Team Seacats

Here’s a great clip of a proper skipper / crew relationship….

Before you even ask, the answer is “because we can”. I played side-kick to fellow one-meter co-designer, Neville, last night as he start to weld up the aluminum pieces I fabricated on Friday. If you have been much of a mountain bike aficionado within the last 10 years or so, you might have heard of Neville Mountain Bikes. This is THAT Neville and he’s pretty handy with a TIG welder and a lathe. With the garage door open the house across the street was illuminated from the arc of the welder until about midnight last night. I’ll go into detail about the vacuum reservoir when we start to assemble the mechanicals – but it’s looking good so far.

We also milled the plug for the 4lb lead keel. I cut an aluminum template using a scale print of the CAD drawing I used to calculate the weight and get the proper NACA shape. Neville used that template to slowly shape a piece of PVC to fit. A box will be built and a substance similar to plaster of paris will be poured around it with an internal aluminum mesh to hopefully make it pretty durable. I’m working today more on the recreation of the hull plug.

Although, it does look like one, no, it’s not a bomb. This is an example of a vacuum pump with a home-built resovoir. We’re looking to improve our existing vacuum bagging capabilities and energy consumption and should be able to do it handily with something like this. Currently all our vacuum bagging is done with a venturi style vacuum generator that requires compressed air to operate. It pulls plenty of vacuum but even when the part being made is fully evacuated, the venturi vacuum generator continues to consume the same full amount of compressed air. The solution? Attach it to a vacuum reservoir through a check valve and an electronic vacuum sensing switch that connect to a pneumatic solenoid valve. This way the vacuum generator only “turns on” and consumes compressed air when the vacuum in the system drops below a set point. Even if I were to buy a very expensive mechanical vacuum pump, it would have to run constantly without such a resovoir. We’re fabricating our own reservoir from scrap aluminum and are a little concerned that it might not be beefy enough. If we were building a vessel designed for pressurization, I would have spent an extensive amount of time calculating the loads and putting in a whopping safety factor … but in this case, implosion is not quite as a harmful threat as explosion…so we’re going with the thumb and one eyeball principle. As is though, a quick run with the calculator shows that this thing will have about 18,000 lbs of force pressing inward. I’m going to work on the one meter plug some tomorrow morning and venture over to Neville’s house were we start welding tomorrow evening on the tube and endcaps I rolled this evening.

These guys have instructions, several kits, and/or pieces parts to build your own resevoir system at Veneer Supplies. Cool website.

Sorry for the lack of progress on the US One Meter mold…been busy keeping up the household for a few days. How about this one to pass some time? Have an old Hobie 16? Perhaps missing a mast or some sails? Here’s an idea for you (note: this comes from Michigan where the winters are cold and long). I hate to think what might happen to your hat if it blows off your head (or worse). It’s for sale too! (also note that I am in NO way affiliated with this craft)

Buy it now on EBAY!

Thanks to the folks at AdventureOnline.TV, we have a new video player with bonus items! Click the link below (or the obnoxious “CLICK FOR VIDEO” thing up top). After seeing the new Tybee 500 Promotional Video (it’s the default video that loads up), you must see the WWF Season 3 Ep 1 video (WWF = World Wave Federation) hosted by Neitz Boy who has coined modern sailing phrases such as “one-edging” it (flying a hull). There is everything there from skydiving, kiteboarding, surfing, and even Laser sailing right after a hurricane. Seriously – it’s good stuff and thanks to Brian Karr for his talent and effort in putting together all that incredible footage. If you click on the links to go to the AdventureOnline.TV site, you can buy full length, high quality, DVD’s of many of the videos, including the 2006 Tybee 500, you see there.

Hey, also note that there is a new “maximize” feature to see the videos in a larger format…Seacats say “cool” and keep “one-edging it” Brian.