Its been a fairly busy weekend in the garage, with a significant amount of work completed. As can be seen above, we placed the sides onto the jig and they conformed pretty well. The sides were done in two pieces and joined slightly forward of the midpoint in a position that didn't experience much bending.


We also managed join the panels in the bottom of the hull and and glue them at the chine. Now only the forward sections of the hull need to be attached. Then we can begin trimming up the chines and getting it ready to laminate the outside of the hull.


We also managed to make a few components to help take to load off further down the track. The image above is a bracket for holding the self tacker track ends to the flat foredeck. This is the same arrangement as used on my old boat, but just made a little neater this time around. (The item above is cut into two brackets and trimmed up to be fitted to the boat)


This is the rudder gantry being laminated on the mould. The layers on the underside were laminated straight to the mould and then the foam plug was placed over the top and laminated over. The lay-up consisted of (1x carbon cloth, 2x 300gsm UNI carbon) each side and a 30 x 25mm foam core. The flat panel on the bottom is to prevent the gantry from "catching water" as this was a problem with my previous design (mainly because it was mounted to close to the water).

The above image is with the final later of carbon cloth ready for the peel ply, release film, breather and vacuum bag.


This is the gantry in the vacuum bag.

Above is the mandrel for our new boom. Simply a 20 x 20 mm steel box section with 75 x 50 mm strips of polystyrene foam glued each side. The steel is the keep the foam straight when shaping and laminating. My aim is to shape a boom with an elliptical cross section that tapers from goose-neck to boom tip. It will be maximum depth at the goose neck (class rule: must pass through a 104 mm ring) then taper to approx 60 mm at the tip end.

After this weekend the remaining components to manufacture are as follows:

• Laminate tiller / build rudder stock
• Laminate transom bar
• Build side tank moulds / make side tanks
• Design / build centre case
• Foreword tension strut for rig space frame
• Foot rests for floor

Then basically finishing the hull shell and putting it all together, easy right?