I don’t know about you but when MY Captain, aka wife, aka Christine, says “Come check out the new bed with me” I say “Aye aye Captain”!!

Lucky me, my Captain/Wife said that to me on Saturday when we brought my brother Bruce and wife Lyla by Naval Yachts so they could check out our new boat.  It had been over a week since Captain Christine had been to the cabinetry shop so she had not seen our Master Cabin bed assembled and it was a real treat for both of us to see the previous models and renderings being transformed into real Rosewood furniture at the expert hands of our Master Cabinetmaker Omur and his assistant Selim.
We have had a non-stop stream of friends and family coming to visit and staying with us for the past month and that continues for several more weeks so we are having an unusually full social life these days which has been wonderful.  However it doesn’t leave much time for putting together blog posts and answering questions on all the various mediums and forums so thanks very much for your patience with these delayed posts and responses.  Right now we have Bruce & Lyla with us from Vancouver through the rest of this week and then the same day they fly out my cousin Donna and husband Jamie fly in from Doha in Qatar to spend the week with us.

I will try to let the photos do most of the talking so I can get this already very tardy update with all of last week’s progress uploaded for you.  As always and especially for this rushed update please don’t hesitate to post questions in the “Join the Discussion” box below each blog post.

In keeping with the title I will start over in the Naval Yacht’s large Cabinetry shop where they have been building the King sized bed unit and walk you through all the progress Omur and Selim made on that last week.

To help visualise this whole bed unit, here are two of the early renderings of our Master Cabin.  You are looking aft while standing up by the vanity sink which is on the WT bulkhead with the Forepeak on the other side.  The glass walled shower and bathroom are on your right and two of forward glass door wardrobes on your left. 
As you can see the bed is raised about 1m/3ft to provide LOTS of storage below.  We have changed since this early rendering so there will now be 12 large drawers on two sides and then  2 large storage areas accessible below the bed.
Returning to reality in the Cabinetry shop, here is what the bed unit looked like at the start of last week.  As you can see even the insides of the cabinet where the drawers will go have all be veneered with solid edges in Rosewood, a point Omur was quite insistent upon and yet another example of the level of quality and detail in all the cabinetry work.
The lighter Beech area will have snap in place upholstered headboard panels and you can see how the toe kick area is recessed all around the base of the bed unit.
This toe kick detail will be used throughout the interior with these same large radius solid Rosewood corners with the “quilted look” where they join the horizontal grained side boards.  You can also see the groove where LED strip lights will be fitted to provide dimmable indirect lighting at night.
The whole bed and drawer unit is too large to be moved aboard in one piece so the plywood platform has the profile of the finished unit accurately laid out to assist with assembling all the individual components and temporary cleats like the one you see here are screwed to that platform to hold them in place.
Standing up near the headboard on what will be Christine’s Port side of the bed, you can see how the vertical plywood pieces have been slot fitted together so they can be disassembled to move aboard and then reassembled easily there.
Omur on the left and Selim are dry fitting the angled corner using biscuits and then these will be glued up when assembled onboard Möbius.

Biscuits are also used to join the solid Rosewood edged drawer frames and these too will be dry fitted here in the Cabinetry shop and then glued together onboard.
Some of you were curious about the tool used to cut the arced slot for these biscuits so I pulled the spring loaded fence back so you can see the carbide tipped cutters on the circular blade inside.  I’ve used this same system for many years when I was building cabinets over 30 years ago so this is a very well proven, fast and accurate way of joining these kinds of cabinets.
The outer corners of the base drawer unit are all solid Rosewood with these large 50mm / 2” radius cut on them.  Any areas such as these which are likely to get the most wear and tear over the years are made of solid wood so that they can be easily sanded and refinished to remove any damages they incur over the years.
Where these vertical corners join with the solid wood edging of the mattress frame they need to have these inside corners cut out like this.
And then attached to the sides of the drawer frames.
Clamps and tape are used to hold everything in place as the temporary assembly continues.
As explained in previous posts I am very insistent that there are NO sharp corners aboard so all the solid  Rosewood edged corners are radiused such as this vertical corner piece.
This base level shot along the toe kick shows how this all starts to come together.
Up on top of these corners this solid piece has been shaped to fit into those cut outs we saw earlier.
Like this.  Biscuit slot all ready to receive the solid Rosewood mattress frame piece and cellophane tape to prevent the glue from sticking to areas that still need to come apart.
Here is what the whole dry fitted corner looks like.  The light coloured Beech strip is where the blue/green “horizon line” I’ve described previously will be glued in place. 
These Horizon Lines are part of the overall interior design theme we have come up with and consist of thin 2mm thick strips with wave like swirls of aquamarine epoxy “printed” on their outer surface to simulate the continuous line of the horizon we most often have surrounding us in the remote anchorages we favor.  You will see much more of this in future updates as the interior cabinetry progresses.

Here is the overall shot of how this all looked at the end of last week May 24th, 2019.

The U shaped Rosewood frame you see below the headboard is the dropped ceiling above the head of the bed which you can see more clearly in the renderings above.  It will be attached to the ceiling of the Master Cabin directly above where it is sitting in this photo. 
Finishing off this update on the bed cabinetry, here is my beautiful bride model to give you a sense of scale of our overall bed and drawers cabinetry.
Heading over to the shipyard floor, we find Uğur up on the foredeck doing his final checking of the first hatch lid to have the hinge arms all welded in place. 
This is the most challenging part of building these hatches as the Hatch Lid frames must sit with their inner surface at just the right distance from the surface of the deck mounted Hatch frames so that the seal is compressed fully and equally against the Hatch frame welded into the decks. 
Then the upper surface of the Hatch Lids have to be 15mm below the deck surface as this is the thickness of the tempered safety glass which needs to end up being flush with the deck surface. 
All of this is determined by how the Hinge Arms attach to the Lid frames when the SS hinge pin is installed.  Once they had the technique mastered with the first hatch they could move on to repeating the process for all the other nine hatches.
With its Hinge Arms tacked in just the right spot the SS Hinge pins are pulled and this Lid has been removed and set in place to await Sezgin’s arrival with his TIG welder to fully weld the Hinge Arms to the Lid.
BUT, as if this wasn’t already challenging enough, the CNC milling machine broke down just before we could use it to cut the profile of these Hinge Arms into a single length of a solid aluminium bar stock.  This would have made it quick and easy to chop saw each individual 50mm wide Hinge Arm from this one length. 

With the CNC mill is down for an undetermined amount of time, what to do now?

Go Old School baby and cut them by hand! 
Uğur and Nihat cut 50mm wide blocks of aluminium from a length of 100mm / 4” square stock

Cut out a thin template from a print of the CAD files and used this to trace the shape of the Hinge Arm onto each block
The 8mm holes for the SS Hinge Pins were drilled first and used to precisely locate the profile of the Hinge Arms.
Then Uğur, resplendent in his white Tyvek bunny suit to reduce the aluminium chips from covering him and using a large clamp to keep his fingers well away from the sharp new bandsaw blade,
was able to cut each of the 20 Hinge Arms to shape.
He and Nihat soon had a mini production line running and were able to get each of the 20 Hinge Arms all cut, shaped and sanded ready to be welded to each Hatch Lid as you saw above.
Elsewhere inside we find Cihan, pronounced “Yee Han”, our Master Plumber and pipe fitter up in the Master Cabin putting in the aluminium flat bars to mount the cable and wire trays which will carry all the hoses and pipes.  Each mounting bar is welded in place and then covered with 5mm hard rubber to help insulate them both thermally and electrically before the trays are pop riveted onto them.
Back in the Workshop you can see how these perforated cable/hose trays look once installed.  These ones are having the AC wiring fitted now as we keep AC, DC and data cables separated so they don’t interfere with each other.
I squeezed in enough time to put together two quick videos for all of you who have been asking for more of those.  First one below is the typical sped up overview of the progress made during the week of May 20-24, 2019 and the 2nd one a short guided tour of the large Forepeak storage area up front and a narrated show and tell of the first hatch to be installed in the front deck.

And to quote Porky the Pig “Th-th-th That’s All Folks!”

Hope you enjoyed and thanks for your patience in waiting the few extra days before I could get this all put together and posted.

Always enjoy getting any and all comments, questions and suggestions from you so you are encouraged to put those in the “Join the Discussion” box at the bottom of each blog post.  If you are enjoying these and want to be notified when new content goes live just hit the “Subscribe” box in the top right corner here.

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It is another busy week coming up so it may take me a few extra days to get this week’s update posted so I’ll ask for your patience in advance.

-Wayne