With the seams failing, it was time put together a new dodger. The old design had many short comings I hoped to address. The flexible plastic windshield panels had yellowed and crazed badly making standing watch under the dodger impossible. The panels came down to the deck about 2 feet short of the coaming, allowing any rain or spray to fall inside the coaming and flow into the cockpit via the cockpit seats (wet cushions and butts.) This also made for much wasted space ahead of the windscreen . The dodger needed to be extended to the top edge of the coaming with a weatherproof seal. The wind screen needed to be non-yellowing, and provide a clear undistorted view. A hatch to provide access to the forward deck had to be included (the walkway outside the coaming on the O/I 30 is extremely narrow and would be unsafe in large seas.) The solution would be an aluminum frame with a rigid durable plastic glazing material unaffected by sunlight and weather. Except for the welding, this could be fabricated at home with hand tools and mounted on the boat in spring.
Project started by placing old dodger on a wood frame and cardboard template representing the outer edge of Moonshadow's coaming. This assembly was inclined to match the same angles as on the boat. A vertical template to represent the desired rake angle of the windshield is set (this matches the slope leading up to the coaming edge from the deck.)
Using some 1/8 hardboard, a rough template is started to develop the final shape of the windshield. After trimming and wrapping around the coaming template and raking to proper angle, a 1/2 finished windshield shape template is trimmed (not yet done in this picture.)
Here the finished 3D windshield template (left and right side joined together with the hatch opening left open) are laid in a flat 2D plane along with the coaming template in the background. The flat aluminum bar stock, 6063 Aluminum (do not use 6061- too difficult to bend) is formed to match the templates with the 1" dimension laying flat on the template. The bottom frames are shown here, but a similar process is used to form the top frame of the windshield frame. These two pieces, the bottom windshield detail and coaming detail will later be joined and welded together to make the bottom frame of the windshield.
The details have been assembled and welded using the windshield templates to hold things together. The bottom windshield detail was wrapped around the outer edge of the coaming detail. The various details were drilled and tapped for 10-32 NF threads as necessary, which later will hold the screws used to fasten the plastic windshield to the frames. I used 6" spacing on these screw holes. The coaming detail was not tapped, but drilled for the mounting screws to be used later to hold the completed windshield to the boat while the 5200 bedding compound sets up. Small angle blocks were cut, drilled and used to hold the coaming detail and bottom windshield detail together in an angled shape for welding. The same holes were used to screw the templates to the frames , holding everything together for welding. One of the templates caught fire after we finished the welding and didn't cool things down before leaving it.
After a trip to the boatyard to check fit and do some final tweaking of the frame, epoxy powder coating, it's back to the basement for final fitting of the Lucite-Tuf windshields and hatch.
The windshield provides excellent distortion free visability that is just not possible with the soft vinyl windows found on most dodgers. Detachable side curtains will also use the Lucite-Tuf windows