efficient 10m displacement powercat

[harry cassin]

Glad to see you designing you own cat, i wish i had enough knowledge to be able to work cad etc, I was going to do a 50 foot simpson some years ago and thought on it for 6 months and came to the realisation that it's a huge commitment.

[groper]

And so it has begun...



These are the first 2 peices of this boat to be infused;




They are 2 of the webs in the forward beam which will also form the sides to the anchor locker etc...

All bulkheads and beams have been cut out of the airex foam sheets via CNC router from the CAD drawings, the files sent to the local CNC guy look like this;





Ive put together the mold for the hull "shoes" and this will be an interesting experiment to see how well a direct female mold for infusion works... its built very lightly out of 3mm foamed PVC as an inside former, with a skin coat of glass/epoxy to seal up the joins and staples etc... i have no idea how well its going to work with infusion, could be a complete disaster and destroy itself or a surprising success!



Here is an updated rendering of the boat as ive made a few changes prior to finally making up my mind



The weather is absolutely atrocious these last few days, so i cant do anything outside, but I will be gradually getting thru things over the next few months when the weather improves... just doing some more small infusions to get a better feel for how things work, then ill go for those hull shoes! So far so good... happy days

[harry cassin]

Looks fantastic, hope to see many more photo's

[groper]

Busy infusing bulkheads lately... ive worked out that its quicker and easier to hand laminate small panels, its only worth infusing the larger panels IMHO... so im planning the infusions to be as large as possible from now on...

So heres a few pics;

This is a few peices i hand laminated on the table;


Heres a pic showing how im doing the cutout reinforcement in the bulkheads. The cutout is routed out of the foam core, then fill the bottom of the channel with thickened epoxy and let it setup. Then wetout some 1000gsm UNI tape, fold it up and push it into the channel and finish it flush with some more thickened epoxy. Once its all cured, i infused the top and bottom skins over this, and trim it back to the solid UNI edge once cured. You could do all manner of cutouts like this, windows, doorways etc...


And this is the end of the infusion of one of the beam bulkheads including the shear web reinforcement, aswell as the 6mm x 100mm thick solid UNI top and bottom caps rebated into the foam and infused in 1 shot after the cutout reinforcement. This panel is 5m beam * 2.2m depth to give an idea of size and weighs 38 kilograms + whatever paint goes on later. Will do another one of these tomorrow if all goes to plan



Happy days...