Developing the... ..

Winding down the tooling process..

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 16:30:58 -0700

Its been so long. Let see where were we when we left off last time? Oh yes, Late 2010, Dart #2 was nearing completion. We’d also struck a deal with ABC Yachts to be a dealer for Darts. Now we have Yachtworld.com presence. Eww fancy!

About this time Jim Betts enters the picture again. Leif, the designer, is buddies with Chris. Chris is our local Ullman sail rep. Now Chris is buddies with Jim Betts. Colin, our new salesman from ABC Yachts, was up at Jim’s shop schmoozing. Between all of these characters it was decided that the Dart needed a stinger bow sprit. And, that I wasn’t getting around to this as fast as I should.

So Jim just starts building carbon sprit for us. The first I heard about it, was when he informed me that not only was he building me a sprit, but he’d already ordered a chute to fit it from Chris.

“Oh really?..”

Jim test fitting his carbon stinger to the bow of Dart #2.

Actually, they were right. It did need a sprit and I was busy elsewhere. The boat was completed, the sprit installed, sails delivered, deals inked. All just in time for the Seattle boat show.

Having a “pro. sales force” I was instructed to stay away from the boat show. Never let engineering talk to customers.

Back at the shop it was becoming obvious to me that it was time to move the company. Mostly we needed more room and that pushed the issue. So, while sales was doing the Seattle boat show with Dart #2, we picked up and moved shop.

Most of our stuff packed into the new building. Oh yeah, it was pouring down rain when we did this. I swear if feels like its been pouring down rain ever since..

We got a screaming deal on the rent for this place. Then there was the issue of the land lord not bothering to move his stuff out.

Finally, after weeks of fighting to get that resolved, we discover that the owners of this building complex are broke. Oh fun! I’ve moved the company to a building that’s going to be auctioned off by the bank in a couple months.

Currently there’s two different boat builders sniffing around hoping to buy the place. One has wanted this place for awhile, so I assume he’ll toss us out if he gets it. The other came by to inform me that he’s going to up my rent. As soon as he gets the building.

Lovely!

But anyway, what’s been going on in the tooling department?

We’ve been working on a production trailering package.

Rear mast chock plug. This is in the old building last year.

Making the mast cradle molds. No more plywood mast cradles for this machine!

Keel bulb cradle plug. Also in the old building.

Now here’s the beginning of the trailer story. Guy, remember Guy? He designed our first trailer. It was a quick and dirty thing just to get the boat launched.

Guy and his buddies at Shell Oil (Shhhh, don’t tell Shell) designed up a really nice welded aluminum trailer for us. This was all based on parts and dimensions from the original trailer.

Ok, now the main problem with the original trailer was that it chewed up the keel. Jim Betts had the fix for this with a nifty keel bulb cradle design. The other problem was it was tough to ramp launch with the boat riding so high. To solve this, Guy designed an I-beam extending tongue for this trailer.

At this point I gave the drawings to Jim, he’s an aluminum fabricator, and told him “build this”. He looked at them and asked; “Where’s the base for the keel?”

“You told me all about how to do those, put your design in there.”

He gave us the specs. for the keel plate and we started doing what we do. Build molds for it.

Then over the course of a month or so.. Everything changed. “You don’t want to do bunks they are too labor intensive, you really want fiberglas cradles.” Actually I did, but I didn’t want to deal with that now. Oh well, fine we can do that. Then the axles changed to fit the new keel tray. The design drifted further and further..

Trailer cradles. much bigger job that any of us imagined. Here’s the beginning laying up the initial shaped from the hull mold.

There was an huge amount of geometry that had to be accounted for in this setup. Luckily Tom has a knack for this kind of stuff. It would have melted my brain otherwise.

The raw cradles molds out of the hull mold.

Attaching the backing plate form braces.

Backing plate wood form.. Lots of geometry going on here that’s not obvious but must be perfect.

Backing plate being glassed together.

The wood form is all pulled off. We have the shape and geometry we need. Now we add 1/2” of glass & core to make up for the thickness of the foam that the boat will rest on.

The mold’s finally shaped and ready for final gelcoat. Next we pull off a part and see how it fits.

All dry stacked, ready to bag & shoot.

The part, turned out great!

Lining things up on the trailer.

After MUCH labor and a few runs back and forth to Mr Betts’ shop. The finished trailer.

Whew!

Welded aluminum trailer with extending tongue, composite cradles, composite mast chocks. Its a class act that took far more engineering and tooling that we figured on. But its done, and its slick!

And, as soon as I complete the paperwork on becoming a registered vehicle builder, it’ll be street legal.

“Ow my brain!”

Other things going on?

Washington state is feeling the squeeze for cash. So, it seems that they decided to do a lot of business audits to find those missing tax dollars. We’re in the middle of all this trailer & landlord stuff when we get the “You have been selected to be audited.” I’m like “Really? I’m spending bank on tooling, and you think maybe I’m holding back on some sales tax?”

Anyway, the last I heard from my book keeper is they were coming up with the exact amount the state owes US! Ha! that’ll show ‘em to pick on us little guys!

Stereos!

I taught my fiberglass boat building crew how to build the stereos. Now I don’t have to do it myself anymore!

Yay!

So we built 50 of them! Need a Simple Stereo? We got ‘em!

Refrigeration.

I wanted a project to learn 3D modeling with Solidworks. Also, for a long time I’d been fascinated by Peltier coolers. So, I finally designed and built one. Maybe we could use this to build refrigeration into the Darts? Donno’. But the thing works great. Within a minute it gets so cold that water dropped on it flash freezes instantly!

Racing..

Chris Winnard, remember the bow sprit deal earlier?

Well Chris & crew took Dart #2 out on the Windermere regatta and won.

Stephanie Schwenk, local racer here in town, has been borrowing Dart #1 for some beercans and local regattas.

She just ran Dart #1 in the Bellingham Women on the water regatta, pulled second. The Bellingham Herald did a photo shoot of the race and at least 1/2 the photos had Dart #1 in ‘em.

Pretty cool!

Geoff’s been taking Dart #1 out overnight cruising. Also, racing it with a crew of high school kids from the local high school. They’re having all sort of fun on the machine!

That’s about it

Closer and closer..

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 13:23:51 -0800

Its taking a lot of discipline to work through and document all the final details involved in building one of these boats. But, we’re doing it. Hopefully this will pay of later down the line. Here’s a quick look at what’s been going on.

Keel #2. We contracted James Betts to build us a new keel bulb mold. The last one didn’t survive the first pouring. Along with the bulb mold we also had five ingot molds built so that we will no longer use lead shot in the keels. There are now shaped lead ingots that pack much tighter into the keel fin for the extra weight.

The keel skins being bonded together.

The nose of the keel, glassed and smoothed. The nose of the keels are glassed over to help holding everything together. Once the keels are all bonded together, they are filled completely with liquid epoxy. The result is a very strong solid piece.

Keel’s all finished up ready for final fitting.

While this is going on we’re also busy in the hull mounting all the sailing hardware. Notice the printouts in the picture here. Documentation, documentation, documentation. What parts go where and what fasteners hold it all together.

Most of the bits installed. Even the LED running lights have been installed and tested.

Beginning the window install. Spacers are glued on first.

Pressing in the window.

Held in place waiting for the adhesive to kick off.

Electrical accessory panel installed. This is for mounting the battery charger, stereo and TackTick wireless speed and depth system. The difference this time is that we were able to build it all up as a module on the bench and just plop it in ready to run the wires.

For example: Switch panel wiring harness built, labeled and ready to instal.

Here’s where the switch panel harness will go. Now, last time these side panels were hand built and were extremely labor intensive.

This time.. We built up a set of tooling and templates to help.

From the mold we use to create the blank wood faced panels.. We built another mold. Using this new “inside” mold we created a set of “outside” skins.

Sometime before, we’d (Tom) created a set of “glass master” side panels. Using these master panels we trim the new “outside” skins to make templates for trimming out the wood faced panels.

Sounds complicated. It was complicated and took a long time! But the result is a very accurate and easy to use set of templates for cutting out the complex shape of the side panels.

And while all that’s going on, we’ve been doing experiments making infused composite teak and holly. Actually ours is cherry and maple.

The underside of the floor for a Dart. They have built in reinforcement plates as well as pads so that the flat floor will fit into the shaped boat bottom.

So, when flipped over and installed they look like..

This!

The wood is actually protected behind a layer of clear gelcoat and fiberglass, infused over glass wrapped foam core.

They turned out really cool!

So close! What’s left? The wood trim for the side panels, interior lights, the behind the panel wiring, railing rigging and setting up the mast.

Want a Dart? We can build ‘em now!

The engines drone on..

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 17:13:19 -0700

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!

Next, the deck.. This reminds me of those old pictures of the Ford Model T assembly lines.

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.

The real deal.

Wed, 4 Aug 2010 10:19:15 -0700

Hull #2, the first production quality boat, is going along just swimmingly. All that we learned building “Good Enough” along with Tom’s background and now Tim’s background in boat building is being put to work. Here’s some shots from the shop showing current progress.

Deck core templates. This took a lot of thought, coming up with how we were going to lay out the core on the deck. The deal is that everyone sees the underside of the deck. So, not only is the core a main structural factor, it has to look good as well.

Skin coat. Tom & Steve both beat me up to allow them to skin coat the deck before laying in the dry stack materials.

I didn’t want to deal with the open molding step or the extra weight that a skin coat adds to the part.

But, a skin coat works wonders for achieving an un-flawed surface gelcoat. In the end I relented and let them skin coat it.

Core going on, nearly complete..

A new twist. The navigation light wiring going into the core. That’s right, the navigation lights and the electronics power feeds are being built right into the deck.

On both sides of the companionway door, where everyone likes to mount instruments.. We supply the electronics & navigation light power feeds.

Pretty slick huh?

After the resin is infused into the part. The core looks like Roman tile work.

Cockpit area coring.

Notice the larger core section that goes across the cockpit floor? You can see it in the picture. No longer do we need thwart ship bracing. You will be able to haul elephants in this cockpit!

Deck #2 ready to trim up. It turned out great!

New foot rests. The mold for the version II foot rests is now complete. The new foot rests are the same height, but have more volume underneath. This allows the backstay rigging under them to clear better.

Also, they are symmetrical. This allows us to run one in front of the traveler, down the center of the cockpit.

Hull #2, skin coated. I let them skin coat the hull as well. Not only does this make for a tougher gelcoat, it allows the guys to walk in the hull when adding the first layer of glass.

First layer’s in, core’s going in.

Jim Betts and I had a talk about different brands and types of core. He told me that the best stuff was Corecell. In fact, all the boat builders I talked to around here agreed. Corecell was the best. So Corecell’s what we’re using.

Tim, finishing up the glass work.

Being infused.

All done! Ready for interior.

The new core absorbed far less resin than the old core material. (A good thing) So much less in fact, that it more than made up for the added weight of the skin coating. Better stronger parts and lighter to boot.

Slick!

Lining up the interior parts.

Bulkheads going in..

Tabbing in bulkhead #3. This is the main bulkhead. Most everything in the interior indexes off this part.

Mostly tabbed in. This is going on as I write. I keep going out and bugging them taking pictures.

What else is going on?

Mike’s shooting an experimental gelcoat interior panel.

Delrin molds. We finally found a machine shop we could work with. Inject Tool & Die, Inc. In Oak Harbor. (360) 679-6160 These guys are going on our gold star vendor list. They were able to develop this cool new delrin mold for the stereo.

Inject Tool & Die also redid the touch light tooling in delrin. The new tooling insets the electrical connection area. This makes mounting much easier because now only three holes are needed. Two for the mounting screws and one for the wires. Before this, the customer had to make a rectangular cutout for the connection hardware.

Inventory control.. Things are going into production, we’re going to need a much tighter control of parts. Therefore, we now have the beginnings an inventory system.

I noticed that Harken had images of all their parts on the web. So we put the pictures on the boxes. In this way, our non-sailing crew can figure out what goes where easier. Well actually, we’re all finding the pictures pretty handy.

So, that’s where we sit today. Slowly #2 goes together, but a lot faster than #1!

..and then?

Fri, 2 Jul 2010 12:32:11 -0700

The plan was to write an epilogue to all this. But that never seemed to work out. The story didn’t end at the launch, it goes on. So, we’ll go along and see where it leads us.

We’d launched the boat, sailed it some, pulled it out to fix up the first set of “bugs” we’d run into.

One bit was to get a marina slip to keep the machine in and in order to make this workable, we needed bottom paint. Ian of Counter Current Marine did the bottom job. He’s the only one in Anacortes that we know of that will do spray on bottom paint.

Interior. I’d fought tooth and nail for my big fluffy boat cushions. It was now time to get them installed. We’d left the Dart in the shop over Christmas break and I spent some time making up floor plates, fiddles for the bunks, mounting an ice chest. General interior bits that needed doing.

While this is going on we’re taking the Dart out and seeing how it works.

Winter sailing, brrr!

More importantly, during this time, Ian & Joy are also taking the boat out and seeing how it works. And what needs changing.

Early chute..

The hull mold was pretty torn up when we pulled out the first boat. Again due to our ignorance and my not keeping a close enough eye on what was going on. Live and learn, but these lessons are pretty expensive.

Half the mold all fixed up and ready to put back to work. SteveK did the rebuild job for us. It turned out wonderful!

Then things change again..

Remember this picture showing what cool kinds of boats were being built here in town? Sure you do..

The company that built these monster machines went bankrupt. Actually, a lot of boat builders did last fall.

So, seeing that the guy that was in charge of building them monster luxury yachts was a buddy of SteveK’s. Who, when he’s not busy does work for us.. We hired him and now he is in charge of building Darts. In fact. that’s him helping pull the hull mold out of the shop in the picture above.

Why hire a shop forman? The plan is to build up the second boat using what we learned building the prototype. Also, while this is being done, template everything so doing subsequent boats would be much more reasonable. Tom’s experience building mega luxury yachts, along with him being buddies with the people that have helped us in the past, made him a shoe-in for the job. This allows me to work on getting the bugs worked out of the original Dart as well as finish development on the nifty bits that are going into them.

Also we now have and unending source of boat building knowledge right here in the shop. That and when we need different kinds of work done, Tom must know every worker and workshop in the county.

Very handy!

New things we’ve come up with.

For example..

Looks like wood.

But its not..

Its not wood. Or at least that’s what we call it. Its infused fiberglas panel that uses wood veneer instead of gelcoat.

Infusing an interior panel.

An offshoot of this project was aluminum infusion molds. The boat builders are a bit suspicious of this idea. But the fact that I can have a ‘mold’ made up in one afternoon by the local farm tool repair shop outweighed their nay saying.

Works great!

Fitting the bare panel into the Dart.

Steve making up the interior panel..

Ta dah! The finished panel all installed. Its actually held in place with velcro. An ingenious mounting method that Tom came up with.

The little silver plate inside the cubby hole is the plugin plate for the boat’s Simple Stereo.

This also included adding a battery and wiring harness.

Graphics..

We showed the boat off in the local in-the-water boat show. We were off to the side and mostly the people were looking for powerboats. But it was free, and it was very good to get some experience showing off the boat to the public.

Then we did a trip to Santa Cruz CA. Birthplace of the ultra light sailboat. Also one of the places where I learned to sail back in the day.

The trip was a fiasco. The boat wasn’t ready, I wasn’t ready, the weather wasn’t ready, Leif didn’t show, piles of friends & family did..

The boat turned a lot of heads ( In the 6.2 minutes we were able to sail it ) but pretty much the trip was a lot of stress for very little payback.

Oh well, next time..

Meanwhile back at the ranch..

Tom & crew have been turning out all the bits that go into Darts. Not only that but documenting time & materials along with creating templates for all the glass and core bits that go in ‘em.

Keels skins..

Chains of hatch plates..

Mike & Tom building..

And popping bunk liners..

All trimmed up and ready to install.

While this is going on I’m buried stepping up the stereo building project. This is a far larger nightmare than I planned on. Fighting with machine shops bla bla bla.. What a pain. But they are selling and we need to get them shipped.

About half way through this I take a week off to, well.. Sleep. I’m just that cooked.

Tom takes on the casting step, I do the final soldering. Dr-T assembles the PC boards. It ends up working out rather well. We’re still, as of this writing, doing the machine shop tooling experiments. But I think, fingers crossed, that we have a handle on that now.

The LED Touchlight.

Oh boy..

Not liking what we could find on the market we decided to make up our own reading lights. We wanted the most efficient, longest lasting light possible and hang the cost.

Well.. In the end we got what I asked for. But wow! It took some engineering to get there. And we found out, if you want the best LEDs, they cost a bundle!

This project has been on and off for about seven months.

The result?

They are so cool!

Touch ‘em to get light, touch ‘em to turn ‘em off.

Flush mounted and encapsulated in solid Urethane.

Whereas most LED lights on the market today give you kinda’ a cold blue spotlight effect, this one gives a more golden colored floodlight effect.

Link : Left Coast LED Touchlight

Meanwhile back on the water..

Ian’s been racing the Dart in the local Wed. night beer can races. This is so we can get a handle on what changes we want to do to the Dart before offering them for sale.

The main trouble is that it seems like the Center of Gravity is just too high. At least to me. Leif says that If I add as much as one lb. more ballast to the boat he’s never speaking to me again. Ei yi yi..

Ian, Jim Betts and I talk over our options. One thing we can do right now is to loose the absurdly complicated and way oversized standing rigging. Jim re-fabricates the spreader tips, Ian orders some PBO rigging to be made up.

The PBO project winds up, of course, Wed. evening. We hear the start of our race class as we are still putting the rig back together at the dock. Boom on, vang on, mainsail.. Ok lets go! Guy and I with a pickup crewman go out to chase down our class. No we don’t win, but the scary part is.. We don’t come in last either.

The boat handles great! I’m getting hooked on this lighter rig thing really quick.

Talking to Leif, he tells me that removing the roller furler will have the same effect as the rig swap all over. “Fine.. I’ll try it without.” Ian gets one of the jibs redone with hanks and makes up a new headstay.

Another offshoot of the race course testing is an asymmetrical chute. Both Leif & Ian have been beating me over the head with these. I’ve been dragging my feet about these newfangled things.

This chute is so bloody easy to use, anyone can fly it. It uses no sprit or pole at all. You gybe it like a big genny. Its great! I’m sold!

I call it the “Family Chute”

So we swap out the roller furler just in the nick of time for the local Ullman sails rep, Chris Winnard to try his hand at doing the Wed. night race. We’re talking within minutes here. He shows up, bringing his own crew and does the race. I do the rail meat thing and do my best to keep my mouth shut.

He doesn’t just beat “B” fleet. He destroys every boat out there. Starting in “B” fleet, finishing somewhere in “A” fleet.. ( They are “faster” and have 5 minute head start on us. ) Manages to get the fastest elapsed time around the course for any boat for any fleet including the multihulls..

Yeah, I’m kinda’ pleased. With someone that knows what they are doing, this thing flies!

As we’re pulling into the marina I ask him how the boat felt. Did it handle ok? Was it, maybe too tender? I got one of those “Why is he asking stupid questions” looks. “I like the boat, it works fine.”

Finally! We’ve arrived!