Rudder and Daggerboard

Rudder and Daggerboard Topcoated at a local paint shop.

Update

 

All components are now primed and ready for the topcoat ( Beams,daggerboard,rudder and rudder case are already topcoated).

It's looking pretty good with no pinholes in site and a very good finnish.





 

 

The structure for the spray painting booth is ready.

Next Monday and Tuesday it should be lined up with plastic and exhaust fan,intake air filter and door should be installed. Then it's just waiting for the right weather window to paint the main hull and floats.

 

 

After that the project will be basically on hold until the spars come in. In the meantime still have a lot to do ( wingnets, deck hardware,etc).

Snap shot

Sorry for the lousy quality of the photo. Gotta get a decent camera.
Anyway the floats are there and boat is getting bigger, well, at least wider!

No I just need to sort out the mast and it's not being easy.

Next:

Work on the trailer's berths, take the floats and beams apart and continue surface final finishing for painting.

So far, a lot of swet and high blood pressure but getting there, one day at a time.

Rush!

Trial fitting the beams. It ain't no piece of cake! If you want to get it done right, at least to the point the boat sails straight and even on both tacks you gotta spend plenty of time here. I mean more than 2 days! More than 5mm all around is just too much! Yet still have to tweek around with a close to 18 mm fore and aft gap on the starboard forward beam. The rest is under 5mm tolerance which is excellent by all means! Anyone that garanties more than that has  to come here and show me how it can be done! There are just too many degrees of liberty to handle. The boat was leveled by laser and two opposing lasers were used to line up the beams.
Tomorow the floats will be on. I just hope the process will be much easier than lining up the beams!

On a different front there's the mast charade. No one seems to have ( or to be willing to supply a decent mast for this boat). Some seem they never heard of a multihull. Others thing the world of sailing is all about super yacths and the Volvo Ocean Race ( justice be done here; that's where the $$$ is).At the end I might just make a carbon mast myself at a latter stage. After all it's not that complex and it certainly won't be more of a challenge than
what has been building this boat so far. It will be just another part. Difficult, time consuming but a lot cheaper ( and probably faster than the 6 or 7 months one has to wait for a factory mast). And what about those emails that seem to get lost in cyberspace?
All nice people. Thank you but no cigar!
Well, tomorrow we will see. One day at a time.

The time is now!

"One Flew Over The Cuco's Nest!"

 

It has been a long project and now it's time to kill the beast!

It's just one of those moments when you say " it's got to be now no matter what!"

 

Working 12 hours a day Monday through Sunday sanding, drilling, thinking and leaving bearly no time for dreaming.Living pedal to the metal!

It feels great!

 

 

 13:00 O'clock: using the precious resource of time to eat with the left hand while drawing the gantries. Nice wine ( good old Portuguese Alentejano Red Wine in a local "Tasco" in Ponte Lima just close to the steel supplier)) and  it worked just fine keep that blood pressure down!

 14:10 :People that make crazy dreams possible. Rocha " Fatela" from Ferrolimiana cutting steel tubes like there's no tommorow. Thank you Mr. Rocha!

 15:30 Welding... and weldind...

And voilá! One of the best things I've done! These gantries will make the project flow faster big time.

Sorry for the absence of decent and timely updates. Can't have the cake and eat it too.
My kindgom for time!

Carbon Fiber Rudder Case

 Case GRP tube that I had made before and a plate of carbon covered with tape to make the angled rib for the tube.

 Lining up the tube with a laser ( just in case!)

Trial fitting the rudder system. So far so good!
Next the tiller stub and tiller.
Keeping it rolling!

Rudder, Daggerboard and more

 

Somehow I can´t find what was left from the 1 meter long G10 tube after I used a couple of cm on the rudder mount. I nearly turned the whole shop upside down but no success. I think I paid around $98 for that tube! No way I was going to order another one! So I took on the task of making one by rapping 68 cm of 120gsm BD glass on a 16mm OD steel  tube after laying down 6 coats of wax. I used the metric version on the rudder mount ( 16x19mm) so had to make the same bore. Was a bit sceptic about the outcome but with the help of some searches on the net it came out way better than I could imagine. It looks almost like a factory product although it did put on a fight jacking it out of the mandrel. I’m only sorry about the precious time I lost trying to find a supplier close by.

 Also made flat table to have better control when cutting the rudder case flange molds. Using the jigsaw in this way avoids any angle in the cut out which can be very annoying. By using a remote control on the power main I didn’t need to bend under to turn on and off the tool. It also allowed to use the blade almost like a router to refine the surface. It took some time but after some filing and sanding it worked out just fine.

 The moldes are now in place ready for the carbon fiber. Here I used some vinyl I had around to create the desired thickness and then used plastic tape as mold release. The angled molds are locked in place with hot glue on the outside and wax on the inside to fill in any voids so resin doesn’t get under. As for the fillets I may just use putty and then sand it back to the carbon to get the desired fillet radius after the part has cured. I did buy some plastecene  but was not satisfied with how it handled and how it was releasing from the laminate on a small test I made. Now I'm just waiting for drier weather to lay down the carbon.

By the way the rudder came out super light! At this stage (only need to prime and paint it) it weighs 1575 gr which is incredible! It took me 3 vacuum bagging processes to do it and it was visible the amount of excess epoxy  that was soaked up by the breather every time.  I started with a 825gr foam core with central re enforcement and used full carbon all the way trough.

 

Here is a side view of the daggerboard after 1^st layer of BD carbon and unidirectional carbon. At this point it weighs around 5500 gr which is not bad for such a large part, I think. The perspective of the photo shows how reasonably straight it is.Those who have followed the blog may remember that at the routing stage I ended up with a serious warp due to uneven heat distribution as I was shaping the foil. For a moment I thought the whole thing was ruined beyond repair. I’m very happy the way it is as in fact I can’t find any visible foil misalignment .

 

As if I didn’t have enough thorns on my feet already I ended up with a friend’s Vaurien to work on ( so I believed!) some minor repairs. Oh man,  what a nightmare! Once we inspected the inside it looked like as someone who came out of  a car crash,alive but with every single rib broken in several places! Now I'm stuck with the thing and have to get rid of it to make space for the floats. Always learning! There's always a worse time for something to come up.

Sanding, sanding ..... and sanding!

 Not much posting lately. Not really that much of a change other then sanding. Most work has been around fairing. I don't know about other builders but the fairing compound I'm using is as hard as stone! Normaly I start with 50 grade on the long boards to read the contour and then go up to 80 then 100 until the surface is ready for the primer. I think I can skip the epoxy skimming since I nearly have no pin holes. I didn't go crazy by applying thick fairing compound. Just didn't see it necessary and I guess it paid off. Just about 1-2 mm and here and there some extra fills.

 



In the mean time managed to vacuum the first DB carbon on the ruder blade. Temperatures were around 10-12ºC and had to use a make shift heating chamber to get proper curing. It came out just great. I just hope next layers (UD and final DB carbon) come out just as well. Right now weather has turned very cold and most of the time wet too so I keep on fairing until an opportunity shows up to resume vacuuming de ruder and dagerboard.