I am going the gelcoat route and mixing my own. Color matching was a fun little puzzle for my head. I ended up with a recipe made from off the shelf tints mixed to make the hue I wanted, then mixed into Total Boat white. Although my initial design for a console top ebox failed due to my layup skills, the mold, radiuses, prep and gelcoat worked well.
In theory, I should be able to mix up any size batch as needed.
Thanks to your inspiration I will be jumping back into my doghouse version when I get back from vacation.
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Sometime inspiration is all the we need in order to succeed. I’m glad you are going to build your dog house, if you need help feel free to message me, I have the measurements and angles as I drew it all up from my mind and then built it. One thing to keep in mind is the proportions of the house, I kept my recipe simple, I doubled the length of the grab rail and it wound up being 78 inches from the deck. The overall length of the console forward to aft is 45 inches. The console is 33 inches tall at the heigh point from deck. So I simply build it 44 inches, then added 1 inch crown to my roof for overall heigh of 45 inches.
Some suggestions coming from pro building experts of Pilothouse suggested making the house only 3-4 inches taller than the driver, however I’m not tall at 5/9 so it felt squashed. I did like the the look of the shorter house at 42 inches but Anyone 6ft tall won’t be happy.
I think with the compromise of the loss of the small area it makes it look taller than it really is. I didn’t want a straight windshield and glad I didn’t plan on it bc it would have looked like hell and way too boxy.
I did a Portuguese rake window at 15deg, anything past the 15 deg mark is pushing it since the front pass head on console would be hitting there head. I started my take off point 8 inches from the top of the console, so that gave an average height person comfortable amount of head room without encroaching the seating area and giving a nice pro look IMO.
I took inspiration of 100s of pictures and designs. Truthfully I was a little worried that it would look bad, but I don’t think there are too many options for design since our consoles are very limited in their shape. The driving angle of the helm is also awkward so there’s that as well.
The best approach for a custom house would be to remove this one, save it for any future use or reverting back to stock, make a mold and fab a true 1 person phone booth house with molded in dash and storage. Also a cambered roof with drip edges and radius brows.
Could you share your recipe for the gelcoat match? I would like to try to get it close? If you can give me the ratio I can adjust for the volume I need.
Best of luck bud