Safety - Pacific Crossing Notes: A Sailor's Guide to the Coconut Milk Run - page 71

Step A: Making mounts
The very first step in this process is to determine the exact position for the cradle by pla-
cing it in the desired location and marking drill holes. Then determine how thick the coach
roof is by carefully probing with a drill at one of the marked mount points. In a sandwich
composite construction, the goal is to cut through the top layer of fiberglass and the balsa
core, but not all the way through to the interior fiberglass liner. In our case, these two layers
of the coach roof were two inches thick, and therefore we knew our mounts would be two
inches tall.
With this preliminary information established, you can begin to prepare four mounts that
will support the cradle. These can be made by stacking discs cut from sheet glass to create
a mushroom-shaped mount. Eventually, the mounts will be fitted into four wells in the
coach roof, establishing solid attachment points for the life raft.
Schematic of the mounts bedded into the coach roof
To construct a mount, you will need to stack a number of discs cut from ¼ inch structural
fiberglass sheet, with a disc diameter of 2 ½ inches. The number of discs depends on the