The Unglamorous Side of a Refit: Fairing, Filling, and Fixing Leaks
Most of a refit isn’t the exciting part people picture — it’s fairing compound, sanding, and prep, week after week. Here’s what a week of that actually looks like on Paikea’s port side.
Harry’s Room, Reconfigured
Harry’s room — the kids’ hull — has had its layout genuinely rethought. What was originally another bathroom in Paikea’s factory layout has become a foyer-style entry to his room, with his bed extended all the way back to the bulkhead for the extra length that freed up. The overhead hatch above his bed is being blacked out rather than kept open above him directly — partly to protect the paints and resins currently stored in there from UV, but also because the plan was always to close that hatch off and rely instead on one of the small side port hatches for airflow, positioned above the door rather than directly overhead.
The doorways into this area have been filled with unidirectional fibre along their outboard edges, strengthening the section of bulkhead there, and edge-capped to finish it properly. They’ve also been cut down flush with the new floor level, which is only possible because that floor is now structural — glued and taped into place rather than simply resting there. A section that was monolithic — just the outer skin, no core, letting light straight through — has been filled in to stiffen it and make it easier to finish.
Prepping Everything for Paint
While the bulkhead and doorway work has been Shayne’s job, the kids and I have been working through every surface that needs prepping for paint — old penetrations in the bulkheads filled, glassed, and faired over, with a lot of time spent checking for low spots and going back over them. The composite flush hatches installed the week before are all in and finished on this side. Aden’s room doorway has been marked out and built up to the same 550mm-wide, floor-flush standard as the others, ready for its own edge cap and unidirectional fibre reinforcement once Shayne gets to it.
Down to Two Bathrooms
Paikea originally had four bathrooms. She’s going down to two — one of which is staying roughly where it is now, becoming an ensuite off one of the cabins. The composite door with the carbon frame going in there follows the same build process covered in an earlier post on the engine room doors. The surrounding structure is staying largely in place, since it’s genuinely structural — it stops flex in the deck — though a section got cut out to bring some light into the space to work in. A fein saw, picked up recently, has quickly become the tool everyone reaches for first.
Next up in that area: pulling out the old taping, then rerunning the wiring the same way it was done in the aft cabin — down through the space beneath the furniture. Exactly how it threads through the bathroom itself is still being worked out.
What’s Coming: The Galley
Once the bedrooms are done, the next major push is the galley — largely solid timber, and heavy enough that pulling it out and replacing it with composite should make a real dent in the weight-reduction goal on its own.
That goal is being tracked properly: every piece of timber that comes out gets weighed by the kids before the number goes into Shayne’s spreadsheet, and every composite replacement — a new floor panel, a hatch rim, whatever it is — gets weighed again once it’s finished, so there’s a genuine weight-out and weight-in column rather than a rough guess. So far, accounting for everything removed and everything added back, Paikea is roughly 650kg lighter. The target is a full tonne off — from around eight tonnes down to seven — and the numbers say that’s well within reach, especially with a galley’s worth of solid timber furniture still ahead.
The plan for that space keeps the same general layout, just rebuilt entirely in composite, with a modified nav station and some encroachment into what’s currently the “Room of Requirement” — the 3D printer and workshop space currently doubling as battery storage, which will shrink but likely stay in roughly the same spot.
Ayden’s Room and What’s Still Being Decided
Ayden’s room is next in line for the same treatment, with a few specific additions: an escape hatch, and space for a washing machine. The existing bathroom there is staying, just shifted and adjusted slightly to make room for both. Forward of a new bulkhead, the plan is a larger storage locker — though whether access to it comes through the bulkhead itself or via the deck above is still undecided.
Some of the fairing here has thrown up its own small puzzles — a divot running the length of a repaired section turned out to be filler shrinking back as it cured, over a strip of plywood that had been cut flush rather than tapered into the surrounding curve. Not a structural problem, just something to fair around properly rather than sand straight through.
A New Leak, Found by Following a Bubble
A small bubble in the paint, followed back to its source, turned into a genuine hole — small, but positioned right where it was letting water straight into a hull cavity, with daylight visible through it from inside a locker. The fix isn’t complicated: empty the locker, cut back the old fill material, laminate the underside of the plywood section properly, then address the fillet and taping from the outside where an earlier repair job hadn’t been done particularly well. There’s a harder version of the fix — pulling the whole section out and replacing it with fresh glass — but the laminate-and-reseal approach should hold up fine here.
It wasn’t entirely smooth sailing getting there — a bit of filler in the eye meant an unplanned trip away from the tools for a while, with Harry and Shayne stepping in to finish laminating over an exposed piece of plywood in the meantime. All part of the unglamorous week.
Follow the rest of Paikea’s interior transformation on the Paikea’s Refit page.