Friday 1 April 2011

boats... boats... boats...

i have always loved being on the water, and have been sailing since my early teens,
    i've been wanting a single handed dinghy that i could car top for a while but they all seem far too expensive for my meager pockets... so. i thought, why not build one!   i want something pretty extreme really, fast, scary, super light and unsinkable.  i began with a free design program called hullform and worked with it to produce a hull shape i was happy with, going on the principle of, if it looks fast and silly it probably will be.
    i designed it with hard chines so it would be simple to build from plywood,  3 metres long for ease of roof topping and general maneuverability   with a simple rig directly sourced from a windsurfer.


   since this point, over the last couple of weeks i have built the foils, from glassfiber skinned pine laminated with oak strips for extra stiffness
  then, i started on the hull,  its all made out of plywood,  slotted together like those old cut out dinosaur models, 

    this is then fitted together and glued up...
    after this i've made a mast gate out of plywood, carbon fibre and aluminium  tube and a rudder support also from carbon and aluminium, fixed in the mast bottom mount track and prepared the hull to recieve them,
    i'm now waiting for sheets of plywood to finish the build..

  incedentally,  after beginining the build i found a class the boat will fit, sadly its an italian class, for boats  ten feet long, with a maximum of 8 m2 of sail,
    basically thats it for rules...  and its ended up with some  really interesting craft
    link o the site here... http://www.diecipiedi.it/ns/main/index.html

   updates when i finally get the little beast finished

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