All glassed in...

Not the greatest picture, but you get the idea. The boat is all glassed now. Yeah!!! Unlike lots of building this boat, this is a non-stop situation. You really need to have the time to keep going.

The fairing was a bit painful and the pictures were ugly. But the results look pretty good. I know for sure that my hull will be a unique shape because of some of the odd panel alignments that I ended up with.

If you had 60" glass you could probably do the hull with 2 19' pieces. But I only had 50" glass so I had to use 3 pieces. I used 1 piece on the bottom and trimmed it to hang over 3" at the chine. Then I ran a piece down each side panel. I figured it would be easier to fair the seam if it was along the chine where I need to fair some more anyway so that's what I went with. The plan in general worked pretty well.

Things not to do...
#1 Don't waste time with 8 shots of epoxy in the cup. I was working on the bow area for longer than I expected. So I got to about frame 53 on the bottom and as I started to pour out the rest of the cup of epoxy it started going off (means the epoxy started exotherming and setting up very quickly). I did a quick clean up but the glass was trashed in that area and I had to put a patch in. Thus my nice smooth 1 piece of glass on the bottom plan went up in smoke. Morale is to work with small batches when doing difficult areas. When you are doing a large area, go for the 8 shot batch and just dump it out.

#2 Don't let your nicely trimmed side panel piece fall off. I had the chine area wet and layed the glass on the side panel and just tacked it into the wet epoxy. This worked ok and I got the gunwale trimmed off. But then as I'm working on the other side, the first side peeled off (starting at the bow) and I found it on the ground. All it would take is 1 piece of masking tape to hold the bow for a short period of time and I would have been ok.

I put 2 coats of epoxy on and now it's time to sand the seams and fill the low spots before a 3rd coat of epoxy. I'll sand that out and then it's time to prime and paint.

Cheers, Kevin.

A little outhaul...

So, When I went to the strictly sail show at Chicago back in February with Jeff, we were looking for cool stuff to do to our boats. That's one of the joys of building your own boat. You don't have to suffer with some other guys idea of what's best.

One thing we saw that was really cool was a 2:1 outhaul on the viper 640. It looked cool and seemed pretty simple too. So, I took a picture and stored it away for another day. Well that "another day" is here.

Step one was to make the basic structure out of something stiff and strong. My solution was 6mm Gaston G-10. The only problem with this stuff is that it's heavy. It's basically epoxy and glass cloth compressed and cured. Very stiff and strong. I bought it to make backing plates that could be taped for screws so my hardware in odd places is easier to install and remove. That's why I got 6mm thick stuff. It comes thinner and at 3-4 mm would be strong enough for this. Anyway, this stuff is pretty tough and will take it's toll on any sharp cutting tool you throw at it so use an old bandsaw blade.

The layout is pretty simple. It's 2 4" by 1" pieces that have 10mm spacers between them so a harken 306 1" sheave will fit between them. Then there are braces to fill in to the sides of the boom and a little triangle to guide the line down to the bottom notch. It's all held together with some neat epoxy. Then there are some notches to hold the tail of your outhaul line.
The line I used is 4mm Excel Racing line. It's got a spectra core that's braided so the other end will be lashed to a 29mm ti-lite for a secondary 2:1 cascade inside the boom. You could go smaller on the line, but then you have to work out the other end differently.

A simple stopper knot is all it takes to secure the tail. Should make rigging the main pretty straight forward.

I need to add a bail on the top to keep the line from jumping off the sheave and it will be all done. Once I cut the boom to length (it's 2.8m long right now) I'll fillet this into the end. Then it will get clear coated with some Perfection 2-part varnish just like the rest of the rig. Should look pretty sweet and work smoothly. It was also a good side project while I waited for fairing compound to dry.

Cheers, Kevin

p.s. Now I have to go back to sanding and fairing the hull :-(

Keep on Sanding...

Let the fairing begin. I'm off and sanding my arms off now to get the hull nice and fair.

There are 3 things that happened during the early days that I'm now fixing. First, the hull panels in places did not stay stitched corner to corner. You want that for a nice fair chine. To remedy this, use the dowel or pvc under the zip tie method when stitching. I'd go with Tim F's idea to do small fillets with squares of cloth over them as your inital run to hold the boat together. Then remove the ties, clean and sand everything and put down a good fillet and tape. I did this for my roof and got much better results. Stay out of the hull until it is setup too. I think that's what messed me up.

Second, don't over tighten the zip ties in the middle of the side panels. Especially at 53 and 89. Check the hull for fairness as you go and stop when it looks good. You can use Jeff D's method of sistering a strip of ply to one side of the frame to fill the gap between the hull panel and the frame. Then fillet in from the back side and tape both sides. Don't forget to use some microfiber in the lamination of your sister strips.

Lastly, the bow is tricky. It all depends on how you connect your stem and what you like to see up front. There is no good intelegence on what will make the fastest bow so we'll all just have to put some boats in the water and go sailing to figure that out.  My bow has a concave curve to it forward of frame 18. I'm going to go with it and just make both sides as close to the same as possible.

Don't mind the huge patches of compound. The forward ones have not been sanded out yet so they look worse then they actually are.  I firgure a couple more nights of dorking around with fairing and I'll be in good enough shape to start thinking about glassing. Need to shape the bow nicely too. Right now it's a little blunt.

Oh, and micro ballons are easy to sand, just have a good fairing long board and a wire brush to clear the "green" epoxy from the paper pretty frequently. I've washed the areas down and still gotten clogging on the paper so it's not blush. This is a "slow and steady" type operation which drives the family crazy. They are looking forward to the "it's good enough" decision point.

Cheers, Kevin.

FLIPPED OUT !!!

So we flipped the boat yesterday. By all accounts it went well. The process was pretty straight forward. Pull the boat out. Add supports for the boat while flipped to the cradle. Flip it over and lay it on cradle. Then roll it in.

Here's a pic of Dad and I after the flip. And here's a video just for fun.



Cheers, Kevin.

All Glassed In...

We finished glassing the cockpit sole last night. It was more pain then we wanted. But sometimes you just have to suck it up and get it done. Last night was one of those nights. I'm glad it's done and we are ready to move on to bigger things.

This weekend is a big celebration at our house. So the boat works will be on break. We might sneak in a little work hear and there, but nothing major.

Cheers, Kevin.

A good Memorial Day

First we sanded like crazy. Mirco balloons are easy to sand, but it's still sanding. The goal was to get the basic fairing done so we didn't have to work too hard at that after the glass was on. Dad had worked hard on the cabin roof and the cockpit sole over the last week so we were in great shape.

Then we had this crazy idea to put some glass on. That's when we bit off a little more than we wanted. At this point, glassing is pretty routine at the boat works, but it wasn't all fun and games. Big pieces of cloth means you are committed to lots of epoxy when you start. We had plans to do the cockpit sole in addition to everything else but we scaled back and will do that on another day.

I think it turned out looking AWESOME. We'll second coat tomorrow and then go from there. The next week will be a busy one on the family front so the boat progress will be less dramatic. Still hoping to flip the boat next week sometime. We'll see how we do.

Cheers, Kevin.

All decked out!!!

Pipedream has been decked !!!

We had an awesome day yesterday getting the deck on. The only problem came when the foredeck piece I had cut didn't fit (short by 2 inches in most directions). I have no idea why it wasn't big enough. So we quickly cut another piece and got it on before the epoxy set up on the top of the frames.

We got some fairing compound on as well. If it all sands out nicely tomorrow then we are going to glass the deck.

Cheers, Kevin.

The Platypus Deck Breakthrough

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Prod sleeve and Chain Plates are done...

We mounted the outer prod sleeve last night and it looks fantastic. To catch up those not paying attention earlier, the Prod is internal and thus will leak water into the cabin. To prevent this we got a 90mm ID x .9mm wall carbon sleeve from C-tech. It's mounted around the prod to catch the water and drains into the cockpit. One thing you have to do to make this work is widen your cockpit in the pit area. I'll snap a pic of the cockpit in a little bit once I've smoothed out the sleeve to frame 110 area (It looks a little ragged right now). The sleeve is amazingly light at about a pound. At both ends there are openings for the rigging. Should work out pretty well.


We also taped the chain plates in. I used some more of the carbon cloth that I bought for an arm and a leg. Again, it may be expensive, but it lays down so nicely. I also figured, if anywhere needs the added strength of carbon, it's the chainplate gusset. I would do all carbon just for the easy of fabrication if I could afford it. But that's a thought for another boat. All that's left to do on the chain plates is drill out the bolt holes which shouldn't take long.

We are in cleanup mode for the rear compartments of the boat now. Once we have averything cleaned up and ready we can work on the side decks. The just need slots for the chain plates. We might put them down tonight !!!!! Wouldn't that be fantastic !!!!!

Cheers, Kevin.

More coarbon...

So, what do you give the carbon tube that has everything. You give it more carbon of course. I had some fabric that we used to tape the inner prod sleeve to the hull. It looks so good I can't see covering it up with paint. We'll see how that goes over time, but for now, I'm leaving it exposed so I can admire it.


I also used some fabric on the aft side of frame 18. I needed to tape the frame/hull fillet and decide it would look best in black. Not the neatest job in the world, but pretty good for my first go at laying down carbon fabric. I found it more conforming to odd shapes than the e-glass has been. e-glass always wants to be straight I've found out over time.

Anyway, tonight we fit the outer sleeve and tape up the chainplate fillets. And then we should be ready for some decking. Won't that be wild to see. I could be glassing the deck on Friday night or Saturday if things go really well.

Cheers, Kevin.