Saturday, December 21, 2013

Main hull floor panels

Back to the shop for 4 hours today. We redrew and cut the main hull floor panels from 10 mm thick plywood. This proved trickier than expected. First of all, the suggested nesting diagram is a very tight fit for the forward and mid floor panels, as shown in the photo below. Consider also that our panels are 6 cm longer than the standard length (2.50 m vs. 2.44 m), so the fit on a standard panel will be even worse.


Moreover, we found several "off" points which caused evident unfair spots on the curves. In particular, the width at the transom end of the floor panel seems about 1 cm too large per side. So we deduced the width both from the drawings and from the real transom and were able to produce a fair curve. I really hope we did it right, but we'll be able to verify this only during the main hull set up.
Here's a picture of the whole main hull floor


We're still waiting for the lumber from the sawmill...

Total work time to date: 27 hours

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Back to the boat (slowly)

Last saturday (Nov. 30th) we worked 3 more hours. To be fair, I should say that we spent 3 more hours in the shop, but a lot of time was devoted to study plans to decide which parts we should cut next before starting to assemble the hulls. This is not as obvious as it seems: hull bottoms and decks have to be traced from the assembled hulls (albeit the float decks are drawn with dimensions on the plans). Apparently the only remaining hull piece to be cut beforehand is the main hull floor. We traced the mid section on a 10 mm panel only to discover that we have to retrace it backwards because otherwise the forward section wouldn't fit on the same panel. Moreover, we discovered that the false transom must be cut from the 19 mm thick sheet while we cut ours together with the other bulkheads from the 6 mm. Oh well.
Today we went in a local sawmill to check the availability of proper lumber for the stringers and the akas. It looks like we found some good material so we'll place an order shortly after translating the bill of materials in metric units. Also, we found a good source of epoxy resin at decent prices, so wel'll place an order very soon. Here's a photo taken in the lumberyard showing good quality 5 cm think fir planks to be used to build the akas.


Total work time to date: 23 hours