Building the Cockpit

The first step in building the cockpit is laminating the cored floor, which is a foam sandwich construction using a top and bottom face of 4mm plywood and a Divincell central core.

This is a big assembly and requires plenty of pressure to squeeze out all the air bubbles that might become trapped and insure a good bond between the panels. As you can see here, we threw everything we had at it to weight it down while gluing up the panels.

The finished sandwiched floor assembly came out just right.

Here is a view of the beginning of the cockpit assembly, looking forward from aft of the cockpit. The large side lockers are under the longitudinal seats. We also wanted lockers across the rear and the forward sides of the cockpit. All of these will provide needed storage for things like fuel tanks, propane bottles, the house batteries, a grill, snorkeling gear, boat hooks, dinghy oars, etc.

The forward locker that goes athwartships across the cockpit has a long storage space available for things like the dinghy oars, boat hooks, and spear guns. The lid to this locker will consist of a double panel hinged together that can be folded aft to form a double berth in the cockpit.

Aside from the cockpit, we also completed the T-shaped beam locating blocks that go on the bottom sides of all the crossbeams to lock into the beam landing blocks on the decks.