| Author | Message | ||
     Jeff Roy (Jeffr) Rating: N/A |
I got the new floors made and in place in the boat last weekend. I am very happy with the way things are going. I cut the floors out of black locust. I just learned about this wood and it is the perfect choice. It is twice as strong as white oak and is virtually rot proof. It is the densest wood I have ever lifted. I removed one 4" mahogany floor ( I verified it was mahogany ) and replaced it with a new 4" floor and 2 additional 2" floors. One of the 2" locust floor weighed more than the 4" mahogany one! The only thing that is less than ideal is that the foremost one is asymetric because it was so limitting in work space under the head. The whole thing is so over built now it is not an issue. (I have a habit of going overboard on jobs like this). I laid them in thick strips of epoxy and put thick fillets on the sides and rounded the tops. I am going to put a few layers of glass over them. One of the only drawbacks of locust is that because of it's densitiy it reportedly does not glue well. I glued up some test pieces and they are pretty damn adhered. Oh well. The fore and aft pieces are yet to be made. I plan on making these easily removable. The plan is to coat them in epoxy, wax them up good. Bed them in the hull and across the floors in epoxy and lag bolt them in place. After the epoxy is cured I will pop them off. Then I'll treat the bolt holes with epoxy. I have taken hundreds of digital photos of this project. At some point I will publish a photo essay on it. The image below is one taken last weekend. The plywood is just temporarily holding everything in the right place. floors |
