Perhaps motivated by "self-imposed guilt" from my
previous "Excuses" post, a burst of energy was spent on refining the bow pulpit design.
First, some full scale models of the bow roller assemblies were made from plywood. While these were made from half inch plywood, the real stuff will be from quarter inch stainless steel. The first model was a bit big as the cheek plates were bigger than
necessary, meaning an excess of stainless steel (more cost and weight). But the geometry was good. So, the second model had the cheek plates trimmed down from the first, while preserving geometry. Speaking of geometry, I realized my
initial anchor roller tests from a few months ago neglected to consider any impact of a chain stopper, so I went through a couple more tests using the chain stopper. A good thing as it revealed the base plate needed to be extended aft to accommodate the chainstopper while still maintaining easy deploy/retrieval of the various anchor types.
Second, a full scale mock-up of the bow pulpit platform was made using some plywood, u-bolts, and PVC pipe. The idea here was to test what I had in the drawings to verify it matched the actual bow of the boat. Initial tests say it is pretty close, but I need to refine it more as I cut the PVC a little long. One thing that struck me is how big this thing will be. Not that I expected it to be small, but, as you continually stare at a drawing, it is easy (for me at least) to lose any sense of scale. More tweaking on this to do and maybe we will be ready to have the first stainless bits fabricated (a couple weeks hopefully).
