I thought I'd post a formal thread on this project.
My buddy "Phathom" (Desi) is doing the work, and together we've been doing lots of planning and measurements. Our objectives have been to get something with a SMOOTH bottom that doesn't have a huge lip that digs into our surf wave. We also wanted something that was as narrow as possible relative to the surf wave without changing the platform bracket location. We chose to add a little length to it to make it more user friendly.
Here's how it's looking so far:
It's made out of two pieces of plywood sandwiched together, because that's the wood we had laying around. Spray on undercoating to cover it, again because we had it laying around. If we like it, we'll make one out of a single thicker piece of wood, glass in the wood and put some closed cell foam decking pad on it.Still have to sand down more(possibly) and coat the bottom. It's all cut, sanded and coated on the top. It is measuring 62" at transom, 14.5" deep the brackets, 13 3/4" long angled transition, and a 43" wide platform end that measures about 23 7/8" long transom to platform end all at 7/8" thick.
My outer brackets were pretty wide, so we did what we could on width as I didn't have much of an interest in moving them or making new ones. (thanks for the welding offers though). I should have to cut off about 1.5" of the extisting outer brackets though. But it's the flat bar before the angle brace comes in, so it shouldn't affect things much. Not sure if we'll have to shim the new platform up or if it'll be thick enough to match the height of the existing as is.
I did a drawing of the dimensions. The platform brackets are in orange. they overlap our platform a tiny bit on the sides, but should we go with a full blown version, it'll be easy enough to chop 1.5" off the ends of the brackets that extend past the angle brace as mentioned above.
Pictures of the OEM Platform for reference: