Boat carpet and plastic plywood

I asked for help when going to repair the floor and replace carpet in my Lund Explorer this Spring and several of you responded. I received some good advice and I hope to pass on anything that I have learned along the way.”Jimbo” told me about using recycled plastic plywood and I looked into that and I did use it. On the internet you can find it in varying thickness. I bought mine at Menards, it was $45 for a 4’X 8′ X 7/16″. It is good to work with, regular skill saw and drills work fine. It doesn’t hold a screw the best but pop rivits are great. I removed the bad floor and replaced some wiring while I had the floor removed. I used a hole saw to cut 1″ holes and I ran plastic conduit for my new wiring. I am upgrading my front troller to 24 volts and I installed some interior LED lights. This made it easy to pull wire from back to front and also protected it. You can see the grey conduit along both sides with wires running to my onboard charger. You will also notice that I did add some bracing for the floor using 1/8″X 1″ X 1″ aluminum angle iron. The plastic flooring does bend a little easier than plywood so I did brace the floor. I think that I could have doubled the plastic plywood and glued the two pieces together or found some thicker material. The floor turned out great, it is solid and it will never rot. The next photo shows the plastic plywood all ready for the compartment lids. The picture of the compartment lids shows how much glue remains on them after removing the carpet. I lucked out and was told about the Goof Off remover. It is great stuff (I bougth it at Farm & Fleet), I sprayed it on let it set and scraped off most of the glue. I sprayed on one more coat and wiped and hosed off what remained. The aluminum looked new. I then pop riveted the compartment lid frames onto the plastic plywood. Orignally the frames are screwed into the plywood. When glueing the carpeting to the floor the staples held fine in the plastic plywood. Then it all just came together with a comleted boat. One other hurtle was removing dried glue from any plywood that you might want to reuse, for this I used a two handed paint scraper. It worked great and stripped the glue right down to the wood. I gotta tell you that about half way through this project I was asking myself what the heck have I started. Allow yourself about three times as long as you think it is going to take you. With the high water down on Pools 13 & 14 I didn’t miss anything this Spring. Let me know if you have any questions so we don’t make the same mistakes. Battchief