Structural Bulkhead: Building a Return Flange Under the Floor

Some weeks the best footage comes from the people who weren’t supposed to be filming. This one belongs to the boys.

With a week away at work, Harry and Ollie took over documentation duties aboard Paikea — and there were two genuinely separate projects happening at once: stripping out an old bathroom and bunk area by hand, and Shayne building a structural half-bulkhead with a return flange destined to sit under the floor.

Sanding out a hardened repair, one panel at a time

Harry’s bunk, in the port bow, had already had its lining stripped out and a rough bog repair applied — then left to fully harden before the real finishing work could begin. That job fell to Harry and Ollie: sanding down a filler that had cured properly hard, working corner by corner rather than trying to tackle the whole panel at once. It’s unglamorous, physically demanding work — plenty of divots and corners to chase, plenty of “are you broken yet” moments along the way — but it’s exactly the kind of labour that has to happen before anything gets painted or finished properly.

The adjacent space, a former bathroom and toilet area, got the same treatment. Most of the original timber lining in there had rotted through, which made the decision easy: strip it all out, replace it with fibreglass and foam, and finish it properly rather than patching rotten wood back into place. Pulling the old lining away also revealed just how much genuinely usable space had been hidden behind it — nearly double what was visible with the original timber panelling still in place, a small but real bonus that comes from stripping a boat back to its actual structure rather than working around decades of accumulated interior fit-out.

The structural repair going in under the floor

While that stripping and sanding work was underway, Shayne was building a lower half-bulkhead — the piece destined to sit under the floor at the exact point where a crack and hole had previously been repaired. This isn’t decorative. It’s the structural reinforcement that makes sure that repaired section of hull doesn’t see a repeat failure, laminated in with fibreglass marked, cut, and glued directly onto the panel before it goes into position.

The return flange built into this bulkhead follows the same principle used elsewhere in the refit — a folded edge that seats directly against the surrounding structure and bonds cleanly, without needing a separate taping step around the joint. It’s efficient, and it’s part of why this repair is built to hold rather than just cover over the original damage.

Priming as the next real step

With the bulkhead work progressing, priming became the next milestone before the floor itself could go in. A high-build primer went on — thick enough to fill and smooth minor surface imperfections more effectively than expected, doing double duty as both the finishing primer and, in the areas that need it, a barrier coat against moisture. Most of the boat will eventually carry this same primer, making this section a genuine test run for the product and process ahead of a much larger job.