Making Progress with the Interior

I have been working long hours and finally feel like I am making progress.  The floor is now behind me and I am onto boxing out the interior.  My first step was to make two boxes out of Mahogany along side of the seats.  These boxes will serve several purposes.  They will help in the finished look of the interior, be used as mounting supports and cup holders and they will also hide some cables and wires.  They were very time consuming and took me more that a week to build.  The inside wall of the boat is curved from front to back and sloped up and down.  Need I say, there are no square corners on a boat unless you build them. 

My next step was to figure out where everything was going to be placed.  This includes the instrument panel that houses the fuse panel/switches.  I started with a $50 piece of wood and put in a slopped instrument panel 5" in front of the one in the photo above.   Once I realized that I wanted more room in the pilot cockpit I discarded that panel ( after 4 hours of work) and now I am going with my original frame as the instrument panel/dash and I will tilt just the steering wheel 20 degrees for comfort.  I wanted to position the fuse/switch panel in the right corner so I needed to make a mount for it.  It does not look like much but this little guy took me an entire evening after work to design and build.  I will epoxy it to the existing frame/instrument panel and when it is done will look like one piece of material..

 Next, building the seat bottom frame boxes, seat bottoms and backs.  The seat bottoms and backs are removable and sit in the frame box.  I still have another day of work on the seating but the rough fitting is done.  I think I spent almost as much time thinking, measuring, and designing as I did building the seats.  I will not fasten the seat boxes into position until my upholstery is done and the steering wheel is mounted.  I want to be sure that the seating is comfortable and in the correct position.

Like I mentioned above, the seating is rough fit so my next project will be to finish them up.  I need to drill a couple of drain/air circulation holes in the seat bottoms.  I need to router all the edges on the seats so the upholstery will not tear from use.  The final thing for this stage will be to make some templates and cut out four insert panels that will be upholstered on the right and left side of each seat.