Still at it, and you doubted us..
Still at it, and you doubted us..
Dr T at Left Coast South has been busy! What you see above is LED touch light PC boards stuffed, tested and ready to cast into their shiny metal hoods. Dr T builds these by hand. I don’t envy him. The parts are so small, I can hardly see the silly things. We are down to our last two touch lights and none of them are the silver ones we need for installing in the Darts. Each Dart gets four silver touch lights. Therefor, the southern factory has been awakened and is turning out electronics for us again.
Speaking of churning out product. Here’s the first pass at the order from Fisheries in Seattle. When buying boat parts, most everything we don’t get direct from the manufacturers, we get from Fisheries. They have been pretty good to work with.
I figured I’d give them a plug there.
Yesterday was a pile of boxes about the same size from Harken. the stockroom is filling up.
The “last mold”. Is getting closer to actually becoming a mold. Here it is getting its backing reinforcement bits glassed in.
And here’s the front side, popped off the plug. Its going to need some sanding. The plug was a quickie.
Remember on the build log for #3 I went on and on about green angle? Well, here’s some being used. These are the latch brackets being bonded to the bottom of a Dart hatch. These brackets are carved from.. Green angle.
The bit of plywood is a template to position them in the correct locations.
Being stubborn about not buying overseas glass fabric has tossed a bit of a monkey wrench in things. We’ve run completely out of 1700 and that’s a real staple size for us around here. So, we switched to making trailer bunks. We need trailer bunks as well as boat parts, and they don’t use 1700.
Rear bunk being infused. This is going on as I type actually.
Hull insert. This is the bit that’s waxed up, attached to the bottom of the hull mold and creates the hole in the hull where the keel goes through. Now, from day one we’ve had issues with the keels being a little too tight fore and aft when we install them. Even Mark’s Dart, #3 gave us trouble when we installed the keel.
On our list of things to upgrade was, find out what’s the deal with the keel to keel hole fit. Turns out this piece was built about 1/8” too short fore and aft. So, the first step is to reshape this part to be correct. What you are seeing is the reshaped part. But here’s the deal. The build tolerances for this boat are very tight. Meaning, this change will ripple out a bunch of other changes.
For one, this is a new keel ring sizing template being built to fit the new hull insert. When a keel is built we glass on a ring that fits very closely to the hull opening. Well, that opening is changing, we need to build a new template.
There are also changes in the keel trunk. That mold has been in rework on and off during most of this build. I’ll get some pix next time.
..and there’s other things being built that will hopefully make assembling Darts easier.
But it all takes time..
Wednesday, December 19, 2012