The front deck was built with 1/2″ marine plywood as an underlayment for the 1/4″ thick Sycamore veneer pieces. Sycamore is a common wood in Indiana, but not highly regarded for furniture or high quality wood work.

It is not as hard as White Oak, Black Walnut or Hard Maple, but harder than Soft Maple and similar to Cherry. So, when I found a group of 4/4 Sycamore boards from the same tree that were perfectly quarter sawn, I couldn’t resist buying the lot.

In preparation for the top veneer layer, I started with two layers of 3/8″ marine plywood as underlayment, which allowed for some bending of the deck contour, and some room for fairing. This can be seen below at the front.

Then, I began with a 1/2″ Cherry stripe in the middle, and added the first 5″ wide Sycamore strips, rough cut and sanded as well as possible to fit to the Cherry deck trim. I pre-drilled 1/8″ holes to screw it down to the underlayment.

Rather than drilling a 3/8″ counter sink hole for a screw head and future plug, I used a wood spacer to protect the Sycamore veneer.

This is the cross deck behind the back seat, and shows the wood washer / spacers. After the parts were epoxied in place, I removed all of the screws, leaving only small holes.

After epoxy and removing all of the screws, this is how the deck parts looked, ready for final fairing and sanding. It takes long sanding boards to smooth out the hills and valleys.

Next up is making some small plugs to fill the small screw holes.