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 up, the aftermarket DIY custom floor board was removed. This was a one piece flat plywood with underbeams built by a previous owner. However, it made bilge access underway very difficult, an almost impossible with the esky sitting ontop.
So designed and built new sole-floorboard from 1/2" plywood. It fits snugly across the 11" wide keel/bilge opening and was cut into 3 pieces. 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)
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 concave shape again. It was lowered by 4cm, which increased legroom and pop-top headroom as well. There's plenty of fibreglass floor area around the floor's ply "hatches", to place feet while opening a section of floor up.
This modification has allowed about 25 litres of water under the floorboards in the bilges. Various sized small plastic water bottles are stowed there now. They are 2 litres or less, easy weights to handle.
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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. (Valuable cockpit locker space was freed up for light weight items or extra fuel cans etc.)
The lowering of heavy liquids aboard should make Teria stiffer, more capable of carrying sail in a strong breeze. Perhaps a reduced heeling angle could help comfort too.
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, (spare UHT milk, porta-potti chemical, and vinegar for box jellyfish sting treatment)
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| The marine floor carpet cover |
Teria's original fibreglass sole board is in the shed still. This is one-piece so has a similar access problem to the DIY ply one. I would never cut it up into pieces either, this is a prototype idea and still need to be tested in practice.
