CNC Plans not Included

Plywood sanded and painted so no fairing is needed. It wont be ultraglossy though, hull will have to be scuffed, primed, sanded and painted. Im also thinking using laminate over ply, like formica or polyboard which has a finished surface

 

I've been there, done that- it's not as easy as it sounds
.. how will you ensure the entire thing is vacuum tight? All of the Chines and coves have to be airtight. If it's not, how long will it take you to find all the leak points and seal them up... it just goes on and on... and then still have to high build, spot fair and paint the entire thing... it's huge Jorge.

Have you added up all the costs of all this temporary material? It's not cheap either...

I don't think I would go for a stack infusion. I think it's more time efficient to pull perfect finished surfaces 1 at a time. The joins are quick and easy to fair and flow coat over, sand them back and Polish them back to a shine. Or just hide them under antifoul, interior stuff etc. Taping seams is pretty quick. The fairing of the edges in the coves and chines takes forever as its easy to pick unfair lines with a naked eye so they have to be perfect. Same goes for the finish of every surface, the tiniest imperfections show up like dogs balls one you have a gloss coat on it. That's why repeatably pulling perfect surfaces from a table saves so much time...spend the time on making a perfect table and it will repay itself many times over throughout the build.

 

I can sheathe that mold pretty darn fast and it will be perfect. All butt joints have to be beveled back and filled with resin then feather sanded down. Would has to be sealed, primed and painted. No way it can not be vacuum proof by that time.

It's going to be tedious but it will go fast. I have one month scheduled to build the mold and cost will be around 25-30K for materials. Also I will have two or more laborers helping during that time.

 

Kelsall's KSS system

Groper,..Just wondering what you think of Derek Kelsall's KSS system ??
http://www.kelsall.com/TechnicalArticles/SummaryOfArticles.htm

 

It's a bit intimidating because of it's size but it's not complicated.

 

Brian- KSS is great. However you can't achieve the underwater lines were after using the fold up method - hence you build the below waterline section separately then join on developable Topsides...

Jorge- the amount of effort your talking about building this mold is equal to building another plywood boat! It's huge... and I doubt you'll be able to reuse the mold too, you'll end up destroying it to get the boat out of it.

All this to avoid a few tape seams? I taped by hull shoe to topsides, and bridgeck to hull seams in a couple hours per seam. Could probably do 4 seams in a day working with 1 helper to help with the overhead seams of th3 bridgedeck floor ( working from underneath).

If your mold chines aren't perfect you'll still have to bog sand and fair these areas anyway....

 

The reality starts to set in.

Been there done that as you say.

Vinylester you speak of preferring, shrinks like all get out. Every foam cut every
infusion channel will print through. Laying down CSM (heavy) against the gel only renders a small improvement.

Pretty sure this is why Mr Kelsall says KSS boat still requires painting. Gel gives one something to sand and is orders of magnitude fairer to begin with.

Having gel repaired for a living, good luck matching your flow coated joins. Gel out of the same tin will set with colour variations (noticeable when polished) due to variables such as temperature during cure, amount of catalyst added etc etc.

Basically if you want a nice finish your going to have to paint.

 

Everyones reality is different,
http://www.the-wayfinder.com/wayfinder-build-part-3-infusion/

But Groper yes you are right when you say pulling more than one boat might be a problem, not because the mold will be destroyed, but because we might not have the vertical clearance.

If you want to build in flat panels, that is totally up to you. It may still be worth the while to build in Croatia so we can leverage buying power and we can help you with laborers, equipment, whatever the proper infusion table as we would use it too I am sure, paperwork etc...

 

My old boat pictured a few posts up was vinylester. When the boat was finished in 2003 it was perfectly fair. Or so I was told, but have no reason to believe otherwise. I don't know how long it lasted but as the vinylester post cured over the years a lot of print through showed up. It was very noticeable from some angles and mentioned on the survey, but only as being cosmetic.

I spoke to the builder (the cat factory, back them Mike Bakers yard). Powell told me that this is what happened "back then" when they didn't post cure. Now they would post cure such a vinylester hull to prevent subsequent natural post curing causing print through.

So don't forget the post curing if you use vinylester. Sure its beneficial for strength with both epoxy and vinyl, but at least epoxy doesn't shrink to any meaningful degree.

 

Liveaboard Cruisier for the Real World

Another touch of 'reality' to sailing around the world....

 

Interesting article. Plenty of his theories I could dispute. But his main general philosophy is solid. I will however add that his boat is a very poor performing boat in light wind. Considerably worse than my own boats I have done real sea miles on and much worse than the style of boat being designed in this thread.

I crossed the Pacific from California to Brisbane and motored for less than 10% of the distance not 50%. Mostly in the ITZ. My boat was a hunter legend 40.5 which by looking at sailboat data has a large rig and I equipped her with a furling screecher. Our daily average went down by almost a knot after the screecher was destroyed by a whale in Niue when it ripped the bow of our boat off after it tangled in our mooring.

The above is something that only someone with cruising experience can understand that has also payed for brand new sails. Having sails slatting in very light winds where waves still exist (read almost always) is not only extremely annoying and uncomfortable, its also a monumentally stupid way to try and save money. As soon as we had much slatting we motorsailed to keep them full or lowered them. As old mate says, it cost about $1.50 per hour to motor and new sails cost $10,000. The motion also gets far better. Its sea sickness inducing to sail in those conditions.

Jorge should be able to motor in these conditions at 4k which should be OK. We found in sloppy sea states we need to go 5k plus to get a more comfortable motion. But this was a mono. I found cats need to go faster than monos to get a similar dynamic stabilisation effect. But with this boats intended large sail plan and motorsailing on the gen set, it may probably be fine in many occasions.

Another anecdote here. We sailed from the Marquesas to the Tuamotus and left the same time as our freinds in their light racing boat with a good turn of speed in light air. Soon after the wind died. Us being us fired up the engine, them being them who rarely fire up thier engine did not. They slatted around a while then finally dropped sail. We beat them to the destination by SEVERAL days, even though we only motored for about 14 hours. The only explanation for that which makes sense is we motored out of the dead calm into wind and started sailing again. They were stuck in the dead area of no wind for days.

 

The whole game has changed in recent times with respect to materials. There is epoxy gelocoat now, very low shrink VE resins that often have superior properties to infusion epoxies. The industry has driven forward rapidly thanks to the wind turbine industry. If you think they haven't figured all this out you're still living in the last millennium....

 

Yeah well it didn't seem that long ago when I suggested using vinylester for infusion on such a build and you said it was a silly place to save money when epoxy is so much better and wont increase the cost of the finished boat by all that much...

Seems an area you would research directly before buying, just like the solar electric system instead of going by what you think you know about today's and yesterdays products. Seems even polyester has come a long way, and if I were about to buy half a ton resin of I would even take a look at that. For interest sake at least, it may still not be strong or waterproof enough.

http://www.easycomposites.co.uk/#!/...-vinylester/ip2-polyester-infusion-resin.html

https://docs.google.com/viewerng/vi...15/12/tech-data-vinylester-infusion-resin.pdf

I just randomly picked the first 2 I could find and the iso poly has a higher tensile modulus but the tensile strength is lower, and so is the elongation at break and it absorbs a lot more water. That concludes my research on the matter as I am not about to buy a whole bunch of it. It would probably take a few days to do a proper comparison. I'm sure someone has done it. Certainty it seems the folks at Dazcat have done it and can make a very fast, light and stiff cat using it in much of the build.

 

It's not all about circumnavigating

You know what I love about the whole idea of living in Croatia in an old stone house with my boat anchored just out my back door. I can get my neighbors who probably don't speak english to watch my donkey, chickens and dog while I take the boat out for a month or so and bring back some fish! lol

That is the life!

well maybe the donkey and the dog can come with me, now that would be a sight ))

 

Thats it. No wind, well just don't go out May favourite application for electric aux propulsion is for racing and pleasure sailors who just need to get on and off thier mooring/dock. Makes perfect sense here. The batteries will be charged during the week and ready for use on the weekend.