Mast step parts welded

All the 6061 T6 aluminum and 316 stainless steel parts are now welded. Many thanks goes to Dusan (the welding artist),Vlad (the facilitator), Mike (the good guy) and Les (the extraordinary machinist) for this effort.

Late note: (May 25th) If any builder is having trouble locating a source for the 1" diameter 316 stainless steel ball, I found an ebay store ToolSupply . The ball bearing ships anywhere by mail and is actually a couple of dollars cheaper than McMaster-Carr who declined to process my order.

It weighs about 3 lbs and I am very happy how it turned out.





Now to get it coated and perhaps build a main hull to mount it on.

Other recent news: my 26" Northstar 600 is now listed for sale. Here is the link.

A couple of links

Just wanted to upload a couple of links
1) A hydrofoil dinghy - enough said
2) Oliver Dom's F22 with sails up on an $800 dollar mast!
That's all

Mast step parts

As a favour to me, a friend from my previous workplace machined the mast step parts on his own time for me. At this price :) I could not turn this offer down, and as it happens they turned out very good indeed. It shows that CNC cutting is not necessary to make any of these parts. A decent quality mill with encoder feedback is all that is needed. I recommend that other builders print out the fabricated parts drawings with no scaling on the printer so that the part shape is actual. This will help the machinist and yourself verify the part contours are correct.

I am somewhat saddened that I could not make a batch of parts as I had offered earlier to the builder's group. Maybe Ian Farrier could be persuaded to make these parts in a batch as he is making the folding system kit. His new online store looks very professional and he is promising to expand his offering for the F22.

Below are a couple of pictures showing the parts laid out and some actually standing more or less in place. It is an intriguing mast step design.



Next step is to get the parts welded together.

Spring activitiy begins - start the push to finish float laminations.

It has been a very busy and stressful spring up to this point and it has been bothering me that I have not updated this blog for about half a month. A couple of things have happened
1) I resigned from my old company and I have just accepted a position in a new one. Sometimes you just have to make a change, however, I'm not the kind of person who makes this kind of change easily. The new job looks amazing and is a very good fit for me.
2) I've listed our Northstar 600 sloop for sale. We have spent the last few weekends cleaning and making sure she presents herself well. A few pictures of 'Gwaihir' can be seen here.

But back to F22 boat building.


I have the outside laminations complete on one float except for the deck and the transom. My plan is get the other float to the same point so that I can work on the decks with the floats side by side. Below are a couple of pictures of the float getting some extra heat into the resin on a sunny day. Using two people and two bathroom scales the float looks to weigh around 106lbs at this point. Still have the deck and transom to go.




Next the flying float gets lowered into the supports for lamination and the other one gets itself strapped up high.

Better results on the bulkheads

Well, in my last post I thought there might be an issue with the Divinycell foam. This was certainly not the case, and I think I was hasty in publishing that post. As Tor commented, my problems were certainly caused by something else. I may never be sure.

Things are going much better now. After work today I cut the glass, the peel ply, the plastic sheet, measured and mixed the epoxy and completed the above lamination for the standard cabin bulkhead in 1 hour. I could never do that vacuum bagging.

Starting lamination of main hull bulkheads - a problem with using plastic over the peel ply

It has been hard to find time lately to work on boat parts. Same old story, too much time at the day job. That said, the little boat building demon in me will not let things stop totally. I started a test part ( the small middle forward bunk bulkhead) with the plan to do one side at a time going for a hand lay up, using peel ply and the plastic so that I could squeegee the air and excess resin out. To my surprise I found out that using the plastic on one side of a foam piece will not create the vacuum that I have seen elsewhere on the outer float hulls. After I would compress the foam, air would reappear underneath the plastic sheet. I can only deduce that the Divinycell foam that I am using is not totally closed cell in construction. I will be running out of Divinycell sheets at some point fairly soon. I think that I will make the main hull out of Corecell, especially if the foam turns out to properly closed, in other words, one side of the foam air isolated from the other.

So, for the moment I am just using peel ply as I can knock them off pretty quickly, laminating one side at a time. The epoxy weight to cloth weight ratio is alittle over 1 on the first part (ie epoxy weight/cloth weight) but I can live with that. I could go back to vacuum bagging the flat parts but it will require a setup of a larger table and I can't seem to find the time.

There are other techniques I can try. No doubt by the time I have all the bulkheads done it will be quite optimized. I can see why that after building the first boat some people just have to build another. All these skills that have been mastered and optimized for ones own personality, just have to be put to some use!

Main hull bulkhead outlines transferred to the foam

It is not very exciting work, but transferring the full size plan outlines to the foam is challenging in its own way. The many bulkheads parts have to located in the sheets, then they have to be correctly aligned and taped together. I've used 8"x11" size sheets of carbon paper, this means that on some of the larger bulkheads there are 'many' carbon sheets to keep underneath the lines that you want to transfer. Not a difficult job, but tedious.

Here is a picture of one of the sheets of foam with the bulkhead shapes ready cutting out and laminating. You can see that I go over the carbon trace with a permanent marker.

I'm thinking about doing these panels differently from the float bulkheads. Back then I cut the parts to the exact size and proceeded with the two sided vacuum bagging technique. This time I may cut the parts with about an inch or so of extra material around the perimeter. Then after lamination cut them down to the exact size. I'm also thinking that since my 'hand lay ups' with peel ply and plastic is getting so good I just may carry on with this technique on these panels.