Plywood Boat Plans | Wingbar corners foil strut Part 5

Plywood Boat Plans

Two of the more complicated components were always going to be the bladder moulded wingbar corners and the centreboard strut. I put off starting them for as long as I could, but at some point I needed them to progress so I had a coffee and started working out what to do.

I did a bit of research on the web on bladder moulds, and found this guy to be quite helpful. Im sure there are other similar vids but by the time youve watched those, youll probably have gained all you can and then you have to do an experiment. I had two tests with cheaper materials before biting the bullet and laying up the first part. The first test was pretty hopeless, but by the third attempt I had it down.

 The moulds I had finished and prepped earlier, and worked pretty well but in hindsight they could have been stronger to take the fairly serious pressure that they get put under. On one, the MDF split at the join where the two thicknesses of wood had been laminated together, and created a bit of a bump in the finished part. MDF is ok, but probably use a single thickness or glue the sheets together with something better than PVA!

I made bladders as shown in the video, with a soldering iron ground flat at the tip. I went through half a dozen before I got one that would go the distance. I used black builders plastic, but something more elastic would have given a bit of margin for error - it was too thick and would split before it would stretch. Making it quite oversize seemed to help, with the final size being almost twice the circumference and 100mm longer than the mould. I used a barbed Nitto fitting that plugged straight into the compresser and sealed it to the bladder with a big rubber band as in the vid. A bit of plumbers tape helped, tacky tape was surprisingly useless under positive pressure.

I laid up the tubes so that the carbon in one half was about flush with the seam, and the other half had a 10mm overlap on both sides. That seemed to make it easier to get the bladder in - deflated with the vacuum pump - and then get the carbon to seat cleanly onto the other half when closing the mould. Once closed, I found it could take 40psi without too much drama, and I just left it like that until it cured. Sometimes there would be a slow leak, and the compresser would just cycle as required. Thats not ideal, and its worth getting a good seal.

Its surprising how much more compact the laminate is when cured at 40psi (2.75 atmospheres) compared to under vacuum. The corners came out at about 460g each, but considering how much carbon was in them, that translated to a resin ratio of about 30 - 35% which was on the money I reckon. They are about as bullet proof as I could hope to build. Its a great process.

The two test runs and the finished product

Making the plastic bladder with the soldering iron, baking paper and template

The two halves pre-bladder

The bladder deflated and held in a bundle with blu-tac. With such a thick laminate it was quite difficult to get it to all sit down long enough to close the mould.

The mould closed and under pressure, with resin oozing out of it

The centreboard was fairly straightforward by comparison, the only difficulties being the meaty layup and the carbon pultrusion that needed to go down the middle. I used standard modulus carbon even though there was some IM available from CG, only because I already had it lying around. I reasoned that the foil section is quite thick at the hull intersection, and that it should be inherently quite stiff, but at the end of the day you cant go wrong with higher modulus material. Next time.

When laying up, I added some extra laminates to build up a flat section for the pultrusion to seat onto. That was all bagged down and in a second step I closed the mould with glue and foaming epoxy inside and let the excess foam spew out a couple of holes. The idea was that as the foam expanded, it pressed the glue into the joints. It seems to have worked, though its a bit heavier than it could have been - at 250kg/m3 fully expanded, the foaming epoxy isnt as light as a milled foam core, but it is convenient. The whole thing went into the oven for a ~12 hour post cure.

Making the cutting template from aluminium foil

Cutting out the carbon 

Under Vacuum

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Plywood Boat Plans | Ama part 2

Plywood Boat Plans

Today, the inwales were fitted and slid in from the stern and the inside of the ama was coated. With the inwales in the temporary gunwales used to pull the sides in could be removed. I weighed the side panels and bulkheads pre-torturing at just under 30lbs. I expect that with epoxy coating, bottom paint, crossbeam structure, dagger trunk and a deck it will easily finish up around 40 which would be ok with me. 45 would be less ok but whatever it comes out at, "ill own it" as they say.

This time I glued in the bulkheads near the keel pre-torture and that caused the hull to be a little less fair than I would have liked but its rock hard now so no going back. I dont plan to make changes for the port ama. Its not that bad.

You can see that I went for the inverted bow, wave piercer ama shape with influences from the Nacra Infusion, and Seacart 26 tri.

Apologies for the quality of the pictures. the shop is dimly lit at night.

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Kayak Boat Plans | Finishing the hull Part 6

Kayak Boat Plans

Just a quick post to show how the hull went together, and note a couple of tricks I picked up in the process. On the whole, the parts from the CNC tools fitted together really well. I thought at one stage there was some sort of error with the front wingbar socket location, but it turned out to be human error. I wasnt careful enough in aligning the two sections of the mould when I joined them. Lesson: dont leve any small detail at all up to the human! The sides and foredeck were designed to just glue to the hull, (they only fitted in one spot so it was impossible to get that wrong) but the deck needed to be glued in and then the joints reinforced with carbon tapes.

After Half-meanies disastrous tapes, I decided to try spray gluing the dry carbon to the joints and wetting out with resin afterward. I used a product called Infuzene, which is designed for temporarily holding the laminate together in an infusion process. It worked pretty well, but ended up coming un-stuck in some places where the resin wet it out. Some people suggested just 3M spray glue, which I might try at some point. The final bond of the tape to the hull seemed ok in the end - Infuzene is designed to be a bit lumpy so as not to coat the entire surface of the cloth - time will tell if ive completely stuffed it up.

I took the boat outside for a tidy up, and wetndried the whole thing ready for clear coat. The surface isnt going to be perfect - the odd pin hole, dent, seam etc. but I just couldnt be bothered fairing it at this point! it looks fine generally by my standards. The foils will be a different story of course.

Dad helping out after we joined the second fairing to the hull

Dry tapes stuck down with spray glue

Infuzene spray - the pink blotchy stuff

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Boat Plans Aluminum | The build part 1

Boat Plans Aluminum

Just reporting that construction is well under way on the new boat. After reading Phils post the other day about how the moth blogs are drying up, I thought I might as well have a crack at keeping this one a little bit up to date. Uncharacteristically for me, the build is well ahead of the blog, so this and the next few posts are going to be something of a retrospective about the various stages of the construction that began in December last year. Ive tried out a few interesting methods that Id like to share, that have really sped up the process and allowed for a bit of extra complexity.

So, this is what its going to look like:

The design is based on the shapes I was playing with in the last post and prior. The design development/evaluation did progress to a better CFD package (thankfully), and the results looked promising enough to invest some time in building. You have to draw the line somewhere right? There was certainly still room for improvement but CFD runs take so much time that I got sick of trying new things and decided to aim for some real world testing. More fun. Notable features: wing shaped tramps blended into the hull for super sweet aero, forward mast and foil position, centre console to consolidate all the messy lines and reduce drag, aero gantry and probably some other things that Im not talking about just yet. The rig, mainfoil horizontal, complete rudder and adjustable wand are all spares that didnt go with Half Meanie.

As usual my composite products and consumables have come from CG composites, Tubes are from CST, and the tramps will be built by Yancy and Pete Williamson at Doyle Mooloolaba. Thanks to all those guys, I appreciate their patience and technical know-how. The hull shell was built by Doink, and mate once I got all that furry shit out it looks great, cheers! Very light and stiff in pre-preg from John Gilmores Alpha mould. All the little fiddly bits will be 3D printed from Shapeways where required -easier and cheaper than machining. Sometimes.

Current status: All the large parts are done, internal structure is half-in and the wings are about to go together. Heres a photo taken a couple of weeks ago of the whole deal held together with sticky tape. Target finished hull weight is less than 10kg.

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Pontoon Boat Plans | CAD to real life Part 4

Pontoon Boat Plans

The build is progressing well, an I apologise for getting behind on the blog, but I thought it might be neat to sum up some of the tricks Ive been playing with in an attempt to keep the project on schedule. With a detailed Rhino model as a reference, its been amazingly efficient to print or CNC cut templates for all sorts of jobs at 1:1, eliminating the need for double-handling of measurements and reducing the potential for certainty of operator error. If only you could make buildings this way, it would save all that time making 2d drawings from the 3d model, only to have them poorly re-interpreted back into a 3d building! Here we go from 3D model to 3D boat.

For a start, it has been fortunate that the Alpha hull is incredibly close to the original digital shape. John Gilmour did a nice job with the mould, and I guess would have used CNC to cut out the stations from his initial model. Im benefiting from his hard work now, with the female moulded deck, foredeck and wing fairings mating onto it with only minor swearing and banging.

All the internal bulkheads were hand cut from carbon flat panel, guided by templates that I created in rhino using the section command. I made an allowance in the drawing for the thickness of the shell, and just followed the line with the jigsaw. They all fitted perfectly first go after an  hours work, a big time saver compared to the last boat.

To align the wingbars, a traditionally painful job, I cut a couple of templates from some scrap MDF on the CNC. They eliminated all the guess work in setting up the wings, it was almost too easy. You can see how perfectly the template mated to the CNC cut deck. In the end though when I eyeballed the wings, I decided that they needed to be a bit steeper, so I propped up the templates off the deck a bit to get that to work.  I guess its always a bit of a surprise when you see the real thing having understood it on the screen, and you have to trust that you can make judgements in real life too. I had to then adjust the CAD model to reflect those changes so that the tramps would still fit!

Another job that was painful last time was doing all the tube copings. There are coping calculators around that would have helped me before with the round tubes, but with a few foil sections in the mix, that becomes a bit problematic as well. The solution was to model the exact sections in Rhino, intersect them and the use the smash command to unwrap the surface into a flat piece. Then you have a template that you can just print out, wrap around the tube and cut.

A few assorted pics below:

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Dinghy Boat Plans | Part 2 tooling up

Dinghy Boat Plans

I was thinking of calling this port tooling around because that probably best sums up what Ive been doing for the last month. No-one cares about that though, instead Im going to run through the process for creating all the moulds needed for the new build.

Because I still have access to the CNC router - its now being housed by my mates at Street&Garden Furniture Co. - it was pretty straightforward to send every part, big or small, to it and create a set of female moulds. Detailed things were made in ply or MDF, and the large simple shapes were cut from Isoboard EPS insulation foam, recommended by the guys at CG. I designed the boat and made the 3D model so that everything would be able to be done this way, and it was super quick to pull parts out, create the toolpath and press print. I set up a new dust extraction system to deal with the polystyrene dust, and it works really well. didnt miss a drop.

Heres a photo of the setup, and another after a weekends of successful routing.

The bigger parts took an hour or two to cut, the smaller ones obviously were quicker. I had a couple of small issues cutting the foam where it melted etc, but thats boring so I wont go into it. Thick parts were made in layers 75mm thick, and then guled together with epoxy later. The rough-ish surface (3mm step) sanded back easily and I then sealed it with some epoxy and colloidal silica bog. Then another quick sand, another layer of thinner epoxy/silica, carefully applied with a credit card, and youre done! The moulds all held a good vacuum with no problems, important because you cant envelope bag it as it compresses the foam, and the surface quality was generally within range of high build. Its gotta be the quickest way to make large composite parts.

The MDF/ply bits are now pretty straight forward. Ive learnt that its better to cut them with a much finer stepover (1.2mm or so) so that you almost dont need to sand them. It takes a bit longer on the machine, but saves you lots of stuffing around later. Then one coat of resin and a sand and theyre good to go. The foil strut mould was the last thing I did, and turned out the best.

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