2004

January 2004, and I decided the daggerboard had got to go. It was still not very smooth, despite endless fairing, but worse is that it didn't fit well into the trunk. I built a daggerboard blank from Airlite and shipped it to Phil's Foils for shaping.  Phil has a 3-axis milling machine and is able to make daggerboard and rudders for just about any boat.  He will finish to any degree.

I was getting close to completing the rudder, as well as all associated parts like case, sleeve, and brackets. I also found out that I would be moving to Columbus, where my wife would be a professor at Ohio State.  I decided to build the floats in sections and either assemble them before we moved, and trailer them to Ohio, or ship them in parts. I set up the first section on the strongback, from frame 6 to frame 9, received a carton of Core-Cell foam (Composites One. Feb. '04 for $2.67 per square foot. + tax.), and built the port inside and starboard outside sections, including vacuum-bagged Kevlar inner skin.

Floats

Then the daggerboard came back, so I set to work fiberglassing it.   Phil did a great job, but DHL did their best to destroy it while delivering it.  I guess I had become complacent with the generally good condition that UPS boxes arrive in, and forgotten the time when boxes were thrown off trucks and run over.  DHL reminded me painfully that it still happens.

My company was acquired, which slowed things down in the workshop.  I also built a couple more flat parts: the forward beam bulkheads, made from carbon, with fiberglass patches on the parts that will be cut out.

I finished the daggerboard to a rough state, but it's already far better than the original.  Plus, it actually fits into the trunk.  I was a bit nervous because I had to grind down some rough edges for it to fit, but it slides in and out easily.

As of April, I had completed 4 sections of float hull, 2 inside and 2 outside.  Each section is about 8 feet long and weighs around 10 pounds.  The Kevlar is a mess to work with on concave surfaces.  Fortunately the vacuum bagging process resulted in only a few small voids at the turn of the gunwale, which I'll fix when I join all the parts together and add the additional laminations.  I also had some problems thermoforming the Core-Cell but got better at it as I got more practice.  It shouldn't be a problem to sand off as much as 1/8" on the outside of the floats since they are such a compact tubular shape to begin with.

At the end of April, I decided to wait until after we've moved to continue building float parts, since they're going to be bulky to move.  Plus I'm working so much that I have little time for building.  Most of the time I only get into the shop once a week.  I have started "tuning up" the Goody-E, repainting and reinforcing weak points.

During spring and early summer I was too wrapped up in our move to Ohio to work on any boats.  Plus Tanya and I were traveling most of the summer.  I had the garage town down and construction on the new one started in September of 2004.  I puttered with the old boats during the summer: foot and knee pads for the kayak, and a conversion to kickup rudder on the Goody E.  I also tried the small sail during high winds and it performed OK, but the Goody E is a wet boat when that bow transom slaps through chop.

In summer 2004, I purchased nearly complete hulls and a trailer from Matthew Church, who was building an F9AX north of Toronto.  He had to move overseas and needed to sell his boat.  He had just joined the main hull, and his floats were fiberglass-complete and primed.  He had been working on his boat for 7 years and his craftsmanship was meticulous.  He used Dow Derakane vinylester resin, which is supposed to be as easy to use as polyester but stronger than epoxy.

In September, Ian Farrier announced availability of plans for the F-32 trimaran, the home-builder's version of the F-33.  I upgraded my plans but will probably end up with a boat that's mostly F9AX.

In early October, the contractor finally started building the new garage.  I built rolling frames for the hull so I could lift it off the trailer and roll it around the garage.

By the end of October the garage was complete.  I still had to wait for the building inspection before I could open the back of the garage (I used the back wall as a shed roof for the winter) because the boat barely fit diagonally and took up the entire garage.  I laid the boat down on its side, to make glassing easier.  I did my first tests of the Derakane Vinylester resin on October 30th.

New Garage

When the F-32 plans arrived, I was surprised to find that the form frame spacing is identical to the F-9, and the bow and stern foam is extended to make the boat 32 feet.  The forms are almost identical in shape, but the gunwale is about 2"-4" higher, to accomodate the higher CMM position, which allows for shorter beams.  I decide it's not worthwhile to try to use the F-32 beams and CMMs.  Instead I'll just use my CMMs, and get beams from Corsair or Eric Precourt.  I'm also surprised that the new floats are larger than the old floats by at most 1/2".  If saltwater weighs 60 lbs per cubic foot, than a cubic foot spread over a 1/2" thick surface occupies 24 square feet, or a surface less than 2 feet wide and 12 feet long.  Another way of looking at it is that if you increased the entire 178 square feet of the float surface by 1/2", you would displace an additional 445 lbs of water, less the added weight of the extra material, which is probably under 10 lbs.  It seems like you take away much more bouyancy by cutting off the top outside corner to make the boat 8'6" trailer-legal.

I sanded the entire deck of the boat.  Matthew faired all of the glass on the deck (about 90%) and prepped the rest of the foam for glassing.  He didn't put some of the unidirectional in the right position on the port forward deck so I redid it.  Because he didn't correctly glass the inside of the daggerboard trunk, and because my daggerboard is probably too fat to fit in his trunk anyway, I to cut the trunk out of the boat and put my trunk inside the cabin.  I started fairing my daggerboard, but I think I will look into purchasing some ready-mixed epoxy fairing compound because it gets tedious quickly to mix resin and then mix in fillers, plus it's hard to get consistency batch to batch.  One advantage to building the boat in a large space and in the order specified in the plans is that it allows you to work on many projects at once, so when sanding becomes boring you can always switch to something else.

November 6-7, I built a deck behind the garage, hoisted the 16x8 wall on hinges, and built walls around the sides.  Unfortunately, I was so busy at work that I was travelling for several weeks and wasn't able to do any work on the boat, except for occasional sanding here and there.  I was also concerned that the Derakane I got from Matthew had outlived its useful life, so I ordered 3 fresh gallons from Aircraft Spruce.

November 28th.  I returned from Mexico and California after Thanksgiving and finally put my first piece of fiberglass on the hull.  It's 50x54", and used a little over a quart of resin, on the forward part of the deck.  It was so cold that I could see my breath in the garage (slightly above freezing outside), so I plugged the electric blanket in and covered the glass with it to accelerate the curing.

Over the next few weeks, I completed the hull exterior.  It required 10 pieces of glass on the hull and some patches on deck, as well as several long sections of unidirectional.  I used 3 gallons of resin total.  On December 6th, I put the last piece of fiberglass on the outside of the hull.  In the meantime, I cut out the daggerboard trunk.  I started to fair the new glass to see how the PolyFair works, and I like it.  In the cold garage it stays workable long enough for me to do a pint at a time.

Finishing the glassing on the hull was one of the easiest jobs in the entire boat.  The Derakane was nice to work with, except for the styrene, but I wore an organic respirator.  It was a lot easier to handle large sheets of wet glass than I thought it would be, and I applied a lot of glass dry and wet it out on the boat.  As I've mentioned before, for the thin laminates that Farrier specifies, there isn't much advantage to vacuum bagging, and probably not to wet layup, where you try to squeeze out excess resin on the laminating table before applying the cloth.