Engine bed prep

With an hour or so free this evening, I began feeling my way through the initial stages of the engine installation. I honestly have very little clue what I'm doing. Following encouragement and some expertise from a knowledgeable source, I proceeded with my plan to use a length of the stern tube material I'd purchased, capped with two wooden plugs, to begin determining the centerline of the prop shaft and engine. The picture below doesn't show the string rigged through the center of the plug, but it provides an idea of what I did.

The idea is to secure a string in the center of the wooden plug, run the string through the stern tube and out the center of a matching wooden plug on the forward end of the tube. The string is then run down the centerline of the boat, drawn taut, and secured. Having established the centerline, the tube and string are then adjusted vertically to achieve an angle that does not exceed the recommended angle listed for the engine, a Westerbeke 20B (which happens to be 14 degrees) - all the while adding shims and hot glue to hold the stern tube in place.

Once I'd experimented with a couple of angles and my engine mockup, I set the string to an angle of just under 10 degrees - 9.2, actually - that seemed to give the rear engine mounts a little more room at the narrow portion of the aft bilge. I transferred the pitch and level of the string to the engine box panels, then drew a line on each to indicate the attachment point for cleats that would support the engine mockup while I took measurements for the engine beds.

With the cleats mounted, I rested the template on two 1/2" pieces of plywood running laterally and eyeballed the arrangement. Alignment looks pretty good, but I'm concerned that the rear engine mounts are too close to the hull; I need enough material under them to thread a mounting bolt into. I could get more room under them by adjusting them up, but I centered all of the mounts so that I'd have adjustment room up and down. I don't want to lose that for fine tuning. The other option is to move the whole engine forward, but I don't want to do that either because the engine will already be pretty far forward in the compartment. Anyway, feeling a bit hurried (and uncertain), I decided it was time to quit and let things percolate. I'll take a fresh look at it later this week and see if I've arrived at a clearer idea of what I need to do.