Team Seacats

We’re going to be a bit out of pocket here through next week but will be competing in the Performance Catamaran Midwinter Championship in the Formula 18 class in about a week and we’ll have some reporting here.

We are pleased to report that we are on track to break a new record for Team Seacats to receive in excess of 40,000 hits on the website this month! Thank you for visiting! We promise to do our best to keep it interesting. For comparison sake, we received 24,000 hits during the 2004 Tybee 500 so we can only imagine the traffic coming for this year’s race May 14-19. The bandwith and servers have been upped and are braced for it.

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I had hoped to be able to use the paint booth at work during a couple of weeknights in order to get the hulls gelcoated. However, the company requested that I use it only on a weekend instead. Because I have several weekend obligations coming up, I had to initiate plan B…which is; go ahead with reassembly of the boat, rigging, etc. in the evenings until I get the free weekend to take the hulls to the booth. After finish sanding the orange peel I had in my test spot (so it’s ready to spray after some minor cleaning) Tim Owens dropped by to help me move things around. Tim traveled with us as part of our indispensable ground crew last year and will be returning with us again this year.

After we positioned the hulls on flat ground and in general position, I ran a tap through the bolt holes that secure the beams to the boat. Over time, these tend to get gummed up with lithium grease and sealant and it can be hard on the threads to drive in a bolt on dirty threads. Once that was done, we snugged up the beams and took several crossing measurements. The hulls appeared to be racked only by about 1/2″. With a ratchet strap just snugged up, we were able to easily tweak the cross measurement spot on. We will look at it, but there is not much we can do with the toe-in of the hulls because that has a tendancy to change slighly when the boat has rigging tension on it. However, we’ll make sure the hulls are ever so slightly toed out before we actually set the beams.

Once that was done, Tim helped me finish up the rear latching pins for the trailer box. The rear of the box is held in place by two tapered stainless pins that line up with holes in the lip of the lid. The idea is to lift the front of the lid clear and slide it forward to engage the pins at the back of the box. Then the front is dropped in place and there is a flip catch to put a pad lock on. In order to make a firm attachment of the pins, I attached a 1/2″ bar across the inside rear of the box (its overkill – but all that was in the scrap bin today). We then drilled holes sized to be tapped for the 3/8 bolt and then drilled four holes for rivets high enough that they would be covered by the lip on the lid when in the closed position (so they can’t be drilled out). We then tapped the tapered pin holes, removed the bar, and counterbored the rivet holes (the rivets would not grab well if they couldn’t balloon out on the inside when being set). Some 5200 was placed on the bar and it was riveted in place on the box. I then took two 3/8 stainless bolts, cut off the head, and chucked them up in a drill and worked them to a nice taper on a bench grinder with the drill rotating them. It’s no lathe – but it worked admirably. I then put a jam nut on one end, applied locktite, and threaded the pins in place. Then I put the lid on and slid it right up to the pins. With a hammer, I tapped on the lid until the pins left an indentation in the lid and I drilled gradually enlarging holes until the lid closed firmly and the tapered pins put a slight pressure on the top. Pictures are up at the flickr site. This is one high end box!

Originally uploaded by Team Seacats.

We are finalizing an additional sponsorship arrangement with a company that puts together some high quality items of personal sailing gear. These folks have put a lot of thought and effort into designs with some really “out of the box” thinking and are just breaking into the sailing industry. I can’t wait to tell you more about it! More soon.

I took a couple of days to tidy up some household things and we’re pretty much out of parts and/or waiting to get an opportunity to spray the gelcoat before reassembly of the boat can begin. I’ve flopped yet again on my paint-booth decision and have decided to use the paintbooth again. It will be nice to simply take out the weather variables and get the gelcoat overwith. Based on the test performed last weekend, we determined exactly what we need and an order was placed for 1 gallon of gelcoal (we wanted 1/2 gallon – but it was the same price as a gallon), 1 qt of styrene (to use as a thinner), and 1 qt of air dry (styrene and parafin wax mix – used to both thin the gelcoat and provide an air barrier for a full cure). These items are coming from the west coast so they won’t be here until next week. Then I will pre-mix as much as possible in multiple mason jars (without catalyst) and enlist the aid of several friends to help me get the hulls transported back and forth.
Once that’s complete, the hulls will be sanded again and polished with a buffer. Then they will be setup on flat ground, leveled, and squared. Then the beams will be waxed where they meet the beam sockets in the hulls and I’ll mate the two perfectly with an epoxy resin, milled glass fibers, and microballoon slurry. Once that sets up, the beams will be tightened in place and we can start putting the boat back together – that should go quickly and will only take a couple of evenings. Then we need to sort out the sail control rigging and mount some cleats and other hardware. Then we’ll probably make an order for additional control lines, high-tech chordage, and do some tapering and eye splicing. However, I’ll probably keep the splicing to a minimum since we aren’t going to have a whole lot of time to debug the boat. Knots aren’t very pretty but you can see when they’re approaching failure. A splice doesn’t let you know it’s failing until you’re staring at the bitter end in your hand.

I took a picture of the new SailMax.biz kevlar center traveler mount. Sometimes rigging is as much about personal preference as functionality. Originally, the cleat for the control of the traveler is mounted to the traveler itself and slides up and down as the mainsail traveler moves. Personally, I feel that it makes the line slightly more prone to tangles but mostly I don’t like it because I don’t ever really know at what angle the traveler line is going to be. If the cleat is mounted in the center of the rear beam, I can count on it being in the same spot and usually grab it without looking. Obviously a lot of folks feel the same way and SailMax.biz came up with a great solution. This mount will mount to all Nacra / Inter catamarans with an extruded “D” shaped beam.

I covered the new hatch/port in the port hull last night to keep the dew from getting into the sealant. I uncovered it this morning and it looks great. I like these Beckson ports because they have a nib on the inside for attaching a screw for a lanyard (so you don’t drop the thing overboard when open). They also have a larger thread that is less likely to jam and a tapered O-ring seal that seals better than the other ports I’ve used in the past.

The Self tacker installation went anything but smoothly. What should have taken about an hour took nearly three. I first discovered that the end of the mount was bent and probably happened somewhere during shipping (it was wrapped in bubble wrap so it wasn’t evident until I had unwrapped it). I needed to remove the Harken traveler track so I could straighten the base unit using a vice. It’s not that it’s hard to bend – it’s aluminum – it’s just that it was bent in a funny place and I needed to support it properly to get it back to shape. I had about 4 of the 12 screws retaining the track that were galled and difficult to get out. I had to retap those holes and run the screws through a die to clean up the threads and it went back together very well. I also noticed, like my F18 did, that the self tacker had four sharp points on the traveler stop – and we don’t like sharp things on a sailboat. I ground and polished these points and applied a little “Georgia” anodizing (spray paint). I then had to lay out the positions for the mounts on the front beam. Since my F18 has the same beam, spinnaker pole, and mast base position, I used it as a guide. I first measured and drew a straight line on the beam that matched the upper edge of the “T” shapped tabs that the tacker pivots on. I then marked the position for the first two inner tabs measureing them from the tacker and from center of the mast post. Then, because the self tacker still wasn’t perfectly symmetrical, I held the tacker up to the front beam and marked the location for each tab. The 3/16″ holes were drilled, 5200 applied copiously, and each tab was riveted in place. I elected to set the stainless rivets by hand since it could be viewed as a good hand strength excersize – it really wasn’t that bad (those weights at the gym are paying off!). I then pinned the tacker in place but found that I had several interferences with the tabs that resulted in the tacker only having about 5 degrees of freedom – it should have more like 110 degrees of freedom. Comparing again with My F18, it appears that a couple of the stainless tabs are shorter letting a couple of legs hit rivet heads and weld fillets, and that the one rivet I had to replace from my stock (I lost one of the supplied rivets) has a larger dome. With my frustration level peaked, I decided to move on to some other projects for the time being.

I then sprayed gelcoat as a test on a 3′ section of the hull. Remember the spot where I overheated the core and had to repair the same area twice? I was almost as interested to see how my fairing job came out as I was to see how difficult the gelcoat was going to be to work with. I was pleased on both aspects. There are tons of conflicting advice with regard to dealing with gelcoat and it’s difficult to sort through it all. However, I now have a plan. I was limited with the materials I had available for this test and thinned the gelcoat with acetone instead of, what I intend to use, styrene. I also top coated it with PVA mold release to seal the gelcoat from the air (for a full cure) instead of using the wax additive to the gelcoat as I intend to do in the final run. I made a quick trip to a pharmacy to get a baby medicine dropper so I could accurately measure the MEKP hardner. I first thinned the gelcoat and then and mixed in about 1.25% hardner to gelcoat. I found that, as I was advised, the acetone evaporates too quickly and was probably mostly gone from the time the gelcoat left the gun and hit the hull. This resulted in substantial orange peel (surface that looks like the outer peel of an orange). Some organge peel is expected – but I could certainly tell that it was too thick to lay down well. I then cleared the spray gun with acetone (twice) and poured in PVA mold release and applied. It went down smoothly and after a few hours the gelcoat had kicked and cured. If you’ve never worked with gel coat, it is a polyester based resin and will not “dry” like paint – it has to form molecular bonds in order to become hardened just like fiberglass polyester resin. It also has the risk of hardening in the spray gun if you take too long or get your hardener ratio wrong…and THEN if you don’t get the hardener ratio correct or seal the surface from air, you end up with tons of goo to remove from the object you just sprayed it on. While the risks are higher than working with paint, gelcoat does give you a thick repairable surface that can take a good bit of abuse but still look great after a few minutes with a buffer. We’ll need this feature for the multiple full-speed beach landings we expect in the Tybee 500.

I then went back to examine the self tacker and decided that I was still too frustrated to work with it. So I started on the trailer box. It needed to be mounted to the trailer and have hardware installed to secure the lid. I made a trip to the hardware store to pick up some materials and decided to go ahead and carpet the inside of the box. I mounted the box to the trailer by first placing some scrap pieces of marine carpet between the box and the trailer, then placing three 1/8″ aluminum reinforcing strips along the bottom inside of the box. I drilled a tap-sized hole through the strip, the box, the carpet, and into the trailer cross members. Then I came back and drilled through holes through the strips and the bottom of the box. I then ran a tap into the trailer cross member so it will directly receive the bolt. I countersunk the reinforcing strips so the flathead screws would sit flush, smathered 5200 between the strip and the bottom of the box (to adhere it firmly), put locktight on the screws, and bolted it down. I then vacuumed out the box, and used contact cement to work in the capet – first gluing it up one side, then gluing it in the corner, then down the center strips, then the other corner, and finally up the other side – trimming it to fit. I then cut several small strips and glued them to the top lip of the box to form a gasket for the lid (keep down on the rubbing and the noise). In between rounds of letting the contact cement cure, I cleaned up the enormous quantity of tools and equipment I had unleashed on the backyard today. I’m quite happy with the progress made this weekend – if nothing else it served as a really good endurance workout!