When the panels have been properly wired and the hull bent in proper form the panels need to be spot glued together with epox.
In the picture above you can see the first hull spot glued on the left side. My spots seem to be a bit wide. The other hull is ready to be wired together and in the picture below the wiring has been done and note that the sun has set 🙂
At the end of August I started to prepare for joining the side and keel panels. This was done by wiring the panels together with copper wire and whipping twine. The work started with drilling holes for the wires and rounding the panel edges so that they could be joint together.
After the panels were prepared they needed to be bent to correct form and the wires needed to be tightened. Above picture shows board that spreads out the sides and is supposed to be horizontal too. Front is supported by a 90 degree frame. The transom end of the hull is fully spread. The load at transom is so high that it needs to be wired with whipping twine to keep the panels together. The picture below shows the transom, I used small pieces of wood to tighten the whipping twine:
During the past three days I glued gunwales and stringers to the hulls. The gunwales required a lot of bending so that they would fit to the side panels. This meant that they needed to be screwed to ply so that they would keep their bent form. I started by placing the screws to correct places so that the screws just need to be tighten:
After the screws were prepared I just applied the epox and then bent the gunwale to shape and tightened the screws. The gunwale is bent quite much where rear deck is connected to the main deck.
The stringers were glued in similar manner as the gunwales (they were only easier because they didn’t need to be bent).
The gunwales and stringers are made from wrc (western red cedar, “jättiläistuija” in Finnish). I had some problems finding wrc in Finland, in local woodshops nobody seemed to know what I was looking for. Luckily I found out that wrc was a high end sauna bench material, it seems to smell nice when it’s wet, we noticed that when bringing it home in poring rain 😉 Btw, couple of boards of wrc were as expensive as couple of sheets Okume ply…
I cut gunwales and stringers with bandsaw to almost correct size and then used plane and sandpaper to trim them to correct size. Some tapering was needed because I didn’t have proper sawing table, thus the outcome wasn’t perfectly straight.
The keel panels were cut from side panel leftovers:
The side panel remnant plywood was cut half so that the keel panel would be wide enough in the middle. Once again some drawing was done to plot the keel shape on plywood and then it was cut out. Final touches were done with plane and sandpaper. Resulting keel panels lying on top of side panels:
Most of the work was done yesterday, today I just did the final trimming.
Today I did final cuts on side panels:
The side panels were also trimmed to be symmetrical:
The cutting and trimming took only 10 hours. At this point there hasn’t been any problems.
Earlier this week I trimmed the hull sheets to fit together and glued them together with epox. Now we have two huge pieces of plywood that cannot be fitted anywhere. 🙂 Today I did a lot of drawing i.e. plot out the hull shapes:
I also started to cut the side panels out of the sheets with jigsaw:
First week of building contained some little work that could be easily transported later to the actual build location. We (wife and I) just cut out luan templates for bulkheads and styrofoam bulkheads. On Saturday we transported everything to the actual build site, an old cow-shed at my parents place 😉
Winter 2005/2006 contained lot of dreaming of getting back to catamaran sailing (I used to own couple of Hobie Cats). First idea was that getting to Archipelago Raid is a must. This would mean that I need to find a crew interested in sailing a F18, but after some time trying to find one I gave up. Later that winter I saw an ad of cheap used Tornado (with new rig) and I tried again to find myself a crew. Most of possible crews said that they would be happy to come sailing but they could not give any guarantees of their participation. There was no point of getting a Tornado and then not to sail it, so no Tornado for me.
During the winter it became obvious that a) I need a cat and b) it needs to be easily sailed just by me and also it should be possible to have a friend on board. After doing some surfing on the net my choice was clear, I’m going to get a Formula 16 cat. At first I thought about getting a factory built cat but then building my own cat started to feel more appealing. I decided to contact Phill Brander who is the designer of the Blade F16 cat. He directed me to a gallery of Blade build process and I was sold. I got the plans in a week or so after ordering the plans in spring 2006, but didn’t have time to start the project before the summer holidays. The first task was to obtain all necessary materials and with help of Puukeskus (Okume, normal plywood and rest of wood) and Kevra (epox and rest of laminating stuff) everything that I needed was ordered.