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)
Farrier F36/F39 Ravenswing - Trimaran Sailing 
Wow, that is one beautiful piece of wood!
Loving the sole panels as well.
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Beautiful!
Dumb question: when laminating whatever material onto a foam core, do you always vacuum bag or on smaller pieces do you also simply use Peel-Ply and forgo vacuum-bagging?
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Hi Joe,
I’ve found that laminating raw wood over foam is best with the bag. But clamping works well too the surfaces of both faces are ‘true’ to each other. For the fixed portion of the chart table top I clamped two more strips of the mahogany and used strong hardwood scraps to distribute even pressure. The most important learning has been to NOT apply epoxy to the finish face during the lamination step. Get the part completely fabricated then go back for final sanding and finish application. I created some messes at first when trying to do it all in one step.
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