Team Seacats

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.