Birch interior grade plywood for cabin linings.

Y

yachtorion

Well-Known Member
Joined
4 Oct 2009
Messages
1,025
Visit site
As part of trying to modernise the look and feel of the cabin I'm working to get away from textured vinyl and dark woods. I'm currently planning to line everything with "whitewash" exterior woodstained birch interior grade plywood with darker trim as suggested in a previous thread.

Anyone any experience of using interior grade birch plywood for this purpose please? It's a relatively low cost material with an attractive appearance but normally even inside a boat I'd be looking for at least WBP... The construction of the material and veneers etc looks well up to marine standards I'm just not sure about the wood species and the glue...
 
If buying from one of the big retail outlets such as Jewsons, Wickes, etc., inspect each sheet very carefully before buying. A lot of the sheets they sell are of lower quality, with filler added to clean up knot holes and other imperfections. Using these with painted finishes may give disappointing results.

I made cockpit locker lids from hardwood-faced ply bought at one of these outlets. Despite being WBP the surface veneer has broken up badly after one year, even with three coats of Woodskin.
 
vyv_cox said:
If buying from one of the big retail outlets such as Jewsons, Wickes, etc., inspect each sheet very carefully before buying. A lot of the sheets they sell are of lower quality, with filler added to clean up knot holes and other imperfections. Using these with painted finishes may give disappointing results.

I made cockpit locker lids from hardwood-faced ply bought at one of these outlets. Despite being WBP the surface veneer has broken up badly after one year, even with three coats of Woodskin.
Click to expand...
Mine didn't last that long!
 
I am partially refitting my Rival and have come across two types of ply used in her interior: genuine Lloyds approved Marine Ply and genuine shit ply. As far as I am concerned only used known quality exterior ply or genuine marine grade ply and so far only Robbins Timber has provided me with a confident buying experience. As far as I can tell from the threads on this forum shit ply is standard supply these days and it falls to bits in less than a year. A 9 mm 8' x 4' sheet of genuine exterior grade ply which has WBP glue from Robins is £66.29. On my own yacht I am lightening up the dark exterior by painting onto quality marine ply.

So far I have taken down panels around windows, backing panels for vinyl cloth, hull lining panels all of which split into their individual ply sheets such is the shit quality of ply I guess was used in the 1990s during the last refit. I almost had a heart attack when what appeared to be the main bulkhead that supports the mast delaminating, only to be relived to find that it was just a thin veneer separating into its component ply sheets that had been added to tart up the original bulkhead (which is still as solid as the day it was laminated).

It is unfortunate that trust in suppliers of exterior ply is low as Robbins are not low cost, but thats the way it is.
 
I'm not sure if this is helpful or not but I am currently redoing the floor in my cabin & in my efforts to find a suitable material to do this I came across some artificial floor type stuff thrown out the back of Homebase & am using this.It has a sort of planked artificial surface onto a backing of some sort of man made fibre type board.It seems very resilient & though I doubt it would survive wet conditions by giving it a coat of ALDI fence panel type preserver I reckon it should stand up pretty well.I've stuck it on a backing board that is also some sort of man made board as it is only about 5mm thick.
Maybe these modern man made products are a viable alternative to what sounds like a lot of very inferior ply that would seem to be the only thing available?
(I'll maybe add some photo's if anyone is really interested).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Share this page

Top