mitiempo wrote:The floor timbers should become one with the hull. They add stiffness needed in way of the ballast.
OK - far be it from me to disagree with you when it comes to anything remotely related to fixing or maintaining boats - I will more than readily admit I'm way down at the far left end of the learning curve. But in this case, I think maybe what's needed is more of the facts of the situation.
What I tore out - the original, factory installed sole and "floor timbers" - if they can be called that - did not meet your criteria at all. Which makes me wonder whether the new ones need to. Which is why I was wondering whether I truly needed to glass them in versus just gluing them down.
So if you'll bear with me -
The sole was a sheet of 3/4" marine plywood, with a continuous fiberglass/resin tab running around the permiter where it met the hull. I didn't get the impression that that tab did an awful lot in the way of making the sole "one" with the hull. It seemed to me it mostly was to hold the floor down and prevent any water that might enter the cabin from getting into the edges of the plywood. I suppose it might also have been meant to try to stiffen the hull a little bit, but how much stiffening or structural strength would that piece of plywood add, when we're talking about a 1-1/2" thick, 5-6 ton, cored fiberglass hull. The plywood met the hull at a pretty acute angle, too.
The floor timbers, such as they were, were not attached to the hull at all; nor were they even scribed or profiled to match the curves of the hull. They were hunks of oak - which looked like scraps, in fact, of varying dimensions. The ends of the oak timbers had been cut at an acute angle where they came up against the curve of the bilge. But they rested on the hull only at the very tips, or in one or two small places. They basically were big, fat shims, to hold the plywood sole at the right height and approximately level and even. I have to admit I was a bit surprised and dismayed at how it really did look like kind of a quick hack job, rather than a carefully fitted, workmanlike job. In some cases, the oak timbers didn't even go all the way across - just a hunk here and a hunk there.
What it looks like they did was simply lay those hunks of oak across the hull to make an approximately level surface, then laid down the plywood across the oak timbers, and glued and screwed the plywood to the timbers. They laid the plywood in a resin bed around the edges and then glassed all the way around the edge. There was no fastening of any kind between the oak floor timbers and the hull - the timbers were attached only to the plywood sole above them, and not attached to the hull in any way. So when I used my reciprocating saw to cut out the plywood in sections, I could just lift it out a section of sole with the oak timbers hanging off the bottom of it. The only thing holding that whole sole in place was the glass/resin lip.
So now I'm thinking of doing something completely different. From how it was constructed, I got the impression that the floor was not a structural element, at least insofar as providing additional rigidity or torsional stiffness to the hull. It seemed to me to basically be laid down in the cabin and then glued around the edges to keep it there and keep water from penetrating the plywood edges - but I don't know how much that would make it contribute to the structural strength of the boat as a whole.
So if that's right, I'm thinking I can glue down new floor timbers and then attach longitudinal boards to those timbers using screws, to make a floor. Instead of the perimeter fiberglass tab holding down a plywood sole, the glued timbers will hold everything down, because the sole will be screwed to those timbers.
Does this make sense?
Should I do this with the boat in the water instead of on the hard, assuming the hull might flex a bit?
I appreciate all the help and thoughts on this - I'm making this up as I go and learning a hell of a lot along the way, so I'm always glad to benefit from the knowledge and experience of others.
Thanks!
Bill T.
Richmond, VA
"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible." - T E Lawrence