Day 444  Forward desk seat
    The forward desk, also known as "my desk", has had an office chair at it for quite a while as I have used the desk for soldering, making to do lists, and even writing website pages. It works great on "dry land" but would become adangerous  rolling menace at sea! For this reason it needs to be attached, yet still useable. I thought over several systems that could be employed here. A sliding car on a track would work, but would present a tripping hazard when the seat is in, and would be a challenge to keep a clean floor around.
  A folding arm might work, something like a dentists x-ray machine but low to the floor. It would need to be very heavy duty, and may require pins to lock it into position. The attachment point would need to be pretty high so it clears the support frame on the chair.
The last option, one I think is best, is to have a fold-in slider system that can allow for a wide range of positions so the keyboard drawer can be pulled out and used as well. Aren't I the picky one!
It must be just so!

So off I went, with no Maya 3-d design on this one, and started cutting up tubing and welding stuff together. Where the seat base connects to the arm needs to hug in close as bolted plastics tend to bend and deform.

I found a giant knob (white thing in photo left) off something or another, made a fancy wrap around clamp the inserted a 1/4" flatbar section inside. This was threaded for the knob to tighten the slider
On the first try, the push out arm was too long, so I cut it down a few inches and everything fell into place. On the ends of the main bar are tabs with 3 holes in them, measured to line up with the hull frames (webs) on each end. A small tab was added to the center of the bar as there is a frame there.

The seat is very rigid when further out, but somewhat bouncy when in. If this becomes a problem, I'll shorten the push out arm a little more.

When snugged all the way in,(photo left) There isn't much support so I will add a Shepard's hook off the foot of the desk to secure it.

The slide clamp has a piece of split PVC pipe inside so the pipe doesn't get scratched. A small screw was threaded in to stop it from sliding out, which it did constantly.

Not bad for one day!
 Gena readied the parts for the auto-helm rudder. She's waiting for the weather to get warmer before gel-coating it. The thing was in pretty rough shape before with dings, scrapes, and light damage to corners etc. We found the top section of the mount on the boat is in the way once the whole thing is flipped up so needed to be cut off.
 It's 3/8" stainless plate so Gena had a bugger of a time cutting it with the grinder.

Don't know how that happened, there was clearly no room at all.
After that, She greased the chain and sprockets for the cockpit steering station, and properly attached the wheel. For some reason, there was no setscrew in the wheel's shaft hole thingy. so Gena had to drill and tap that.

Day 444:
 10 hours: Made seat bars for my desk, prepped auto-helm rudder parts


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