Good evening, and here is more main cabin detailing for your viewing pleasure.

We set those painted sole panels in place to see if the whole look ties together.

Hinges and latches go on tomorrow.

The dining table is now in place. It has a Forespar spring-loaded riser to move in between dining height and dropped down for the bunk conversion.

The last “flooring bit” is making a panel for the equipment room (the pass-through under the cockpit) sole. We’ve run out of the fancy foam core sheets, so this was a good project for bundling together scrap pieces. You’ll see various brands of 1/2″ thick divinycell and similar products under the glass layers here –

The cardboard nearby was the pattern made by piecing it right in place (bring masking tape and scissors to the job) – gotta do that for these odd shape pieces. Anyway, the foam core scraps are fine in this zero-sheer-stress application.

OK, pop quiz: put google away and answer this – which Rocky movie enjoys the theme song Eye of the Tiger by Survivor (dressed in unfortunately tight jeans)…

We’ve been saving some of that tiger-stripe mahogany for the nav station chart table top. It needed to be laminated to the original core.

Looks like a mess with the epoxy oozing up between the joints and the three planks having random thickness variations. But the big rotary sander and 40 grit, used carefully, trues it up.

We used two slices from the original plank and butterflied them to match up the grain. Neighbor michael’s big table saw helped clean up the plank edges before glueing. Then we milled another mahogany type for the fiddle edges. The two diagonal corners were bonded first with excess sticking out both sides. After they hardened up we cut the miter corner flush with the open front and sides of the piece. And the next night the other three pieces were bonded, again with excess tails.

The best part is after it’s all sanded, clean and kind of dull looking, we hit it with the epoxy and the grain and color explode out of the raw wood. Pop got to see the action today.

With that set to cure, I climbed the stairs to the boat and looked down on the work table. Bam – staring right back is the eye in the tiger stripes.
And now you’ve got that song stuck in your head…

(Rocky III, the one where he’s fat and lazy)

Not a spiritual moment, but rather a bit of staring down at one’s feet… We’ve been working on the bottom portions of cabin finishing, the soles (floors) and lower hull sides. It needed a darker color down where shoe scuffs will accumulate. The masking process for all this paint work is significant.

We learned the hard way we should have used “gorilla tape” brand for masking. The Scotch blue EdgeLock allowed some white to leak thru/under to the finished wood so now there are hours of sand-and-touchups to do. But overall things are looking good.

In that floor shot you see three of the eight total sole panels removed. The wood framing is clear coated to look nice when we lift up the boards for storage. The fixed part of the sole is the slate grey that extends up the hull sides a bit. So that leaves the panels themselves…
First the exposed glass fabric was filled then they were primed and the latch locations chosen. To set the latches flush they need some rebating with the router. We used a hole saw on the drill press to make a 1/8″ pilot track for routing.

The hole saw left some small chips that will need a tiny bit of filling, but that’s better than freehand messes with the router.
Here the sole panels get the same paint as the hull interior.

And a few YouTube videos later, Martha Stewart’s team had us trained on faux bois painting. Got the tools through Amazon for a few bucks.

Then mixed one part of the same grey paint, one part glaze and two parts water. Brush it on, wait a few minutes then carefully but creatively flick those scrapers around.