i550 hull 87 build PAGE 3

Bulbish. Sort of. I had to recut both of the ones second from the bottom. Thanks to Searoom for the use of the knife and the pink foam donation.

4.25.09 Tabs vs Nuts.............Below, the 2nd boat in Oz hits the water!

Way too many things going on at work to devote much time to the i550, but I find that if I can't do at least one or two things a day, no matter how small, I start going a little nuts.

I start obsessing about when I'll next be able to spend some time with plywood and epoxy. And I start finding ways to put off doing what I'm supposed to be doing, in order to be able to spend 20 minutes doing something on the boat.

If doing any actual physical work on the hull is out of the question, then I'll spend some time on the net, asking for advice or researching how to do something.

This week, I asked a question to other builders about proper technique for laying down biax tape. I got some great advice (stuff I should have thought of myself, in all actuality). But that session ended up with at least two of us who are in the process of building right now, wishing that info had been available 12 months ago when we first started.

Whatever. An internet search prior to starting that phase may have been helpful.

But with temps approaching record highs this weekend, I was glad to have skipped the NOOD regatta to work on the boat. The process of tabbing frames continues...I am amazed at how quickly two of the other boats being built in the U.S. got their frames tabbed in...it's taking me forever and I'm not even doing that great a job, at least not aesthetically. I think the boat is very sound, structurally. But it isn't the prettiest fiberglass work I've ever done. The unselvaged 6 oz. biax cloth is a bear to put down and make pretty.

Working from both ends toward the middle, so just the cable ties in the mids are left. Hot chah!

Okay, so my tabs aren't exactly up to Hinckley standards, I do not get a feeling the boat is going to fall apart.

This is one of the few with the cables ties left in the boat....there has been discussion lately that this is probably a no-no.

So be it.

4.07.09 ...Pink Foe

Club Sisyphus met again last night with the topic of frustration being Pink Foam and the number of different adhesives you can use that don't work very well.

I have to remember to consult the Oracle in Chicago more often, as reading kmac's blog can save you a lot of hassle. The other night it was finding a bunch of different adhesives that were labeled as being OK for use with "foam," but really weren't and they did a great job of dissolving and distorting the binding surfaces of the bulb sections I was trying to glue up into a suitable shape.

It was not a total waste of time though! I was using a hot-wire knife to cut the sections, and in all honesty, these things take some practice, so I consider my first, failed, bulb shape as a valuable practice session. I was getting pretty good with the knife by the time I realized that the thing I was assembling was: 1) looking like crap and 2) falling apart every time I picked it up.

So yeah, what the heck...pink foam is cheap. And time? I have all the time in the world. All the freakin' time in the world....

ALSO: been putting the finer points on the keel foil. It's still a lttile too thick in some spots and I'm using the template/grinder combo to bring it into cofirmation with the NACA 0012 foil section...I'll need it to cast the bulb and build the keel box. There is no shortage of projects to get done on this boat! Which is not neccessarily a bad thing.

3.08.09......Go Day

Disappearing zip-ties signify progress!

So, given the gift of two straight days with the highs near 80 degrees, on a weekend no less, it's not a surprise that a lot of zip ties are now missing from hull number 87!

Got the stem glassed in and I am really happy with the job. I feel as if, way after this thing rots away in some creek somewhere in 50 years (hopefully), the stem and the glass around it will be sticking up out of the mud completely intact. Maybe I'll be wrong, and the headstay will rip this thing out of the hull in the first puff above 25, but I don't think so.

It's amazing how much stiffer the boat is with just a few of the frames and the stem tabbed in. The boat is starting to move like a solid object, instead of a flimsy collection of plywood.

I'm tabbing in with 6" biax tape. 6" uni was spec'ed , but the biax just seems like a better fit. The forward second frame never did match up well with the plywood skin (right, below). It's a lot to ask of a piece of ply to be tortured into conforming to the shape of this frame. As it lays, naturally, there's approx and inch and a quarter gap about halfway up the topside's panel. Instead of trying to get the plywood to conform, I shaped a second piece of 1/4 inch ply to sister on to the frame (by laminating it) and then just did an easy fillet/biax glass to the topside's panel.

This is going to distort the hull shape very slightly, but I feel like it's a stronger way to build the boat, and when roaring downwind and stuffing the boat into the back of a 4' chop at 15 kn., the teeny bit more reserve buoyancy, afforded by the fuller sections forward, cannot be a bad thing!

3.02.09 .....Sno Day

Happy to report the hoop house survived another bout of winter weather. We got about 6" of the white stuff, but luckily it's very light and powdery (unusual, for a mid-Atlantic coast snowfall) and the amount of weight put on the PVC hoops and the tarp was significant but not damaging. I should have gotten up about 3 a.m., and gone out to knock some of the accumulation off the house, but I just couldn't face blowing snow, 26 degrees temps and 25-30 mph winds at 3 a.m.. I'm just glad I don't own farm animals that need emergency care in the middle of the night. Major props to all those farmers and dairymen (dairywomen)!

But anyway, for the 2nd day of March, it feels a bit like being in jail.

But if life gives you lemons, make lemonade, eh? So being trapped indoors (so to speak) it's a good time to take the keel bulb offsets from the .pdf file and convert them to usable documents, e.g., 100% sized templates that can be printed out and transferred to the material from which I'll build the male plug. I wish I'd started this in December, but hey, life is hectic!

Also making headway on all these support beams and stringers, and the chevrons that will be used to attach the beams to the bulkheads (framing members). I cannot wait to see how much rigidity these guys will impart to the overall hull. I think I have about 16 of these in various states of being finished. They are stiff as heck, down in a 58 degree basement. The chevrons are slotted to receive the T-beams. They get attached temporarily by brass wood screws, just to hold them in place, then the T-beams get fitted in and the whole mess gets tabbed to the bulkhead...I'll probably use the 6 oz. biax for that...uh.......maybe one day when it warms up a little. Doesn't look like it's gonna happen today!

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2/9/09...stemming along

I have this ridiculous notion about the stem. For me, psychologically, it's like the karmic center of a boat. Even if it doesn't make sense from a structural perspective, I still feel like it all stems from...uh...the stem.

So, I was obsessed with shaping this stupid thing. It's from the white oak plank I bought almost a year ago for the keel laminate.

Today it was warm enough to stay outside for hours on end, and in part of that time I spent some quality time with an angle grinder and an orbital sander, shaping this thing and getting it fitted the way it'll go in on the next warm day to do the glass work.

So if nothing else goes right with this build, at least it'll have a first rate, fine grained, clear running white oak stem. I take some solace in that.

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2/6/09....Carbon Fiber Rig

Kevin, building hull # 74 out in Chicago, negotiated one helluva great deal for 6 of the current builders in the U.S.A., hull #87 included. We'll be getting a carbon fiber mast, boom, prod and prod sleeve from the highly regarded spar builder,

C-Tech, in New Zealand.

The rig will probably make it here to B'more sometime in April, so this build better get into high gear soon! Single spreader, swept-back and rigged for a frac jib and masthead kite.

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2/6/09.....beams

Man, this has been one bitch of a winter. Normal high is 41-42 F in these parts for most of winter, and we've had just a handful of days reaching anywhere near that since late December. The good news is that this weekend they are forecasting temps in the mid-50's, so my plan is to get outside and run some more biax inside the boat, get the frames glued down and maybe the stem glassed in! In the meantime, the basement is getting overrun with these things:

I have to say, these are amazingly stiff and very, very light.

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1/21/09....damn cold!

It got cold, then the holidays came and went and used up a lot of time and energy & then it got a lot colder. Really cold. So, I moved inside and have a pretty long list of inside projects...like these little engineered I-beams that will be used for stringers and cockpit sole supports. These are fun to build and you get into sort of a rhythmn with these.

so....it goes on.

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12/14/08...HOOP ROOFED & STITCHED UP

Got a cover on the Hoop House and then that night it snowed and the next day we had like 40 mph winds, and the thing stayed up, so I guess the next step is to get some ends on the structure and then put in the stove. The boat is now stitched together and I can't do much more on it, outdoors, until it either warms up into the 60's or the stove goes in.

So over the holiday I'll get the thing heated and then get going with 6 oz biax and some pox. In the meantime, there's a bunch of stuff to get done indoors, stitch together the cabin trunk up, carve the keel bulb plug, build some lightweight I-beams out of pox and ply to use as stringers and cockpit sole supports, etc.

Always something to do...

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11/29/08.....A HOOP HAUS

These earlier than normal persistant cold temps are putting a serious damper on my build progress, so I decided to throw up a quick hoop house....$71.00 bucks worth of rebar and 3/4 inch gray conduit.

The cover is a flame retardant tarp that I bought online and hasn't shown up yet in a UPS truck. The the ends get capped with a 2x3 and beadboard wall (to keep it looking nice), a door and a window or two and then the woodstove that is sitting unused in the shed.

Not an enormous amount of space, but 95% of the work I'll do this winter will be inside the hull, so this should be more than adequate and space enough to heat adequately.

It basically took me longer to go to Home Deputz, buy the materials and get it home and unloaded than it did to put up this frame. It's just stitched together with zip ties so that the thing can be adjusted later to get all the frames in line and evenly spaced.

ridge pole unattached here, but almost done.

Next step was get rid of 1.6 billion red maple and willow leaves...

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10/20/08...A hull emerges!

When H.H. "Dynamite" Payson and Phil Bolger tagged these tack & tape designs "Instant Boats" back in the 80's, I was a bit skeptical. Yeah, right..."instant."

But this thing went from a pile of plywood into something actually resembling a boat in an incredibly short time. In fact, I had done the butt joints (plywood being limited to 8' sections, for the most part, the sides [hull panels] and bottom have to be joined in 3 sections to make up the 18' LOA dimensions of the boat..they are joined, end-to-end, in simple, inelegant "butt joints") a weekend or two before....and Sunday morning, after running a 5K event with one of the kids, I came home, turned on the Ravens pre-game show and by half-time I had a hull, maybe 2.5 hours later, MAX!

Single-handed, no less! (as an added bonus, the Ravens actually won a game on the road!)

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10/13/08...back at work, finally.

With the sailing season pretty much done (except for Harbor Cup in 12 days) I can get back to plodding along on the build.

I have one more butt joint to do and then I can stitch this puppy together and will finally have a hull...albeit an empty shell of a hull, but definitely a hull!

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6/25/08....KIt came

Amazing, given a certain amount of motivation, desperation and stupidity, how much crap you can force into a small stationwagon. I got the bulk of this stuff home in one trip, although, as luck would have it, it was blowing like stink when I got the stuff tied down on the roof racks. A block away from where the pallet was unloaded (huge thanks to my man Roger who's company has a forklift) it was becoming perfectly clear that a trip around the Beltway to my house was going to be out of the question (especially at rush-hour). I figured a puff into the mid-20's at 60 mph would put enough apparent wind into my roof foil to rip the whole roof rack assembly off...so I slow-balled it through the citt-tay and arrived with many, many pieces in one piece, so to speak.

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6/15/08......Keel foil faired out

Father's Day allowed me a few hours with power-sanders to get this thing into something resembling a proper foil. Not completely done with the shaping (before it gets glassed) but getting closer.

TR says the kit will be trucked out this Thursday...YAY!

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5/18/08 ...Keel foil coming along

When the end of your driveway is, for all intents and purposes, your workshop, then you are at the mercy of Climate Change to dictate your schedule.

And since climate change, as we know it, is persistent Global Cooling and the tendancy toward turning Baltimore into an Olympic Peninsula-like rain forrest, then don't count on getting much work done outside, except for trying to keep an explosion of biomass in check, e.g, getting out the lawnmower every three-four days...that one day of the week when the sun appears for a few seconds.

I also had 15 races over a 9 day period that took up most of the first 2 weekends in May, so I am definitely behind schedule, but...what schedule? I finally got a chance to break bad on the oak laminate keel foil I'd laid up in April and I attacked that hawg with a 40 grit rotary sander (on a 3/4 inch electric drill) in an attempt to rough out a NACA0012 foil section....here it is so far:

(right) The bottom edge is a bit rough due to some knock-outs that just happen to fall at the cut-off point of the oak sections...no big deal, as the foil is a few inches too long right now anyhow.

Another issue is one section I cut too thin (ignore the outline of the inner foil--that's a 12 inch section that I drew on for some reason...probably wasn't paying attention). This edge will have to be filled in with some 410 Light mixture and then I can fair it out...no biggie.

I figure: get the oak strut as fair as possible but dont lose sleep over it...it'll need to be faired again, once the S-glass goes on, so just make it pretty and deal with the fine tuning after the skin gets laid up.

5/5/08.....13 sections finally laminted for the keel strut

Finally got this bastid glued together and when (if) the weather gets better, I'll sand it down to a true foil section, maybe, one day.

4/27/08...slow going, but progress

March and April are just pure bloody hell for me in terms of work and other obligations, so I didn't expect to make a huge amount of progress over the past two months. One good thing though: my foil core for the rudder arrived from Flyingfoam.com.

It is cut with absolute perfection and gets delivered in the blank from which it was cut...which is a double bonus for both laying up the CF skin and as a form for building the rudder cassette.

I also made a bit more progress on the white oak foil laminte for the keel....hope to wrap up the laminate tonight.

so...things are plodding along.

4/06/08...getting started on the Baltimore Build

Thirteen sections of 1.125 inch white oak ripped to sections derived from a NACA 0012 template.

These will get laminated together to build the keel strut. More pix to follow.

Rudder will be built from a smaller NACA0012 foam section, that has been ordered and should ship soon from flyingfoam.com, an on-line supplier that cuts foam sections by CNC. The foil section for the rudder will be cored in spyderfoam and skinned on carbon fiber.

The plywood for the hull and deck has been ordered as a pre-cut "kit" and should arrive in April.

Note to self: 3 bar clamps on a 60" section are not enough...

(all for now...more later)