1979 Viking build

Thanks guys. Hippie it looks like yours is just core and no sub floor which I like but my hull was so bashed up in this area I’m wanting all the support I can get without totally losing my footwell. Further I’m tall so I really need the space making this even more of a thing to want. I am planning to add seat boxes around 4” high which I will test out with the cap on before glassing anything in. Thankfully we didn’t bond anything in yesterday so I will check mine and compare with yours Tony and see where this all ends up.

we are very pleased to be at this stage finally but we are both a little rattled at how little time we have been able to work on this build. We are not even averaging a day per week which is wayyyyy less than we initially planned. If we had two solid weeks with no interruptions I believe we could have the structure complete and gel’d with the cap bonded back on and start refinishing the running surface.

speaking of the running surface we will be stripping off all the factory gel and I’m thinking we might lay a layer of csm with vinylester over the entire cored area of the hull to simplify repairs and to add some durability to the factory glass which is kinda weak now that I’m used to working with the Ve resin.

Front stringer tabbed in two layers 1708 each side and two over top. Also began tabbing the bulkhead in. A little more to do inside the stringers and that will be it for tabbing these all in. Outer stringers next then floor or maybe vice versa



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Originally Posted by LakeFever

Thanks guys. Hippie it looks like yours is just core and no sub floor which I like but my hull was so bashed up in this area I’m wanting all the support I can get without totally losing my footwell. Further I’m tall so I really need the space making this even more of a thing to want. I am planning to add seat boxes around 4” high which I will test out with the cap on before glassing anything in. Thankfully we didn’t bond anything in yesterday so I will check mine and compare with yours Tony and see where this all ends up.

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I just have the core and stringers and the floor on top of the stringers. I am also tall (6' 2"). I was going to put a short seat box in it but I would have sat up so tall so pretty much put my seats on the floor. Whoever redid the boat (very poorly might I add) before I got it, left the original seat box but redid the floor from the seat box back so it wasnt much higher, maybe in inch or so, than the floor they put in. I think the original floor would have been smaller and lower.

Also, here is what the original footwell looked like. It did have a small subfloor I guess you would call it. I did away with it but the box up front is the same size as the original and in the same place.

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By the way, your build is looking great! :)

My first stream was an 88 valero and it had quite high rising seats. I didn’t measure but I would guess the metal bases were 5 or 6” high and I really like comfort of that boat. I was riding high way above the windshield but I could sit and cruise comfortable all day. My last Vking had the seats directly on the floor which was good for head height but sucked for comfort. I’m aiming for middle ground and hope to get a comfy seating position that doesn’t have me up so high it looks weird

The factory back to back seats I rebuilt and put in mine have the top of the front edge at about 8" above the floor. The drop down to about 6" at the back edge of the seat to give the angled bottom. These are 1" shorter than the original bases that I copied. I'm 6' tall and find them very comfortable, but I'm also 34. This height puts my head above the windshield and eye line far above the windshield rail. But the wind hits me at the top of the forehead like a well fitted motorcycle windshield would. Boat is very comfortable cruising at 70 as far as wind is concerned.

Lake, I should add before you get too far. If I had to do mine over agin I would skip those seat mounts I made and just put the T nuts right into the floor from the bottom side before putting the floor in. Not sure if you were planning a design like that or not but figured I'd mention it.

Thanks for the measurements that’s helpful. I have a newer Vking interior so it’s buckets and rear bench going in. The buckets are decent but the bench is a bit soft so I’m going to use it as a pattern and build a new one. All of it needs to be recovered so that’s something I’ll farm out. Seat boxes I think will be simple square boxes to fit under the buckets and I’m going to try and hinge them so I can have some storage under there. Maybe 10” square, 4” high. It ain’t much but I’ll take anything I can get for tool kit and maybe some oil cans.

Outer stringers are in. We still have a ways to go but so far we have used a pail of corebond, 13 gallons of resin and a ton of 1708, A fair bit of 1808 and almost no CSM yet. The structure is almost completely fabricated we have to glass it in now. Remaining we have one front rib, the floor, the footwell floor, transom knees, a battery tray, a foot throttle tray, seat boxes, and thats it for the hull. Then we move onto the deck!

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Cap went back on to test for seat box height. Ideally 4” total would be perfect and I have some seat tracks that are 1” high so the seat boxes will be 3” high. We test fit all the floor pieces and I will be trimming the footwell rib down 1/2” from where it is now. We tabbed and capped in the outside stringers as well. Got a good system for capping now that gets a nice tight fit. We fold a crease down the tab beige laying the cap piece on and resin and bubble roll one side only. Once that side is down tight I pull the cap over and down the other side which results in some really tight caps. Lays again are one 4” tab and one 8” tab per side with two caps; one 4”, one 8”. The hull now seems solid enough to run it as is without the cap or the floor bonded in. I detect no flex at all lifting the front up off the cradle. Very pleased with the results thus far.

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Milestone day. Floors in! We covered the bottom side of all floor pieces with 1.5oz csm yesterday and set the floors in on fat beads of corebond today using the ziplock bag piping trick. Core bond is very difficult to fare when wet so this time we really did very little fairing with it. Just enough to fill whatever voids we could and that’s it. The rest will be filled with thickened resin when we lay glass tabbing this all in. It was a hugely satisfying moment to finally get these floors laid in today. Feels like we have it under control for the first time in a while. So many days of little wins and tasks that seemed to continually pile up. It’s a lot of little tabs to get all the bulkheads and stringers tabbed in and capped. Far more than I thought it would be. We also drilled some drain holes in the bulkhead and rear of the stringers. I coated them with two layers of vinylester to seal them after chamfering and a quick sand. We also put a couple coats of resin in the bilge area to make a clear line of site to the core so over time we can keep an eye on it.

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Looks good! Thats a big milestone!

We are glassed in!! What a big lay today was. When we laid the csm on the underside of the floor the other day after it cured there were quite a few tiny white pinholes from the little pimple size cavities in the coosa. We used corebond just like spot putty and filled all the little dimples before laying in the glass. We also made some transition pieces out of coosa to angle the floor up to meet the core 1/2”-5/8” and used more corebond to fare the edges out a bit smoother and hit all seams with thickened resin when we laid the glass in. We ran 4” 1708 tape around the perimeter of all floor sections and three lays of 1708 across it all, one for the main floor, one for the footwell, one for the front floor. It was a ton of work but a boat load of fun. Really enjoying this phase

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Made some seat boxes and a battery tray and started on the knees. After some deciphering we came up with a way to laminate the knees into the upper deck stringers and tie the battery tray into that as well. Should be fairly simple and we need the deck restoration complete to lay these in so we switched gears and began to work on the deck. Messy and itchy but a bit of a fun change of pace

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Stripping, sanding, preparing on the deck. One more day of this and it should be ready to start laying material back in. Scarfed two coosa stringers for the sides today as well. We will be using core bond to bed them into the hull and we will be laying a layer of 1808 over the inside walls of the deck first because I have lots of it left and want to use it somewhere and the sides are so skimpy theres almost nothing to them now that we have stripped out the factory stringers. We are also going to lay one layer over the entire underside of the deck a combo of 1708 tape and 1808 lays and will also be coring the deck. There is a single piece of pink colored foam core under the deck now. It does look like it was installed during manufacturing but I dont know if they had these foam cores back then?

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Ran a layer of 1808 around the inside of the deck in prep for stringers
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Bonded in deck stringers today

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