Reply To: How thin can the decks be?
I had a boat decked some time ago with thin ply and the builder wanted to get as fair a deck as he could. It is very easy to get ripples across the deck where the beams touch it. He actually made deck beams of thin ply and put in a lot of curved stringers fore and aft. He scalloped out the beams between the stringers so that the deck only touched on the longitudinal bits. The other thing we did was buy ply with four layers so the top veneer was along the boat but the underneath veneer crosseds the stringers. This gave a very fair deck surface. The stringers were light but reasonably closely spaced – I still didn’t walk on the foredeck though! The other thing we did was put a post under the stern deck from the keel to the deckbeam so I didn’t have to worry about landing hard on the stern deck. It all looked good and lasted a long time.
Bill
