Initial Fabrication
Once more time to consult the plans and work out the profiles for the cabin top, draw them out on your favorate temporary framing material and cut them out. The main cockpit bulkhead will be in place so unless you are building a monster of a boat there will probably only be another 2 or at the most 3 more frames.
The Mystery Cove had quite a curved cabin top and this does really look nice. I used Nidaplast as my material of choice and purchased 18mm thick sheets faced both sides with gabbon ply. Some areas of the cabin were highly curved, this area I built up using Nidaplast sheathed only on one side, once the desired curve is attained, glass the unsheathed surface to hold it in position. When built the whole of the cabin top was glassed with 600gm biaxial - hey presto, an instant cabin, well a couple of weeks work.
Flipping the Cabin
You will, of course realised that I built the cabin top on the top of the boat, I did give some thought to constructing the cabin top on the shed floor, completing the whole thing this way and then lifting it up onto the boat, but was worrried about whether or not it would fit after this. so built it up on top of the boat. This does mean that the half built top has to be lifted down to the shed floor to be completed, but hey 6 or so of my sons mates the job was jobed, You will need to build some strengthening onto the cabin top to prevent high loads from snapping the sides from the flat top. 4 bits of chipboard glassed on over the curve did the trick. So she is down now the right way up, well actually the wrong way up cos you want the thing upside down so the inside can be finished. I tried rolling the structure from side to side. Does not work. We ended up sort of physically lifting the whole thing up tipping the back edge up and rolling the cabin top upside down.
Now glass and finish the inside, don't forget to make provision for the lights -forward thinking. Really make sure that you have finished the surface to how you want it, much easier now - spend that little more time on getting it right.
Back Up It Goes
You see I am the eternal optomist and because of that always expect things to be easier and take less time than they actually are or take. Putting the cabin top back on was like that. Thought it would be easy as now its stronger, getting it flipped was easy but getting it back up now that it weighed heaps more was not. What I expected to take 2 hours ended up taking 6, but we got there in the end with a combination of physical effort, oil drums, chain tackles etc. Once in place glass it onto the deck and bulkhead(s) and that's it.
One thing worth thinking about is that although large curved windows look great, there will be a time when you need to fill this large hole you have cut out with glass or acrylic. I consider glass far superior, but getting glass curved as its toughened is not cheap and I had to go for acrylic on the 2 large front facing windows, just something worth thinking about before you cut out the holes. I also modifed the cabin top to extend a little further over the cockpit, better shelter from sun and rain.
