With the help of some friends, first main hull half is out and up on a rig suspended from the garage ceiling.
Mold has been inverted and ready for planking.

Work has been suspended since May due to some other projects that came up in the meantime.
Now I'm free to continue the boat project.
Will be doing doing some sailing on the Minitransat early next month.

Beams have arrived and are waiting in Lisbon to be transported by truck up north.

Some progress.

Winter has been pretty nasty around here. Since I'm working on a partly open space I guess I was a bit betrayed by the traditionaly mild northern Portugal winter weather. Not that it doesn't get sometimes cold and wet enough to render work nearly impossible, but I was counting on two out of three days on average of decent weather. Under these adverse and unreliable conditions I decided to keep the main hull half on the mold for the sake of stability and covered it with plastic.
In the meantime I took down the unfaired floats I had set away, and brought the surface close to the final finish before painting.
Here you can see the solution I came up with for the long board. A simple piece of plywood. Wrap the sanding paper around and that's it!. This way sanding paper can be used up nearly 100%. I had made some custom long boards with handles and everything but it turned out the paper was ripping off prematurely leading to significant waste.

As I shopped around looking for a orbital sander I wasn't to eager to pay well over €100 for a decent 150mm disc sander. Luckely I found this 125mm bargain for less than €50 with variable speed and just about as effective as higher branded products. Since 125mm discs are more expensive and harder to find in different grades I ended up using 150 mm discs which work perfectly.

Using a vaccum inlet realy pays off! No more dust clouds around!

Fisrt hull half resting on the mould waiting for better days!

I still fancy good hopes to finish the boat before the end of this summer!

Long time no posts!

Long time no post!
It has been some time since I last posted some pics about the daggerboard case.
Since then some progress has been done on the first main hull half and interior panels.
Here I decided to preglass the cabin setee stiffner . This way I hope I save some work later.

First float half is nearly ready to extract from mold. There's only some last taping to be do on the cabin bulkhead. I also left the cabin bulkhead for last as it was easier to walk in and out of the hull to tape all interior panels.

I'm stopping all major laminations until next Spring due to low temperatures. In the meantime I'll be making all the smaller composite and metal parts. This way I hope I can have the boat ready by july 2010. Floats still need to be faired and painted so that should keep me busy till next Spring. If I find I have some slack I may vey well set myself into making a carbon mast!

Daggerboard case mold

Here I'm setting up the mold for the daggerboard case. To set the tapper on the sides I simply tilted the saw blade 1º as I cut the stiffners and it came out just fine. Inside stiffner tops are also tappered 1º to provide a correct alignment while clamping.Some wood glue and a few screws and it's done !

I had to butt join an extra board to make the 430 mm width out of the cut offs available.

Here I'm applying a sealing coat. If I find it satisfactory I might try to use wax instead of packaging tape as a demolding surface. Temperatures are falling down ( although they have been in the upper 20's till the end of September !) so it's taking longer for resin to cure. Tomorrow I hope I'll be able to sand the mold and apply another resin coat and test if the wax option works.

Cabin roof

After experiencing some unsatisfactory results on the lamination of the first float half at the very begining of the project, I decided then to apply a coat of resin thickned with microballoons before lamination and it yielded excellent qualities with nearly no flaws. Since then I've been using this technic prior to all laminations and the result has been very good.

Here it's possible to see the application of the pre-coat on part of the foam. The metal spatula works very well and the process is easy and quick. After, it only takes a light sanding to prepare the surface for glassing.

This was the most challenging situation so far regarding lamination. It took longer than I expected and for the first time I ended up with a steep exotherm in the resin pot with the roller nearly getting stuck to the fabric before I figured out what was going on. Luckly I had enough time to prepare another resin batch , set up a new roller, put on new gloves and resume the lamination with no problem.

In the end everything came out well. There are no bubbles and the bonding is very good. Perhaps this time I didn't manage to take out as much excess resin as I would like but still the laminate came out reasonably thin.

Cabin side

I decided to do the cabin side and roof in two steps. This way it's much easier to set up the planks and laminate. Here is the cabin side laminated.
At the bow area I came up with this solution. It looks pretty good but perhaps there's no need to spend too much time here since plane butting will do the same.

I borrowed a laser from a local contractor for the weekend in order to mark the bulkhead lines. It's a very helpful tool. Now I have to figure out how to put the 5º angle in there!

On to the main hull

After stocking away the floats ( I left them with the fairing strips to do the fairing later together with the main hull) I set up the frames for the main hull. Notice that I cross braced every other pair of frames to make sure they stay vertical as battens are screwed into place. In a first attempt without the braces I had a hard time keeping the frames upright. I was a bit afraid the braces could get in the way later on but it turned out they didn't pose any problem at all.

Here I laying down the first foam planks. I used 360 mm ( 14") wide planks and despite many other builders reporting difficulties working with larger widths I didn't experience any problems here.

Notice that I move the plank a bit to the side in order to use the clamps while I heat form the plank. The difference in the shape is minimal and makes planking a lot easier. I also use V slots on the planks. It worked well with the floats so I decided to repeat the process here. Slots are cut at 45º and they take up a considerable amount of bog . On the next planks I may reduce the angle a bit to reduce bog volume.

Well. Planking done! Thinking about it, it's much faster than one could expect.

Voilá!

Looks good but not as fair as the floats. I did have some misalignments in the curved section near the joining line. On next half I'll put some extra battens on that area.

Now that the hull is ready for lamination I'll be making the bulkheads and other components as I wait for the right temperatures to laminate.

I'm still getting daytime temperatures around 20ºC but by night temperatures can drop close to 10ºC so I guess I'll have to use a plastic tunnel and some heat source to avoid any possible setbacks due to improper curing.