Storage / Weight on wooden roof/decks?

[Kaya]

Hi All,

I've serached around for any information here but i'm hitting nothing - any advice would be great.

All my experiance is with Steel narrowboats, but i now have a 1960's Gibbs Admerial - like this one http://www.theyachtmarket.com/boats_for_sale/78023/ but its basically a livaboard which has been glassed.

I want to store some wood on the foredecks - i use 1m3 vented potato bags (like the normal builders tonny bags). I would like to line a couple out with chicken mesh, fill with seasoned mix of split hard and soft wood, and rope canvas tarps over each bag to give a nice finish.

Will the foredeck hold these? - how would i know? - they'd stay there all year around really cycling through wood i bring from my store - i really don't want square meter of wood falling through my bedroom roof!

Thanks for any advice

[jfm]

It all depends on how the deck is built but I'd hesitate. It might be ok. A cubic metre of wood could weigh 800kg when wet in the rain. Add a ton+ of snow in winter, more evenly distributed of course, and people walking onto the deck, and you might approach have 2.5 tonnes of somewhat spread out load on the deck. Intuitively you'd expect a good sea boat could take that, as would be needed if you got green water on board, but you'd need to look at how the boat was built

[Kaya]

All very good points, when you talk about the amount of weight spread out on deck in the snow ect, it's pretty amazing.

The deck is bowed - but i don't know if it's strong - the wood wouldn't get wet - but even so...

i need to calulate the avg weight of the wood....

Thanks again