Headliner replacement General Forum Forums

Someone else brought this topic up so I am bumping it back up to the top of the list

I pulled the headliner down in the Head on the the boat  yesterday. It was a bit surprising. There was a thin layer of foam on the section of vinyl on the side of the cabin around the port light. However there was no foam at all behind the vinyl on the ceiling. It was just straight vinyl. The staples are a pain in the you know what to get out. I used a razor to cut the vinyl down and then went back and used vise grips to pull the plastic trim stuff and little rim of vinyl that was left down. There are staples every 1/4 inch around the entire perimeter and they are a pain to get out.. first get it up a little with a screwdriver and then pull with the vise grips. I think I will put some insulation back in and then some kind of panel system that allows me access to the hardware in the coach roof when I need it. For the immediate future we are just going to scrub the roof and paint it white.

So far in the areas we have pulled down or gotten behind the head liner it has been pretty clean as no mildew or mold. The head compartment we pulled it all down and there was a little behind there but not much. As we pull it down we are going to clean, lightly sand and paint all of the ceiling with a anti sweating microsphere paint. Still need to order some though. 🙂 might add in an anti-mildew additive at the same time.

So I was looking at your pictures and all of a sudden wen't " thats not a DE38 as there is nowhere on the boat that looks like that" lol.. then I realized its a DE32 🙂 

For a minute I was wondering if you were pulling a fast on on us 🙂

Sea Trader said:

3.We have read the blog about difficulties using a 110 Genoa with the Staysail. We have a 150 Genoa that I can only imagine will be impossible to tack while the Staysail is up. Isn't this an either one or the other solution? How would you reasonably tack while sailing  them both? We are also looking for any reference source or experienced instruction on how to fly our drifter/reacher without a whisker pole?

 

Hope I have not breached the protocol by posting 3 separate topics? Any help, suggestions or guidance will be greatly appreciated.

 

Happy New Year with fair winds and flat seas![Image Can Not Be Found]

 

Allen

 

Allen, 

welcome to the forums and website. In general your good but there are several categories that your questions cover that would work better in their own forum categories. I have posted a link to a question of staysail/jib interactions someone else asked. Maybe post your question over there and lets see if we can start a conversation there. 🙂 I actually have a little experience with this on the DE38 and will post over there on it. 🙂

/forums/sails-and-rigging-standing-and-running/genoastaysail-interaction

 

as to refinishing the teak 🙂 lol that is a much debated subject. I found a product I love but the creator of it died and his company disappeared.. I am now trying to create my own mixture of tung oil, varnish and some variety of thinner/dryer to replicate its properties. No progress yet. 🙂  other than that you have your choice of traditional varnishes, some sort of teak oil, two part finishes such as Bristol, Cetol, or a lot of variations in between these.  I'm not going to jump into it in detail until I have created my own formula  and then I will post it. Simple search of refinishing teak or bright work on boats on google will give you more reading that you have time to finish on a bunch of the boat building and cruising forums.

 

Scott

I did the last boat I had where we pulled down the marine fabric/carpet down off the bulkheads and hull and sanded and painted. It looks great. However I wouldn't do it as a finished surface for one of these boats. Not enough insulation and to much condensation. 🙂 We are living on the boat right now and in the moderate 40 to 70 degree temps we have been living in I can already see issues in the head where we pulled the headliner down all the way as well as spots where we have pulled corners back on the existing headliner and ambient air can touch the exposed deck and fittings. Lots of condensation. I plan on painting with a anti-condensation paint when we redo stuff to help with that but for the most part there will be a tight layer of reflectix insulation installed above the system we go with as 

I have a plan in my head for our headliner and overheads.. It will have drop down storage between the beams over the settees and flush with those hard panels the rest of the space. I'm uncertain if I'm going to use luan nicely stained and varnished for the panels or use a white melamine type material. The panels would be almost flush with the teak trim strips, just slightly higher. This should give an inch and a half or more of storage for things like spice bottles in the galley, and misc other stuff other areas in the salon.  I would like to use 1/4 inch cream neoprene for all the curved surfaces. It would be attached with Velcro to be easily removable and would be fuzzy side out so that you could stick custom built pockets with Velcro to it. The end result would allow us to put a little insulation up there, give us quick access to 100 percent of the underside of the decks when needed and take us from old dingy vinyl to a slightly refreshed/upgraded look. 🙂 I hope. 

It will help with running all the new wiring for projects I have planned also. Speaker wires, hdmi cables, more power wires for led reading lights in the vberth and salon, power wires from the solar panels on deck to down below, gps and satalite radio antenna wires run back down below from the top of the new hard dodger, as well as power wires running up to the dodger for accessory power up there and led lights under it.

It will probably be done a section at a time over time as functionally needed. Right now there are 3 sections that will need to be done soon as we have damaged the vinyl gaining access to deck hardware to work on it for on deck projects and repairs.

Isn't it amazing how many things the headliner affects. 🙂

Scott

I was thinking of just putting some reflectix as insulation in. It's pretty thin 1/4 inch or so and seems to do really well. I used it to create ducting for the on deck window unit AC we used last summer on the boat living here. There was no condensation on the outside even though it ran most of the day. I figure that is pretty good considering it had cold air blasting on the inside of it all day long.

We just pulled down the headliner over the chart table and galley as well as the vertical area in both those areas on the aft cabin face. I am putting solid wood panels on the back cabin face with spice and tea shelves on them. The over head will have hinged panels that drop down a foot or two and when up are flush with the cabin bows. This leaves them acting as little storage bins that drop down. Lights and fans will be attached to them. I am using a pretty 5 mm luan to make the panels with. I will treat it with penetrating epoxy and then varnish it. I will try to keep it as light as possible in color.

its in the 50's here temp wise and I can tell a difference in the aft of the boat without the headliner in. Definite difference.

So we got the panelling with shelves up in the rear of the boat. I did a write up and posted it to the front page. Here is the direct link

/archives/2990

I was pretty happy with the end result and now after a couple weeks using them I and my wife are very very happy.

We put up reflectix behind the panels for insulation so basically a combination of the mylar and bubble wrap. Seems to be working well.

The desgin of the overhead bins is still wandering around in my head. Like you said a positive latch system seems to be very key to retaining whatever you put up there. The only ideas I have had so far is to have barrel bolts on either side of the drop down portion of the bin or a small line that runs up to an eye in the roof directly above the opening end of the bin and then from there over to a small cleat that you can tie it off on.  Maybe a strip of foam seal above the opening end that as you close the bin it will compress against in the shut position so that the bin will not rattle.

As to the sidewalls, I am going to leave the current headliner in place for a while. It is working well. When we do change it out I will either just use the same thing or maybe some neoprene in a cream/off white color. Neoprene with a fuzzy side out would give us the ability to build fabric/canvas pockets with Velcro on the back of them that could be stuck to the fuzzy side of the neoprene. We wouldn't be redoing any of the headliner on the boat to be honest if I didn't both now and in the past year need to access deck hardware under it and also want to create overhead storage. It is dingy from age but other than that in immaculate shape. They did an increadable job on it when it was installed.

right now one of our major irritations in life living on the boat is managing shoes for three people.  I think that in the near future we are going to sew up or buy and adapt some fabric hanging shoe racks and put them in the little corner beside the companionway and behind the chart table to port of the opening for the pilot berth. I think we could build in enough storage for at least 6 or 7 adult size pairs of shoes there. Other than that I had the idea of building a box to attach to the back side of the companionway that you access through large slots or holes in the back of the companionway under the steps. Maybe 6 inch deep or so. just enough room for a few shoes stuffed back up into there. I need to mock up a cardboard model and tape it in place to see if it will affect access to the engine compartment with the companionway opened up or impinge on closing the companionway.

Living on the boat for the last year has really highlighted a lot of storage deficiencies. There is a lot of storage space on this boat but it is extremely hard to use it effectively for real world daily living. Most of of it is just big bins and compartments that stuff just jumbles in. Gradually we have been creating custom solutions to specific storage needs. We still have along way to go and I'm sure that once we start travelling that new ideas or needs will come up as we deal with living in a heeling/bouncing environment. We are trying to plan for that in everything we do now but planing for and living it are probably two different things.

Scott

On my last boat we sanded the cabin sides in the salon and went and got some decent gloss porch and floor paint custom tinted at home depot or lowes and painted instead of putting the headliner back up. We didn't sand it smooth. Just took the old glue off and smoothed out the rough edges. Two coats of the thick paint and it gave it a nice texture and the gloss was easy to clean. On the DE the transition from the bows to the deck is pretty rough and I don't think your going to smooth that transition without a lot of filling and fairing. So my end call would be that it will look nice but a bit industrial painted with out a a lot of work. Painting it might be a very nice transition stage to give you a nice usable interior that doesn't look to bad once the headliner is down until you can put something more polished in place. Now that I think of it I might do that here also.

One downside to just painting is that you will notice a difference in heating and cooling the boat without the headliner there creating a dead airspace. The decks should be foam core which helps a lot on these boats but even so the dead air space of the headliner is as much more of an insulative measure also. We will be gluing or taping reflectix insulation to the undersides over the bins we plan on building.

yep that doesn't look bad.:)

In the end its all about what makes you happy. If the picture in your head says this is the way you want it then go for it. It might be more work than I would put into it but your the one that has to live with it. I have a lot of things that it is all about get it functional as quick a possible and other stuff that I wanted it "just so!" and spent a lot of time and resources doing it my way. I get a lot of wow that’s nice on those projects but not many people that would spend the time or effort to do it like I did. Some of my just get her done projects people go "you should have done more there.  In the end the only place you have to be uncompromising is projects that affect structural safety. Rigging,repairs to the hull,thru hulls,etc…

The secret to a boat is to keep water on the outside,people on the inside and have fun,all else is subject to the whim of the owner:)

here is a picture of what my last boat looked like when I painted instead of putting the headliner back up over the shelves in the salon.

hmm.. i thought I left a long post about my drawer on the ceiling plans but it seems to have disappeared.. sigh.. oh well.. maybe another day 🙂