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The begining
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I started by tearing up the carpet and removing a few test boards to see what I was dealing with. Little did I know the previous owner had placed hundreds of pop bottles in the floor as some sort of poor mans floation foam. The foam that was left there was pretty much saturated too. The floor removal involved finding and removing plenty of SS screws. There were also plenty of rivets to be removed. This involved carefully drilling them out.
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As you can see the cabin floor was actually worse then the main floor. The reason was the main floor was replaced, but the cabin floor was original 1977 Riveted in ply. The main place the rot hit was where the cabin wall bulkhead met the orginal cabin flooring. It pretty much just fell apart around the rivets. Not pictured are the gas tanks that were removed prior to the picture. They were in the areas that appear darker at the bottom of the frame. They were just crudely boxed in with treated ply and rusted out nails. Who uses nails on a boat?
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Rot and bottles!
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Floor after removal
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Here are the pieces of the floor after removal. Plenty of rot and mold can be seen around edges. Removing the floor also involved removing the side panels and the cabinets. These were mostly riveted with large aluminum rivets to the side of the boat. Again carefull drilling made that an easy task.
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Here is a better shot of the rot I had to deal with. In addition to the floor notice that the side boards are also rotten at the bottom. This can be told from the aluminum angle having pretty much broken away and hanging by the vinyl covering. Notice the large rivets in the side board. Those were what needed to be removed to get the sides off.
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more rot!
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The floor is gone!
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This is what you are left with after the wood is removed. This is also why I chose an aluminum boat. I didn't have to waste countless hours replacing stringers and doing epoxy work. This still needs a good cleaning and some repir work to the cross braces.
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You can see where I replaced the missing/broken rivet on the cross brace. I had to do this on each outside edge of these braces. These braces are placed where the sheets of plywood butt togetherer.
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replacing rivet
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Floor!
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Here is the test fitting of the new floor in front. There is really no secret to how I did that as the old floor held together just enough to use as a template. This ia 1/2 exterior grade ply. It is just laying in place for now as it still need some sort of finish on it. This is so much stronger then the pieced together front floor that it replaced.
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Again, this is the newly cut back floor in for a test fit. It fit great and was also much more solid then the one it replaced.
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Back Floor
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priming floor
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I primed the bare plywood with some primer I had lying around. I took extra care to get the primer deep into any cracks or knots in the wood. Not epoxy, but it will only be in contact with water if the boat sinks. Also, the design of the Chieftain is such that water is not trapped under the floor unless you put foam there to hold it in.
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I decided to use a latex enamel floor and porch paint. It was inexpensive and dried pretty hard. I plan on going with a snap in carpet but we will see what I choose as the project moves along.
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painting floor
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