Float half 3 of 4

Past week has been quite productive despite some rainy days along the way. The first two float halfs are ready and the third float half is on the way. Working productivity is increasing with time as expected.
Floats should be done by the end of next week which is not bad for a an effective working time of about 160 hours.
There should be some delay due to unusual weather pattern for this time of the year. By now we should have continuous clear skyes and day temperatures in the upper 30's but actually it looks more like late winter weather with plenty of rain and temperatures around 18ºC.
While this may delay lamination jobs, there are plenty of other things to do such as preparing some smaller components in advance.

Race time!

The building process will pause for a few days along the coming weeks because I have to get our boat ready for the next reggata. The start line is in Baiona (Spain) so we must sail the boat up north next weekend.

On July 10th we are participating in a reggata form Baiona( Spain) to Aveiro (Portugal) in a distance of about 100 miles. The reggata takes off at 3 pm and part of it will take place overnight with the first boats arriving next morning. Last year we finished 2nd out of about 40 boats with wind on the bow running mostly over 25knts.

Let's see how things run this year.

Here is a picture of our Coco mini650. This is a very competitive boat and it's just too bad we won't be able to keep both the Coco and the new F22.

Half no.1 almost ready!

First float half is nearly finished. After bonding the chainplate the float half is ready to come out and free the mold for the second half.

Chainplate

The sequence shows the process used to make the carbon chainplate core from design specifications to final step.

After spending some hours trying to figure out an easy and efficient way to make this part I decided to use this simple jig based on a hard plastic sheet ( from a paint roller package) and two pieces of wood with holes for the G10 tube and an extra hole to pour the resin in.

At the end the part came out quite satisfactory needing only some minor sanding to take out some resin flashing.

After pouring the resin there was a small leak at the bottom which was readely blocked. There's a significant volume o resin involved and considerable temperature build up ocurred during curing which called for the use of a small fan to keep exotherm under control and avoid the distortion of the plastic sheet.

Tomorrow I'll aply the carbon laminate.

Stringer

After nearly two weeks of low temperature and rain I finaly managed to add another step to the project. Here I'm gluing the stringer. Tomorrow I should be able to vacuum bag the laminate.
I also decided to use peel ply as much as possible on laminated areas where other laminations will take place. This avoids sanding and leaves a nice surface for post bonding. At the far end of the stringer one can see the peeled surface patch where the later the forward beam bulk head will be bonded.

Back to business

I've been busy lately with some CAD modeling for a local company. Anyway the weather has been pretty bad for the past 3 weeks so not much of a change to do any lamination. I took the opportunity to test my new CAD version and drew the mast foot step. Only if it were that easy to execute the part for real.