The memory card on my camera has filled a few times and this blog has gone out of date but the work on my Pearson 28 hasn’t stopped. Since my last posting in June I’ve turned a corner on the project and can now faintly see a launch date in the boats future. Most of the interior has been finished including plenty of small, and large, projects that have been completed. Boat work is wrapping up for the year due to the holiday’s and to the pending cold weather but I plan to catch up on my blog posts in the next few weeks.
After finishing the companionway drop-boards and re-bedding the transom mounted hardware I moved into interior woodwork. A lot of the interior projects progressed simultaneously. I found woodworking to be very challenging and made plenty of mistakes along the way. There were pieces that I had to redo multiple times, spending many hours on each version. The end results are a functional interior that I’m happy with but that I can see flaws in and continue to revise in my mind. Designing and building comfortable, functional, reliable and manageable interior systems (or any systems for that matter) is difficult and requires an expertise that I’ve learned to appreciate but haven’t yet achieved.
The interior of this P28-1 was stripped down when I got it. My suspicion is that previous owners raced it and wanted the boat to be as light as possible. In any case the interior was missing a lot of the non-structural components the largest of which were the main cabin settees and shelf faces. I’m not sure what the originals looked like but I decided to design my own seating and storage areas in the main cabin. I’m setting this boat up for cruising, not racing, so I want more storage, comfort and durability for regular use.
What I constructed includes seatbacks that fold down to make counter tops for tools/work items and access to new storage that was opened up behind the settees. The seat backs can also be removed from the settees for widening the berths. I also added faces to the shelving above the settees that have sliding acrylic access panels. The design evolved as I constructed it and was a compromise between a variety of factors. Below are pictures of these projects as the progressed.
These are photos of the seatbacks which fold down and are removable:
These photos highlight the storage spaces that I cut out and added shelves to behind the seat backs:
The port settee seat backs can be used to widen the port berth:
The faces for the shelf above the settees saw a few revisions but turned out nicely in my opinion:
Great work; simply amazing. Please hang in there and bring it home!