The galley box rebuild

Last year I built a galley box. Well, it lasted a season. When I pulled it from the storage in February, it had thick black mold between the sheets of Aluminium and walls.

Those cheap boxes are made of fiber board and over the winter they soaked up and were bloated. It was a nice idea, great form factor but sadly too cheap a quality to survive cruising live. I'm not too sad, since it was a prototype anyway—but I had hoped to not start over from scratch.

A new search revealed that accordion style boxes are rather rare and a custom build was way too expensive. Even ordering new edge profiles and corner protectors would cost more than just buying the same box new and ripping it apart.

So, I reclaimed the Aluminium parts and cleaned them really well with dish soap and an ultrasonic cleaner. Then I cut new walls from marine plywood and stained and varnished them.

Optimizations

Besides better material for the walls, I also optimized the interior: The bottom part of the trangia no longer snaps into clips. I glued in wooden parts were the cooker can slide in very tightly. The cooker is still not gimbled but that wasn't a problem last season and I doubt that it will be in the future.

The cardboard box insert didn't prove to be very practical. The benefit of removing it to gain more space in the box while cooking is nice but not necessary. The downside were the walls of that box that took away a lot of space.

In the new box I added a separator made of plywood that can be removed. It has an aluminium sheet cover next to the cooker to block the tiny amount of heat that might get to it at the top side.