DIY vs Professional EVA foam boat decking & Flooring | TBNation Tutorial

hey guys what's going on the whole premise here is to show you how easy it is to do this don't look at this project and think that oh i can't do it because if you're watching me you're likely a pretty high skill diy er a lot of you are guys are in the trades you can absolutely do this with a standard router from lowe's and a few bits that i just found i just eyed them i know some of you guys out there are like seriously skilled if you actually know what you're looking at um i'm just going to show you how i did it explain my whole process there will be chapters for this so if you look down and you expand the description area there will be hyperlinks also in the comment section i will pin the hyperlinks and you should be able to scroll through the video and see what chapter you're in with youtube's new features if you want to see where we're getting the phone from it's sourced from our site tbnation.net it's called orthodec and we're using the diy self routing sheets is what we call it they also have pre-writed sheets if you want them and there's also hydro turf and seedag and anything else you like there for your flooring but we are specifically showing you orthodec and we'll explain it to you why check this video out and also check out our complete series on this boat if you haven't checked out how we got this far it's up here in the icard and also the description below as well thank you guys alright let's begin if you're following this series you saw that last episode we put together all the hatches this is the gen 7 core and we also mixed in some gen x core also to make the entire thing work along with acoustic board side panels we really did it took a long time to do this diy but the fact is you can do anything you want essentially make any kind of hatch you want without a welder so out of your small garage just like me you can put a whole boat deck together and so that's where we were at now we're prepping it and we are going to actually paint the exterior some stuff i learned down in georgia from those boys down there working with nate is that they paint all their hatches they actually powder coat all the dry hatches so we can't actually do that here but we do have some truck bed liner that's a little bit more durable than the average spray paint along with some regular spray paint so we're going to do a few light coats of self etching primer and that's what's recommended from the audience saying to not go too thick on it just use light coats and that'll do it and then i have this truck bed liner sitting in my little locker of hazmat for like ever and finally get to use it which means i can go and buy more use of spray paint to sit in my garage for the next five years but anyways this came out pretty sweet and now we're putting on the door edge guard garden what that does is really drown out the sound and the clanging of the aluminum hatch it's almost non-existent it's one thing to get to the fish in a boat this skinny it's another thing to keep the element of surprise through stealth so we will do whatever it takes to make sure we have complete stealth many of you know that this is not my first attempt to try and turf a boat deck and self-route diy them in fact that's kind of been my major ammo i did a first trial run on my boat and they came out pretty good considering you know we didn't even know if it could be done and then i had better success there on the 14-foot alumacraft but i was a little afraid to really go all out like i'm about to try right now we start by laying the shape flat on the ground i like to lay it face down with the adhesive backing up that way i can trace a nice clean line with a marker where i need to make it i always give more of an a cut so i try to do like one inch over at least that way if for whatever reason the turf sways or kind of you know just strays off the line you'll at least have an inch gap to put it on because when the adhesive touches the aluminum ice where it does not want to come off you'll likely stretch or ruin the turf trying to do it a lot of times the adhesive just straight separates and stays on and it's a big giant mess that's the only risk where when using this stuff so we're going to show you a trick on how to avoid all of that and just lay down straight with no problems we are going to be using alcohol rubbing alcohol that's all you need you can use denatured alcohol but nothing too strong just enough to get the initial contaminants off and then uh you know but not strong enough to take off the paint obviously we don't want that whoa what the hell's on here you can also tell there are pretty gross contaminants on here something is on here yeah it's doing a good job now we lay this turf on and i know this is touching a dirty surface but there really is no better way so we make sure that it's straight that we like the way it's looking and pull this way even and while it's there you kind of want to clamp it in place so it won't shift that's the important thing the better option is to have somebody just hold it in place while you apply the initial layer but since we don't have that we are we just have ourselves and we do not want this to shift even shift it there a little bit here we want we want the overhang because we're going to end up cutting this we are we do want the overhang a little bit on there so that won't move that's right here we're gonna cut a strip here i call this the safety strip meaning this adhesive on the back of this is some supreme adhesive it is real stuff and then once it's on there it is on there it is not coming off so you got to get it nice and you line it up once so we have it lined up pretty much perfectly even with the end here which is what we wanted and that is fantastic our safety clamps [Applause] and we can just slowly work our way down the line and it's just going to naturally fall the way we have it set [Music] it's we go that stuff is not going to come off it will peel paint off of the aluminum and it'll probably separate the adhesive is so strong it'll separate from the foam before you ever pull this strip off a little tip from days i use these small ones just something between less blade being in the turf allowing less drag and i don't know what what it is or i can't explain you the science behind it i just know that it works [Music] we had a few options we've got this beast to do a nice little center curve in but we kind of don't have that going on on the edge so it might look stupid we got this beast we got these with the same thing one of these will give us a thicker line [Music] i'm kind of favoring the thicker line i think it'll look nicer so this it's got that same bit on it i didn't get a chance to show you what bit that was but it essentially was like this kind of counter concave i don't know flanged out bit kind of like a triangle but not and that i just put it to the the only depth you can see the depth of the brown right there and right now you see that i went a little down a little too deep so you want to only just take enough on any bit to just get through the first layer of foam if you dig into the black layer the second layer of anything not only will you risk a bigger chance of making your line go off groove but it just looks kind of crappy it's harder on the blade etc and you definitely don't want to do that with the side bit that we just routed the whole edge on because then you can kind of ground away the aluminum which is terrible right now we are just using this meter stick to mark about about an inch and a half border and then we're going to use as best we showed you earlier to do the border so this router has guidelines so we just put the line right there and then right there and obviously we just run i'm running a piece of angle i was going to try and run tubing earlier but it just wasn't gripping on these gen 7 hatches the way it would grip on a gen x so i switched to a piece of angle and so we're going to butt this piece right here i'm using the round edges i used to put the square edge above this and then somewhere down the line it would bind and it would move just the lip would be like straight it would curve like that and then the line would go crooked but if but if you're on the round edge that can't happen you can actually you can twist it and turn you do what you have to do and it'll still go straight all the way down we go all the way down to the end turn around and repeat you're gonna see the plunge depth right here [Music] so there's probably smarter ways to find the depth and add it there and not find that you have these measurements somewhere right here i don't exactly even know how to tell i just they've been doing it by phil i know i don't do things a traditional way like an actual skilled craftsman of his trade would do but i hope you can uh follow what i'm doing and then apply your professional skills uh to make this process even better and i and everybody else will also appreciate that [Music] helpful tips on this go slow follow the guideline and blow like blow all the grit that comes out of that turf because it's going to get in front of your router and it's going to jam it up and it's going to make your line bend ask me how i know wait never mind don't ask me just blow at it i'm blowing at it right now you can't tell and then before you go all the way back because you have to go all the way back you sweep all that stuff off you have to go back and forth to get the edge on both sides so it comes out clean it looks good look at that let's just do the tv nation first i don't know the boats a lot i really do like the boat john from jds outdoors part of our tin can crew did all these when we went down to illinois for that four day build and uh i finally found a pretty good use for it other than hanging in my office looking pretty i'm using it for a stencil it's not quite perfect but it's pretty close so when i go to route this i'm just going to do it freehand no jig no nothing i mean it's not like wood where you know the slightest little thing can jar off your blade and your whole your whole project can be ruined this stuff is pretty forgiving as long as you go slow and i will say this dewalt xr router i don't this is the first router i ever owned besides like a chicago electric runner from harbor freight which was terrible so i mean i love this thing it's very easy to move with one hand you gotta control it with your bottom hand you can see right in the glass you got some goggles deflect all the all the crap flying at your face i mean you can see right where it's cutting it's pretty good it's a little tedious to go back around your line in the letter after you've already made the line but it's pretty essential in making it look clean in fact the smaller bit didn't show away as good as the bigger bit did so i will have to go in and show you this other trick that we've done before when i traced it with john's very awesome plasma cutted whatever like thing i could tell that it was gonna be a little goofy like not not the exact verbatim template and you know i'm okay with that and i was and last time i cut this out i cut out the whole thing and darkened i like darkened the whole thing and that was pretty cool but i don't know how well that's gonna like last for the deck you know i'm saying like super deep in so i think using just thin lines will be all right now obviously that smaller bit even when i went back in through it did all right it didn't ride it this clean like this is super supremely clean routed like you can't even tell it was used by standard but this you can definitely tell now i don't like using this technique especially on the high quality foam but it does work to burn off the edges but you have to be very precise and you can't run it on here for very long because it does show you have to be a little bit more careful some about this higher quality foam doesn't like to be burned on the edge so you got to like be real [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] the end kind of got away from me i kind of chewed away at the underside and you can see that which is okay because i kind of left it goofy style so it just kind of adds to it but definitely kind of screwed the end up right at the end i was just all cocky i got my rhythm back i remember how i used to do it that it wasn't that hard and then it so constant caution now i have done more intricate jobs than this you know for the tracker but i'm fine with these yeah it looks good that looks [ __ ] great i can't wait to do the other side i want to do like one hatch or maybe one or two of the day uh there really was quite a bit of work you know a lot of it was epic engine i haven't done it in over a year took me a little bit time to get back into the groove but that looks dope man [Music] [Applause] so i made the lids last video this video we are going to have to put under supports and specialties under some of them like for this one we need a pedestal mount for this boat is only 32 inches at the bottom it's going to roll it is going to do it so one of the advantages that we do have over yak is that we could put a butt seat right in our hatches and that's pretty good i had a butt seat last time and the need for outriggers wasn't really there um not not near as necessary but if i don't have a butt seat here i almost 100 fall out of this boat my balance is not the best and i plan on keeping this boat for a while it's probably going to go toward me in my in a toy hauler somewhere when i eventually go to tour the country if that comes into fruition we'll see but right now here it is and then here is the front hatch with a gen x uh frame and we found that sticking just a few pieces of tubing in the middle does really good and if you really want it ultra stiff one of my patrons figured out that all you have to do is put another piece of sheet metal right on top of the tubing so you have like a double like you pretty much have a fully boxed under support and that makes the hatch extremely rigid and inflexible especially in these gen 7 hatches where i did not expect the fully boxed under support here to make it as stiff as it did where if i had known it was going to be this stiff and strong by itself once we added this i would have made the entire boat gen 7 instead of most of it 75 25 split between gen 7 and gen x because these tubes and the 1 16 inch top make it super inflexible it's like one of the strongest hedges i have it's also one of the biggest hatches i have inside the boat and we cut a little spot there for the camel over latch and we also installed the spots for the struts and all that will be going on as soon as we turf the rest of this stuff we're turning the aluminum lids that we painted and later on we will be turfing the cooso board hatches as well we glassed this and then we sanded it kind of made sure it was all flat and even and a little bit of an abrasive top so that the adhesive from the orthodeck would just stick right on it and it does so quite beautifully just cut the extra fluff off we did paint the insides black so they would match whenever we open up the hatches [Music] but each piece that we get done and ready to prep for routering it gets increasingly more exciting [Music] okay so here it is just with the edges routed so the edge routing is like the simplest thing ever so if you want to in some ways it might even be simpler than the larger line turquoise even the line the thin line turf like the camera turf because as long as you're running all the foam the same direction meaning you know you make sure it's running the way the same way because if you look at this piece right now if you look at that piece it's running similar if i flip it it's actually a different direction it's just the way the light hits the grain the way it's cut so as long as you as you make sure it's all running the same way which all this right now does is actually really easy [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] you [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] you oh [Music] [Music] oh [Music] this is your time if you're watching this channel it is likely because you are smart and highly skilled and ready to take this on you can absolutely do this and the most exciting part of it will be when it's you doing this not me the leader of a movement is only the leader for a moment until the movement takes place become part of the movement become part of the empowerment that is the tiny boat nation and after you do it send me all kinds of pictures of your jobs because i want to post them all over instagram where they belong tie lines guys i'll see you out there you

Channel: Tiny Boat Nation

Views: 45,819

Rating: 4.9614768 out of 5

Keywords: eva foam boat decking, eva boat flooring installation, EVA foam, eva foam tutorial for beginners, Seadek, marine mat, hydro turf install, hydro turf, Hydro Turf Jon Boat, Bass boat, TBNation, tiny boat nation jon boat, tiny boat nation subfloor, tiny boat nation livewell, tiny boat nation, Orthodek, aluminum boat, fishing boat restoration, aluminum boat restoration, boat decking, jon boat deck build, jon boat to bass boat conversion, michael lopez, eva foam, boat, jon boat

Id: vZf0nEH7Zm4

Length: 25min 19sec (1519 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 13 2021