Nearly Ready for Cockpit Deck

It is now the first week of February and besides just a couple minor touchups I am ready to install the cockpit decking. Thinking back to September, I remember my timeline was that this decking would be installed the last week in October. So I’m only three months behind.

Things always take longer than on paper. For instance, I remember in my September timeline I had given myself one night after work to screw the floorboards down. In reality this took several week nights and part of a weekend to get done. The floorboards had already been cut, shaped, oiled, and placed with pilot holes months before. How long does it take to screw down a handful of boards?

Like most all things, there was simply more to it. The pilot holes in the floor (joists) had filled with paint and needed to be drilled out again. Many of my countersinks in the floor boards themselves were not deep enough and had to be deepened, which means exposed wood requiring oil for sealing. Despite a good dry fit months ago, some of the boards didn’t sit quite flush with the rest and needed to be shimmed or shaved accordingly. And on and on similarly with the other tasks like paint, electrical junction boxes, etc.

In the end, I’m glad I didn’t rush things as often I wanted to do. Some good pictures to follow…

Cabin Paint

Getting finish paint up to the top of the recently added hull sides took longer than expected because I had not primed well enough over the line of glass tape I had laid on the joint where the sides meet the bottoms. After a couple coats of finish paint, the tape still stood out way too much, so I laid a couple of primer coats over the tape joint and then more coats of finish. That did the trick.

Electrical

I wired up my two stern junction boxes as this is easier to do without the cockpit decking. Here they are all ready to go. Thanks again to Terry Goding for letting me steal his design.

Floor Boards

As mentioned earlier, the installation wasn’t as straightforward as simply screwing them down. But this was as enjoyable a task to complete as there has been to date.

Footwell Flotation

The manual recommends placing foam flotation blocks underneath the footwell in the stern compartment. The implication is that this would be loose foam blocks. I decided to build a sealed compartment for this foam. I figured the foam will degrade over time and I’d have pieces all in the stern storage, or the foam would slide around (some people have installed straps to keep this from happening). And then there would still be this difficult to reach area under the footwell, to where small objects might make their way, never to be seen again.

I cut these three pieces from scrap in order to build the compartment…

Because of the way the two compartment side pieces notch into the transom cleating, these pieces could only be joined to the footwell sides after the footwell sides had been installed. Below you can see the footwell sides installed and below them the outline where the compartment pieces will meet the hull bottom.

The three compartment pieces were then installed and filleted at all joints inside the compartment and out. The exposed fillets will be sanded and painted before the cockpit deck goes down.

The new sealed compartment was then filled tight with foam and the footwell floor installed.

The footwell sides and floor were all glued with thickened epoxy and held in place with SS brads. There was a small gap between the floor and sides that was filled with thickened epoxy. These joints will be reinforced later with a much larger fillet.

A tough job here was cleaning up the squeeze out underneath the footwell. I didn’t scrape away the squeeze out but instead used a fillet tool to make small fillets at all the joints. These weren’t finished as cleanly as usual since they won’t be exposed to view but enough so as to be relatively smooth if ever reaching under there or stowing gear that could get snagged.

Next

All that’s now left to do before I can install the cockpit deck is to paint over the exterior fillets of the footwell flotation compartment and seal a couple of very small gaps left between the footwell pieces and the bulkheads.