The primary beams shown in prior posts are 10″ wide. Now we start on the fairings, or ‘caps’, that mount to the front sides of the beams. When complete they’re about two feet wide, which should be a good walkway between the hulls. The fairings will be strip-planked in female mold frames, in the same manner as the hulls. Except these will have lightweight foam core, not cedar.

Step one is transferring the plans to the frame base. The curve of the beam is seen on the left side of the white paper. Carbon paper is laid underneath, and we simply trace over the pattern to mark the wood or foam core.

Here are the form frames getting ready for mounting to the base and then planking can begin.

Sane people were home wrapping Christmas presents. Here on the sailing fringes, we were wrapping with a special brand of itchy fabric :)

Glassing the beams all the way around is a messy job, with epoxy dripping and catching on the clothes, etc. So it was a night to push through, and by 12:30am all four beams are now structurally complete – building them was pretty much a full year of work squeezed in amongst the full-time “day job”. Happy to move on to cosmetics.

Merry Christmas to you Royal Oakers, my colleagues, fellow FBoaters, dear family, Friends of Origami, and people humoring me by reading this stuff. May you enjoy a safe, happy holiday time. And if things go well, let’s sail this big boat together in late 2013!

Just like peeling the last apple in the canning batch, we finally found the last piece of over a hundred layering sections for the beams. All of the bottom layers had to have two precise slots cut to fit around the brace tangs.

The forward beams have their final 14 layers done with progressively shorter staggers measured so that the thickest lamination is centered over the brace tang.

Similarly the bottom faces got 10 more layers on the forwards and 4 on the afts.

Tomorrow I’ll add the reinforcing patches at the high stress points, then the complete beams get wrapped in two layers of fiberglass.

Finally, the beam work arrived at the satisfying step of laying down large tracks of carbon fiber! Listened to the 49er’s game on the radio while rolling out an entire football field’s worth of laminates this afternoon. After a busy weekend, all beams now have six layers of carbon on both their top and bottom sides. That’s it for the bottoms. Next weekend it’s 14 more layers for each of the forward beams, and a lesser amount for the aft beams. Watching the $500 rolls of carbon whirl away is a bit like the depressing feeling at the gas pump when fueling up a Suburban. Gulp. The beams are getting quite heavy, but still possible, for single handing. The fitting into the floats will certainly take two people and some jacks. But that’s still a ways off.

Trying to decide the sizing of the aft cabin – to – cockpit hatch. 24″ square is too big. A 20″ unit seems just big enough for shoulders access, but will mean cutting away more cabin roof than already done. Glad I experimented with various sizes in cardboard this weekend. Now it’s keeping an eye on the clearance page at Defender – seems to be the best place for good deals.

Too long between posts!  It’s probably due to too much work travel, and the beam work has been repetitive steps of not very interesting stuff. The mold for the beam caps was easy – the shape was formed from having saved the off-cuts of the sheets that formed the beam molds months ago.

We elected Dad as the ranger of the clamp forest; figured he earned the title based on who had more epoxy on his shirt :)  The beam caps went on without too much fuss, and we used PLENTY of epoxy putty along all the horizontal surfaces at the tops of the beam structures.  With the caps on, these now start to look like substantial beams!  And a shout out to Mike Leneman’s grandpa – notice the squeezed out tube in the photo below. That’s a magazine cover rolled up like a cake decorator’s bag. Roll the paper spirally, tape the seam, fill with putty from the top, roll the top closed like toothpaste, and cut the desired bead-size hole in the tip. This idea is working GREAT for filleting. Thank you Mike!

And now the past couple of shop days have been spent wrapping the beams in 2 layers of DB170 fabric. These beasts are growing heavier with each step, but I can still push them around and roll them over enough to make progress solo. After finishing this evening, there’s just one more step of wrapping the ends (after repositioning the supports), then we’re ready for laminating on the black gold – 16 layers of carbon for the tops of the forward beams. Actually looking forward to that job – very satisfying to be using space-age material for a strong, light boat.

the two on the right were done last weekend – curvature of the beams makes the fabric shaping very difficult, so I’m resigned to overlaps for strength, then sanding and fairing as needed. Beam in the middle had just been finished and peel-ply’d, and the last one is shown ready for the evening’s epoxy job.

Thanksgiving weekend sounds like a good time to get started on the beam fairings mold, and hopefully those structures will be built much faster than the core beams.  I won’t be installing the plan’s aluminum backing strips for the net lashing eye strap screws – we’ll be doing the updated ‘slit-tubes’ as seen on this F39 beam:

Thanks to Griffin for lifting the port beams up in to position (I can see why other builders hoist completed floats up out of the way!). Good news is these beams lined up just fine. Labor Day weekend is slated for installing the diagonal bracing tangs in to the beams. These two beams’ internals should go much faster than the starboards because all the parts were fabricated at once, so this time it’s just an install job.

Access to one of the forward port beam bolts is inside the shower stall wall, so that led to deciding/cutting in a cabinet door – that’s going to be a great storage space for bulky bathroom things. The shower stall is generous – might use up some space with a vertical water tank? Time to calculate the volume of 6″ deep, two feet wide and five or so feet tall. Hmmmm

It’s been two months since a post because progress has been tedious with many little steps to finishing the internal webs / structures inside the beams. And severely limited building hours due to lots of business travel. In the photo the ‘wings’ just inboard of the sides, plus the brown foam along the center, are glueing attachment points for the beam top. When sealed up, the glue joints complete the box structure for final rigidity. The tops will never be able to come off without major surgery.

Now the fitting and internal structure of the port beams is underway. Spent all day Sunday with Griffin’s help repositioning the workshop to slide the main hull six feet to the right. This included taking one of the 35′ float hulls out in the street, which always gets the neighbors buzzing. 

While building the internals of the starboard beams, most of the pieces for the port side were also constructed, so construction should go much faster (including not repeating some time-wasting methods used the first time). The plan is to get all four beams ready for sealing, then build the four top pieces all at once. Then it’s on to the wrapping laminations, and building the fairings. At this rate, these beams will consume all of 2012. Slow and steady and rock-solid – just following Farrier’s documents with all the big warnings about “Do this part right!”

PS – the GORGEOUS 50′ carbon rotator mast has been purchased, and is awaiting transport west…  More on that later – yea!!!

OK, now it’s starting to feel like a multihull! With the beams set up, we got our first taste today of how big the main nets are going to be – lots of room for stargazing evenings.

Big thanks to Dad for the painstaking drill press and cutting work on the 8 aluminum tangs that emerge from the beam bottoms and attach to the diagonal braces. Those braces are about 3 ft long, made from heavy 1/2″ stock. The plans allow them to be narrowed down to 2″ along most of the length. I think after all the trial fitting they’ll go to a cutting shop to remove that extra weight, but more importantly when they are narrower, I’m thinking it’s less surface area for waves to hit on the leeward side.

The second photo shows the positioning of the tangs inside the beam. The web they attach to is 12lb high density foam with six layers (each side) of 18oz bi-directional fabric, alternated 0-90 and 45-45. This is some of the beefiest fiberglass construction on the whole boat. Next week is a multi-step process of positioning the metal precisely on the web using wooden dowels, then glueing one tang at a time, drilling out the dowels and replacing with bolts, etc. etc. Many more hours of permanently hidden details :)

looks like the boat is stretching out its arms for the first time

note to other F36 beam builders:  plans call for putting the ‘wings’ on the top of this web before you glass the web in place (same as the beam-attach web in the top of the photo). Having those wings in place made it really difficult to work on the tabbing-in. This time I’m leaving them off for now, and once tabbed in the beam, will go back and add wings with the similar method Farrier wrote for attaching the full side-widening edges just before installing the beam tops.