April 10, 2024

Calliope Girl 98

Wednesday

Before getting back into cabin sole work, I took a few minutes to remove all the masking from the upper galley.

Next, I lightly sanded as needed the epoxy work on the new floors, then cut fiberglass to fit as needed for the final tabbing to secure these floors to the hull at each end.  For now, I held off installation so I could continue working on the sole.

With some basic measurements in hand, I cut slightly undersized plywood  templates of each side of the main cabin sole, roughly to the centerline.  Ultimately, the sole would consist of two permanently-mounted pieces on the side, with removable panels down the center, so the important thing was to get the shape of the edges where the sole would meet the hull.   With the basic templates cut, I laid them in place in turn and scribed the edges to the exact shape.

Apparently I didn’t photograph the process on the port side.

I transferred the marks from this first set of templates to another piece of template plywood, and cut out what would essentially be the final shape of the actual sole, giving me one more chance for a test fit before committing to the real plywood.  I tested the new  templates in place after first installing a final support cleat at the aft end of the space.

At this point, I had enough to do off the boat that it was time to clean up and install the tabbing at the ends of all five cross beams.  First, I applied some more thickened epoxy to dress up the existing fillets at the ends, then wet out and installed the tabbing.

During what remained of the day, I transferred the final templates to a sheet of new ply wood and cut out the two sole panels, still oversized in the center so I could mark the final cuts for the center panels in place.  This would happen next time once the fiberglass had cured overnight.

Total time billed on this job today: 7.5 hours

0600 Weather Observation: 32°, partly cloudy. Forecast for the day: Scattered showers, 48°