Most
older yachts in the 42' class had rudimentary engine bay access.
Essentially you have to pop open a small hatch door in the saloon and the go
crawling around in a dimly lit space trying to check belts, check the oil,
clean the seawater strainer and the like. You could do it but it wasn't
very fun, and it doesn't get more fun as you get older. 
Well,
I'm a maintenance oriented person, and doubly so with a boat. I do not
want my first indication of trouble to be a loud bang in the engine
spaces. So it was important to us to be able to do all maintenance and to
do it easily so that it would not become a chore that people would be tempted
to fudge on.
To be sure, in the original design
you could remove all of the furniture from the saloon, pull up the carpet, pull
out multiple small deck plates and one large one and in only 15 minutes you
could have access to half of the engine bay. But that is way too much
work for someone who likes to investigate any hint of problem. Also, it’s
difficult enough to do this at dock, but if you have to do it at sea in an
emergency you then have to find a place where the deck plates won't be sliding
around or worse yet falling down on your head. Since we were tearing into
this boat we wanted to try something new that would help us avoid all of these
issues.
The first step was to fabricate
frames for the new, dual engine bay doors. We used 11 ga rectangular
steel tubing and we did all the welding ourselves quite easily with a $100
Harbor Freight wire spool welder. It came out just fine. To the top
side of that frame we bolted a sheet of 3/4" plywood using bolts that were
countersunk using a forstner bit.
Once we had the plywood on, we
flipped them over, filled the open spaces with insulating foam and then covered
both units with 2 layers of #6 glass cloth using polyester resin. We
covered all surfaces so that the wood would be protected as well as the steel
frame.
We then created our own custom trim
using black starboard, a round over bit on the router and a jig on the drill
press in order to achieve even spacing and countersinking.
Using the trim we created a frame on
the top of the first door and then installed a WPC (wood-plastic-composite)
based flooring that we actually imported from China directly in order to save
as much as possible on the shipping fees (it helped a lot to have a
brother who works in the shipping business...).
We didn't have time to finish both
doors before we had to make the next trip up to the boat but the work we did
accomplish at least served as proof of concept for us. Below you can see both doors laid in place on
the boat. The fit of the doors came out quite nicely but it was a lot of
work to get the hinges just right.
Each
of these finished doors weighs over 200 lbs. So there is no way we were
going to be able to lift them by hand once installed in the boat. For
that reason we had planned ahead and bought a pair of 600lb capacity Progressive
Automations linear actuators which would do the heavy lifting for us.
In order to get the location of the
linear actuator just right we first roughed it in with wood strips as seen in
the picture to the left.
Then we took measurements.
When we got back home after that trip we used TinkerCad to design custom
bracket and then we ordered the stainless bar stock online and had a local
professional welder in Austin TIG weld the parts.
