The materials needed include wood doweling, heavy outdoor material (like Sunbrella), durable screen material (like Phifertex), a sewing machine, a couple of inches of Velcro, and some scrap 3-strand rope. The idea behind the construction is to use the dowels within fabric sleeves to make the screen rigid and fit exactly within your companionway. The dowel thickness, including the material contained in the sleeve, should fit in the groove that holds the weatherboards. The horizontal dowels are permanently sewn into the sleeves and the vertical ones are removable. To make them removable, I made the vertical sleeves a couple of inches longer and use the Velcro to lock them down once they are folded over the dowel to hold them in.
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| Fold-over on the sleeve with Velcro |
The sleeves are eight inches wide and cut to the appropriate length on each side of the opening. It can be a little tricky sewing the sleeves into a frame, but take your time and use plenty of straight pins to get the angles right. Also, be sure to make the tubes holding the dowels as tight as possible to ensure a rigid frame. Do this by keeping the sewing foot up against the dowel when sewing the tube.
Our screen butts up against the companionway hatch and leaves a little gap that bugs could still get through, so I sewed a "baggy winkle" along the top to stop the pest. A baggy winkle is essentially a length of rope with short lengths of frayed rope woven along its length. This was originally used by seamen to provide chafe protection on-board a ship.
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| Bug-proof fit |
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| The finished product |
We are now sleeping soundly without that nagging buzzing sound around our ears at night.
Branko
