Durk. Cabin floor.

After removing ceiling on the inside my current floor - durk - no longer matched the hull sides, leaving voids on the sides and exposing red, bilge paint. I don’t like the view, it’s untidy.

In an attempt to fix it I took measurements to cut new durk from thick plywood. Against the tradition I wanted to have fake-stripes of wood perpendicular to the boat’s axis, not parallel.

I’ve cut some pieces and took for dry fit. I didn’t like the result.

Of course, these panels will become much darker after epoxying and varnishing but… It didn’t feel good to put this plywood in otherwise solid-wood interior.

So I took closer look to my current boards. They were covered with red, bilge paint on the bottom and were varnished (long time ago) on top. Varnish was in good condition but some boards were broken on the edges, one developed a crack in the middle with visible repair attempt. But the wood! They turned out to be solid wood, wide mahogny planks! It’s hard to buy such wood today! I mean - there are few such trees standing today.

So I took fallback on my plywood project and instead took old durk into my workshop.

First was scraping all the ugly paint. Hot air gun, gas mask (it smelled!) and sharp scraper went into work.

Several hours later, with no paint left, came a step of sanding all surfaces with 180 grit paper.

Oh yes, it was dusty. And dust filter on my mask had a short life but mahogny dust is especially dangerous so I felt no obligations to save on filters.

Due to temperatures in my workshop (-8 C) I had to move the next step to heated place. My bedroom. The room was closed from public for 24 hours and I was applying 3 layers of West system epoxy on all surfaces, fixing cracks with West Flex epoxy at the same time.

Epoxy was applied wet-on-wet so cleaning in water with soap was needed only at the final stage, before varnishing.

The effect is really pleasing. And I have the feeling of keeping boat’s original interior as better than replacing it with plywood.

Voids and bilge paint spill offs will have to be fixed some other way. Not sure now how but I will try to do it without replacing these newly renovated panels.