Beginning the Cabin Sole

Construction of the interior for the Liberty 42 Flybridge begins with the cabin sole, which is built in foam core construction with 1/4" plywood on the top and bottom faces. Our assembly of this core begins with joining the plywood panels that make up the bottom layer. The panels are joined with 3"-wide 1708 triaxial fiberglass tape.

Before taping the joints, we first dish out the areas that will get the glass seam using grinders so that the finished tape joint will be flush with the surrounding surface. Below you can see the tape being applied to the joints.

Here is a closer view of one of the joints, showing how the plywood has been dished out to receive the tape and epoxy.

Here all the panels that make up the bottom of the sole have been joined and faired with thickened epoxy fairing compound.

We use 25lb. bags of lead shot to hold all the foam panels in place while the epoxy bonding them to the plywood cures.

This view shows the plywood panels of the top skin weighted in place joined at the edges with the fiberglass tape. You can also see the level platform we had to first build to assemble the cabin sole on.

Here is our epoxy mixing table in the foreground. This epoxy station is located between our two major current projects: this Liberty 42 interior and the new Tiki 30 catamaran (not visible here) that we are building in the front of the shop.