Building seats

The cockpit in this boat is massive! It has almost 10’ of bench seating on each side. The seats are made of 1-1/4” by 1” Sapele slats. They follow the curve of the hull, so I had to bend them to fit.  The slats didn’t want to bend on their own, so I used steam to help. The photo below shows the slats temporarily installed.  I have to remove them once more to encapsulate them in epoxy for waterproofing and trim the ends to even them up.

 

I made a pattern out of a 2x6 to bend the slats. I just laid the straight 2x6 on the frame gussets, which also serve as the seat supports, and made a mark on the 2x6 at each frame showing the distance between the frame and 2x6.  A curve drawn between these marks will match the curve of the seat. It will actually be a mirror image, but can just be flipped over.


Then I used a scrap piece of wood as a batten to draw a smooth curve through each point. I cut along the line with a jig saw and attached the two pieces together to get a full size pattern for the seat as shown above.

I used the thickness planer to clean up each slat to its final dimension and then put an 1/8” round over on the edges of each slat to soften it up a little.

I bought a steam machine and made a steam box out two 5’ lengths of 4” round heating duct.  I put a few carriage bolts through the duct to rest the wood on so it is steamed evenly on all sides. I steamed each slat for about an hour or so, two at a time, and then clamped them to the pattern to give them the desired bend.

I left each piece clamped for about 24 hours.  The pieces sprung back a lot when I removed the clamps, but were much easier to bend back to the necessary curve after the steaming and clamping.

The frame gussets / seat supports are 1/4” marine plywood that sandwich the Sapele frames. I made some blocking that fits between the gusset on either side of each frame to fill the space and provide something to attach the slats to.

I made a few different size spacers to find the number of slats and spacing that worked the best and settled on six slats with about 1/2” spaces between them.

The slats meet the transom at a compound angle, so I cut them by hand. I also had to notch the outside slat at the transom and forward frame because the seat supports are a little narrower there.  I’m not sure why they’re narrower, but I built it to plan and the notches fixed it so I’m happy with the way it turned out.

Each slat is attached at each frame with a 1/1/2” x #8 stainless steel wood screw. I was careful to draw a line so the screws were straight.

The last step before installing the seat slats was to encapsulate them in epoxy. I just coated the tops and sides and left the tops for later.

I then reinstalled the slats and epoxy coated the tops.  I think this is going to turn out to be a mistake because I got epoxy on the screw heads. 

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