Since the last post, a lot has happened. And I mean a lot. In the last post, we had one section of cockpit floor down, now it's all done. We also have a keelbox. Anyway, rewind. After my last post, Oaky & Timmy set to work, and fabricated the basic section of the keelbox. Using an excess off-cut from the keel, they wrapped it in marine carpet, and then piled on some Carbon Fiber, to achieve the shape, and then glued it into the hull. We also put the back section of the cockpit on, after giving the icebox a lovely coat of paint. After gluing and filleting that section in place, Oaky & myself worked some magic, and laid Carbon along the join between the top-sides and the cockpit sides. After a bit of fairing, it doesn't look too bad at all.

Last week, Timmy left to go on a cruise to Fiji & New Caledonia for 3 weeks, and so left Oaky and I with the job of getting the boat ready for Sports boat & Trailerable nationals in 6-7 weeks time. No mean feat.

However, we’re currently making brilliant progress. In the 4 days since Timmy left, the two of us have made the keelbox close enough to a nuclear bunker. After already having strips of hardwood shaped and glued in, we then resined the side of the keel shape, and put two big pieces of timber down either side, before filling any gaps with some bog, and then closing it off with some pieces of resined ply.

Next on the agenda was finishing the floor. We gradually cut down a piece to fit the width, and then cut out a slot above the keelbox, obviously, for the keel to go through. Then, today, we stuck it down, after running some final fillets down the side of the keelbox, and resining the entire thing. After gluing it down, bogging up all sorts of holes, and Oaky running some beautiful fillets, we took a break to wait for it to set, before getting serious.

We cut some 500mm wide Carbon in to strips approximately 165mm wide, and then resined down the sides of the cockpit, and the bottom of the cockpit sides, and then laid down the Carbon and smoothed it out. We smashed out the port side, but took a little bit longer on the Starboard side, needing to smooth a few kinks out, with help from one of our mates.

Now, our hope is to start laying down some glass tomorrow, mainly on the cockpit floor, and nationals are looking decently realistic at the moment! Final challenge is the rig, with only a bare section in the shed at the moment. Also, if anyone has any tips on which sort of glass cloth to use where, they would be greatly appreciated!

Anyway, stay tuned for more very soon!

Progress.

Since our last post, we've made some very good progress. Especially where the keel is concerned.

Our primary focus has been on the foils and the cockpit floor. After cutting the pieces out, leaving a small section at the front for us to fit the keelbox, we resined the two main pieces, and tonight we stuck down the middle section of the cockpit floor, before running fillets along the edges, and weighing the section down with the lead for our keel.

As you can see from the above photo, we've also beefed up the transom, to provide some extra support for the mounting of Hiking straps.

Now, the foils.

We have just completed the fairing of our rudder, and will be looking to coat it with Hi-Build etc. in the very near future.

We have already passed that stage with our keel though. A coat of Hi-B

uild is on, and we will be looking to paint very soon, stay tuned to see the colour scheme!

We have also made a couple of other other minor adjustments. One is to stiffen up the underside of the overhanging cabin-top lip, and one other involved the outer sleeve for our Carbon prod. We originally placed it so that it finished up just short of the stem, however we have now cut it back so that it is flush with the strengthening that was originally put in.

Our other little task was to place some Carbon around the front of the stem, which will look pretty cool once painted, and all of that. You can see this in the above photo!

There'll be another post soon, hopefully filled with Paint and Fibreglass! Until then, watch this space!

The Return.

So, it has been a good 5 & 1/2 months since the last post, and that is because not alot, if anything, has been done. Oaky and Timmy have recently finished the Sydney-Hobart yacht race, and now we're back, and right back into it. Our first order of business was the rudder. With the basic back-to-front profile completed, we needed to decide on a shape for the bottom, which we did. We then resined it, and then wrapped a layer of Carbon cloth on, and then some peel cloth for overnight.

After that, cockpit sides were the order of the day. We decided that we wanted to go with a rounded cockpit seat edge, rather than having a sharp/pointy edge to sit on.. We're doing this by using 100mm wide pieces of foam, cut to fit between each set of frames, and then using epoxy to glue it to the underside of the seat. The step we're doing now is to sand the corner of the foam to produce the curvy shape that we're after.

We've now put the cockpit side sheet into place below the foam, so progress is looking good so far. We've recieved our mast and boom, and our sails are not to far off, so watch this space for more info!