Warren's Build Log, CAN 573

[Warren Nethercote]

I haven't set any records for speed but it took just 10 pages of build log to get to launch (and this post is the first on page 11). Launch day was a bit chaotic, including dropping a keel retention bolt in the keel box, which took a while to fish out, but we got it wet and I even went for a short, main-only solo sail. Need to tidy up some running rigging .... the tension between getting it right and running short of Harken bits was apparent!

More sailing tomorrow, along with a few tweaks.

[Marino]

Excellent name for the boat and well done.

[Warren Nethercote]

Another sail today, this time with main and jib. Demonstrated that I need to rework some control lines and especially the jib halyard arrangement. I will admit to having had trepidation over sailing to the handicap (150 sec/mi), but three-up in 8 to 10 knots wind and light chop showed satisfying speed upwind and near continuous planing downwind, with a very melodious keel. I guess I screwed up my anti-singing trailing edge.

I am quite happy with the sails so far, and especially the square-top main. But it is definitely going to be a 'gloves required' boat in any wind.

The major disappointment is the discovery that I too have a leak, probably associated with the keel box like other's. It is not bad so it won't get fixed any time soon. Gotta sort out the control line issues before our first race, not to mention giving a chute some air time.

Sorry, no new photos.

[admin]

Oh man, does this ever sound familiar! And yeah, those keels do sing...

[monsters inc]

Mine too.i think it’s an F#.

[Warren Nethercote]

Sorry, no photos, but we got our fourth sail in today .....

1. Launch day I sailed for about 45 minutes, solo and main only, towing a dinghy.
2. The next day, Canada Day, we sailed three up in 8-10 knots. No great effort at sail trim but went uphill well and planed off the wind. Spent the next to days re-working some control lines.
3. Saturday I intended to sail in a single-handed race because the forecast was light. Missed the start because I was late assembling control lines and then the sky cleared and the sea-breeze turned on (10-12 knots and lumpy sea). With full main and jib I made poor progress to windward, but man-o-man, what a hoot off-wind, bearing off down wave faces and heading up in the troughs, but planing all the time. The deep rudder is a godsend.
4. Today we went out to practice for the club's 'ladies race' on the weekend. I managed to snag a past 470 Women's World Champion to drive and hope some of her knowledge sticks to me. It was light today, so no off-wind planing, but lots of tacking and gybing practice. Spinnaker douses were problematic at times, perhaps in part because the recovery patches aren't quite in the right place. But the last time it went smoothly, so maybe it's us ....

Overall I am pleased, and especially so with the square-top main. But kudos to Phil who sailed his i550 mainly single-handed. No easy job that.

Now for the question: in a crude sense, what apparent wind angles are people sailing at when sailing down wind in races for best VMG? Based solely on the Windex, is apparent wind on the beam or aft of the beam? Presumably the angle gets deeper as wind increases. I have seen some polars, but they just don't make sense ....

[Warren Nethercote]

There have been some nice comments about my trailer so I thought I'd give some detail. I looked around for ready-to-go designs and bought plans from Glen-l, but found the most useful 'model' in a RIB trailer from 'Trailer Sauce' a New Zealand plan source. I bought his plans and went from there. The lineage is hard to trace since I'm using rubber suspension instead of an axle an leaf springs, but having a starting point is always useful in a design process. Design process is pretty glorified, as I never completed a detailed drawing and the trailer changed as it went, the first being change being to adopt a 3 inch draw bar so I could use a commercially-available tongue hinge. Enough chatter, on to pictures.

Gonna take two posts to add all the attachments ......

[Warren Nethercote]

Continued .... guidance drawings. When I was looking at commercial trailers the target was 63 inches between fenders. I ended up with 66 and that is barely adequate, the goal being to get the boat as low as possible for easy launch and haul and a good view in the rear view mirror.. The penalty is width over 80 inches which invokes more detailed lighting requirements.

Apologies for mixed metric and British units. I know it is a bad habit, but I choose the one that's most convenient ....

Oh yes: I spent about 1,000 bucks or more. A drop centre commercial trailer of suitable width looked like about $2500. That extra $1500 would have been money well spent in terms of efort! Having the trailer galvanized was a good deal at something like $275 for the 351 lb frame and fittings.

[Warren Nethercote]

We were doing some pratice today before tomorrow's 'ladies race' at SMSC. Someone liked us enough to take a picture and put it on Facebook, so it's low res and it didn't catch us at the best moment either. But hey, it's a photo so Blondie must exist.

[Warren Nethercote]

Back to the build log - I might as well do some 'adjusting' while the broken mast gets addressed. First on the list is the tiller ...

Don't know how many I've built but I rarely get the length right first time. This one was too long. Great for the helmsman on a beat, but a pain when tacking and an awkward angle on the tiller extension when perched on the corner of the boat going fast down wind. So, let's lop off 10 inches, which is about the limit of the raised horizontal portion. More than that and a new tiller would be in order. Next season we'll see if it is enough.

[Warren Nethercote]

If you can't go sailing you might as well use up carbon fibre scraps ... well, some bought sock too.

Put together a wand for my rarely used video camera rather than do nothing. Insurance has approved my mast repair and it has been scheduled.

[Warren Nethercote]

Back in business ...

I picked up my repaired mast on Friday and count my good fortune because the shippers really did their very best to destroy it en route from Arnprior to Halifax via Montreal and Moncton. But it survived what must have been an angry forklift indeed. In the end I think it was the mast that was keeping the crate together.

Today we re-ran the halyards, re-attached the spreaders and rough-measured for the new, conventional lower shrouds. I need to order some heat set Dyneema for those.

Oh, we're still six to eight weeks away from sailing, but I wanted to get things ready and get the mast out of the way in the shop.

[admin]

Glad it arrived intact, Warren! Can you describe the method by which the mast was repaired?

[Warren Nethercote]

Mast repair process:

The mast was broken in two places, first one being at the gnav lowers t-hook plates and the second just above the lower spreaders (coincidently just above the top of the sleeve where the two pieces mast was originally joined (CCI only has a 20 ft autoclave so the mast was made in two pieces).

We couldn't just clean up the breaks and shorten the mast because I have a max hoist mainsail. Additionally, with the upper break just above the original sleeve, a stepped sleeve would have been required - ugly. Instead, CCI cleaned up the top of the bottom bit, and the bottom of the top bit, and made a new, longer centre section and two sleeves for joining the bits. The bits were reassembled at the correct length and the only outfitting required was replacing the lower spreader brackets and the lower t-hook plates, and installing a new (49er style) sail track after clear coating.

The repair took a while because I indicated that an early spring delivery would be fine so CCI were able to do it as a ‘fill in’ job in the shop rather than as a priority.

A nav arch/surveyor friend of mine has dealt with a number of replacement spars, both his own and customers, and in his experience no mast has survived road shipping (specialized boat shippers aside) without some damage. He thinks I was lucky. In a similar vein, many, many years ago the Kidd brothers sailed in overseas I14 events by borrowing hulls at the regatta but taking their own rig on the flights as excess baggage. The system worked fine until a lazy ground handler balanced their mast across the tines of a fork lift and drove though a doorway that was significantly narrower than the length of the mast. Oops.

[Warren Nethercote]

Last year we found the mainsheet traveller and mainsheet jamber too low for easy cleating so I thought we would change something. Building bits is more fun than buying new hardware so we stripped out the traveller and mocked up a traveller bridge and jamber support in foam. The foam mock-up is likely to become the plug for using up left over carbon fibre. Overkill perhaps, but cool ...

One consideration is whether the 'arches' below the bridge will be big enough for drainage - I think not. When you stuff the bows into a wave a lot of water rushes over the foredeck and there is no reason to invite it to stay longer than is necessary en route to the transom.

If the photo looks odd it is because it has been rotated - the boat is actually on edge as the attic ladder in the background illustrates.

[Warren Nethercote]

I decided that the solution to letting the water through was turning the bridge into a beam, with separate supports. It is design on the fly, so I haven't figured out the end fixtures yet: probably a flange ... access to the side tank is problematic at the mainsheet traveller. I need to review my build photos to see where I added a doubler for fasteners. (Edit: I checked and the doubler is forward of the frame - success! or luck.)

I surfaced the foam core with 3mm Okume to keep it straight while laying up the carbon fibre and inserted wood dowels to take the compressive loads of the fasteners for the track. I won't bother disolving out the foam from the beam.

[Warren Nethercote]

Progress ...

Flanged the ends of the beam via a bit of Heath Robinson (aka Rube Goldberg). Now have some cleanup, filleting and filling before installation. And clearcoat of course.

[Warren Nethercote]

Here it is, installed. No traveller car yet - why is it that you only have (n-1) 4 inch machine screws when the job requires n. With Nova Scotia's COVID Wave 3 lockdown I won't get that last one (for the traveller car end stop) for 10 days or so. The finished bridge, without hardware weighed a bit less than 3 3/4 lbs, so I didn't bother to dissolve out the foam core.

I must get on with getting stuff back together. And I think I found the site of my small leak last season, so I can address that too. But time will tell if I am correct.

[Warren Nethercote]

Keeping the crew's union happy ...

About a year ago I posted about my jibsheet ratchet and jammer solution, hidden under the deck. It worked fine, but the sheet cleated upwards and released downwards because the cleat was upside down under the deck. I have turned the cleat over, with some Delrin spacers to gain some height. Whether a Harken 150 CamMatic will survive when mounted this way remains to be seen, but the crew should start the season happier!

[Warren Nethercote]

An engine hoist is the boatbuilder's friend.

Our COVID regulations still don't allow outside-of-family gatherings until at least next week so reinstalling the keel and restoring Blondie to level from her on-edge winter was going to be a solo affair. My engine crane to the rescue!

The crane helped getting the boat onto the trailer too, but no photos because of the blue atmosphere.

[Warren Nethercote]

It can (almost) always be undone ....

Remember last year when I chopped 10 inches off my tiller and wondered if I'd cut off enough? Well, it was too much, and caused some consternation during gybes. So I took advantage of the interregnum for my surgical recovery to stick 6 1/2 inches back on. It's a good thing I saved the off-cut! I simply cut a step joint in each part, filled the interior near the join with Divinycel and thickened epoxy and, after that set, covered the joint with two CF and one Kevlar sock from my scraps box (the Kevlar sock was left over from a DN tiller).

[Warren Nethercote]

A couple of winter jobs started ....

We're trying to clean up spinnaker drops. Part will come from a new, not quite so big spinnaker, at 33 SqM, half way between our two existing ones. The second part comes from reworking the opening in the deck to improve radii - the old opening was pretty square and I'd just used a 1/2 inch round-over bit for the corners. The recovery patches could hang up on that.

I also wanted to 'fix' the jib tracks which were too far forward and couldn't really sheet inboard far enough. I was torn between going conventionally or staying with transverse tracks, but in the end stayed transverse, although I needed to build some CF supports to cantilever the tracks inboard. It would have been easier had I built a more conventional, narrower 'companionway' opening.

Work in progress.

[Warren Nethercote]

Small steps of progress. I sheathed the revised spinnaker launch/recovery opening's perimeter with 9 oz. biaxial carbon (much easier to manipulate around the corners than cloth) and then decided to add a layer of Kevlar because of the tracks left in previous carbon fiber sheathing by the recovery line in dousing disasters. I sliced open some 4 inch diameter Kevlar biaxial sock that I had on hand and laid it on REALLY wet so I could get a good surface with the peel ply. Experience tells me that you create nothing but grief if you have lumps in the Kevlar that need grinding down. There are some wrinkles in the peel ply that I hope are just full of resin ....

I have to admit that 'slicing open' a Kevlar sock is not a simple as it seems unless you have a a nifty set of 80 dollar scissors. A ceramic knife works too.

[Tim Ford]

Looks incredibly solid!

[Warren Nethercote]

I came to regret the layer of Kevlar when I sanded through the resin and the Kevlar turned to bullet-proof fur. But I found a solution. I applied a coat of two part primer which solidified the tufts of Kevlar fur and then sheared them off with the ceramic knife I bought for cutting Dyneema. Not a perfect solution, but good enough. More primer and spot filler needed before the top coat. I think I'll use White VC Performance Epoxy burnishable bottom paint for the edges of the opening. It will wear better and provide a smoother surface (after wet-sanding) than the one-part polyurethane.