RENEWING THE FLOOR BOARDS

Samourai was now on the hard for all winter. Unfortunately, since October, a nasty back pain did not permit us to go on with the boat jobs. November was already well advanced and we had to get on with the next project: renewing the floor boards. This was a major task and it had to be done before spring !

Firstly, we had to get rid of the old plywood floor. Most of it went off easily, but the thinner sides were  entirely bonded to the hull. On starboard, a long plywood piece of 4 mm had been glued with some kind of hard polyester cement: that was a real nightmare ! The thin plywood piece went off effortless, but the hard material lying under, had to be scraped off with a chisel. Pieces of old filler were flying all over and we had to wear safety goggles to avoid any eye injury.

When fighting with the mallet and chisel was over, sanding the surface appeared to be a piece of cake. After all the refit, we were trained for this job.

The cleaning and preparation of the surface took around 10 days. It goes without saying that the boat interior was previously well protected with plastic sheeting and cardboards.

Once the area was all smooth and cleaned, we could start planning the next step of the rebuild.

Our new plastic water tank was temporary re-installed with the floor supporting beams.  Then, the positions of these transverse beams were all marked with a pen and masking tape was used to indicate their final location. With this method, the edges of the floor were appearing clearly and measuring would be more precise !

One of the most difficult stages was to find a system permitting to have removable floor supports. The idea was to obtain a long floor board which could be open and extract the water tank. In the future, having this option would give us total access to the bilges.

After discussing different options, we found a system which could suit the floor supports we already had made. Our favorite materials, epoxy and plywood, could be used for this job. We glued little plywood wings to the hull with thickened epoxy. A wide electrical tape was used instead of masking tape. The advantage of this PVC tape is that resin does not stick to it. The spots to be bonded were exactly indicated and any overflowing epoxy would not adhere to the transverse beams.

Between the galley and the chart table, the floor supports were much  easier to install. Those could permanently be bonded to the hull. The gluing was done using resin thickened with silica and milled glass fibers.  Later on, fiberglass cloths would be laminated in order to re-enforce the whole structure.

Meanwhile, the floor supports had to be enlarged adding another piece of plywood in the middle. Those middle pieces had exactly the thickness of the “wings brackets” which were now bonded to the hull.

The system was designed in order to be able to slide those floor supports out, but at the same time, they would stiffen up the whole keel area.

The old floor  boards were temporary re-installed and a level device was used to check that the different plywood pieces were perfectly adjusted.

Afterwards, the new floor boards were cut out of a 15mm marine plywood. The color was not matching exactly the original interior but that could be corrected later with wood stain.

All plywood pieces had to be adjusted with each other. To keep an access around the mast foot, two pieces of plywood where joint together.

For covering the sides, 4mm plywood pieces were cut to shape and then bonded to the hull with a brown marine sealant.

Under the companionway, we kept the original design which had two hatches to access the bilges.

Before ending the epoxy jobs, there was still one plywood piece to be glued under the floor boards. This was a special bracket supporting a second manual bilge pump.  Of course the boat had already a bilge pump accessible in the cockpit but, for obvious safety reasons, a second manual bilge pump had to be installed inside the boat.

And what a better place for a bilge pump to be , than in the bilges !