Cabin sole boards

It’s raining cats and dogs today but I went to boatyard anyway.

It was time to re-circulate oil on Meritaten. I’ve also replenished oil/turpentine with additional 5 liters since the hull swallowed one canister already.

After winterising chemical toilet I started preparing wood for new cabin sole.

This is task no.1 for this winter. Since I removed ceiling on the entire cabin - to see what is behind - and discovered 60 years of dust and dirt (smelly) I’ve decided to not put it back. I want to see the structure - because it is beautiful - and I want to be able to keep it clean and ventilated.
At the cabin sole level this has created gaps between floor boards and freeboard. Not only it looks ugly but everything which drops on the floor instantly rolls into bilge. Floor is also unstable and prone to tilt if one stands on the edge.

After many thoughts I’ve decided to build new cabin sole in a workboat style. I’ll use current boards as foundations and glue wider mahogany planks at 90 degrees to freeboard. I will loose 12mm of head clearance but that’s a small price to pay for stable and nice sole.

New boards will be mounted as circa 14mm strips - distance between frames. This way I’ll avoid a pain of cutting openings for each frame and the whole assembly will be stronger. Workboat philosophy.

I’ve started with cutting 12mm plywood which serves as a top-level of future sole. By making templates on top surface I can cut wood to the bigger size and then bevel it to match planking bevel.

There are many ways to make templates. In this case I use a joggle stick (cardboard) with few cuts which give me exact position of the stick after removing the template.

After marking positions of all corners I take the template onto my mahogany stock.

Here I simply reverse the procedure and after a while I have all points of the needed shape.

Careful cutting with a handsaw and finishing with block plane.

Such jobs usually please me but today I gave up after few boards. Not only that the weather was nasty - I was alone in the yard, all sane people were at home watching TV - but also working on the gravel, without proper bench to plane these boards made me tired. These conditions are OK for prep work but now these boards need to be jointed so I need to use a proper, jointer plane - and that works only on a bench.

Going back and forth between the boat and my workshop uphill would take too much time, even with a bicycle. I need to build or buy a proper, mobile workbench. Maybe time to look closer onto Sjöberg benches?