Cabin Sole

As we lacked a vacuum pump during this project, various clamping methods had to be devised to hold the material in place

My usual disorganised jumble of stuff ! The home built bench saw was very accurate, despite appearance. Router Table with the corner cutting jig also worked well.

First the sole planks are glued to the plywood backing and then the roughly nibbed border fitted. Once glued in place the exact groove for the ash inlay is cut with a trimmer.

Laying the sole planks onto a removable section. The end grain of the plywood is sealed off with tongued and grooved edge pieces.

All the borders have their grain aligned to leave no end grain exposed.

Why we changed the Cabin Sole

The original cabin sole was a wood-grain laminate in very large sections, built over fairly heavy plywood. It was very difficult to open and move the pieces without damaging the furniture.

Having built new water tanks under the cabin sole we needed a new configuration anyway. We designed and built the cabin sole to give easy access to the spaces under it. Batteries, storage units and the water manifold can now be accessed easily. Some of the hatches on the new cabin sole are hinged, allowing for access without having to move the hatch covers. This works very well underway and in heavy weather.

Construction Details

Iroko was the timber of choice since it is harder than teak and was easily available in Marmaris. It’s also more economical than teak. The inlay was ash.

Iroko was bought in solid baulks, and, all bar the material required for the margin boards, flatsawn into planks about 50 mm thick, one face was then surfaced on the jointer and then the plank thicknessed to 44mm and 20mm layer of ash glued between several pairs of planks. The resulting slabs were then sawn in two giving an ash edge to each, these were then thicknessed to 50mm and sawn into 4 mm strips with a bandsaw. The stock for the margins was chosen from the widest quarter sawn piece which meant that all the finished planking was vertical grain.

Number one on the list for the actual laying of the sole was to build a table saw in the cockpit using a small power saw mounted upside down into a sheet of formica covered plywood. With a fence made out of a few pieces of aluminium angle, and a groove routed parallel to the saw blade to take a sliding table we had a machine that could rip our margin stock to width and cut any angle across it, even very short pieces, much safer than trying to use a miter saw. The margin boards for the many corners often have to be cut or trimmed from very short lengths of wood.

As I never leave raw plywood end grain all cut edges had to have a solid edge of timber tongue and groove jointed into them. To make these pieces a corner cutting jig was made for the router and the straight sections were cut on the table saw.

The general run of the planking was plotted onto the plywood sole and all the lift up hatches were also marked in place , planning the cutouts so that the each hatch was sized to allow for an ash inlay to be fitted around it’s perimeter and that it sat in the same line that the planking would take. That avoids the visually disturbing look of narrow planks and mismatched lines of inlay.

The margin board shapes were then drawn onto the plywood sole, the run of the wood grain determined, and a rough width established to allow for any “nibbing” of the planks. “Nibbing” refers to the blunted end cut onto a tapering plank to margin joint that occurs because of the narrowing of a sole or deck. This was done to both prevent a knife end, (which before the days of waterproof glues could curl up and stab a foot) to a plank and the unsightly doubling of the inlay or caulking width that would occur if the former was allowed.

When building a new boat the next step is fairly simple, with no furniture in place all that is required is for the joints between the individual bits to tightly fit together and, provided they are wide enough for the furniture to cover the outside of each piece, the job is done. Not so with a retrofit, first the outside has to fit the often curved furniture, then each piece has to be cut fit its neighbor, not for the impatient!

The margin boards, left a little wider than their finished shape required, were then glued in place. Once the glue had set a small router with a carefully built base plate that set the cutting bit exactly 50mm from the furniture base was used to trim all except the pieces that needed to be nibbed, those were to be shaped in conjunction with the planking, to their final shape.

The planking, with the ash inlay was then positioned, overlapping the margin boards, including those that had to be nibbed and then marked for cutting. Because there was to be an ash inlay between every plank end and the margin board this was not a very exacting task, after the planks were glued in place the router would be used again to trim the length and provide the rabbet for the ash inlay. The boards to be nibbed were marked and cut then placed over the margins again and those marked and cut roughly to shape, again, provided that the plank ends fit with less than a 6mm gap the ash inlay will cover the short fall.

The planking was then glued in place in sections and while the glue for these was curing the lift up hatches were planked and once the glue for that cured their margin boards fitted.

The ash inlay now had to be made for all the corners and plank ends. A Circle cutting jig was made for the router and many rings were cut from 20mm thick stock, these in turn were sawn into 4mm thick pieces. By making all the radii the same on all the hatches and corners around the furniture only two sizes of rings were necessary.

Next was the sanding of the entire sole, the first fairing cut with my purpose built “square pad” sander and then a quick finishing cut with a random orbit machine.

Polyurethane over an epoxy sealer finished the job. Ada’s claws soon gave it that antique look!