Hi Pete,
Hope you enjoy your new boat. There will always be some challenges and frustrations but the Nonsuch offers less than found on other boats. This forum will make your life easier.
When I bought my boat, it was evident that the cabin sole deteriorated due to water that filled the bilge and appeared to overflow and sit for some time. It looked, not so good but I felt that I could temporarily fix it but the first thing to do was to eliminate the water problem. Re-gooked every fitting on deck including the hand rails. The biggest culprit was the through plates that keeps the head bulkhead in place. You can tell if that’s one of the bad guys by the wooden cover outside the head bulkhead, both ends, if it is stained. If you need pictures, let me know. That is an easy fix by the way. Contact me any time and I’ll gladly give you my tale of woe and what I did about it.
I ended up cutting a couple of inches off both ends of the cabin sole, galley area. The forward area was not the best but did not need to replace wood. I then got a hold of some teak pieces and ran horizontal boards across each end. Sanded it all down and re-varnished. To do this I did removed all of the cabin sole. I installed and made new teak plugs for each of the screw holes. You can Purchase a plug cutter fairly cheap. Sanded those down and varnished again in the boat. This was all a temporary fix as I still did not like the look. The previous owner took good care of the boat but the first thing you saw inside was the cabin sole and took away from all the other nice things that he had done to the boat. Again, I’ll send pics if you would like.
I finally concluded that I do not like the cabin sole and that it is going to be replaced. To make a long story short, I reviewed all the possibilities out there and was not satisfied with any of them and they were all very expensive. So, I decided that I am going to build my own from scratch and I wanted it to be brighter and distinguished, if possible. I had some black walnut, was given some cherry and I bought some curly maple. I also bought 2 sheets of MDO 3/8” thick. I made a design for the 7 1/2” boards that cover the bilge and I am working on that right now.
The above picture shows some of the work process for the bilge boards. First I made tiles that consisted of 4 pieces of Black walnut, each sandwiched by two pieces of curly maple. I did the same with cherry. Alternating the pieces I glued 8 (4 each to make tiles that I could work with). I cut the pointy ends off and glued the ends together to be sized exactly like the existing bilge boards and glued them to the sized MDO boards. I then added a black walnut and cherry strip followed by a curly maple strip on the outer edges. The picture with the clamps is the mounting of the appropriated number of tiles to the MDO board. At this point every thing is a mess. Since I oversized the thickness of everything, the planer takes care of just about all discrepancies. The area on both sides of the bilge board will be black walnut with curly maple strips just like the teak/holly arrangement found on most boats. The black walnut will be accented with 3/8” curly maple plugs every foot or so.. When everything is completed, construction wise, all finished pieces will be planed down at the same time as to ensure that they are all the same. The thickness is a tad less than a half inch (this means I don’t know the metric measurement as of this writing. When don everything will be epoxied and I have not made a decision on final finish yet.
I hope this helps,
Cheers,
Butch
Butch Garren
Nonsuch 30 #196
Whiskers II
Solomons, MD
(attachments)
