Team Seacats

Yes, I realized tonight that I can see a light waaaayyy down the tunnel.  If we’re lucky, it’s not the headlight of a train!

I guess when you work on a long term project over so much time, you rarely (well, I do anyway), pick your head up and look ahead.  Tonight, I looked at the boat and thought that I could be within a couple of weeks of a test sail.  I have ordered what should nearly be the last of the knic-knacs for the boat, a 2mm tap, some 2mm screws, nuts, washers, a 4-40 tap, etc so I can make some of the hardware I need.  By the time I purchase two miniature turning blocks at $8 each, I can easily make them and buy the tools required for less.

Tonight I present the pictures of the installed radio tray…its a bit dusty and needs some cleaning but here it is…also shown with the hatch lip I installed over the weekend (not terribly pretty yet).

I didn’t spend much time with it this evening, but I did work out the geometry of the sheets, main and jib sheeting points, and the other related hardware and control lines.  Tomorrow I’ll take the sail rig into the shop and finish the rig by shortening the booms, tying up the outhaul grommets, and adding the sheeting points.  As for the boat, if my tools come in tomorrow, I’ll get the deck hardware mounted and it’s going to be time for some primer.

The aluminum machined mold for the keel bulb is not going to be done terribly soon so I’m going to rebuild the plaster mold we made late last year using the same PVC plug.  The lead, once cast, will require a little more finish work but it won’t be too bad.

I should make a list (edit: geesh, I keep adding to this):

• Install sheeting hardware (must cut temporary access hatch in bow since the Team Seacats dummy sealed up the main bulkhead before the wood reinforcement was in place up front). need taps for final hardware install
• Make a slew of bowsies
• Install sheeting points on the booms, replace temporary Dacron lines with spectra including outhaul grommets – do some eye-splicing if there is time
• Build the main boom vang
• Install rudder servo, rudder linkage, and linkage boot
• Mold new lead bulb, machine for strut, cut and drill strut, make keel fin (this could take some time)
• Primer, Paint, wetsand, clearcoat, wetsand, buff
• Sail

Oh and if you noticed the picture quality improved, it’s because the replacement camera charger arrived…and not 3 hours after I found the old one (in the closet with the spare light bulbs of all places – told you I left it somewhere stupid).

The radio tray is installed.  The large taper on the tray both accomodates the widening of the hull and puts the tray at a bit of an angle so that the line enters the winch in a straight line.  Pictures of the installation coming tomorrow.  The entire tray weighs slightly more than 0.5oz!!!

Today we finish the radio tray installation…here’s the plan…I left some extra room for the battery because until I get a special LiPo charger, I’m going to use the 600mA Nicad that came with the radio.  I know that’s not much capacity for a day of sailing, but I do have three or four of these packs lying around.

I made my first, and last, rudder out of the new rudder mold.  The result was pretty good.  Although I brushed in an early thin layer of epoxy in the mold with the intent of holding a nice outside finish, I didn’t let it cure enough before vacuum bagging the carbon and the vacuum sucked the still-to-soft resin out leaving some pinholes between the carbon weave.  After trimming away the rest of the pieces, I put in some filler but will probably have to make another pass to get it right.  I filled the core with a thick epoxy / microballoons (tinted dark gray) before sandwiching the two cured skins back together in the mold.  The rudder looks good and while it is probably about average in weight, I think I can cut a little more weight out of it.  The brass rod itself weighs as much as the rudder so first step would be to find a lighter alternative.

Oh, the reason for the “last rudder out of this mold”?  The newest mold-half warped badly while cooling after I left it in the sun curing the rudder.  I’m getting tired of looking at this rudder mold and don’t think I’ll remake this half again until I need another rudder.  I think maybe I laminated the mold too thickly in one step…or something.  Might have to talk to some folks to figure out how to keep this from happening again.

I also worked out the bulkhead and radio tray material.  I took some light weight PVC foam and ripped out a .25″ thick sheet from a large block.  I then planned the position of the main servo winch and using a razor blade, cut out the foam to receive two balsa blocks to provide something to screw into for the winch servo mounting.  I then vacuum bagged one layer of 5.7oz carbon cloth using epoxy resin to each side of the foam.  It’s amazing stuff.  The whole sheet ways a touch over 2oz and is enough to make the main bulkhead and the radio tray.  I admit to being a little stumped for a while trying to figure out how to template the bulkhead without a ton of trail and error fitting.  I finally decided to utilize the hull molds to make a template so I marked the position on the molds with electrical tape and laid up two layers of 1″ fiberglass tape in the same area where the bulkhead will be inserted into the hull and used those to trace a template on the foam core carbon material.  After trimming the carbon, I fitted the bulkhead and with only some minor cleanup of the resin where I had placed fixtures inside the hull it fit perfectly.  The bulkhead is flat on the bottom leaving an opening for water to drain out of the front of the boat should there ever be a reason to do so.  It will be much easier to perform the assembly of the shroud connection points and mast compression post in one step next time.
 

  

I’ve also been trying to sort out how I can mount the keel trunk and get it accurately placed.  Obviously a jig of some sort would be great but I need to have the first one setup to jig anything.  I decided to hang the boat from the stern and the bow and use a level to sort out squaring up the keel.  For the fore and aft measurement, I measured the height of the waterline at the bow and the stern from the floor getting them pretty level (I know where the water line is from the computer design and verification through the float test we did several months ago).  With the keel trunk attached inside the hull to a long aluminum bar (that will later be in the center of the future keel foil), the bar acts like a pendulum and as long as the hull is level fore/aft and side/side, the bar will be plumb where I want it.   I’ll glue up the main bulkhead and the trunk together at the same time and fit the radio tray in as a sub-deck reinforcement to the keel trunk later this week.  It should be very solid.

Aaaaaa…more on that later….I’m not sure which needs a rest more – the washing machine, or my favorite t-shirt…