Sh*t, we're battening!

That's what Sophie said to me after I'd screwed on the first few battens, "Sh*t, we're battening!"

It's a big milestone for because we thought we'd be at this stage a long time ago but getting the steel under floor cleaned up and then building up the framework for the floor has taken us a lot longer then we anticipated, and with the arrival of an alien parasite, Sophie has been unable to do as much work as normal. Therefore it was pretty exciting to be finally screwing the battens to the steel.

The battens are used to fix pretty much everything else to the boat, and also to add some extra space between your cabin lining and your cabin side. We will be putting a fair amount of insulation in this gap, with some space for services to run behind the lining.

Tools of the trade: 850W corded drill (3mm bit), Cordless drill (4mm bit), and cordless impact driver, and self-tapping screws.

There is a knack to screwing the battens to the steel, and it's not easy. You need to hold the batten in place with one hand and drill a pilot hole through the batten the steel in one go, then whilst ensuring the batten doesn't move, drill another hole through batten and steel at the other end. Then you can widen your hole to the appropriate size for the self-tapping screws you're using and then you can screw your batten to the steel. That's six operations with three tools, two fixings, and one hand (the other is holding the batten in place).

Battens along the cabin side.

Apparently it is possible to use a nail gun but the cost for us to hire one would have been more expensive and the cock-up potential considerably more so than using screws. One moment of inattention and you've blasted a hole through your cabin. No thanks.

Adding extra battens 100mm from windows results in some "over battening", but better safe than sorry. You won't see them when the lining is in.

We matched the position of each batten to line up with the box section welded to the inside of the roof (which we will come to shortly) so we can line up all of our interior fixings in an aesthetically pleasing manner.We then added extra battens within 100mm of each bulkhead and window where it's likely the internal lining will need to be supported at its' end.

What's this, a pirate ship?

As the roof is curved we needed to have battens that would follow the curve of the roof. This is not possible with the normal battens we had used throughout the rest of the boat (25x50mm) so we had two sheets of 12mm WBP (weather and boil proof) ply delivered and cut them into strips 50mm wide (thank the tool god for circular saws). This allowed us to bend two of these strips along the curve of the roof and screw and glue them in place, giving us a 24mm batten to fix the ceiling lining to. We couldn't simply use 24mm thick ply because bending this thicker ply would have been very hard and potentially begun to split the timber.

The pirate ship slots into place.

There are some areas we couldn't screw into, so used Sticks Like to adhere the timber directly to the steel. This stuff is pretty impressive, it sticks pretty much anything to anything else, you don't need to prepare the surfaces and aparrently you can stick stuff together when it's wet. We used this for the inside of the side hatches, and several other places where we needed to affix extra battens such as under the windows where we would have long unsupported sections of lining.

Avast me hearties! The pirate ship is complete.

For the most part battening was pretty fast, but the little details took a fair amount of time (as usual), and some parts were a little tricky. For example in the roof the battens had to follow the curve of the roof, so we used ply cut into strips so we could bend them around the curve. This required 5 screws (15 operations), all above head height.

Liners for the mushroom vents made fom cheapo ply offcuts.

Once all of the battens were in place it was just a case of organising the spray foam people to come and and then panicking thinking of all of the bits we might have missed. Anyway they came today to do the sprayfoam, so there will be another update shortly! We were pleasantly suprised that the battening was reasonably straightforward and pretty fast, given how slow the summer has been, but now it feels like we're making good progress and making fewer mistakes. Roll on lining out!

Sticks Like...

Stuck like...