Sails

I picked up the sails for the i550 from Farrar Sails in New London CT this weekend.  The main and jib are Kevlar/Mylar tri-radials.  The picture to the left shows the spinnaker.  At almost 500 sq. ft. I don't think that we will lack for downwind sail area.  Of course it will look a whole lot better filled out on a reach than it does on the grass.

I have most of my standing rigging on order so I'm hoping to be able to hoist the sails soon.

More pictures

Not much commentary, just a couple of pictures

Rudder foil

 In the last few days, I vacuum bagged the rudder foil.  I built this in a very similar fashion to the spreaders I made a while ago.


I started with foam inserts from Flying Foam.  I ordered a tapered insert for the bottom 2/3's of the foil and a straight section for the top part that will contact the rudder cassette.  The maximum chord (front to back distance) is 10", but I trimmed a bit off of the trailing edge since it would just get distorted during the fabrication since the edge was so fine.  


I split the foam inserts length-wise and then glued them back together around a piece of 1/4" Hydrotech which acts as a spar of sorts.  The plywood is really just intended to keep the outer skins of the foil from separating from the foam inserts.  

The foil started with an interior layer of CF sleeve.  I used an 8" sleeve which easily conformed to the foil (which varies from 10" at top to 6" at the bottom).  I then added three layers of unidirectional CF which taper from the top to the bottom so that at the bottom only a small section of one layer of uni is used, and then covered the whole thing up with an outside layer of the CF sleeve. 


The photo above shows all of that being vacuum bagged.  And the photo to the left shows the result afger I trimmed the ends.


A little bit of fairing, and then I'll use the foil as the mold for the rudder cassette.


There have been a bunch of broken rudders on i550's.  Hopefully, this one is strong enough to hold up.




A bit of an add-on to the original post:

The foam that I used was not stiff enough to insure that the process of vacuum bagging wouldn't distort the foil, so the first layer of CF sleeve was not bagged.  Instead, I used the same technique that I used to create the spreaders, using the female foam sections that came from Flying Foam to provide pressure on the wetted-out CF sleeve.  The picture to the right shows the result.  You can just barely see the plywood "spar" at the bottom of the picture.  I also shaped the foam to round the leading edge using a surform tool.  Once the initial sleeve hardened, the foil was plenty stiff enough to vacuum bag.  Of course for all layers I used release cloth and absorber cloth.

Cabin top all shiny looking

After a lot of sanding and coating with epoxy and more sanding, I finished the cabin top and the cockpit curves with Interlux Perfection clear.  


The photo to the left shows the cabin top as well as the oyster white colored non-skid surface on the deck.  I'm debating whether or not to put clear non-skid on the cabin.

Base coat is done on deck

 I'm done with the base coat on the deck of the boat.  I put on three coats of Interlux Perfection Snow White.  


The pictures to the left show the boat after I removed the masking tape which was protecting the cabin top and the curved corners in the cockpit.  As I'm mentioned several times earlier these were built using cedar strips, and my intention is to leave them natural.

The next step is to mask off the areas on the deck where I will not have a grip surface and then paint those areas.  Hopefully the non-skid will be done in a couple of days.  


The final step (as far as painting is concerned) will be to finish the cedar strip portions with Perfection clear.  

Deck painting

More sanding, fairing, and painting.  The first step was to mask off the finished hull with masking tape and rosin paper so that the new paint doesn't mess up the nice paint on the bottom.  With the green tape and the pink paper, the boat has a distinct easter egg look.   

 The boat is just about ready for its final (third) coat of primer.  One more light sanding and of course clean up is needed before putting down the paint.  


We've decided to go with Interlux Perfection snow white for the parts of the deck that don't have non-skid on them (the same as the bottom).  For the non-skid I bought Awlgrip course non-skid beads and we're going with Perfection oyster white for the non-skid areas

Some time last summer, I described building the cabin top using the cedar strips with some mahogany for accents.  I fabricated a mast step platform today out of a piece of solid mahogany.  This block of wood had to be shaped so that its bottom matched the contour of the cabin top, and so that the top would be level.  I did this by transferring the cabin top curve onto the block with a pencil, and then used my table saw to cut grooves that matched the curve.  Using a belt sander, I cleaned up the grooves and shaped the curve in the lateral direction (side to side). The picture to the right shows the mast step platform glued to the cabin top above frame 89.


The block was also sized to support a stainless steel deck organizer that I bought from Dwyer Mast.

Boat is upright again

 We rolled the boat back over today and put it on the trailer.  Rolling it over was actually very easy.  We just put some plastic sheet on the grass and tipped the boat and cradle over and rolled the boat right off onto the plastic.  Picking the boat up to get it on the trailer was a bit harder because the paint is actually pretty slippery and it's hard to get a good grip on the boat.  However with my two younger sons and my wife helping, we made pretty short work of getting the boat onto the trailer.  The only thing left to do once the boat was on the trailer bunks was to adjust the winch stanchion so that it just touched the bow.  We actually only had to move it an inch or so from how it came from the factory.

The pictures to the right show the boat on the trailer.  The top photo shows my two helpers.














More about the trailer




The picture to the left shows the completed  trailer waiting for the boat.  This particular trailer, a Ventura 1300, seems to be very well suited for an I550 because the back cross-brace lines up very nicely with frame 169 and there is another cross-brace right under where the keel will be let down.  I still need to attach a keel bulb platform to this cross-brace, but that will happen after I lift the boat in order to install the keel foil.