Thursday, April 10, 2008

Painting Begins at Last

When you're building a boat it's always a good feeling when you start applying finish coats of paint for the first time. On the Tiki 26, painting the interior of the port bow hold and forward buoyancy compartment is only a small step in painting the whole boat, but at least this is one area that is closer to being finished. This is actually not the final coat of paint in these areas, they will get at least one more, but the high gloss white is really brightening things up in here and I'm one step closer to getting the deck on this section.

In these photos you can see the new location for the inspection port opening that I moved as described in a previous post. The ring for the plate is not installed here, just temporarily stuck in place. Aft of the plate you can see the large bow hold and the permanently mounted shelf section I installed. Forward of that shelf, there are two removable shelves not shown that rest on the stringers and form a solid horizontal divider to make the compartment more usable. The two forward shelves are sized so that they can be taken out through the deck hatch for access to the larger area below.

Aft of these two painted compartments, you can see the natural wood surface on the other side of bulkhead 4. From here back, in the living quarters of the cabin, the wood will all be finished bright with varnish.

While working on these below deck areas of the port hull, I've also been filling and fairing the inverted starboard hull, and it is almost ready for fiberglass sheathing, after I do a bit more shaping and sanding.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

it's wonderful to watch this project come together so quickly and so well – tornados notwithstanding. the hulls look great too (the tiki 26 really is the best resolved of all the tiki designs, i think!).