So After getting onto this website and being the project junky I am I decided to take on this flooring project. I used the seadeck copy stuff from China and my experience was the same as everyone else, 2 weeks, showed up, well packaged, seems pretty nice. I had studied a little bit on here and decided to go with a straight plunge router bit as I felt it matched the factory lines the best. I used a router table for all the straight lines and a trim router for the curves.
So for the curves I just free handed them, I would run all the straights and then mark where I wanted it all to go with a sharpie then free hand it looking through the trim router cage.
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After kind of roughing it in I would go back and hit it again in the spots needed, or you can sand it a little too
This was my first little tester piece.
So this project took me probably 10 hours, getting the old crap off there and cleaning up the glue took some time, and templeting took a bunch of time. I used Mylar and tape and my patterns were one time use, I guess I could have used them again but I didn't save them. I do not think this is the best way to do this, I think the wood templets used as a guide for the router provides the best results but in all honesty if I had done it that way this is a project I wouldn't be getting to for a while. I went for it and am happy with the results, it looks good but not perfect, I had trouble placing the pieces, this stuff is sticky and once you start a piece you are stuck with where it lays....or fresh cut. I got better at everything as the project progressed. The tighter the corner the harder it was (for me anyway) to make the cut. The final results are great on the feet, this stuff doesn't get hot and feels nice. I had 2 issues with the material itself. 1 piece was not squared up meaning the lines did not run perpendicular to the sheet so i had to square up the cuts, not a big deal but had to pay attention. I had another sheet that had some seam separation between layers, of course I didn't find it until we used the boat and some started looking like crap. I have since glued it down but that was a bit disappointing, hopefully that is the only piece, it separated in the middle of a full strip, not on one of my router lines. All and all I am very happy.....is it as full on pimping as a fully custom CNC cut seadeck job?....No, but for less than $500 and how hard we use our boat, this is just what the doctor ordered. The very last picture here is pre cleaning, this is how it looked with the work finished before I put a little elbow grease back in it. I cleaned it all pretty thoroughly, and we used it the next day. I have 2 full sheets left over and a bunch of pieces, I think I could get pretty close to doing this again. Probably should have just cut doubles of everything...hindsight!!!!
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