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.

Backyard Pirate Ship - Day 17

Well what a momentous weekend this was.  The pirate ship had it's maiden voyage!  Meaning, Mathieu slept aboard for the first night ever.  Anyways, I'll get back to that.

Let's go back to Friday.  I took the day off to make this a really nice long weekend and I got to work on some finish stuff.  I wouldn't say that I hate finish work but it's definitely not my favorite part of the job.  I just find that progress is a little harder to notice once you're down to the finishing touches.

So the plan was to at some point this weekend, finally sleep on the ship.  I was not going to sleep in this thing without proper doors so I started with the back one.  Trimmed out the frame with some 1x4, made a nice edge and voila.

Viewed from inside.  Now I know this doesn't look airtight but hey, it's a kid's playhouse.  Besides, I am going to add some of that sticky foam strip to the inside of the trim so that should eliminate the daylight we see coming through the edge of the door.  On that note, one colleague lamented that I had not left any space between the boards when I covered the hull.  See how those board have dried up even more and I now have plenty of space between those board.

Now from the first pic I'm not sure if you noticed the poistionning of the hinges but from the next pic you can see that this door, when open, doubles as a ramp.  Now I still need to install some sort of a rope and pullie system with some counterweights so that a small kid has no difficulty in closing it, but this component is almost complete.

So that left the cannon room door leading onto the main deck.  Did the same here, trimmed it with 1x4 then made another custom door.  I have to admit that I didn't go with my first idea for this door but I'm glad I went this way cause I'm pretty pleased with the result.



Mathieu loves it because he's had a padlock for a few years now but with nothing of his own to lock, now he unlocks and locks this door ten times per day.

That's about all I got done on Friday.  Yesterday was a bringing in the firewood for the winter day and we had friends coming over for our labor day bon fire and fireworks.  And after everyone left, I was reminded by a 7 year old that I had said that once the doors were on we could sleep in the ship.  So I got the bunk ready.



Mathieu loaded up some snacks in the cooler now that the some of the beer had dissapeared, and he also made sure to get some pirate booty.

I know it's hard to make out but there's jewels and gold coins in there.  I finally tucked him in around 11 PM.  Temperature was going to drop to 8 or even 6 celcius so we opted for some tuques.  Always wear a tuque when camping in the fall.

Now he slept really good, I on the other hand have decided that this ship will very soon, be equipped with a fold down cot that will double as a table.  I will let you know the dimensions of this table once I have found an appropriate materass for it.

Anyways, he got up this morning, went through the forward hatch, unlocked the cannon room door and came down the rear ladder, opened up the cooler and poured us each a glass of orange juice.  Then he felt he needed to go to the bathroom and realized that make believe is all fine and dandy but when you gotta do number 2, you need to get back to the real world and find a bathroom.  He loved being able to sleep on his ship though.

So, we went back to the house, he went to do his business and I went up to bed, told my wife "tag, you're it" and slept for a few hours more.

So back to some ship business.  I've been getting a few e-mails from people about getting the plans to this thing.  Unfortunately, all I have right now are some rough sketches.  Once I've completely finished the project, I'll get some proper plans made.  Also, through various social networking sites and just plain search engines, I'm noticing some readers from as far as Russia, Germany and Australia.  Glad my blog is getting some viewers from around the world.  I started this thing so that co-workers and friends could follow the project but now e-mails and comments I get serve as motivation on those days where I don't feel like getting the tools out.  Keep em coming.

On that note, I bid you good night.