Saturday, April 11, 2009

Strong back


With all the materials to build the hulls ordered and on the way I got under way with building the strong back and setting up the form frams to start building the floats.

After spending some time studying the plans I decided that the easiest place to start was actually at the begininnng strangley enough. So with that in mind I decided to start on page 1 and get on with building the floats.

I spent quite a bit of time over the week getting the strong back nice and level and roped in a builder mate of mine and used his theodalite level to get it as close as possible.

Friday, April 3, 2009

Decisions decisions

After Stuying the plans for a month and getting quotes for the materials from various suppliers I ordered the materials today.

There have been alot of decisions made this month. Firstly which technique to use to build. Good old fashioned hand layup, vacuum bagging or resin infusion. There is alot of info on the net regarding Vacuum bagging and resin infusion.

When I started thinking about building a yacht a couple of years ago I was very interested in resin infusion. Although the end product will be very high quality with infusion I decided to go with hand layup. I will be considerably quicker to build and it may be a few kilo's heavier but as Ian Farrier recomends handlayup to build one of these yachts it can't be that bad. Hand layup is afterall the technique that has been used successfully for a long time and should be quicker and invlove less risks than infusion.

I have decided to build the 'R' version, I can't help it really I would rather sail fast than slow, and based on the theory that you can make a fast boat go slow but you can't make a slow boat go fast so I opted to go with taller R rig. Initally I thought I would build using the minimum fabric weights as specified in the plans but after a bit of reflection I thought itmight end up a bit of an egg shell and lets face it when a yacht gets a bit of use it will eventually bumpinto the jetty or something else and the slightly heavier fabrics will give a little more protection.