General Discussion

As with window tracks on many boats , their drainage always seams to get plugged up resulting in water damage.

In my 35 , especially with its swept shear line , the cabin side windows have an aftward rake.

Over the years water had spilled up and over the drains which can get blocked up by dirt, spiders, leaves , whatever, and would run onto and down the stbd. Bulkhead.

A bunch of trim, a storage shelf, a false wall, a clothes hanger bar, the false wall behind the built in couch, the bottom of the couch , wireing, and a few other things had to come out.

With the area all accessible I mapped out where I would need to cut into the original Philipine mahogany bulkhead.

I setup a series of guides to allow my trim router to cut progressively bigger swaths of plywood.

Then I Inland one layer of new veneer at a time to essentially stich the plywood back together

While fairing in the third layer

I found something a bit odd.

Within this plywood was a 1-1/4" wide strip of masonite.

As I dug deeper I realized that someone at the factory auctually used masonite (which for those of you that don't know is basically compressed paper board) as a spline to join two pieces of the edge glued plywood that make up this bulkhead.

Of course when it rained , it (the plugged up window tracks) leaked and dripped right onto that exposed masonite spline which acted like a sponge highway for water to migrate into the core of this bulkhead which caused decay and delamination

The yellow in the pictures is nothing more than tape that was precisely fit into the area I routered out. Once removed , the tape makes a nearly perfect templet which then gets stuck onto the new veneer used for the inlay.

For the final veneer, it took a few hours of just rummaging thru my stock of DRM mahogany to find the board that best resembled the look of the bulkheads existing grain pattern

I resawed that board to get 4 matching veneers

The final and largest tape pattern was then adhered onto all four veneers ,sliced into four parts , cut exactly to the pattern , and then fit in sequence onto the bulkhead.

Of course its a lot of work for an end goal to look like nothing was ever done.

The slight difference in color of new to old will be addressed when the bulkhead gets refinished.