Ready!

After almost 10 year, almost exactly 800 hours of work - i.e. the building time estimated by the designers - the boat is ready for rigging. Due to limited tools and space, we spent two hours to assemble it but disassembling was much easier. It took a bit of curse words and sweat to convince the bolts to pass through akas, vaka and amas, but we did it.

It has been a nice ride but we spent much more time than originally foreseen, mostly because either Cinzia and I, in the meantime, were called to face more responsibilities with our respective jobs. Neverthless, as we said before, slow and steady wins the race. 

The next photos shows the milestone beer

and here's to you the proud builders.

Now we have to figure the best way to transport the boat to the beach, rig it and above all how to haul and lauch it: but that's another story.

Tiller and stick

One hour today to rivet the stick on the universal joint and to attach it to the tiller. We used two 4x25 mm aluminum rivets and two s/s 4 mm bolts and nuts.

 

 Total work time to date: 804 hours

Mast base and V-cleat

 Cinzia had worked for one more hour in the past weeks to give the tiller two more coats.

Today we worked one more hour to install the mast base on the stem aka and the V-cleat on the aft aka.

For the mast base we glued the wooden step on the stern aka using thickened epoxy and tightened the nut underneath. Also, we screwed the mast step on the streamlined wooden base with four self-tapping s/s screws. For the V-cleat (used for the rudder lifting mechanism) we simply used two self tapping s/s screws after coating the pre-bored holes with epoxy.

Total work time to date: 803 hours

Painting the tiller

 After a very long period of time here we are back to finish this boat. Today we sanded and gave one coat of grey enamel to the tiller, ingeniously hung to the kitchen cabinets

 Total work time to date: 801 hours

Mast base installation (4)

 This stuff turned out to be very tricky. Today and the past saturday we worked for three hours. We glued a 3-mm thick layer of rubber to the mast base support, and then dry-installed everything. 

Total work time to date: 800 hours!

Coating with epoxy, and more

Two hours of work today for coating the tiller, the mast base support and the hole for its bolt with clear epoxy.

 

 

Moreover, we managed to find an aluminum tiller extension, which we embellished with a clear plastic cork :-)

Total work time to date: 797 hours

Tiller

Only one hours of work today. We had various discussions on how to install the mast base, and then we turned to the tiller and made the hole to bolt it to the rudder head

Then we made two holes to bolt the universal joint for the tiller extension. The photo shows it with a 15 mm diameter wooden stick, but we will use an aluminum tube.

 Total work time to date: 795 hours