boxing in the kick up steps

You wouldn't think it but it takes over ten individual panels to box in each kick up rudder assembly. The panels shown here will get bonded into the openings in the stern and four more are needed to box in the sides of the steps. The tenth panel will be the horizontal bulkhead that will support the upper rudder bearing.

chopping the starboard boarding steps

I've chosen to build the under slung kick up rudders.  I chose this over dagger board rudders to minimize the chance of sucking air down the rudders and reducing the effectiveness of the rudders at speed. Having experienced this as windsurfer this usually results in a "spin out". In the case of a cat this would just result in a little induced drag.  Truth be told, I just like the clean, functional lines of unobstructed boarding steps

port side boarding steps

Before mixing any epoxy, I've draped a single length of 34oz.triaxial glass cloth over the two aft boarding steps and trimmed it to fit.. I then marked the corners of each step with a sharpy so that I can lift the glass up to roll on a good coat of epoxy. I then laid the fabric back in place, rolled on another coat of epoxy and topped it all off with peel ply.

baby birds

 In preparation for glassing the cabin top and decks, I'm spending a little extra time and effort making sure that all surfaces are as clean and smooth as possible.  Notice the thick plastic that I had to put up over the rafters of the shop. With spring and summer comes baby birds and mother birds spreading lots of used bugs and worms all over the place. Now the birds can go about their business without spoiling the decks. As much as I dislike the mess, I just don't have it in me to outcast a nest of baby birds.  

100 percent certianty

The carbon fiber chain plates are in the bag and it's nice to know with 100 percent certainty that all reinforcements are fully saturated.  This vac bag session involved laying 34 pieces of both glass and unidirectional carbon fiber. The key to being able to manage such an involved process is all in the preparation.   Before the first batch of epoxy was mixed, I measured and cut each piece of fabric and laid them out on a clean table in the order in which they were to be applied. The vacuum bag was also ready to go with a layer of breather, perf and peel ply in place.

To make it easy to apply the laminates, I mounted the two chain plates on a base standing up on ends. This allowed me to apply resin between each layer of unidirectional carbon offering an additional opportunity to squeegee the resin downwards insuring that all of the unidirectional carbon was aligned.

I have little doubt that something else will break first before these chain plates fail............Now I will be able to sleep like a cat when waves are bashing the cabin top.

Humility

For reasons that I cannot explain, I was not 100 percent certain that I had achieved full resin penetration. Knowing that I will one day face some harsh conditions, and that I did not want to have this weighing heavy on me while waves bash over the bridgdeck cabin, I took the chop saw and laid waste to a weeks worth of my labor.

Good thing.......only half of the 10 layers of carbon were fully bonded together. I'm not sure whether to be happy or sad.

What have I learned?  Sometimes infusing a part may not be the way to go.  For my next go, I will lay this web on end and hand lay each layer of carbon then vac bag to get the proper resin to reinforcement ratio........"poor Horatio, he was only half a boy"  ( Opey Taylor)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eI689Qxaao

Rorschach Mandolbrot chain plate infusion

here are a series of photographs showing the resin infusion of two carbon fiber chainplates:

laying out the flow media

Can you spot my foolish mistake? 

( flow medium on the wrong side of peel ply )

The flow begins

Flowing nicely

Almost there

completely infused

Mandolbrot or.....

 Rorschach ?

Rorschach

Carbon Chain plates

Seen here are the beginnings of two of the three most important parts of the cats rig.......the two chain plates.  Along with the fore stay, a failure in any one of the three will bring the rig down.

The raised diagonal portion of these plates contains 10 layers of unidirectional carbon fiber that wraps up and over stainless steel spools and is interlaced with several additional layers of glass.  At this point, all reinforcement fabric has been lightly tacked in place with 3M -77 spray adhesive in preparation for a very critical resin infusion process.

The plank

If your going to have to walk a plank, It may as well be a very lightweight composite plank with high density inserts and epoxy micro balloon reinforcements. Seen here hanging on a 2 ton chain hoist is the core blank that will become a walkway between the two hull sections.  Once laminated, it will become a structural portion above the bow tube that in turn will house the telescoping bow pole.

Carbon Chainplates

prepping the carbon fiber chain plates for resin infusion process. In the foreground, the precut foam chainplate is being covered with a specified schedule of fiberglass and carbon fiber.  

A stainless steel thimble is captured by 10 layers of 9 oz. unidirectional carbon fiber.  Spray adhesive is being used to position all reinforcing fabric. As bad  luck would have it, I ran short on carbon uni so the process is on hold until material arrives.  I'll pick up the next steps when it arrives.

simple

Simple ...you've got to be kidding.

bottom paint

Here I am taking a break and studying up on bottom paint.

Starting to look like a boat.

I stepped back and amongst the mess, I realized that shes starting to look like a boat.

lowering a little drag.

this shot is a bit disorienting but your looking at the port side, aft end of the centerboard casing.  To minimize potential hydrodynamic drag created by water flow past the centerboard case openings,  I've opted for the tapered exit which will be glassed over creating a  smooth trailing edge slot.

Cleat reinforcement patches

Not an incredibly exciting picture but here are the saturated glass reinforcements that will go in the interior of the ship where the cleats will be mounted on deck. The larger patches are reinforcements for winch locations.

Again, the trick to doing overhead glassing is to lay things out on sheets of plastic.  in this case, I  start with 1)  sheet of plastic 2) peel ply 3) glass 4) roll on a coat of epoxy 5) more glass  6) another roll of epoxy then let sit for a little while so that it's fully saturated and a little tacky.

Then slap those things in place and squeegee them in place with a bondo spreader.

Cabin top stiffeners

In this life, there is nothing more challenging and unrewarding than laminating the cabin top roof stiffener in the overhead position.  Unless of course..............

it is laminating the roof top stiffener of the other cabin.  One of the tricks that brings this into the realm of do-ability is using a sheet of plastic to wet out your reinforcement before you try to bond the whole mass onto the ceiling.  Another trick was using a bit of unidirectional carbon fiber in the mix to delineate the location of the unidirectional glass within the layers. 

Rocking snail and kitchen drawers

If your going to build a boat, it's a good idea to save some shop time for repairing rocking snails and kitchen drawers with the little globs of extra epoxy.  Incidentally, the crates for the Yanmar 3YM Marine Diesel engine make good clamps for  gluing drawers together....... A bit spendy however.

Reinforcing for deck pulleys

Prepping for the under side of the cabin corners where deck pulleys will attach.

Lucy

The "Lucy" of all belt sanders.  This incredible machine was developed by a man named Eichenlaub; and yes. she's hydraulic. I picked her up from a salvage boatyard in Port Townsend, Wa.  It needed belts and some re-wiring but this machine was designed for faring compound curves. It has a clever mechanism for adjusting the curvature of the sanding surface.  Nice work Mr. Eichenlaub.

Notice the "missing" belt cover.  Ya wouldn't want to get your shirt tail caught in that!

composite half pipe

Rather than glass in the 6 in. PVC, I took the liberty of creating a nice composite half-pipe that I will cut down to form  external drains for the cockpit. Of course this is a Cat so I'll be doing another one. Although I could have ripped the pipe in half and used the two halves to vac bag these pieces, I decided just to use the squeegee peel ply method.  Gained the weight of another half-pocket full of dimes.  Oh well.....gained an evening under a palm tree.

clamps

It takes a lot of clamps to make a boat. Here I've used a few clamps and quite a few straight boards to make sure the lamination is spot on.

forward bridge deck bulkhead tips....(.for lack of a better name to call them )

Here I am demonstrating my remarkable ability to make the world go away.  If I try really hard, I have found that I can also make the universe go away too.

So I just realized that I forgot to show the small forward bulkhead tips that were laminated with the stack of batteries.

One would not be able to determine whether they had been vac bagged or not. They came out nice and light.

Port side transition

The transition between the forward hull deck to the front of the bridge deck is a bit tricky.  In the plans, Ian leaves it up to the builder to work out a nice shape. From this angle, it's difficult to get a feel for the lines and adding to the confusion is the fact that I needed to add a few wedges of foam to ease the transition the way I wanted.  Future photo's should make a better impression.   The array of tools from left to right are:  hand auto  body work sander with 36 grit, nice lithium ion cordless screw gun, spring clamps, Moisture cure polyurethane glue, spray mister full of water, heat gun for adjusting the shape and fitting of foam.

Gravity

sometimes you just want to get the job done......In this case, I'm laminating both of the small triangular bulkheads that were cut from foam using the cardboard templates ( see last post)

If you do the simple math, 4 old salvage trojan battery's don't even come close to providing the compressive forces that can be generated by vac bagging. However, in this case,  knocking the job out quick takes precedence.

Just for kicks, you can see my Ryobi drill which has become the  master epoxy mixer. It's not such a good drill but it works just fine for mixing batches of epoxy.

If you look closely, you can see that there is an open portion at the front of the forward deck. The piece that I made last night, will eventually go there but first I need to make two small bulkheads that provide support and seals off this area underneath. I'm using two pieces of cardboard to make a template that I can use to transfer the shape onto core cell foam then I'll vac bag them and bond them in place ..........looks like it's time to clean up the shop.  Extension cords sometimes look like piles of spaghetti on the shop floor and I sometimes find myself entangled and confused as to which cord goes to which tool. I think I have about 500 power tools but I have a wind generator on the shop roof that offsets some of my electron usage.

Trial fitting the sail drive

Forward bridge deck section

In the upper picture, you'll notice that the forward section of the bridge deck is absent.  The 13 inch x  12 ft. strip will eventually cover this section and form an area where the trampolines will attach. Although I didn't laminate the full 12 feet with one full length of fabric, I elected to use a few of my excess pieces of 24 oz. glass.  Doing so adds about a dollars weight in change due to the overlaps and extra resin but it actually creates a stronger part and I think it's good not to waste if you have the opportunity to make good use of excess material.   I then smoothed the entire piece down with peel ply.  The glassed portion will be on the inside of the boat.

The confidence of goats

After pouring the mounts with foam, I used a simple hand saw to carve away the extra foam then I used a disc sander wheel to create a groove all around the inside edges of the mount.  When bonding these mounts to the inside of the hulls,  I'll mix a good thick amount of cabosil and epoxy, load it into a large zip-lock bag  then cut the corner out of the bag so that I can lay a good thick bead of thickened epoxy inside this groove and smack the mount down where it belongs.

The thickened epoxy is then smoothed along the edges to form a fillet and then two staggered layers of DBM1708 tape.

When you're not really sure what your doing, it's always good to confide with a small billy goat.  Chickens provide little or no boost in one's confidence as they are generally very apathetic.  Note:  When making photographs of foam filled motor mounts, never leave them unattended as goats will eat all the foam out of your new engine mounts and you will have to go back the the previous steps.

Yanmar 3YM20 bed re-work

A little chopping, grinding and glassing and I have both engine mounts ready to go.  Tomorrow, I plan on pouring   the insides of the mounts with two part expanding foam. My thought is that when I bond the mounts to the hull, the foam will prevent the thickened bonding epoxy from squishing into the void and this should allow me to create a beefy fillet between all of the bonded edges. 

No worries

Although this fix got the best of my Sunday afternoon, I chopped the engine bed down, overlapped the flanges and bonded them back together with a thick mixture of cabosil and epoxy. While it was curring, I strapped the engine bed onto the engine/sail drive unit to make sure that it fits perfectly.  Tomorrow, I'll pull the temporary screws out, grind the splice into a nice shape then glass the heck out of the splice with multiple layers of glass fabric, inside and out. Although this miss-match created a fair amount of extra labor, the finished mounts will actually be stronger than the originals.

However, .......since this is a cat,  I've got to do the same dang thing again for the other engine.

wrong engine bed......

So what's wrong with this picture?.........Wrong engine bed!!!!!!!.........As you can see, the engine bed is about 8 inches too long.  ( This engine bed must have been for the larger Yanmar series engines.  so..........I can either whine or get out the chop saw.

Twin Yanmar Diesels

Now that both portions of the inner hulls have been reinforced, I've scribed and trimmed the engine beds so that they fit the contours of the inner hulls. Next, they will be sanded, and bonded into position with multiple layers of glass and epoxy.