Installing a Wood Burning Stove: Part II

Cutting a hole in a perfectly good house top is daunting business, but it has to be done.  Fitting a deck iron (which is bronze) is less daunting, but a lot of work.  The deck iron wants to be level and the house top is not, so it is necessary to make a donut that supports the deck iron and levels it.

Taking the angle is simple enough.  Cutting the angle in a 9 inch square block of hardwood 3 inches thick requires multiple angled cuts on the table saw, and finishing with a hand saw.  The only hardwood I had that was thick enough was a slab of walnut.  Walnut is suboptimal for nautical uses (it is not particularly rot resistant), but painted well and properly maintained, it will do the job nicely.



The interior of the donut need not be cut precisely -- it just need to accept the bronze deck iron without leaving excessive space around the walls of the casting.  I wasted the interior of the donut with a drill bit, and then chucked a drum sander in the drill press and ground out the sloped sides by eye until it fit.

Finishing the outside of the ring is a good deal more demanding, as one wants a pleasing and consistent slope to the sides that is stylistically harmonious with the design of other accessories on the boat.  I used stationary disc sander to achieve this (after a scary and abortive try with a heavy router bit on a router table).



After shaping and drilling holes for the bolts, a couple coats of Brightsides finished the donut prior to installation.













Cutting the hole was straightforward.  The new one is much larger than the pass-through for the kerosene stove, and I took care to locate it between the house top beams so fasteners would bolt through from the top of the deck iron, through the donut and the house top, spaced so as to allow good access for fixing the nuts on the bolts.

The house top is curved gently, so it is necessary to profile the mating surface of the donut so that it fits well.  I was scratching my head as to how to do this, but my brother, a font of wisdom in such things, gave me the trick: fix a sheet of sticky-backed sandpaper to the housetop and use that to sand the mating profile.  Voila!

I used Dolphinite to bed the donut to the house top and the deck iron to the donut, and set it all in place with 4 4 inch 10-24 bolts.  I spun on the nuts from the inside, but didn't tighten it all up (one of the virtues of Dolphinite is curing time that gives you days to finish the job).


Comments

  1. GEORGETA DANMarch 5, 2016 at 9:00 AM

    GOOD

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousApril 24, 2016 at 1:55 PM

    Thank you for sharing this information! Where did you source the 3 inch bronze deck iron?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting a Chart Plotter, VHF, AIS Receiver and Tiller Pilot using the NMEA 0183 protocol

Image
NOTE: An updated version of this posting that includes an AIS transceiver is now available here. Ripple's complement of communication and navigational electronics now includes: Standard Horizon CP390i chart plotter  Digital Yacht AIS receiver   Raymarine ST2000  tiller pilot  Standard Horizon VHF/DSC radio These devices can all be networked, so installing them includes making decisions about whether and how to connect them.  As with most everything on a boat, there are tradeoffs.  The benefits of additional functionality are always at war with the unanticipated dangers of creeping elegance and the instability that arises from proliferating connections (natural failure points). My four devices, like most modern electronics, can talk to one another using the well-established NMEA 0183 protocol.  NMEA 0183 falls short of a full-blown network, but it meets the need for point-to-point connections such as are appropriate to my configuration..  The NMEA 2000 protocol provides
Read more

Re-powering s/v Ripple

Image
My Summer, 2017 Adventure An irregular sound, a vibration untuned to the sum of your experience: this one was a momentary drop in RPM... 25, maybe 50 rpm. I bumped the throttle, right? Then it happened again, and denial shades into anxiety. The opening hours of a 6 week cruise: Seattle, up the inside passage, over the top of Vancouver Island and a leisurely meandering through the inlets that indent the west side. But this journey ended just as it began. A series of intricate diagnostic rationalizations, fuel filter and impeller changes availed us not at all. Lots of oil gone missing! Limping into Kingston Harbor, Ripple’s Yanmar 1GM10 turned the last of some 300,000,000 revolutions in my service. Broken-hearted 1GM10 Only slowly did I surrender the hope of rebuilding my faithful one-lunger.  As it happens, Yanmar does not make an oversized piston for the engine, as they enlarged the size of the cylinder when the 1GM transitioned to the 1GM10, and given that the
Read more

Installing and Networking a Class B AIS Transceiver with a Chart Plotter and VHF Radio using NMEA 0183

Image
In 2015 I purchased an AIS receiver for a trip up the Inside Passage.  This posting is largely an upgrade of the  posting for that installation . I suspected at the time I might look back on purchasing only a receiver as a false economy, and that turned out to be the case. I want to be SEEN as well as to see others. This year  I purchased a Vesper XB 8000 AIS transceiver to replace the perfectly functional Digital Yacht AIS receiver that I had benefitted from over the previous three seasons.   My decision to go with Vesper was based on the reputation of their product and their customer service,  and also because the device makes the data on my network visible via a WiFi gateway.  This should make it easier to pull off tracking and route data, and to display AIS targets on tablet or phone as well as the chart plotter. The XB-8000 also provides an easily managed anchor alarm, accessible by tablet or smart phone.  I won't have to sit in the cockpit all night watching the chart plotte
Read more