Thursday, 28 May 2009
New Sailing Blog
Just visit http://lukefoster.com/dauntless/ for the latest sailing photos and videos.
Cheers!
Monday, 10 March 2008
sailing Dauntless
(The holiday and the subsequent knuckling back down to study have been the reason for the long delay in posting).
We’re wrapped with how the boat goes. I’m very happy we chose the Navigator. And especially glad we had the big race rig.
Tuesday, 22 January 2008
Saturday, 19 January 2008
today's the day
They say the time it takes to finish any job will expand to fill the allotted time. We've been pretty busy with finishing off this last week. And I have to admit late last night we were still gluing, and I have to get out there now and do a bit of coating.
All the systems on the boat have had much thought and discussion go into them, but we'll find out how they work this afternoon.
Monday, 7 January 2008
nearly finished
The coamings ready for action.
The gunwales ate an enormous amount of time; sanding them flush with the deck without scratching the deck, and plugging them.
The cockpit masked up, ready to apply the non-slip particles.
Wednesday, 14 November 2007
the deck
The bottom of the deck is epoxy coated before we glue it on. We're currently debating whether it needs painting or not.
Monday, 12 November 2007
myth busters: special home edition
That you can successfully steam bend timber at home, using little more than an old brake fluid drum, a weed burner and the draw bar that’s waiting to be welded into your boat's new trailer!
Up till now we’ve managed to bend all the timber onto the boat using only brute force and sheer ignorance. It’s mostly worked; we’ve only broken a few stringers. And a couple of pieces of ply on that over ambitious reverse curve in the bow.
But when we had a quick try with the top outer gunwale we realised there was no way we were going to get it on. It’s Fijian Kauri 35mm by 18mm, and it curves in both directions. A bit of research told us that others either cut it in two or slowly bent it round tightening it a bit every day. Neither of these appealed to us.
Steam bending has always seemed like the next frontier of boat building to me. Like it was a bit beyond us, in the realm of serious boat builders. We did a bit of reading, but I doubted that we’d cobble together something that would work. Even if we managed to get the steam going, whether we’d get that tight curve in the timber would be another thing.
Come Saturday morning, here’s what we had sitting on the drive.
It took us a while to get things working. Once the water in the drum was boiling, we found you need a decent incline on the chamber to get the steam coming through. The chamber had to be hot before we could do anything, so at the start we hurried it up with the gas torch and a heat gun ;o) .
The temperature measured at the far end of the chamber.
Seeing this is myth busters, at this stage I’d say:
There’s a 3% chance we’re going to create a massive explosion and just blow everything up.
There’s a 40% chance we just make the wood warm and wet.
A 25% chance we scorch and burn it.
A 10% chance it works out successfully.
A 20% chance of Zac seriously burning his hands.
And a 2% chance we actually get to go sailing before Christmas.
Yes! After about an hour we got a nice steady supply of steam.