Recently re-built the cabin floor (sole) in Teria.
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| 3 piece plywood floor boards. Finger lift holes on joins. |
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| Middle board removed to access fresh water supply. |
First job was to remove the aftermarket DIY custom floor board, a one piece flat plywood sheet with underbeams built by a previous owner. It made bilge access underway very difficult to almost impossible with the esky sitting ontop. Also it was doing my knee joins in, as the floor is 4cm higher than the original concave fiberglass floorboard design and the old fella ergonomics wasn't right anymore. Wanted to keep mobile and moving well aboard for a few years longer.
So I designed and built new custom 3 piece sole-floorboard from 1/2" plywood. It fits snugly across the 11" wide keel/bilge opening. The forward piece will support the icebox/esky, a middle piece is the most easily accessible and an aft piece supports toolboxes etc (under the companionway step).
It was built as one piece, then measured and cut into 3 sections. Finger holes for lifting boards were cut into the joins between boards. It's as simple as possible.
The boards were painted with three or four coats of decking oil to seal them and get a wooden boat feel.
The existing marine carpet covers it all and rolls back for flooboard opening. The floor is now a nice concave shape again, a similar shape to the original design by Kevin Shepard. On Teria the flat floor was lowered by 4cm, which increased legroom and pop-top headroom as well. There's plenty of fibreglass floor area around the new floor's ply "hatches", to place feet when opening a section of floor up.
This modification has allowed about 25 litres of bottled water to be stowed under the floorboards in the bilges. Various sizes, 2 litres or less which are easy weights to handle. The bottles are first use or recycled. I had to buy some nice cranberry juice to get a few rectangular 1.5L bottles to fit perfectly between centercase and keel side! (Ocean Spray juice, from USA. Cranberries are exotic fruit downunder, they grow in marshy ponds in North America and have allot of health benefits)
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| Water bottles stowed, act as water-ballast. |
25 litres (kilo's) of large water containers could then be removed from the starboard cockpit locker reducing the boats top-weight and aft-weight (Valuable cockpit locker space was freed up for light weight items or extra fuel cans etc. and more hull bouyancy aft)
The lowering of heavy liquids into the keel aboard should make Teria stiffer, more capable of carrying sail in a strong breeze. Perhaps a reduced heeling angle could help comfort too. It has concentrated significant mass low down in the center of the boat.
The new floorboards are close to the original design. (A concave one-piece fibreglass sole-board which most Investigators still use) This is much more comfortable on the legs and knee joins than the flat sole board that was installed in Teria before.
Removed the cube shaped 15 litre jerry can from the cockpit locker. Two dark-colored 10 litre jerry cans are the largest aboard now. They are for solar-water warming and bucket bathing. I've also stowed some other non-flammable rarely needed liquids in the keel/bilge, (eg. UHT milk, porta-potti chemical etc)
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| The marine floor carpet cover |
Teria's original build 1976 concave fibreglass sole board is in the shed still. This is one-piece so has moderate bilge access problems if an esky/tool boxes etc sits ontop. I didn't have the heart to cut it up into pieces, as the present iterant is a prototype idea and still need to be tested in practice.
Below is the "middle ages" custom one piece ply floor, heading for the storage shed. Well made, it was full width about 2 ft wide and full cabin sole length, a hefty piece to handle, impractical to access things under it plus cabin headroom was reduced by 4cm, harder on old knee joints as well.
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