I should first up apologize that my posts are getting further and further apart, I set a fairly high standard early of almost daily updates but at the moment I am struggling to make one post a month, but I will continue to do my best to keep the log up to date, albeit infrequently posted.

After nearly a month off I got stuck into finishing the lounge, which meant cleaning up the inside of it so that I could coat it with white epoxy and stick the top on. But before I could do that I have to run a conduit through it so that wiring can traverse it. Actually I should explain. You might be wondering why conduit wasn’t laid down before the lounge suite went in it is because I originally had no intention of wiring having to travel through it. I had intended for the wiring to cross the saloon under a false floor so that it would not need to travel around the room inside the furniture but directly across it. But I may not do the false floor now, so before I can put the lid on I have to make a path for the wiring (and the water pipes but they wont need to travel across the saloon, they will travel via the bedrooms aft and under the stairs in the port hull to the bathroom and kitchen, which is directly above the bathroom.

So now that a change of plan calls for conduit through the furniture I decided that there was no reason the conduit had to be across the bottom of the lounge suite so I ran it across the top of it directly under the lid. This had 3 advantages, first it would be much easier to retrofit the conduit across the top rather than cut holes across the bottom, not that it would take too much time to do that, another advantage is that up across the top directly under the lid it would be out of the way and finally, not that I am too concerned about this but the 2 middle under seat storage areas have venting so theoretically if we were ever pooped by enough water it could slosh through the saloon, slap into the lounge and splash up into the underseat area and if wiring runs across the bottom and there is any chance of wet wiring causing a short and frying the system I can avoid that by having the wiring running up off the deck in there.

Once I had the conduit in to take wiring under from the switch panel which will be in the port hull in front of the stairs just before our bedroom, it would then run through conduit under the fridge and into the lounge suite, then across the top of the lounge suite (but under the lid) then across the starboard hull and under the top step of the stairs into the nav cabinet to power the electronics. The hole for the conduit through the panel that is the bedroom wall/cabinet side/stair side. Whilst a hole saw could do the job quite easily, I have some holes to cut that I wont be able to get a hole saw to so I found an equally effective alternative method. I used the air powered die grinder with a router bit in it and cut the holes with it. Easy.

I cut the holes so that they would be at the correct height so that the step that will sit above it and conceal it will sit at the exact same height as the bridgedeck. Next step was to cut conduit to length and key it. Then once the holes were cut I glassed the conduit into place. I will glass the step in soon, I just need to tweak the shape a little so that it exactly matches the other steps and hides the conduit.

Next I white epoxy coated the underside of the saloon lid and the inside of each of the under seat compartments after feathering out the tapes and generally cleaning them up. I have done this to each storage area on the boat, I am not fairing any of them as some do, I dont much care what they look like, my only concern is that they are completely sealed and that the surface is smooth and there are no jagged edges.

With the inside and underside of the lounge white coated I glued and glassed the top down, using screws to hold it in place and taped the underside. Coving and taping upside down inside each compartment is a time consuming process and it took me all day to get the lid taped down from the inside. Once it had set (over night) I was able to trim (with a grinder) the ply overhang and route a round edge onto it to so that I can glass the top on from outside. A quick run over with an orbital just to fully smooth out the rough ply edges and I was ready to tape. Coving around the back edges and the tapes wet out and rolled out onto the job. Next I ran some coving into the edges of the step down where the top drops down into the rings glassed to the underside of the top that will hold the lids in place, in order to tape these too but I used surfboard cloth to tape these edges.

Then to finish off the main section of the saloon seating I white coated the top after giving the top and all of the tape edges a feather out to remove any jagged edges. I have still to make the final section of the lounge, the port side chaise. A chaise for those that are unfamiliar with the term is a right angle section of lounge that has no back on it, so it can be sat on from 3 sides front, back or leading edge. The reason I have yet to make the chaise is because it will need to be slightly raised from the rest of the lounge in order to fit under it a single dishwasher drawer which I dont yet have so I cannot be exactly sure of the dimensions until I have one. It is going to be a tight fit and whilst I can get the dimensions you are never really sure until you fit it so best to wait until I get one, even a scrapped not working model. Then from the chaise a cabinet will form the fridge.

So while I wait to get the dish-drawer I will move over to the galley and make the kitchen cabinets.