The wind never backed off on Wednesday (launch day) so Ravenswing stayed at the ramp dock overnight. Yesterday Griffin, Charlie, his friend Larry and I took the boat off the dock for first forward motion.  Here’s to thousands of miles of bow wake. 

With just 18″ of dagger down and 2k rpm on the outboard the boat easily turned 180 in about its own length. The propeller and outboard are noticeably small but I think it will be ok – just have to be smart about it all the time. 

The yellow lines are makeshift motor steering. We’re going to figure out a permanent solution as this maneuverability aid seems important. The motor say nice and deep, but the stern is dragging a bit without the mast up front, so we’ll wait and see about trim. 

The weather was great for a 30 min shakedown, then docking at Charlie’s house on the Napa River. It’s a mile from the Napa Marina where the mast is waiting for weekend dressing. 

The bummer of day 1 was the daggerboard not lowering beyond the foot or so we were able to test last Friday in the shop driveway. Turns out the board gets a little bit thicker as it extends up from the bottom and this is enough to prevent deployment. Argh, one more back breaking pulling of the board and lugging it through Charlie’s wife’s yard to the pickup.  Which led to six hours late night of templating, grinding off paint and power planing away excess fairing buildup. We had worked to build in more curve last year, but I was out of synch with what Howard had built many years ago with the exit slot. Tonight the dagger hangs in the shop like a side of beef, except this one is getting thin primer and bottom paint coats Fri/Sat for relaunch Sunday.

New builders, don’t make my mistake of underappreciating the thickness of fairing, primer and paint. This has caused considerable pain over this weekend, first on the stuck starboard float and now the dagger in trunk. I should have painted samples with all the layers and measured with the caliper, and further adjusted the dagger core. The float problem was just being greedy about cleaning up the beam sockets before final paint. Pretty dumb, as no one will see those parts of the boat and they were already waterproof and solid. The price of rework is frustration. 

In between paint coats we’re trying to recover from the weekof moving   and assembling. The shop is worse than my room as a teenager. 

Now the trollies are gone and the trash pile grows. We’ll scramble to finish bolt-on parts including ladders, hardtop, pulpit, etc. before clearing it out over July 4 weekend. 

Here are the Kevlar and carbon hatch boards getting their edges rebated by Dremel. They’ll go to the boat this weekend to check before fairing and painting.   

Tonight let’s salute a talented sailor at the other end of the ownership spectrum. Captain Rick Holway is saying farewell to his beloved Newport 33 Pelagic Fantasy, as she gets her second owner now. Rick and Pelagic have been a force in the Gulf of the Farallons, winning racing classes, commodore-ing the Singlehanded Sailing Society and perhaps most importantly observing and counting the bird species of our coast. Rick, I thank you deeply for all the offshore mentoring you’ve invested in me this last decade. Boat ownership does not define a sailor  – I think it’s the pushing off from a dock each day. And I’ll be a little selfish here to say it’s good you’ll have time on your hands now to sea trial and cruise Ravenswing. 

Still planning the mast stepping for Monday morn at Napa Marina. Let us know if you’d like to participate. Somebody has to channel Keith Burrage onto the boat!

Here’s the next hero of the story. Jim from around the shop corner happens to have a huge Gradall in his front yard and a few weeks ago I asked if he could help lift the boat bow a few inches on Trailer Day. So this morning he drives over with this

And we start asking, “if we get you close and you don’t extend the boom far, how much can this thing lift?” So imagine Eggleston’s huge relief when Greg’s sketchy plan of blocking and bottle jacks got trumped by complete security / capability

We’re hard pressed to buy this man a nice enough dinner in gratitude of saving the builder’s hide on this one. We had a big crew of friends on hand to adjust the Corsair37 trailer to fit the F39 hull, and after three hours of prep the boat rolled away from her Santa Rosa shop looking so differently from the Christmas 2011 arrival.

That’s Rick Waltonsmith, trailer owner, and your builder checking the fit. Rick’s new, definitely non-trailer able Explorer 44 tri “Round Midnight” is slated to be our buddy boat and/or sparring partner depending on the day:)
The dagger’s new 5/8″ slimmer waistline was glassed overnight, got fairing putty while the guys finished trailer strapping, and primer tonight.

This setback is delaying the water launch at least a day, so those of you planning a visit on Sunday be warned – not a champagne day! Hot, working, bad grass allergies and gnats kind of day. Now targeting Monday for splashing.
It was surreal towing this huge boat through the Sonoma and Napa counties of my childhood on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon. Sailing can be a solo pursuit, but this week is the true definition of community as interested friends and new acquaintances are drawn to this launch by a shared human spirit of accomplishment (and the lure of some fun water time!)

We didn’t have enough blocking to get the floats high enough to join the beams this evening, so Jim, Griffin and I departed before sunset while Charlie and Carlos and Rick stayed in the field working on cartersboat with no Carters in sight because they wanted to finish an earlier problem solve. Jeanne, our sons and I are amazed witnesses to all of your generous time and spirit fellow boat assemblers. We are so grateful you are here bringing this to completion!!! We’ll rally at the SeaRanch in ten hours :)

That’s a big number – the “righting moment” of this F36 design. The leeward float and beams have all that upward water bouyancy pressure opposing the mast and sails that are trying to drive the float in to the water. Add in some high speed sailing and pounding through waves, and we get many tons of force compressing down through the nice new carbon fiber mast. This month we turned attention to getting the sailing rig finished, beginning with confirming all the specifications. Our mast was built for a Shuttleworth 35′ cat; he’s a designer who calls for very tall rigs and minimized weight. Calculations on that boat’s design show about a 70k lbs righting moment, which is in line with the measurements of our mast, including it’s 175 lb weight. Basically, we need to bulk this thing up to a new fighting weight.

Pardon the details here as we thoroughly document this project to assist with the refitting process…

Bulking up means we’re adding more structural material to the mast and increasing it’s compressive load capability to bring it in line with that big righting moment limit. Carbon and epoxy will be applied to the outside, so the mast must first be stripped back to a bare pole. It’s more than a little heartbreaking to cut in to this beautifully finished piece. Here we are at the start, with only the Tides sail track off (but the Tides clips still there)

Step 1 is lowering the gooseneck to bring the boom down to about a foot over the windshield and hardtop. Unbolt the gooseneck receiver and use it to form a new putty base in the correct spot.

Here’s the detail of the original position, in case someone else wants to raise the boom back up some day. I’ll leave the bolt holes with plastic plugs under the sail track.

Next is taking careful measurements of parts that will go back over the new work.

Jeanne’s sailing partner Leslie worked all day stripping down the mast, including over 100 sail track screws. But she respectfully declined the painful job of taking a saw to the spreader roots. They had been bonded on very well, but succumbed to the Fein multimaster. There is a stainless steel structural rod at both sets of spreaders, with the ends bolted thru the mast wall and the nuts entombed in the hollow spreader bodies.

We built a simple spindle rack system so the spar will rotate during the work, and finished the day sorting out and securing new messenger lines inside the mast for the five halyards. The mast is ready for a session of sanding away all the lovely paint this weekend.

A big thank you here to Stephen Marcoe, Jim Antrim, Guy Stevens and Keith Burrage for insisting we review the mast specs between the two boats. Keith and Ted VanDuesen came up with a smart work plan to increase compressive strength and upsize the wall stiffness characteristics. We’ll build the hoop strength via two tight-spiral wraps of 5oz uni. Start the first one clockwise, using 2″ wide fabric, just less than 90 degrees off the centerline. The second wrap goes the other way, forming a shallow X pattern along the entire spar. After this hoop work we’ll bulk up with 4 layers of 6oz uni, laid straight up the mast for the entire length. This will all be hand layup work, and not vacuum bagging as we want specific manual control on keeping the uni perfectly straight along the spar. Bagging runs the risk of introducing warp or wiggle to the fibers.

The folks at Soller Composites are weaving us 2″ wide rolls of 5oz T700 aerospace grade Hexcel carbon uni. to handle the hoop spiral. The mast is about 30″ around; six wraps per foot X 50′ tall X 2 trips = 1,500 feet of carbon fiber. At about $0.40/ft

The longitudinal layers are coming on 10.4″ wide rolls of 6oz IM7 (822ksi) carbon uni. 50′ X 3 strips of 10″ to get around the 30″ mast X 4 layers = 600′. Soller has 300′ rolls at $1.29/ft.

We’ll stick with our high grade Applied Poleramics epoxy, confident that these good materials will make a superior finished mast tailored right to the boat’s engineered specs.

Stay tuned for updates on paint stripping then the new laminations. Also we’ll try to get some glam shots of the cabin woodworking – it’s looking great now in the final polyurethane phase.

sorry about that, folks

This should do it:

The new hinge design looks good – nice and clean up under the beam. Had to use a wood dowel on place of the real steel hinge pin because the metal wouldn’t quite fit past the neighboring brace structure. Must remember to put the real pin in BEFORE mounting the beam to the boat at launch time!

So here’s the basic idea of the engine position. I’ve only seen this placement on Humdinger (the Walter Green tri that’s just now finishing the PAC Cup) and photos of the big boat VirginFire in the Caribbean.

The real trick here is to see if there’s really enough vertical lift room to raise the motor enough under / next to the aft beam brace pole. This wood mock up has the prop fin 13″ above the waterline, much like we sail with the F27 motor tilted up. I need to find a real 20-25hp motor this week to judge how much the engine cover tapers in – thats the part that will hit the brace at the top. Really hoping this all fits as ell as I’m eyeballing it!

PS – the windshield frames are coming along nicely. Probably will have Tap Plastics custom cut and bevel edge the smoked acrylic from templates. Worth paying their cutting fees it seems.

We closed up the shop early Thursday to make the parents evening at Griffin’s baseball camp. It’s hosted by Dusty Baker who actually attended this time because he’s not managing the Cincinnati Reds this summer. Griff had a strong camp and won a batting award, and I got to shake Dusty’s hand and apologize for cold nights at Candlestick in the 70’s when I wished he would strike out (as a Dodger). His reply was, “and I didn’t, did I” with a sly smile.

Ok, it was a couple of months back that the windshield base grew up out of the deck. Yesterday the removable windshield got mocked up in cardboard.

The windshield should provide a lot of protection from nasty SFBay slop spray, and it’s intentionally wide to really enclose the cockpit once the hard dodger and cloth Bimini are fitted. A lot of modern boats are doing nice rounded / curved spray hoods, but I think this look serves the original Farrier intentions and it’s much more realistic to build quickly and cleanly.

The cardboard became templates for the five panel frames, and we cut a 3/4″ wide router pass around the outer facings to allow 1/4″ deep acrylic windows to flush mount in the frames. Expecting the windows can simply be glued in, using some of the amazing new bonding products. Also, the middle panel will be built with a hinge on top so that window can swing forward to allow a breeze to pass through (thinking ahead to the tropics – thanks Geoff!)

The frames are corner-glued now and once that sets up we’ll vacuum bag each panel’s laminations this weekend.