table begins to move into its stowed position.
The table continues to move toward its stowed position.
Here, the table is in a fully stowed position against the engine bulkhead. All of the hardware will be out of sight behind the table top.
Close-up of the hardware design. The locknuts are not yet fully seated because I foresee the need of disassembling many more times before arriving at a “finished” state. My object here was merely to prove that the design would work… which it beautifully did leaving me relieved and satisfied. The hardware is aluminum that I scrounged years ago from an old portable blackboard that had been discarded at work. The pivot shafts are also aluminum, which I threaded on both ends. The brown piece between the bracket and strut is Formica laminated to a thin piece of plywood. It acts as a spacer/bushing/dampener, to stabilize their action.
The table’s success and notoriety will depend on a specially designed latch to hold it in the fully extended and fully stowed positions. So far, this latch design is only in my mind but I’m confident it will work.
The only costs, to date, are the aluminum pivot shafts and locknuts… less than $10. The cedar was cut and milled from a tree on my friend’s property. I had to pay $100 to the sawmill for a huge, huge stack of cedar that I will be hard-pressed to find enough uses for. Therefore, the cost of the lumber in the table and bulkhead is barely computable. I suspect that there will be a lot of cedar used in the exposed interior finishwork of this boat!
1 comment:
I don't get it....I am not much on visualizing stuff like this...guess you'll have to show me when I'm in town. It sounds like it looks very nice and I'm impressed with the invention.
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