20200712

Galley Box

Since cooking on Hatseflats had proved rather precarious I decided to get myself a cooking box. Searching the internet for ready-made products only produced many images of home grown cooking boxes. So I decided to roll my own as well despite the fact that the sailing season had already started.

I designed the box around the burner, the Bialetti coffee pot, a frying pan and a pan for boiling. First the box should stabilize the burner by providing a shelf with a hole to fixate a Campingaz Bleuet C206 burner. Secondly the box should stabilize the 'burnee' by providing a rack to fit the coffee pot, frying pan or boiling pan. Now I put the cooking gear, cutlery and some tinned supplies on the kitchen table. I then cut down a cardboard box to hold everything with 1-2 cm to spare in all directions. The next step was to create a prototype from MDF before I would sacrifice my precious 8mm okoume ply.

20200710

After the prototype of MDF it was time to create the real box from 8mm ply. For this I created three templates: one shelf/divider/spacer/front, one side of the box and one side of the lid. With the router I cut 4 sides of the lid, 2 sides and the shelf, two dividers, front and back from the templates. After I cut the lid and bottom oversized I glued the sides and front to the bottom plate. I used epoxy glue thickened with micro balloons to fill the seams between the sides from the outside.

20200711

Sanded the outside and glued the heat shields and rails in place.

20200712

Gave the outside a first coat of epoxy.