The Floor-Building Assembly Line: Templating, Infusing, and Solving a Leaky Laminating Table

Producing floor panels for Paikea has turned into a genuine family assembly line — every stage running in parallel, with each person’s job feeding directly into the next.

How the Line Actually Works

The process repeats section by section, since the geometry around the daggerboard case is too complex to infuse as one continuous piece. It starts with templating: taking large pieces of cardboard, laying them down, then hot-gluing smaller extension pieces onto them to close the gaps that never quite match the old, imperfect original floor. Building the template this way — rather than tracing directly off the old floor — is deliberate: it eliminates those gaps entirely rather than reproducing them in the new part.

Once a template’s confirmed against the actual space — marking carefully around the daggerboard case for a proper fit — it gets transferred onto 20mm foam, marked up with a full pattern of resin-transfer holes, then drilled through. Those holes are what let resin actually move through the panel evenly during infusion rather than leaving dry patches. From there, it’s ready to be infused, and while that’s curing, the next section further along the floor is already being templated — a genuine rinse-and-repeat rhythm, with everyone’s task overlapping the next stage rather than waiting in sequence.

Infusing a Floor With an Integrated Hatch

One section combines two steps that would normally be separate: infusing a hatch and infusing the floor around it as a single finished unit. The hatch gets infused and finished first, sanded to its final stage, then sealed around its edge with a bead of silicone before being set back into the floor cutout as a plug. Infusing the whole floor around that plugged hatch in one pass gives a single glass base with an integrated lip for the floor to sit on — a cleaner, stronger result than fitting a separately-built hatch into a floor afterward.

Where Things Stand

At this stage, the base of the stairs, the main bedroom, and Harry’s room are all done, with work now running on both sides of the boat simultaneously — Oliver’s room among the sections currently in progress.

The Laminating Table Problem

Progress has been held up by one recurring issue: the temporary plywood laminating table leaks air. Various fixes have been tried — envelope bagging to improve the seal, a layer of sticky-back vinyl under the Teflon release layer — and while each helped marginally, none solved the underlying problem. Plywood, it turns out, just isn’t consistently non-porous enough to hold a clean vacuum reliably.

The fix being built now is a proper laminating table made from scrap 20mm PVC foam, pieced together from whatever offcuts could be found around the workshop. It’s designed with a second purpose in mind too — once its job as a laminating table is done, it’s earmarked to eventually be cut down and reused as the saloon or galley table, so the material isn’t a one-use investment.

Materials sourcing got a mention in passing while waiting on the next resin order: Easy Composites continues to be the standout supplier for reliably getting stock into Spain, in contrast with at least one other supplier that’s been genuinely difficult to deal with for other materials. Not every job can be sourced through one supplier, but it’s clear which one earns repeat business.

Testing the New Table

With the new foam table pieced together, the real test was whether it would actually hold vacuum properly — a fair concern, given the previous table’s problems traced back to a porous base rather than anything wrong with the technique itself. It held. The floors already down prove the process works even with a marginal table; this upgrade is simply about making every infusion from here on more consistent, rather than fighting the equipment each time.

In This Series

The Floor-Building Assembly Line is one part of Paikea’s floor replacement. Follow the rest of the build here:

Follow the rest of Paikea’s interior transformation on the Paikea’s Refit page.