Backyard Pirate Ship Playhouse - The Chest (the sequel)

When we last tuned in, I had built a treasure chest that was too big for it's lid.

So last night I got home, put Mathieu to bed, puttered around the house a bit and it was garbage night so put those to the curb, then I headed out to the workshop.  My plan was to dissassemble one side of the box then rip off a side of the box by running the whole thing lenghtwise on my table saw.  So I took all the screws out but remember when I said carpenter's glue holds wood together better than nails (or screws), well here's the proof.

May be a little hard to make out but the first board I took off actually broke as the edges of the boards were glued together and that joint was actually better than the actual grain of the wood.  A glued joint is definitely not your weakest point.  So I thought so what, I can just cut 2 pieces to replace this face but the more I tried, the more evident it was that this thing would not come apart as I wanted.

So here it lies in the corner, now a scrapped pile of wood.  It's a shame as I should have just left it as is and used it as a nice storage box as I now ended up starting the box from scratch.

I don't even remember why I bought this 90 degree clamp and I know I had definitely never used it but boy was it ever perfect to start a box with.  I predict I will use this clamp again in the future and when the wife saw it she also started dreaming of all the projects she could use this for.  Just goes to show, this thing has been hanging on the wall in the workshop for a few years and I'm just discovering it's usefulness. 

This time around, making the box a little shorter (with one 1X6 and one 1X4), I decided to stagger the boards, 1X6 for bottom board on the face and back and the 1X4 as the bottom board for the sides.  Seeing how strong the glued joints were on the let's call it the prototype, I figured it made structural sense to have staggered joints.

Now doesn't that look nice.  I drilled 2 holes in each side that once this thing is painted, we'll run some rope through and make a rope handle on each side.  I also broke out the palm sander and with some 80 grit paper sanded the joints on the lid and this thing turned out way better than I ever hoped for.  Still need to fill in a small crack with some wood filler and it may not come out as good in a pic but I am more than pleased with this lid. 

Obviously when the munchkin saw this this morning he ordered his mother to paint this "tout de suite".  I'm taking him with me this weekend for a reno project I'm doing and on one of my inevitable trips to KBS or Home Depot, we'll pick up some hinges and a latch so when we get home Sunday we can complete the chest.  I'll post some pics of the finished product.

Till then, as always, thanks for dropping by.

A.

Backyard Pirate Ship Playhouse - Props

A little late with my post this week, or a little early, depending on your frame of reference.

Well winter is almost upon us as it was pretty cold this weekend and let's not forget, more rain.  Anyways, didn't get out to the ship much but last night I decided that I really couldn't go a weekend without doing something for this ship so I tackled something Mathieu has been asking for, the treasure chest. 

This is one of several props (I'm sure) we'll end up making ourselves.  I've been looking for small cheap wooden barrels to simulate gun powder kegs.  I may end up duplicating one technique I used you'll see a little later on this page and make the barrels myself.


So, I started off by cutting all the pieces, which really didn't take too long.

Assembled the box.  You may notice a jar of carpenter's glue next too the box.  If you've never used it, do not underestimate glue in a project like this.  Once that glue is dry, I could likely remove all the screws from this box and it could still take a beating and hold together.



Next came the lid.  Now again, I'm no genius here as I just got inspiration from a small chest I saw in a decoration store and I just improved on the design.  The one I had seen in a store they just built the lid with straight edge pieces so they had cracks between the pieces.  I cut mine at an angle on each side.

Assembled (bu missing last piece) you can see the result.  With a little sanding on the edges where the pieces but against each other, this thing should look really nice.  This is how I may end up making the wooden gun powder kegs.

Now next pics are with the lid on the box.

You see my mistake?  Obviously something went wrong and that something is that after I had already cut the rounded sides for the lid, I went and made a slight design change in the box.  I opted to glue and screw the sides on the outside of the bottom board  instead on top of that bottom board.  This added and inch and a half that I failed to compensate for.  Ordinarily I wouldn't have posted these and would have waited until I had a "perfect" result but I wanted you to see that sometimes, a slight change of plan can have some embarassing results.  My wife couldn't believe that me, the planner, could have made such a rookie mistake.

So Wednesday night I'm going to have to modify this box to accept the lid.  I will need to empty it out first as my wife has advised me that Mathieu has already loaded it up full of pirate treasure.  I left the house before he was up this morning but by what she's told me, he was VERY happy with this new pirate item.

Hope to have some pics of it finished soon.

Drop by again soon, ya hear....

A.





Backyard pirate ship playhouse - the paint job

Hi there.

well, it's been a couple of pretty good days.  I got some more boards to finish up the bow as well as start the trim work on the railings etc...

So Saturday I started by completing the boards on the port (left) side of the bow.  I also put in a porthole on that side as well in the bow as when you look at the ship from the front you see two identical sides.

Then I was planning on staining the bulk of the ship but the threat of rain was omni-present so I decided to keep working on some structural stuff, framing in railings and such. 

Now as for the choice of colours... as previewed, the wife and I had a lengthy discussion about choices, what each colour made us feel about ourselves and about each other, what our choice of colours symbolized.

I'm just kidding, we actually agreed pretty quickly.  And I have just spent all day outside staining this behemoth.  Have a look.

Now you can't see it from this vantage point but the main deck and bridge have also been stained, but in a dark slate colour.  Doors and portholes will eventually be stained yellow.

Now I want to write a bit about stain vs paint,  we went with a semi-transparent stain to give it some colour while still seeing some of the wood grain come through.  It's all about personal tastes but on a project like this I prefer stain.

Today was a good day to do this as it was about 16 degrees celcius outside, not dry but not overly humid and thos conditions were forecasted for the whole day.  The somewhat cool temperature ensured that my coats didn`t dry too quickly, a good thing especially for the novice painter.  If you've ever painted on a scorching July day, you know that your technique has to be pretty good to avoid brush or roller marks, picture framing, etc...  Now I did only finish staining the deck around 5 PM and dew point was around 8 PM so I was cutting it a bit close.  Also they were calling for rain after midnight so I'm a little worried.  The stain would certainly be dry but if you start drenching the whole thing too soon you may end up with some issues.  Tonight will be the test.

Now, to roll and brush or spray.  A colleague did lend me his Wagner sprayer but when I started today it was way too windy for a sprayer.  So, I got a nice roller with 19mm thick material, does a great job with stain.  You need a thicker rooler than you would with pain as stain isn't as thick and you want to make sure your roller soaks up enough stain.  Also, the thicker roller is great for rolling some stain into cracks and grooves.  I used the brush to cut out everything and I'm pretty pleased with the end result.

Now doors and portholes will be painted yellow as well as the ladder going to the bridge.  And although it`s not visible from the outside, to protect the wood from the inside we are still going to stain those inside walls in the cannon room as well as the hold.  We're going to go with a stain that let's the natural colour of pine show through, mayeb even just a clear coat, not sure yet.

Rain tomorrow morning and I have some work to do for the office so I'll be busy but later on in the day it's supposed to clear up so we may end up doing a bit more work on the railings.  If I do you can rest assured I'll do another update tomorrow.

Until then, thanks for dropping in...

A.

Backyard Pirate Ship Playhouse - rained out - AGAIN

Good evening all.

So Friday night it rained, them Saturday it rained, then I'll give you one guess at what happend today.  This is bullcrap!  As I write this at 7:30 at night, it's still pouring.  I'm this frickin close to rounding up the animals in the barn and getting them on the ship, just in case.

Anyways, it did let up just long enough for me to install the crane.

Now this thing isn't quite finished yet as I am not filled with confidence that my son will follow my instructions to not lift anything heavier than a bag of potatoes with this.  Something tells me that at some point I'll catch him trying to lift the dog or one of the goats onto the deck of this ship, so I'm going to reinforce the aft mast with angle steel I have in the barn.  I need to sand it a bit as it's rusted a bit over the past few years and I'll paint it black as with all the other hardware. 

Anyways, as you can see this thing swivels so he can work with it on both sides of the ship as well as anywhere he wants on the forward deck.

As I've mentionned before, our son is very mechanicaly inquisitive, so I know he's going to play with this feature A LOT.  If you were to build this for younger children or if this was for a playground where you wouldn't have a lot of adult supervision, you'd probably want to stick with a slide and some swings on this.

You can see that pine that's been soaking for a few days isn't too pretty.  I will remedy this next weekend (Canadian Thanksgiving) when I will have a long weekend to work on it.  Plan is to spend a day finishing all the pine then a colleague has loaned me a paint sprayer that I'm going to use to stain the whole thing.

As for choice of colours, this has been the subject of a light debate that will quickly erupt into a full blown argument when we finally come to buying the stain.  My opnion is to go with a more traditional pirate colour but my wife wants to go all technicolour on this bad boy.  I'll let you wait for the pictures to see who won.

So then it started pouring again so back into the workshop I went.  Slowly getting ready for a few projects that could keep me busy when it's raining as well as after I'm done with the ship. 

Thinking of making a few adirondak chairs.  They're pretty pricy, the nice sturdy ones at least, and I'm getting cocky enough that I think I can build one myself.  In fact, I'm so full of myself that I think I can improve upon the time tested design.  We'll see.

Also need to build another shelving unit for the ever increasing Lego collection.  I've got a nice sheet of birch plywood that I don't really remember buying but Im sure going to use it.

On the topic of buying and forgetting about it, one piece of advice, KEEP YOUR RECEIPTS!  While sorting through the barn, I have discovered enough electrical supplies to build another barn, and tools I've likely only used once.  Although this project has required a lot of tools I hadn't used in a while.

Suffice it to say that I probably have 1000 to 1500$ worth of good supplies that I'm going to need to find another project for next spring.  Possibilities are endless.

Be sure to drop by again.

A.

Backyard Pirate Ship - rained out (almost)

What a wet weekend!  All I managed to do was pick up the customs metal parts for the crane and work on the portholes.  It did clear up today but Mathieu had a birthday party to go to so off we went.

Ok, so here ae the parts my neighbour made for the ship.

Don't worry if these don't look like anything to you.  I showed them to the wife and she didn't know what I was going to do with these.  They make sense if you go back to one of the first posts where they might have been in the rough drawings I had.  Anyways, 2 of these parts will be going on the main mast but the 4 almost identical (except one) parts will be components in the the crane on the aft mast.  I was going to assemble that when we got back from the party but the 4 inch bolts I have are not long enough.  I didn't figure that a 4X4 (actually 3.5 X 3.5) along with 1/4 inch steel plating (times 2) added up to 4 inches.  DUH!  Of course it does, so my bolts go from one edge to the other but I have no meat left to screw a nut on to.

On Sunday afternoon, at 5:30, hardware store is closed so I went back to working on the portholes.

Now I'd like to say that I used that pretty little lazer level to make sure the porthole on the bow was level with the other two, but I can't.  It was the plan but I ende up eyeballing it as the lazer level just wasn't working out.  So viewed from the outside.

Viewed from the inside.

All I need to do now is run a bead of silicone around the inside and outside of these.

Again, small details that just keep adding to the ship.  Before the cannon doors and these porholes, the side of the ship was just "plain", no character, just no detail.  As I said before, finish work is definitely not my favorite part of the job, or at least I think it isn't.  The truth is when I do end up with some nice detail work like this I am quite proud of my handy work.

So tomorrow I'm going to hit the hardware store and pick up the right bolts and hopefully one evening this week I'll finish assembling the cran for the aft mast.  Also going to grab some more pine to finish the railings, etc...  Plan is to stain this in two weekends, weather permitting, so I guess I'm grabbing some colour swatches tomorrow as well.

Have a great Sunday evening everyone!



Backyard Pirate Ship - the small stuff

Good day to all,

and a special welcome to my first and only reader from Great Britain, whoever you are.  I get a kick out of seeing from what countries the blog gets hits from.  I'm still missing hits from South America so if any of you have any contacts down there, feel free to forward them a link to the blog.

Also, I'm sorry I lost your e-mail but to the gentleman from Somalia inquiring about purchasing 10 of these ships, please e-mail me again.  But let me be clear, these are defintely not sea-worthy so I do not know why you were asking about clamps for outboard motors.  And as for your question regarding purchasing additonal ammunition for the cannons???  These cannons only shoot water, and not at a very high pressure.  You basically attach a garden hose to these, that's the extent of their "power".  Anyways, do e-mail me if you were actually looking for a "playset".

Now back to the build.  It hit me yesterday that I haven't been sharing as many tips and tricks lately so last night when I was doing some more prep work in the workshop, I snapped some pics.

I was procrastinating, I guess, on working on the portholes but since it's dark out early now and I only got home at 8, only thing I could really do was work in the workshop.  I had 5 "frames" cut for some portholes but I hadn't done anything else to them yet.  Plan was to use plexiglass or I think the real term for what I have a sheet of is polycarbonate, instead of glass for the panes.

So, once again I got to pull out a tool I hadn't used yet on this project, my router table. 

Fortunately by backing up the guides on it as far as they could go, it basically gave me the perfect jig to route just a small strip on the inside of my frame. 

I did have to adjust the height of the bit as well as use a scrap of 1/4 inch plywood to give me the right depth that would match the thickness of the polycarbonate.  Take a look, I'm rather pleased at how this worked out and it only took me 15 minutes to set up and maybe 5 minutes to run all 5 frames.

So I then got my sheet of ploycarbonate and and pulled out my multi-tool.  Unfotunately, Canadian Tire doesn't offer this specific tool anymore.  Tood bad as I've used this one A LOT and it is AMAZEBALLS.  It's one of those tools where at first you may only think of one use for, but once you start using it you find all types of jobs for it.  I use it a lot with the plunger router attachement as it comes with a collar for standard router bits.  It's a little under-powered for big routing jobs but a quick setup for those quick jobs.  Here is is with various "Dremmel" type bits I use.

Now you'll notice I've got it laid out on a scrap piece of styrofoam insulation.  Styrofoam insulation is (I've found at least) perfect when you need to work on material that you want to cut but also need consistant support underneath while you're making your cuts.  If the material you're cutting is brittle, thin or just plain fragile, lay it out on some scrap styrofoam.  Make sure though, that if you're cutting material that's 1/4 inch thick and you're using let's say a circular saw with a cut depth of 2 and a half inches, that you either use 2 and a half inches of styrofoam or if adjustable, reduce your cut depth. 

The idea here is to cut through the material while your blade or bit slices effortlessly through the soft styrofoam underneath.  Now don't start heralding me as a genius for this, you can for other stuff but in this case, I did not invent this technique as I'm sure I saw it on some TV show or read it in an article, somewhere.

So I end up with a nice porthole pane made of "kid friendly" and "kid resistant", pretty much shatter proof material.

Take the protective coating off of it and VOILÀ!

Now I'm going to gluegun (yes, I've just invented a new verb.  THAT just happened!), these panes into the frames and at some point during this weekend the pirate ship will have some portholes.  They already look "ok" but I still need to do some sanding on the frames and for the aft of the captain's quarters / cannon room, I'm going to try and do something a little fancier than round portholes.

Probably no new updates for a few days but this weekend, weather permitting, you can look forward to seeing the aft mast completed with the horizontal boom and pullies (basically a crane) and hopefully some of these portholes installed.

Until then, as always, thanks for dropping by.

Backyard Pirate Ship - Days 18+

Allright, I know I haven't checked in in a while.  Combination of inclement weather and some hobby farm chores.  You see, Thanksgiving is coming up and some turkeys needed killin.  After they were all cleaned up, smallest one was 22 lbs and the biggest weighed in at almost 31 lbs.  Those are big frickin birds.

Anyways, back to the ship.  I think I mentionned this before, I'm now at a point where progress seems to be at a crawl, even when I spend a good day on the project.  Case in point, hurricane braces.  Never heard of them?  That's cause I just invented them, so to speak.  You see I was worried that once in a while, living on the sea, we do tend to get some pretty high winds.  I wasn't initially planning to anchor this ship into the ground but as it got taller and taller, I reconsidered that decision and decided to put in to anchors into the ground on the side of the ship that people don't tend to see.

So I started by digging a post hole 4 ft deep. 

Now this 4x4 is going to be encased in concrete so I got one of those cardboard tubes (I think they call them Sono tubes).  Now one hint about buying these cardboard forms, although they have a whole shelf of them saying they're 6 inches in diameter, there are wide variations, at least I found, in what constitutes 6 inches, and I said "Pardon?".  So I sorted through the various tubes on the shelf at the store and picked out the 6 incher that was the widest.  The 8 inch I thought was overkill.  These tubes were in 8 ft lengths so all I had to do was cut it in hal and one tube gave me my two forms for my anchors.

Now if any of you following the blog are certified contractors or whatnot, you might think that I do things sometimes that aren't really in the "book".  Some of the things I do I learned but some things are just "logical" as far as I'm concerned.  So when it cam time to put the 4x4 into the tube, I figured just encasing it in concrete wouldn't be enough if it was just fitted in like a sleave.  I needed some extra grabbing power in that concrete so I cut some pieces of rebar, 4.75 inches long and Mathieu and I drilled some holes into the 4x4's section to be encased.  My thoughts on this that although just small protrusions, they would anchor the 4x4 even more in the concrete.  One inportant thing I remembered reading somewhere though, I had to make sure the ends of these pieces of rebar didn't poke through the outer edge of the concrete, other wise ground water might over time rust them and compromise the concrete.

So our postready to go into the ground, I attached the top of it at the right place in the frame of the ship, then we mixed up 2 bags of concrete.

I know it's hard to see but this 4x4 is bolted on the inside to many of the structural ribs and plates of the ship.  it also serves as the top portion of the framworkfor the interior brig wall so this will provide some lateral structural integrity as well.  One last thing on this task, I usually do not backfill concrete work right away like this but they were calling for 40mm or rain that night and following day so last thing I wanted was the hole to fill up with water.

So a few days ago the weapons system finally showed up.  Let's just say they were worth the wait.

Oh and visitors are still stopping by to see the ship.  Kids play during the day and I'm thinking of hosting booze cruises during the evenings.

So now that the cannons were here, I was able to figure out the right dimensions for some cannon doors.

I like this feature as it's the start of "dressing up" the ship.  It's all the little details that'll make this stand out from other play sets.

I also put in the doors and some pull ropes to open the doors to get ready for attacks.

As you can see, I went with the black hinges again, matching the other hardware already on the ship.  On the inside, I played with the idea of comlpicated pulley systems and winches to open up the cannon doors but seeing as they're really not heavy, I just went with simple poly rope (resists water) and installed some rope cleats to tie the ropes to and keep the doors open.  Actually, Mathieu put in one of the cleats all on his own with the cordless drill.  I don't think you can see the difference.

So that's it for this weekend.  Our neighbour is welding some parts for the boom crane thingy this week and he said they'd be ready by mid-week so next weekend we'll be installing another fun feature.

Until then, thanks for dropping by.

A.