Did you have that day in school where parents came in and described their jobs? Yesterday felt like the reverse, as the shop looked like I was doing my son’s job – a good Paramedic, patching up boat parts:For you fabricators reading this, I was impressed how these guys achieve resin saturation and excess absorption into the bleeder cloth by using pressure from tightly wrapped packing tape and clamps, where vacuum bagging is impractical. We are using this technique to apply the outer carbon reinforcements to the mast head, the gooseneck and six padeye bases along the mast. They also had me do that to the spreader trailing edge wraps last night. See them ‘bandaged up’ and then unwrapped below.

This afternoon we received plans from the engineer / company president for the composite primary hound, and for the web system that bolts and bonds into the bottom two feet, transitioning all the forces from the spar down through the rotation ball and into the deck and compression box below. The load numbers for this boat and rig are so much higher than the trailerable Corsair tris, especially because the righting moment is orders of magnitude greater. So the gear inside the bottom of the mast is REALLY important to get right. You’ll see it develop in the next few days. Tonight I’ve started cutting out the pieces from 3/4″ G10 plate. Back at that old, fantastic big bandsaw…

Yesterday we got a little box from France with my new boat jewelry. You can ask RickWS just how important this $550 “Jesus shackle” is. It’s the only connection point on the mast for all three primary standing rigging lines. The engineer needed it to take measurements that affect the primary hound final design (that’s where it goes). So now we begin that fabrication. And no, it didn’t come in a robin-egg blue box with white bow. Just a packing list from Wichard.