Mr. DeWalt needs a rest, and some new parts.

Tonight ripping strips was on the program. Frode came over and together we ripped enough strips in an hour to build two new panels. We did not finish the job though as our very nice and smooth deWalt skilsaw busted a bearing or something like that. Afterwards we did not dare to use the saw as it vibrated and made really bad sounds when powered on. Saw goes in under warranty tomorrow (new years eve), but we dont have high hopes for when it will be returned. Good that we now have enough strips to build panel #6 and #7. The flipover of the stations in the mould and stuff like that should have us occupied while waiting for the saw. We can also use the time to make progress on the beams.

Even the best plans..

Tonight I had made arrangmentes with Omar so we could cut some more planks. Alas, his son got a fever so he had to stay at home. Sometimes even the best plans dont work out.. But we did get to transport panel #3 and #4 to his place so they are out of the workshop. It takes 15minutes to re-seal the door to the workshop after opening it, so it is something I try not to do very often.
I also got to pull the staples off panel #5 tonight. Easy and fast work with a horseshoe plier and a deft hand.
To finish off the evening I filled all the "knotholes" in #5, and gave the seams where the epoxy from the first brushing had seeped through a new dosis. Probably not neccesary, but it is nice and reaffirming to se perfect glue lines when sanding.

For tomorrow night, sanding or cutting planks, depending on wheter I can get help and what I feel up to.

1060 staples a panel..

After working 1060 staples loose tonight, my right hand is a bit sore. Timecount, 2 hours.. If I keep this up, I will have the same right hand as Hellboy ;-)

Panel #5, glued.

Here is a pic of panel #5 on the mould with gunwhales laminated and planks glued. All done in 3 hours last night. I must say I much prefer to work with wood over messing with epoxy. I am not big on painting eather :)

Anyway, panel #5 is a solo project, and I must say that the result is the best so far. Not becouse Frode and Omar is no good, but becouse working alone seems to result in better concentration. Not many gaps between planks on this hull.
Now there is some filling of knotholes to do, pull some staples and sanding, then panel #6 kan be started. Once panel #6 is off the mould, we can flip the stations around. Whohoo!!

Gunwhale woes

After a comment by a friend, I began to get some nagging woes over how we have done the gunwhales. I had the opportunity to talk with Phill Brander before christmas and check this out amongst other things. Turned out we have goofed up a bit and need to adjust our gunwhales a bit before assembling the hulls

Phill, here are the photos you asked for, showing the inside of a hull panel and the gunwhale butts.
Here is the inside of panel #4, with the electric stapler in the foreground. The electric stapler is a "must have", as each hull panel requires about one thousand staples!

Quality control is important

I went down to the workshop at 0200 tonight (I like to stay up late, but get really tired the next day) to check on our laminating work. I am really happy that I did. Two massive airbubbles/areas where the glass had pulled off. Both about 10cm long and 4cm wide. This was two hours after we finished laminating, so the epoxy had not hardened yet. Some quick work with a squeege and it looked good again. This morning the epoxy had hardened substantially and it looked good.
Going over the lamniate again after some hours have become routine when not using the vacuum pump. Usually I find some small air bubbles to remove and stuff like that.

We are rolling..

Feeling good about progress lately. Panel 4 glassed on the inside tonight (note to self: never allow fillets to harden partly before putting on the glass!).
Panel 5 is on the mould, lacking just two planks and the gunwhale before it can be glued. Perhaps we get panel 6 off the mould during christmas so we can flip the stations over. That would be a major milestone for us!

Frode and I did a major decision today. We are cutting our time spent on "strip plank bulkheads" and go forward with plywood bulkheads instead. We have a lot of hours invested in our special bulkheads so far, but enough is enough now that we can get BS1088 gaboon/okume ply. Even with all the hours invested in BHs, there would still be many-many hours to go before they were done, and the result would not be spectacular due to many different reasons (our building skill amongst them). So, next task is the get the beams started, and then it is the foils. Hope Florian gets the CNC macine running!

Building times

I did some quick estimations today on building time in strip:
Planking 5 hours, when done alone.
Sanding the inside and outsite 2 - 3 hours.
Glassing inside and outside 3 + 3 hours

5 + 2 (3) + 3 + 3 = 14 hours for one half hull panel. Scary stuff!

Some days I wish

Some days I wish we were doing something like this instead.

http://a-class.org.nz/daryl.htm


Faster, and you can pop out a lot of hull panels relatively quick. If only I had access to a suitable CNC mill..

What do you get..

What do you get when you let the boys off to play with the chemistry set without supervision? You get a mess to clean up :-)

Frode and Omar was to glue the rest of the bulkheads at frodes place last week. Turned out they had a small mix up when measuring the epoxy. It is suppsed to be 100 parts resin to 32 parts hardener. Suffice to say that 50 parts hardener to 16 grams resin dont promote a good result. Frode have to clean the parts, do some sanding and try again.

What did we learn? Mark the tins for resin and hardener with a big marker! I feel partly responsible as I did not mark or leave instructions on what was in the unmarked containers, but as the tins was very different, I knew what was in them.

Looking for materials

We do a round trip looking for good materials to cut into strips now and then. Here is a pic of Frode scouting in the racks at one of the warehouses.

Winterizing.. aka: The tin hat society

Tonight Omar and I spent a few hours winterizing the workshop. The single pane window was insulated with some layers of cardboard cut to fit and an alu foil on top. The port to the workshop was more of a challenge. The bottom now have a rubber gasket fitted. Since the port is made of solid wood, we stapeled some tarred paper on the inside, and topped it off with alu foil. The difference in temperature and lack of drafts was immediately noticeable. Hopefully this is enough to see us through the winter with good and stable epoxy hardening temperatures.

Great fun working with alu foil :-)

Carbon fibers arrived

Yesterday there was two big boxes at my front door when I came home. The carbon fiber supplier had shipped the stuff really quick.

Of couse I had to open the boxes to check out the stuff. One roll of weave and one roll of uni, both 100cm wide. This is 400gsm so it is pretty stiff stuff. Wonder how it will be to work with.. Need to be very thorough with the wetting out.

Carbon fibers

We managed to strike a good deal on carbon fibers locally. 36kgs of carbon weave and unidirectionals are on their way. The retail price of 36kgs of high modulus carbon is horrendous, but with the deal we got we can afford to do foils, beams, rudder system and spi poles in carbon. That is good as we need to save all the weight we can if we are to hit min weight.

Back on the sandwagon..

Sanding hull panel #4 now. Busy nights with the beltsander, rotary sander and the torture board..

Our first youtube video.

On my latest business trip to the US I bought a small "Digital Hero GoPro3" camera. This nice little unit have a waterproof housing, adapters to mount it to helmets, bicycles etc. and can shoot still pictures, time lapse pictures (one pic every 5th second) or movies. Last night we got to test it out, and it is a good little unit for what it does and the price.
So here we are, Omar and I, laminating and installing a gunwhale first, then gluing the hull panel together. The film was done with the time-lapse function which later was processed into a film. Gives a pretty good impression of what we are doing in a short time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7h7_lFcSBc

For those interested, the video was shot from 1900 to 2200, and as you can see it was still lots of sun outside. One of the benefits of living at 63deg North.

New digital scale!

Omars father, Albert, pulled some strings and got us a really good scale for cheap. This scale is a precision instrument and gives us measurements down to 1/10 of a gram. Testet it tonight, and after programming it it was really excellent and consistent. Went on to glass the outside of the hull panel lying on the mould. Good stuff!

Dont trust digital scales

I have had a cheap digital scale in the garage the last couple of years for measuring epoxy by weight. This weight went "bananas" some weeks ago and started incrementing its values by itself. Not something you want to happen when measuring epoxy and hardener.

Frode got the mission to buy a new digital weight to measure epoxy. First weight he got did not count one by one gram but jumped from zero to 6 or 8 grams instead of incrementing by one as we added epoxy. We thought this was just a one-time problem and had the weight replaced. Tonight we was supposed to glass the outside of #3, but the digital weight was not reliable! Bugger!! Shop will have the weight returned as it was supposed to be a high quality and very accurate product, OBH Nordic in stainless steel. For the next scales we will do some tests in the shop before we accept the product. Will bring a cup and a bottle of water and check both how it updates and how accurate it is. The shop staff will probably not like it, but if they want us to buy an accurate product we have to test it first. All good things are three is a norwegian saying. Hopefully weight number three is good.A clear wood finish is good looking. Too bad about all the knots, even if they give a kind of "rustic" look. Fortunately the knots dont mean anything strengthwise. This hull is sanded, pre-coated, washed and sanded again, ready for glassing. We use 165gsm twill weave for glassing. Light but strong enough. Twill weave reduces the amount of epoxy needed to wet out the weave and "fill" it. Every gram counts in the end :-)

This photo shows how we laminate the gunwhales. We have a stringer running the length of the mould (almost) with notches at each station. The strips are wet out with epoxy, thickened epoxy added and then secured to the mould with screws and a few clamps. Works quite well.

Grrrrrrrrinding..

Last night in short: Belt sander in action and sanded down the outside of shell #3. Finishing it off tonight or tomorrow night. Glassing in the weekend (with mask, ref. the Epoxy safety thread on catsailor.com), hopefully both the inside and outside. Gaining speed..

Time for some light humour

The "On the wire" e-zine had a lot of good stuff. Here are two of my favourite fiction stories from the archives to lighten the mood a bit.

The worlds fastest Hobie16

No car required

Repeat until done.. The sequel..

Still planking hulls etc. Some small modifications to the mould which I'll do some pictures of "real soon now" to make laminating the gunwhales easier.
Tonight we stripped a full hull panel in 3.5 hours. Well, we miss two strips from a full panel, but anyway, we are getting faster and better! The new plane I bought really makes a difference when it comes to fitting the planks.

Hopefully we can get going on foils and crossbeams soon. Foils will be foam/carbon and crossbeams will be solid carbon. Interesting stuff!

More about ripping strips.

It have been too cold for epoxy work here the last week and a half. With temperatures down to -10 degC outside the garage is seldom above 10degC. So to use the time we have ripped some more strips. We still think the handheld circular/skil saw is the perfect tool for an operation like ours. Virtually no setup time, no need for a large room to rip the strips, good quality on the strips dimensions and no broken strips. We rip strips of two sizes, 19mm and 38mm and only full length. We can sort through the stock of two lumberyards so we pick the best planks available, which usually are pretty clear grained and with reasonable amounts of knots. To save some time we stack the 19mm planks on top of each other and secure them with some screws. That way we rip two strips for each run with the saw.

Besides ripping, routing more bulkheads and some housekeeping we also weighted the first hull half with the inside glass in place. We weighted it three times and it was between 8.4 and 8.8 every time. We are pretty pleased with that.

At least the skiing is good..

We have a spell of cold weather now during easter. The temperature in the garage is down to 10degC and it is snowing big time, so using epoxy is a no-no. If it dont heat up soon all we can do is work on ripping more strips and routing the inserts which makes the bulkhead parts fit togheter.
At least the skiing is good. Frode, friends and I visited the mountain "Kirketaket" on saturday. Walking up on our splitboards and snowboarding down again. Perfect off-piste "powder" conditions! Not very common during easter, but very nice. Too bad we did not get to pull off hull #3 as planned these days instead.

Here is a link to information about the mountain we skied on: http://www.kirketaket.com/index2.htm

Glassing, filling and sanding..

Just some quick shots this time. Inside of hull half #1 is now glassed and have become super-stiff. Compared to the wobbly panel we dropped into the female mould it is now very rigid and stiff. Will see if we can weight the finished panel when the infernal snow stops dropping down on us.

First the building crew. From the left: Frode, Omar and Rolf.






Frode filling some low spots on hull half #2 with epoxy and sanding dust.
Frode will get the job of doing our foils when he is done with the bulkheads. He have done some quick calculations and the sum of all joins he is to make with the router is arund 200. He is very grateful that he was about halfway before he began thinking in that direction. Never think about how much a project is, just split it up into smaller jobs and do it. Dont think.. Do it.. (Phill Branders advice as well)







Omar also filling some low spots. He really enjoys our building nights, learning lots of new stuff but also having a good time. It is his first building project except remodelling work at home. Respect! He have earlier sailed on a monohull, but have only sailed a cat once, so he really is in for a steep learning curve when we launch. I am certain he well do as well on the water as he does in the garage.












We had an unannounced guest in the garage this night. Trond Nordam, kayaker and kayakbuilder dropped by to have a look at the progress and methods used. I think he was suitably impressed with what we were doing. Trond have buildt a CLC Chesapeake 17 plywood/glass/epoxy kayak so he was very interested in the techniques we used for these boats.

Repeat until done.

We have now come to the phase where we dont have much new stuff to show every night. Now it is more about repeating things we have done earlier. Last night we sanded the second hull panel and did some more bulkheads.

Sanding with the belt sander is fast, but need a careful hand to not cut too deep. Especially tricky in the areas with a lot of curvature. Sanding a hull panel takes just about 2 hours with the belt sander and 40grit paper.

Unfortunately I have some low spots to fill on this panel. Good thing that we dont lack sanding dust.

Better and better every time.

Stripping three quarters of a hull in one evening, while working mostly alone. Not too shabby. Feels like some real progress now. Frode certainly likes to see what looks like boat parts begin to fill the garage.








Amazing how much faster we came to this stage the second time we did it. Can it be done faster? Certainly!
I have a japanese dozuki saw with a 0.3mm thick blade on order. The company, Clas Ohlson, takes its time to deliver. Not happy with them just now. While waiting for the saw, I plan to put in a heavy duty sanding session with a drill and a flexible sanding pad on friday. I filled some poor planking last night, and the epoxy had not hardened enough for sanding tonight. At 15 degrees C the epoxy takes its own sweet time to finish off, much like Clas Ohlson in fact..

A good evening in the garage.

Female mould set up and the hull in place. Strips for the next hull half and the bulkheads ripped, and I even got to clean out and organize a lot of stuff in my workroom.


Tomorrow evening I hope to fill a few cracks where I was a bit overeager with the block plane when fitting strips and do a coat of epoxy. Then it is sanding with a rubber backing plate on the drill on wednesday and perhaps glassing. If the epoxy isn't quite there yet, we will begin stripping the next hull half.

Frode continued with the bulkheads after setting up the female mould for inside glassing. He have really began to produce those with some speed and precision!


We set up a couple of worklights over the mould last week. Under the 500W light the hull have distorted a bit. Looks like the wood have dried out and twisted a bit. I put on a moist towel tonight in the hope that it adding some moisture will fix it. If not, I'll put on some lead weights when filling tomorrow night.




Here is the simple jig Frode have made to route the insets for the different parts of the bulkheads.

Not just F16 building.

Rolf is not only working on the cats, he also have a kayak to work on. Tonight he put on the deck on a plywood hard chine kayak. Hopefully it is ready to go out of the workshop monday night! All that is left to do before it can go out for outside storage is putting epoxy on the topside of the decks. His wife have approved storage of the kayaks under the roof of the porch if they are hoisted up to the rafters. Will do!

7.7 is the number..

First hull half came off the mould at 7.7Kgs. We still have to add glass on the inside, but that should not be more than a couple of Kg. Target weight for a hull is 24Kgs, so we have to be careful with what we put into the hulls!

First hull half comes off tomorrow!

Just finished putting on the second coating of epoxy on the glass, the filler coating. Tomorrow the first hull half comes off the mould so we finally get some weights and find out how we are doing. Exciting times!

It's glassed

No updates for a while on the bulding, but we have not been idle. Tonight we finished glassing the hull half, and glued some parts of the bulkheads together.


We put on the glass at +-45deg to the planks. It does mean that we have an overlap on the glass between sheets, but it should give more strength and stiffness. Pretty interesting stuff, just hope the sanding will not be too bad.



Also a boon to be able to put on the glass in several small operations instead of one large. I hope to have time for layer two of epoxy tomorrow night, and then it comes off on wednesday for inside sanding and glassing. Perhaps we are able to put the hull on some scales and get a rough weight estimate. Inquiring minds all over the catsailing world wants to know..











5mm strips glued together to form the basis for bulkheads. We will use a router later on to shape them to their respetive stations in the hull. Should be a really lightweight replacement for full plywood bulkheads.

Multihull article

Article about our project in a norwegian sail magazine. To read click here.

Sanding, and a pre-coat

Friday I was down in the basement filling a few dents and low spots with thickened epoxy. For thickening I used fine dust from all the sanding we have done. Today I had the pleasure of sanding down the hardened epoxy. Some cunning work with the belt sander saved considerable time, but it is risky business! I worked a lot with a belt sander when I did the Quattro 16 catamaran, so I have a feel for it, but it removes a lot of material really fast! After some longboarding I went over the hull with a random orbital sander with 120grit paper for some minutes to remove the scratches from the 40 grit paper on the longboard. Well, it says 40 grit on the paper but it feels more like 60 grit to me. Frode found a bargain on sandpaper in a shop, and it does the job.
After sanding and cleaning the hull half, we applied a pre-coat of epoxy. The idea is to apply a very thin layer of epoxy to the hull and let it soak in before the glass is put on. That way the wood will soak up less epoxy when putting the glass on, saving considerable weight. We used a new hardener for the pre-coat. This hardener results in a thicker epoxy , so it will not penetrate so deep into the wood. At least that was our theory, we are very, very, excited to check out the results tomorrow! Either it worked well, or we have a large sanding job on our hands..

Today Frode worked mostly on the female mould where we will put the hull half for inside glassing. Things are going forward, and we will only become faster with more experience. E.g. today we found out that you fill all lows first, then sand the hull to shape. Saves you from sanding one extra time to sand down the filler.

I also did some photos with a decent camera today, as compared to the mobile phone cameras we ordinarily uses. Phill, the designer, wanted to see what was up to in somewhat more detail. Feedback was "furniture", which was great to hear, but we know where the faults are :-D

First hull half sanded to shape..

No updates for a few days now, but we have been chugging away on it. First hull half is now sanded down to shape and Frode have produced lots of bulkheads.
Sanding was no quick affair, but we expect to improve. Breaking out the beltsander was a good move, tought we were hesitant at first to do so. The hull half now need a little thickened epoxy in the holes and dimples left by the staples and we'll fill a few low spots. Then a quick sanding with 80 grit on the longboard and 120grit for a few minutes and we are ready to glass! Hopefully I find time for this during the weekend so we can start a new hull half next week. Those slow days are gone now!

W V D

Not much getting done this week. The W. V. D has hit us..

Number one..

Still a lot to do before it is a hull half, but the first half is planked. Planking is way esier to do than anticipated. The work with strip planking is obviously setting up for it. Stripping is just zen.

Planking the first hull half

It was our first planking session in earnest but with a respectable result in our opinion. Next hull will be even better!
Tapering the strips to a tight fit was a bit slow, so another of Bjørn Thomassons techniques will be tried there. Using a thin bladed japanese saw to saw the strips to shape. Then sand some if needed. Just need to track down such a saw in our little town..
We had some trouble shaping the bottom of the bow area, but the next one will be better. Then we will taper the bottom strip well before it is put in place. doing so with the rest of the bottom strips as well should make this heavily curved section easier to plank.
Using a plane to make tight fit between planks in the bottom was surprisingly fast and easy.

Frode also put some time into doing an experimental bulkhead. We are not sure tought.. Opinions anyone? There will also be some strips going across like an X over the bulkhead.

A well spent evening.

We got the wide strips for the hull sides ripped, set up the bow and secured no less than four strips. That is real progress!




We are becoming experts at ripping strips with the skilsaw. Fast and easy. Next time we will have to do some hard decisions and start beveling the edges of the strips going into the bottom section.

We will have to re-check bulkhead 300 with Phill. Is it supposed to go in at position 300 and is the bow supposed to be hollow?

With the current setup the bow will be hollow, and I have a hard time trying to imagine Phill designing it like that.. Hopefully we will know before wednesday, when we begin stripping in earnest.

Back on track!

There has been much debate and even indications of controversy over wether to rip strips on a table saw or with a handheld saw. I have been pretty confident that we wanted to use a handheld, while all professional woodworkers and people at the lumberyards have insisted on table saws. Now we finally know..






Last night we ripped three 8 inch planks into strips. We did not count them, but in the end we had rather many strips. Using the handheld saw, we had some ruined strips last time we tried, but this time we found the trick. Using the right techniques ripping strips was straight forward and an easy feat. The key was to focus on the guide and watch it so it did not work out from the plank.




Then it was just a question of pushing the saw forward. In the end, we controlled the saw 80% with the hand on the guide and 20% actually on the saw. If we pushed too hard, we got too much friction and made it harder for ourself. Bjørn Thomasson in Sweden was right all the time. A table saw is not neccesary.

Another key element for us was having a helper to catch the strip when cut off the plank.


These planks were quite wide and thing, for the bottom with lots of curve. One problem with wide planks is the natural sideways curve they will have. You will have to decide how to use the handheld saw when cutting the strips, to make the cut straight.
Next time we will rip some 2inch planks for the sides.






Using the NBC mask for protection was great. No dust in the nose, throat, lungs or eyes. Definately reccomended but perhaps not worth being drafted for

Ripping..

We are finally ripping some wood. We had just two hours due to family comittments, but got to do an extension to the table for ripping and rip some strips. Using a circle saw demands a certain technique so we did produce some unusable strips in addition to the well shaped ones. We will only get better.. And you bet we are careful about where we put our fingers while using the saw!



As you can see from the pictures, some of us dont like dust and at least try to take care of their hearing. While others prefer "no-cost" duskmasks and the higher volume range on their stereos. ;-)
Yes, the mask Rolf is wearing is standard military issue. It supposedly protects against chemical, biological and nuclear warfare so epoxy dust, vapours and wood dust should be no match. Thanks to the norwegian national guard for sponsoring at least some useful gear.