Painting the Inside

Yesterday, the pram came out of the cellar and into the garage where she will be painted. I fine sanded her all over and cleaned up all the dust until I could run my hand over the planks and only feel wood, no grit or dust. Tonight, I taped the knees which will be varnished and rolled on the first coat of cream colored paint. This is the first time I have ever rolled paint on a boat. It does a nice job. I tipped out the streaks made by the roller with a brush. I also used the brush to get the places the roller didn't.


The end product looks nice. I used Epifanes marine enamel. I will do three coats in the end. I plan to sand the first coat with 220 grit sandpaper and then not sand between the second and third coats.

Fitting The Seats

Yesterday wasn't a boating day, at least on the water boating. Since it was raining, again, we took the time to work on fitting the seats into the pram. John had brought some pieces of mahogany up from the mill to use for seats. We trimmed the edges first. Next we calculated the angle that each end would have to be cut to. Then the bow to stern angle. The picture below shows one end of the stern seat already cut and John marking the other end.

Here is the stern seat after cutting and placing.

We went on and used the same process for all three seats. The middle seat had to be fitted around the midships frame. The plans call for the middle seat to be removable to give the sailor more room to work while under sail. We will eventually take our middle seat out, plug the screw holes and make it removable. One thing I should add is that in the plans, it calls for the seat supports to be 1" on the support surface. In the hand drawn sheet which shows how to make the removable middle seat, it calls for two inch support surfaces. We found the size screws called for in the plans to fasten the seats would be way too big to fasten to the 1" supports. However, they probably would work with 2" supports.

Now we will sand out the seat surfaces and round over the edges before putting three coats of varnish on. After one more coat of epoxy and a lot of 220 grit sandpaper, we will finally be ready to paint the inside of the pram. Then we will fasten the seats into the boat.

Seat Supports

The next project on the pram was to create the seat supports. These are nothing more than blocks of wood about 8" long, fastened to the sides of the boat. The seats are laid on top of and screwed to these supports. We are using scrap pieces of mahogany for the supports. Our seats will be 1" by 8" mahogany. The seats are fashioned so that they may be removed for refinishing as needed over the life of the boat. We will varnish the mahogany seats and install them after the boat has been painted. We plan to just paint the supports and not fuss with varnish. Below, John is measuring the lengths before he cuts the small pieces to fit. After they are cut to length, we will have to sand and shape them to fall flat on the curved sides of the boat.

Last night, we went down to install the supports. We drew lines on the side of the boat to mark the proper positioning of each support and did final sanding to make them fit snug against the side of the boat. We carefully marked on each support where it's home would be (port stern, port middle etc.). Then we drilled the holes through the sides of the boat from the inside out using our positioning marks as guides. Below you see John countersinking each hole from the outside of the boat plank.

At this point, we discovered that we didn't have any of the proper sized screws left to fasten the supports to the side of the boat. Next we looked at the fasteners called for in the plans to secure the seats to the blocks and discovered they were way too big to do the job. So it was off to the computer to order another box of 1" #8 bronze flat head wood screws and some more appropriately sized screws for the seats.