colbysmith":1mqnkwpy said:
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by original molded interior.
Before the molded interiors came out, all of the 22 Cruiser interiors were made "stick built" style, with a surfaced marine plywood called Decraguard™ (I think the early "wooden" ones used Formica surfacing and the later white ones are more of a paperized coating, but all Decraguard).
Then as they started building a lot of C-Dories (mid-2000's) they decided to go to molded interiors. For the 22 Cruiser, rather than making it just like the Decraguard™ interior, they changed the design slightly and made it more like the 25. Traditionally, the 22 had a "large" dinette table, and two seats (forward one either sliding/reversible or fixed, but same size/shape either way). The two seats and the table take up the entire port side, so are two relatively large seats, and a relatively large table. When they first made the 22 molded interior, they made it more like the 25 on the port side, which is to say that the forward seat box doesn't move, but instead has a permanent footwell forward, a "smaller" seat box, and then another footwell aft, under the table (and shared with the aft seat). Instead of the seat box sliding to convert it, just the seat back is changed from one side of the seat to the other to face the two different ways.
Since the 22 cabin is only so long, this resulted in a smaller table and a smaller forward seat (because the footwell was "subtracted" from the earlier layout dimensions). The layout got some negative reviews from members here (and perhaps some dealers as well), and was soon changed to basically mimic the Decraguard interior, but molded.
The starboard side of the 22 molded interior was initially made pretty much the same as the Decraguard one, so I don't think it was "re-changed" in overall design.
One other detail: It may be that the early molded interiors didn't have any dividers between areas inside (i.e. the multiple doors led into one big area and things could slide between them), and that was changed later --- I'm not sure about that part since you can't really see it in photos. Do your lockers have separation or do they feed into one another by being sort of like "one big room" inside?
There may be more, but that's what I know about it. I've only seen two boats "in the wild" with the original molded interior design. I think it is pretty rare, but not sure how many were actually made.
So folks can see what I am talking about, here is a photo of what I'm calling the "original" molded interior. It's a little hard to see, but the footwell forward of the forward seat is "permanent," the table is smaller, and the seat box doesn't slide to face either way -- just the backrest is changed around.
For comparison, here is a Decraguard interior dinette area. This is without a convertible seat, but when it is convertible, it's all the same basic shape and size, just the "box" part of the forward seat is cut above the foot platform level and slides aft to reveal a footwell (that is normally covered up by the seat box. Then part of the table hinges down to make room for it.
I thought it was interesting that when they (almost immediately) re-designed this to be like the Decraguard layout, they left that "indent" in the raised sole where the footwell is, and so ended up with a vestigial overhang on the base to the forward seat (it sort of hung over and slid back and forth with the seat). Later they cut that bit off, but still left the forward foot platform indented, so the seat box hung over. There is probably some good reason for this that I can't see, but I always wondered why, when they changed the mold that they didn't just bring that forward foot "indent" back out flush like the Decraguard boats, and then the seat box would have matched without a "tail" or overhang.
