Portholio

One of the things that we needed to do in order to put the new inside wall onto the battens was to somehow box i the porthole, otherwise we would just have a nice little gap full of cobwebs and moisture around the porthole. We decided, rather than have wooden boxing in butting up to the cold metal hull wall, to have a welded metal 'box' around the porthole and then build the wall around that.

I began by making cardboard templates and making sure that they fit exactly into the space



Then i cut and ground pieces of steel plate to size and we clamped the top piece in place

for Lorna to weld in place:



Once it was all painted it fit in perfectly with the surrounding hull.


Then we did the same with the bottom piece and it all started to come together. I guess we'll need to add side pieces in too, just to where the wall will come to when it's fixed in place, and then it'll all be sorted.


The great thing about welding a 'box' around the porthole is that it's all completely sealed and waterproof, so if we do have any condensation issues or if (please no) we had waves slopping through from outside, it won't just go down inside the wall.

Hopefully we won't have condensation issues, as we bought some Thermilate insulating paint additive to paint round the porthole with. They make a lot of claims on their website and we're very much reserving judgement to see how it actually performs. But we painted a little patch on the metal wall and there does genuinely seem to be a temperature difference between the painted bit and the non painted bit. If it works then we'll be painting all exposed metal, such as beams in the roof, with paint mixed with Thermilate.