As I mused and dreamed about the new structure, I discovered a drawing of Lemara showing a rigid doghouse over the cockpit. This was however never constructed, probably because Les favored a larger sail area, which required that the boom be set at a position which precluded a fixed structure over the cockpit.
My ideas started to fix on a full a plywood doghouse.
Using photos of Lemara, I superimposed drawings and photographs of various doghouse designs onto her cockpit and consulted extensively with all who love her and have an interest in her with each new proposal. Pictures of some of the ideas, below.
While searching for more designs on the Internet, I found a drawing of a Hartley ferro yacht with lines similar to that of Lemara, sporting a doghouse that was almost identical to one that I had produced, (shown above). This picture is shown below.
The next step was to make a full-sized mock-up of the design out of cardboard. Since I work for a company that imports elevators, I have access to large, sturdy cardboard boxes. I sequestered a few of these and spent a Saturday cutting and shaping the doghouse sides and front. All who walked past made some comment about the effort, most of them derisory in nature, but with some degree of mirth in the inflection to which I could not take exception. Picture of the mock-up below.
One friend who has played a pivotal role in the entire process, albeit somewhat understated, was Graham Raynor. He runs an industrial pump supply and servicing company but also dabbles to a greater or lesser extent in rebuilding boat motors.
When I needed to replace the old Mercedes 190D that was installed in Lemara when I bought her, Graham was most helpful in the acquisition, rebuilding and marinization of a Mercedes 240D. More about this in another post in this blog.
Graham happened to walk past Lemara on the day that I constructed the cardboard mock-up and as usual, engaged me in the conversation for a few minutes. I have learned to memorize these conversations verbatim for all the gems he drops into the chat. During this conversation, he referred me to a fellow boat owner, Roy Mcbride of CDK Boats (www.ckdboats.com), who sells plywood kit boats and rigid cockpit enclosure kits.
I quickly took a walk to Roy's boat and photographed the doghouse that he had constructed and now sells as a kit. Using a photograph of Lemara from the same angle, I superimposed a snip of his doghouse on Lemara to see what the end result would look like. For this, I used a wonderful little program called paint.net, which is a free upgrade of the regular Paint in Windows. Picture of Roy's boat, and of Lemara with the doghouse from Roy's boat superimposed, below.
Lemara
I decided that the kit that Roy offers looked good on Lemara as per the picture above and placed my order with him. When the kit finally arrived however my excitement turned to despair at the extent of the work involved at assembling the construction!
I received sheets of plywood, with the patterns partially cut out of the sheets, all the resin and silicone that was deemed sufficient and an offer of encouragement from Roy. See pictures below.
I loaded the contents of Roy's garage into the back of my pickup and took it all to the yacht club storeroom. After reviewing the process for a while, I came to the conclusion that if I could build this out of cardboard, I could build it using plywood.
I had already become a regular in the local hardware store and I traipsed the well-known path once more to buy some hinges, which I used to fix the vertical pieces to each other. This allowed me to move them all as a unit, for centering purposes.
The following weekend I secured them to the deck with internal supports and for the next few weeks, proceeded to construct the roof using a layering process of plywood with resin between the layers. My balsa-wood aircraft model building experience as a child came into play, albeit on a much grander scale. A few pictures showing the construction in progress, below.
As planned (1st pic below) and as-built
Cindy and I would go to the boat on a Saturday and work on the build for the weekend, eventually completing it around August 2014. Before and after pictures below.
And finally: The drop downsides were installed.
It wasn't easy but it was worth it:-)
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