Building the House

So you have the deck on, with two openings in it. The big one is to be covered with a structure (labeled, variously, trunk cabin, coach roof, deckhouse) that will provide headroom, admit air and light, keep out water, wind, and mos­quitoes, and not detract unduly from the grace and elegance of the vessel. Mr. Rudyard Kipling once remarked that there are nine-and-60 ways of writing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right. So it is with this structure. I've tried most of them in the last 50 years, and have finally settled upon a routine that works well for me. It even pro­duces a result that fulfills most of the above listed requirements. It demands no special aes­thetic sense, inherited instinct, or awesome skill of hand and eye. The end product looks amazingly like the picture which shows a pro­file having a skyline at the top, a line where top meets side, and a third where side meets deck. It also shows an end view of the whole business, showing the amount of tumblehome ( or lack of it) in the sides and ends, and the crown of the beams in the house top. But unless the designer is very good, indeed (and unless your work, to this point, in the matter of sheer, width of side decks, and consistency of main deck crown, is absolutely flawless), you will be faced with the need to make small adjustments-which take time and shake your confidence if done in a hit-or-miss manner, but which proceed smooth­ly and inevitably with the right technique and equipment.  The beam-crown pattern The first thing you'll need to build the house is a beam-crown pattern, which in this case should be a light board slightly longer than the greatest width of the house, with a convex crown cut into one edge and matching concavity cut into the other (Figure 15-1). We'll assume for the moment, in charity, that your designer has been content to use a con­stant crown for the full length of the house. (I've known some designs that required every beam to be different from the one behind it; but I trust that the perpetrators of these horrors have now all been eliminated.) This crown is, very likely, described as an arc with a radius of 7 feet 3 inches (or whatever) and is, of course, easily marked by tacking one end of a slat to the floor, measuring from the nail the length of the given radius, and marking the path of that point along the length of your pattern. For a known radius (and if it is short enough to fit an uncluttered space on your shop floor), this is the sensible way to describe it.  But suppose the S.O.B. (this should, of course, read N.A.) describes the crown as having a height of 83/4 inches in 7 feet 1 ½ inches length. You can lay off this line on the floor and swing arcs of experimental radii until your knees and patience have both given out and you've achieved a curve that comes very close to hitting all those points. Or you can attack the problem as in the accompanying drawing (Figure 15-2, steps a,b, and c), which is self explanatory and uses up what little I remember from my high school geometry lessons.  Then there's the textbook method, known to all students of naval architecture, whereby you draw a doughnut (which sits on a line like the sun on the horizon) and carve it into strange sections whose heights are spaced at ordained intervals along