The engines drone on..
The engines drone on..
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Taking a break from the boat shop doing the Wed. night race in the family RV..
Bulkheads going in and the walls being smoothed before gelcoating. One of the main ideas behind this boat is to really dial in our Fit & Finish. Building hull #1 was all about “Can we actually pull this off?”. Now that we know we can, we’re working on dialing up the quality of the product.
That and doing whatever we can to make Hull #3 easier to build.
Looking aft you can see the compression post reinforcement is in. Most of the green angle is in as well. Green angle is the fiberglass version of angle iron.
Keel trunk being installed..
Every thing’s glued & glassed in, ready for..
De-molding! The interior is a big part of the structure on this boat, so the hull can not be de-molded before the interior is in place.
Last time took two days to pull the hull from the mold. Then there was about a month or rework. This time it took about ten minutes and almost no rework at all.
Whewh!
Slip the completed hull under..
Lining things up..
There you go. Fits like a glove!
Hull to deck seam.
Last interior glass bits attaching the deck to the hull, chain plate braces and stanchion braces..
Finished.
Hand tabbed bulkheads. Looks like they grew in place.
I’m extremely pleased how the hand glassing turned out on this boat. The goal was to make it look like the entire interior was grown as once piece. This is how it turned out.
Inside the lockers under the bunks.
Also, power feeds for navigation lights and electronics. Both sides of the companionway have these power feeds built in.
While this is all going on, we took Hull #1 “Good Enough” to the “Boat’s Afloat” show in Seattle. Lots of fun, I had the kids there for three days.
It rained so much Geoff & I designed a camping tent for the boat. Turned out great! We’re going to include the tent in the interior package. Its that nice!
Another shot. Notice the interior of the boat has a nice homey glow? That’s our LED Touch lights. What you are seeing is a tad more than 1/2 of an amp of power lighting up the entire interior of the boat. ( All four Touch lights running. )
And, the Simple Stereo uses about 1/3 of an amp on average. ( I guess if I don’t tell anyone, no one will know )
A little slight of hand here. When you lift the keel in the Dart, it tends to dominate the entire interior of the machine. This is no good for showing it to prospective customers. Its not like that when your using the Dart, just when its being trailered. But, removing the keel would be bad as well because people would get the impression that it didn’t have one. And, this bulb keel is one of the features that make the machine sail so nicely. Or at all, for that matter.
What to do?
Simple, we build and install a “fake keel”. The fake keel is really lightweight and really short. So, when someone walks up to the Dart on its trailer they see the keel in its trailering position. “Ah, bulb keel, very high performance.” Then when they look inside, the “keel” is shown in its sailing position. “Ah, nice interior!”
If anyone notices, we show them that its a fake for the show. But only about 1 in 20 seemed to notice.