Replacing floorboards in the cabin (sole)

 Recently re-built the cabin floor (sole) in Teria.

3 piece plywood floor boards. Finger lift holes on joins. 

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)

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)

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.

Floorboards in the cockpit locker

Next job, the port side cockpit lockers floorboards were replaced.

I read that early Investigator 563's had an outboard well in the port cockpit locker. At first i didn't recognize the remnants of this on Teria as it was covered by thin plywood floorboards. The discovery was made when i had stepped on the aft floor, which was rotten by now and I crashed through it. Being an eternal optimist i left the forward floor board in only to meet the same fate later.. This left no choice but to replace them with something stronger.

Remnants of an old locker floor board

So the old 6-8 mm thick ones were recycled as garden mulch.

Early investigators had an outboard well in the locker, it looked like this was the case in Teria at one time.    It may have been  noisy, smelly, maybe a bit dangerous to have a sparking outboard next to 5 gallons of petrol in a confined space, also valuable storage  and some hull buoyancy was lost. I also suspect that when a boat heeled to port the well compartment could have flooded.  Nearly all Investigators adopted transom mounted outboards after locker wells fell out of favor.

Signs of an outboard well remain in the port locker. I inadvertently demolished the aft floorboard covering the remnant outboard well, 

Nothing in the lockers well was square. So made up  templates of the floorboards with thick cardboard from packing boxes.. These were easy to cut and shape with a Stanley knife until they fit well.

Cardboard floor template in place.

Then the templates were taken out and the edges were penciled in on the 12 mm plywood. The floorboards cut out with circular saw. Only a little bit of pruning of the edges with the saw and surform plane was needed to get the final fit.  The  floorboards allowed the petrol tank and other gear to sit flat safely once again. Also they are strong enough  to walk on.

Lots of Bad weather lately it's Feb 2014. So time to remove the floorboards and clean out the locker.
Used a Karacher high pressure water jet machine to blast away grime, it took away the remains of some  flaking silver heat shielding glued to the bottom of the hatch too.

Karacher high pressure water jet gun. garden hose attaches to pump body and the motor is 240 volt electric.

Next engine degreaser was scrubbed around, an oily layer had got on every surface, even high under the cockpit coaming. This and the reflective under hatch heat shield layer, suggests that it once was an engine room with an outboard well which was later patched over. The square ply box glassed to the hull may have been a 12 volt battery box in the old days. More water jet blasting also removed loose white epoxy paint applied after construction.

Degreasing the starboard locker.

There is a black rectangular hole which gives access to the hull. The old speed log paddle wheel fitting still sits in here.

The old outboard well possibly glassed over.  It looks like an old battery box on top right.

 The ply floorboards were dried, then belt sanded before 3 coats of "Ultradeck" wood stain finish was brushed on to seal it.

sanded and ready to coat

Drying deck oil coat

The floorboards have a natural non-skid surface with the wood stain finish. Sometimes you need to stand on them to get stuff out.

Floorboards back in place

I tried stowing the 2nd anchor in the old well but decided against it after a few trips. Water does fill the sump a bit as the hatch seals aren't perfect, then its hard to bail out. Stow the 2nd anchor high and dry in a small crate in the other locker now.  

 Split floorboard allows access to sump below while the 24 liter (5 gal) petrol tank's in place.

Locker hatch closed